Abani, Chris. Feed Me the Sun. Leeds. 2010. Peepal Tree Books. 9781845231569. 193 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of Chris Abani’s longer poems, some previously published, the majority new, displays his astonishing energy, beauty of expression and range of reference to contemporary life, history, art and literature. Having this work together in one volume enables us to see the dialogue between a sense of the personal and an engagement with the public and historical, from Daphne’s Lot which explores the life of an Englishwoman (his mother) caught up in the madness of the Biafran civil war, or Buffalo Women, an epistolary sequence of poems between lovers caught up in the American civil war. The focus of Abani’s poems is frequently on extreme situations where the unspeakable becomes too readily the doable, but where against the odds compassion and love remain and the individual determination to resist public madness. In Sanctificum there is a profound meditation on the sacred, whether reached through religious ritual or through art, and the narrow dividing line between the urge to reach for mastery and transcendence and the abuses of power whether personal, contemporary or historical.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chris Abani is the author of 11 books, the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, and is currently holds the position of Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
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Abani, Chris. GraceLand. New York. 2004. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374165890. 323 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kwasi Osei.
DESCRIPTION - In this dazzling debut by a singular new talent, the sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods, and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no job opportunities in sight, Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his odyssey into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by his friend Redemption and accompanied by a restless hybrid of voices including The King of Beggars, Sunday, Innocent and Comfort. Ultimately, young Elvis, drenched in reggae and jazz, and besotted with American film heroes and images, must find his way to a GraceLand of his own. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, Abani has created a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chris Abani was born in Nigeria on December 27, 1966 and published his first novel at sixteen. He was imprisoned for his writings, and after his release he eventually moved to the United States. He is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction, including the best-selling novel GraceLand. He teaches at the University of California-Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.
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Abani, Chris. Sanctificum. Port Townsend. 2010. Copper Canyon Press. 9781556593161. 105 pages. paperback. Cover art: Victor Ekpuk, ‘Good Morning Sunrise’ (detail).
DESCRIPTION - A self-described ‘zealot of optimism,' poet and novelist Chris Abani bravely travels into the charged intersections of atrocity and love, politics and religion, loss and renewal. In poems of devastating beauty, he investigates complex personal history, family, and romantic love. Sanctificum, Abani's fifth collection of poetry, is his most personal and ambitious book. Utilizing religious ritual, the Nigerian Igbo language, and reggae rhythms, Abani creates a post-racial, liturgical love song that covers the globe from Abuja to Los Angeles. ‘Abani. explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and imagination. [he] enters the wound with a boldness that avoids nothing. Highly recommended.' - Library Journal. ‘Stunning poems.' - New Humanist.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chris Abani (December 27, 1966, Afikpo, Nigeria) was born in Nigeria in 1966 and published his first novel at sixteen. He was imprisoned for his writings, and after his release he eventually moved to the United States. He is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction, including the best-selling novel GraceLand. He teaches at the University of California-Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.
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Abdur-Rahman, Sufiya. Heir to the Crescent Moon. Iowa City. 2021. University of Iowa Press. 9781609387822. Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. 1 b&w photo 9 in H | 6 in. 218 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - From age five, Sufiya Abdur-Rahman, the daughter of two Black Power–era converts to Islam, feels drawn to the faith even as her father, a devoted Muslim, introduces her to and, at the same time, distances her from it. Abdur-Rahman's father and mother abandoned their Harlem mosque before she was born and divorced when she was twelve. Forced apart from her father - her portal into Islam - she yearns to reconnect with the religion and, through it, reconnect with him. In Heir to the Crescent Moon, Abdur-Rahman's longing to comprehend her father's complicated relationship with Islam leads her first to recount her own history, and then delves into her father's past. She journeys from the Christian righteousness of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s 1950s Harlem, through the Malcolm X–inspired college activism of the late 1960s, to the unfulfilled potential of the early 1970s Black American Muslim movement. Told at times with lighthearted humor or heartbreaking candor, Abdur-Rahman's story of adolescent Arabic lessons, fasting, and Muslim mosque, funeral, and Eid services speaks to the challenges of bridging generational and cultural divides and what it takes to maintain family amidst personal and societal upheaval. She weaves a vital tale about a family: Black, Muslim, and distinctly American.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sufiya Abdur-Rahman is creative nonfiction editor for Cherry Tree, and teaches nonfiction at Washington College. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
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Abe, Frank and Cheung, Floyd (editors). The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. New York. 2024. Penguin Books. 9780143133285. Introduction by Floyd Cheung. 336 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in the four years of World War II during which the US government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes and imprisoned 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy. Bowing to popular fear after Imperial Japanese Navy planes bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress issued Executive Order 9066 and denied Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process before registering and numbering them by family to enable their mass removal and imprisonment. Government officials then subjected the captive people to a series of administrative orders, including a second registration and a segregation based upon a questionnaire, the compulsory conscription of young men from camp, and a program of voluntary renunciation. By its own latter-day admission, the government had no military need for the mass incarceration – that it was driven by a mixture of race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership – rendering everything that followed just as unnecessary and wrong. This anthology recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by these actions. Through over sixty selections of prose, poetry, fiction, essays, memoirs, and letters these voices share a story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization. The anthology is anchored by the key government documents that incite the action. The span of contributors include incarcerees, the children of the camps, and third and fourth generation descendants who reflect on the long-term consequences for themselves and the nation. This collection reflects the evolution of politics around this history, unearths archival documents, newly translates texts, addresses how attitudes around incarceration have been debated and changed, and highlights resistance literature by Japanese Americans.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Abe is co-author of the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse and the American Book Award-winning John Okada: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, and creator of the award-winning PBS documentary, Conscience and the Constitution. Floyd Cheung is a professor of English at Smith College. He has edited several books including the Penguin Classics edition of H.T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square, and is co-editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy.
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Abel, Jessica. La Perdida. New York. 2006. Pantheon Books. 0375423656. 275 pages. hardcover. Cover art by the author.
DESCRIPTION - This riveting story is inspired by the author's experiences in Mexico City. Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to find herself. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and the consequences of trusting easy answers, La perdida-at once grounded in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal-is a story about finding oneself by getting lost.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jessica Abel is the author of Soundtrack and Mirror, Window, two collections that gather stories and drawings from her comic book Artbabe, which she published between 1992 and 1999. She also collaborated with Ira Glass on Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a nonfiction comic about how the public radio program This American Life is made. Abel won both the Harvey and Lulu awards for Best New Talent in 1997; La Perdida won the 2002 Harvey Award for Best New Series. Abel's young adult novel, Carmina, is forthcoming in 2007, and she is currently collaborating on another graphic novel, Life Sucks, and a textbook about making comics.
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Abish, Walter. 99: The New Meaning. Providence. 1990. Burning Deck. 0930901665. Simultaneous Release In Hardcover. 111 pages. paperback. Cover: Cecile Abish.
DESCRIPTION - This curious work is comprised of five sections, each of which was composed using only portions of the works of other writers. In 99, each part of the pastiche comes from page 99 of some other work, a number Abish considers ‘mystically significant.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931) is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories. Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda (Rubin). At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1960. Since 1975, Abish has taught at several eastern universities and colleges. Abish received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 for his book How German Is It. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Abish is married to Cecile Gelb, a photographer and sculptor. He served on the board of International PEN from 1982-1988. He was on the board of governors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has worked/taught at Empire State College, Wheaton College, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, and Cooper Union. Abish's work shows both imaginative and experimental elements. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter ‘A.' In the second chapter, words beginning with ‘A' and ‘B' appear, and so on through the alphabet. In the Future Perfect is a collection of short stories where words are juxtaposed in unusual patterns.
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Abish, Walter. Alphabetical Africa. New York. 1974. New Directions. 0811205320. 152 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the "geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931) is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories. Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda (Rubin). At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1960. Since 1975, Abish has taught at several eastern universities and colleges. Abish received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 for his book How German Is It. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Abish is married to Cecile Gelb, a photographer and sculptor. He served on the board of International PEN from 1982-1988. He was on the board of governors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has worked/taught at Empire State College, Wheaton College, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, and Cooper Union. Abish's work shows both imaginative and experimental elements. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter ‘A.' In the second chapter, words beginning with ‘A' and ‘B' appear, and so on through the alphabet. In the Future Perfect is a collection of short stories where words are juxtaposed in unusual patterns.
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Abish, Walter. How German Is It. New York. 1980. New Directions. 0811207757. Winner Of The P. E. N. -Faulkner Award Sticker On Front Of Dustjacket. 257 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish's novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American. On his return from Paris to his home city of Würtenburg, Ulrich Hargenau, whose father was executed for his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, is compelled to ask himself, "How German am l?"––as he compares his own recent attempt to save his life, and his wife Paula's, by testifying against fellow members of a terrorist group, with his father's selfless heroism. Through Ulrich––privileged, upper class––we confront the incongruities of the new democratic Germany, in particular the flourishing community of Brumholdstein, named after the country's greatest thinker, Brumhold, and built on the former site of a concentration camp. Paula's participation in the destruction of a police station; the State's cynical response to crush the terrorists; two attempts on Ulrich's life; the discovery in Brumholdstein of a mass grave of death camp inmates––all these, with subtle irony, are presented as pieces of a puzzle spelling out the turmoil of a society's endeavor to avoid the implications of its menacing heritage.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931) is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories. Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda (Rubin). At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1960. Since 1975, Abish has taught at several eastern universities and colleges. Abish received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 for his book How German Is It. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Abish is married to Cecile Gelb, a photographer and sculptor. He served on the board of International PEN from 1982-1988. He was on the board of governors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has worked/taught at Empire State College, Wheaton College, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, and Cooper Union. Abish's work shows both imaginative and experimental elements. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter ‘A.' In the second chapter, words beginning with ‘A' and ‘B' appear, and so on through the alphabet. In the Future Perfect is a collection of short stories where words are juxtaposed in unusual patterns.
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Abish, Walter. Minds Meet. New York. 1975. New Directions. 0811205576. 184 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - in Abish’s first collection, Minds Meet, the story “How the Comb Gives a Fresh Meaning to the Hair” conceives of Marcel Proust living in Albuquerque, where retarded children, cabbies, Pueblo Indians, and a young couple called Mr. and Mrs. Dip flit through short paragraphs bearing titles like “Fingernails” and “Marcel’s Childhood.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931) is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories. Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda (Rubin). At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1960. Since 1975, Abish has taught at several eastern universities and colleges. Abish received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 for his book How German Is It. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Abish is married to Cecile Gelb, a photographer and sculptor. He served on the board of International PEN from 1982-1988. He was on the board of governors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has worked/taught at Empire State College, Wheaton College, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, and Cooper Union. Abish's work shows both imaginative and experimental elements. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter ‘A.' In the second chapter, words beginning with ‘A' and ‘B' appear, and so on through the alphabet. In the Future Perfect is a collection of short stories where words are juxtaposed in unusual patterns.
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Abrahams, Roger (editor). Afro-American Folktales: Stories From Black Traditions in the New World. New York. 1985. Pantheon. 0394728858. Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library. 327 pages. paperback. Cover Illustration & Design by Bascove.
DESCRIPTION - The newest addition to the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library completes Roger Abrahams's masterful survey of taletelling in the black world by showing the vital forms African stories took as they entered the New World. These 107 tales come from the canefields of the antebellum South, the villages of Caribbean islands, and the streets of contemporary Philadelphia. Throbbing with life, they range from earthy comedy (in recounting the scandalous doings of tricksters Rabbit and Fox) to inventive ‘just-so' stories explaining why the world is the way it is, to moral fables about encounters between masters and slaves, kings and servants, black and white. Together, they robustly demonstrate the ways an uprooted people have drawn from the traditions of their past to fashion a life - and with it, a whole new and vital culture - in the New World.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roger D. Abrahams is Professor of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a past president of the American Folklore Society, a former chairman of the English Department at the University of Texas, and a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. Professor Abrahams has done fieldwork in a range of African American communities from a ghetto neighborhood in Philadelphia to the Caribbean. He has also studied arid written about Anglo-American folk songs and children's lore.
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Abrahams, William (editor). Prize Stories of the Seventies From the O. Henry Awards. Garden City. 1981. Doubleday. 0385171587. 404 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Al Nagy.
DESCRIPTION - Here is a wonderful retrospective volume drawn from the last ten editions of PRIZE STORIES - a group of splendid stories that appeared during the 1970s. CONTENTS - LEONARD MICHAELS/'Robinson Crusoe Liebowitz'; JUDITH RASCOE/'Small Sounds and Tilting Shadows'; JAMES SALTER/'The Destruction of the Goetheanum'; DONALD BARTHELME/'Subpoena'; JOYCE CAROL OATES/'The Dead'; BERNARD MALAMUD/'Talking Horse'; HAROLD BRODKEY/'His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft; JOHN CHEEVER/'The Jewels of the Cabots'; RENATA ADLER/'Brownstone'; ALICE ADAMS/'Alternatives'; JAMES ALAN McPHERSON/'The Faithful'; RAYMOND CARVER/'Are You a Doctor?'; JOHN SAYLES/'I-80 Nebraska, M.490 - M.205'; TIM O'BRIEN/'Night March'; JOHN UPDIKE/'Separating'; ELLA LEFFLAND/'Last Courtesies'; WOODY ALLEN/'The Kugelmass Episode'; GUY DAVENPORT/'The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag'; MARK HELPRIN/'The Schreuderspitze'; PATRICIA ZELVER/'My Father's Jokes'; LYNNE SHARON SCHW4RTZ/'Rough Strife'; SAUL BELLOW/'A Silver Dish'; CYNTHIA OZICK/'Usurpation (Other People's Stories)'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willliam Abrahams served as editor of the PRIZE STORIES collections since 1967. A novelist, biographer, and critic, Mr. Abrahams lived in Hillsborough, California.
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Abu-Jaber, Diana. Arabian Jazz. San Diego. 1994. Harcourt Brace. 0156000482. 374 pages. paperback. Cover: Mercedes MacDonald.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the hyphenated-American story told with a sense of humor and bitter-sweet love. Set in a small poor-white community in upstate New York, where 'ethnics' are few and far between, it is the story of the Ramoud family: Matussem, his two daughters, Melvina and Jemorah, his sister, Fatima, and her husband, Zaeed. Matussem loves American jazz standards, Arab folktales, lawn ornaments, and-above all else in the world-his daughters. Fatima, the truest representative of the Old World in the New, is obsessed with joining the social committee of the local Syrian Orthodox Church and with seeing her nieces-Jemorah is nearly thirty!-married. Melvina, 'all-Nurse,' has her mind set firmly on her work, but Jemorah will consider marrying anyone from a pool hustler to a car mechanic to a Jordanian cousin. With 'Family Function Season' about to begin ('thick with the air of summer upstate and heavy, sweating relatives who thought, somehow, that this was preferable to the desert'), Arabian Jazz will explode into a hilarious, poignant tribute to family bonds, hybrid cultures, and the individual search for home.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Diana Abu-Jaber is an American author and a professor at Portland State University. She was born in Syracuse, New York. Her father was Jordanian and her mother was American, descended from Irish and German roots. At the age of seven she moved with her family for two years to Jordan. She currently divides her time between Miami and Portland and teaches at Portland State University. She often writes about issues of identity and culture.
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Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. New York. 1988. Grove Press. 0802110797. 227 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part-robot part-human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kathy Acker (nee Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 - November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy and pornography.
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Acker, Kathy. Great Expectations. New York. 1983. Grove Press. 0394624807. 128 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Using postmodern form, Kathy Ackerâ s Great Expectations moves her narrator through time, gender, and identity as it examines our eraâ s cherished beliefs about life and art.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kathy Acker (nee Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 - November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy and pornography.
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Acker, Kathy. Literal Madness. New York. 1988. Grove Press. 0802100015. 410 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini imagines the Italian filmmaker and writer returning to the Roman homosexual hustlers he knew, in a “scathing commentary on false values in art” (The Hartford Courant).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kathy Acker (nee Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 - November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy and pornography.
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Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York. 1984. Simon & Schuster. 0671530437. 400 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In the twentieth century, no Anglo-American poet or critic has matched the influence of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Despite his political and religious conservatism, Eliot was among the most innovative of the literary modernists, a figure to be reckoned with by admirers and critics alike. In his Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Peter Ackroyd delves into the work and mind of a man who redefined the very terms of modern poetry. From his early days in America to his later life as a British citizen, Eliot fought successfully for his work and his privacy. But with careful research and splendid insight into the poet's character, Mr. Ackroyd has tracked Eliot to ground and brought this remarkable figure to light in an authoritative and fascinating study. "The fullest and most plausible portrait yet achieved." (Frank Kermode, Oxford scholar and literary.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Ackroyd (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist, and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices and the depth of his research. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 1984 and created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
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Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. San Francisco. 1973. Straight Arrow Books. 258 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The further adventures of "Dr. Gonzo" as he defends the "cucarachas" -- the Chicanos of East Los Angeles. Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge. In this exhilarating sequel to The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta takes us behind the front lines of the militant Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, a movement he served both in the courtroom and on the barricades. Here are the brazen games of "chicken" Acosta played against the Anglo legal establishment; battles fought with bombs as well as writs; and a reluctant hero who faces danger not only from the police but from the vatos locos he champions. What emerges is at once an important political document of a genuine popular uprising and a revealing, hilarious, and moving personal saga.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Oscar Zeta Acosta (April 8, 1935 - disappeared 1974) was an American attorney, politician, novelist and Chicano Movement activist, perhaps best known for his friendship with the American author Hunter S. Thompson, who characterized him as his Samoan Attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in his acclaimed novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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Adair-Hodges, Erin. Let's All Die Happy. Pittsburgh. 2017. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822965145. Pitt Poetry Series. 80 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. “What's most impressive in this powerful book is the female speaker's voice - it's striking because what it says is often unexpected, surprising, and exactly right.” - Ed Ochester, judge. “Here in Let's All Die Happy we encounter a voice that is insightful, confident, and deliciously specific. In poems of dark domesticity, this book speaks to both the anchoring and erasure that come with mothering: ‘Some weeks/ no one says my first name, no one's/ tongue flicks the last letter out.' It's a remarkable debut.” - Maggie Smith.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erin Adair-Hodges teaches writing and literature in Albuquerque, NM and is the co-creator and curator of the Bad Mouth Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, and Green Mountains Review, among other venues. Winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, she's also been a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe scholar, and has received awards from the Rockland Residency and The Writer's Hotel.
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Adams, Alice. After the War. New York. 2000. Knopf. 0375406832. 320 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Alice Adams is considered to be one of the major American writers of the last thirty years. Her stories appeared in The New Yorker from 1969 and 1995, as well as in twenty-two O. Henry Awards collections and several volumes of Best American Short Stories. After the War is her eleventh and final novel--the brilliant coda to a brilliant career. After the War begins where her acclaimed novel A Southern Exposure ended: in the small Southern town of Pinehill during World War II. With all the insight and grace that have marked her writing, she brings us close to Cynthia and Harry Baird, transplanted Yankees who moved south from Connecticut during the Depression to find a simpler world for themselves and their daughter, Abigail. But life in Pinehill has become more difficult since the beginning of the war: with Harry off in London to do his share, Cynthia finds her life complicated not only by her own loneliness but also by a growing awareness of local racism and anti-Semitism, and by the rising national dread of Communism. And as Abigail heads off to college, where she faces all the traditional complications of youth, we are drawn into an America caught between past and future, and two generations forced to determine what they cherish and what they must leave behind. Alice Adams's depiction of her native South--full, rich, affectionate, and always one of her many strengths--is at its most subtle and engrossing in After the War.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. After You've Gone. New York. 1989. Knopf. 0394579267. 229 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - .A new selection of short stories explores the impact and adjustment of individuals dealing with separation and the loss of lovers, spouses, parents, and friends. CONTENTS: After you've gone; 1940, Fall; The end of the world; Child's play; Fog; Lost cat; Tide pools; Favors; Ocracoke Island; On the road; A sixties romance; What to wear; Traveling together; Your doctor loves you.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Beautiful Girl. New York. 1979. Knopf. 0394427378. 242 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Alice Adams' fourth book -- a book of short stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Careless Love. New York. 1966. New American Library. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Author's First Book. Set in the glittering, free-wheeling world of San Francisco's upper Bohemia, Careless Love tells the story of Daisy's initiation into the pleasures and perils of freedom, the ways of men, and the vagaries of her own feminine heart.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Families and Survivors. New York. 1974. Knopf. 039449167x. 211 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - “A you-can’t-put-it-down book. Alice Adams has found a new way to tell the great American dynasty stories we all love.” -- The Washington Post Alice Adams’ second novel is the portrait of a Southern-born woman as she reviews her life. From Louisa Calloway’s Southern girlhood to her debut to her first marriage, all the time surrounded by a certain tradition and all the time resisting. In lieu of her conservative, bigoted father, she chooses men who are liberal, free-spoken, Jewish. Nevertheless her first marriage is unhappy, but her second promises to be sounder, as she discovers what she really wants, can have, can become—what she really is.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Listening To Billie. New York. 1977. Knopf. 0394410696. 5217 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Listening to Billie is a brilliant portrait of a contemporary woman adventurously, decisively embarked on her own life. We first glimpse Eliza Hamilton Quarles as a blonde boarding-school student, sitting in a sophisticated New York club, listening to Billie Holiday. She is on the brink of her marriage to her older, worldly date. Twenty years later, a mother, divorced, she, tentatively begins a new life, with new lovers, new interests, new strength, even a new, more comfortable identity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Mexico. New York. 1991. Prentice Hall. 0132023261. 216 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Recounting her decade-long obsession with Mexico, the author describes Mayan ruins, the misery of Mexico City, Mexican art, and the magic of the country's landscape and people.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Return Trips. New York. 1985. Knopf. 0394536339. 195 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Alice Adams’ reputation as a short story writer continued to grow with each collection. The stories in her third collection revolve for the most part around the theme of travel. The stories are about people in search of fresh experience, the inspiration of art, the pleasure of new relationships. people opening up to the accidental magic of a foreign place, or returning to scenes of childhood to forgive the past. Included are “Alaska,” “Time in Santa Fe,” “Barcelona, “ “Molly’s Dog,” “My First and Only House.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Rich Rewards. New York. 1980. Knopf. 0394511018. 205 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Beautiful, sophisticated, a bit world-weary, with a history of bad love affairs, Daphne Matthiessen flees New York city for charming San Francisco. There she plans to help her old school friend Agatha redecorate a house, but soon it is Agatha's friends, the Houston family, who take up most of Daphne's attention.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. Second Chances. New York. 1988. Knopf. 0394568249. 257 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A wonderful portrait of friends who have shared their lives together for over 30 years, helping each other through all of life's ups and downs and testing the limitations of the heart.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. The Last Lovely City: Stories. New York. 1999. Knopf. 0679454411. 191 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - “Sophisticated, charming, often nostalgic, and so artfully written that half the time you don’t know that you are reading on of the best writers around.” --The Boston Globe. In her final collection, Alice Adams ranges from San Francisco to a North Carolina college town, to a run-down resort in Mexico. And a grouping of four stories at the end follows a divorced psychiatrist in an arc that constitutes a short novel. Included are: “His Women,” “Great Sex,” “Old Love Affairs,” and “The Drinking Club,” “Patients, “The Wrong Mexico, “ and “Earthquake Damage.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Alice. To See You Again. New York. 1982. Knopf. 0394523350. 304 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Throughout her acclaimed career, Alice Adams demonstrated a remarkable finesse in both the novel and the short story. Her second collection reveals her ability to feelingly project whole lives in the space of a few pages. Here are people trying to pull free of the constraints of family bonds, people bewitched by capricious love, people conquering old panics, or changing in profound ways. Included are “Snow,” “Legends,” “Lost Luggage,” “An Unscheduled Stop, “At First Sight.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 - May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these
DESCRIPTIONs to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you. see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot - the drama, the actions, the tension - will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
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Adams, Cara Blue. You Never Get It Back. Iowa City. 2021. University of Iowa Press. 9781609388133. Iowa Short Fiction Award. 186 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams's precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia's lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate's difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms. Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cara Blue Adams's fiction appears in Granta, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, EPOCH, and Narrative. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Seton Hall University. Adams lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Adams, Henry (edited by Newton Arvin). The Selected Letters of Henry Adams. New York. 1951. Farrar Straus & Young. Edited with an introduction by Newton Arvin. 279 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Despite his denials, Henry Adams was one of the best-educated figures of his time, the great post-Civil War period of American expansion. Historian, Editor, author, world traveler, distinguished member of a distinguished family, he was in a unique position to observe his world, and to record it in his own vivacious and charming way. This volume, with a critical introduction by Newton Arvin, presents a selection of over a hundred of Adams's best letters, extending from his studious youth in Germany to his last years in Washington during the First World War. Included is a generous representation of the letters Adams wrote on his wide-ranging travels - to Japan, the South Seas, Ceylon and most of Europe, as well as the more personal and revealing letters he wrote during his periods of homekeeping quiet and study. Known in his own lifetime chiefly as a historian, and after his death as the author of The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams has been only less well known as a letter writer. Yet nowhere does his literary power manifest itself more brilliantly and unflaggingly than in the scores of letters he wrote during his long and very full career.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family. Newton Arvin, the editor of this volume, the third in the Farrar, Straus and Young GREAT LETTERS SERIES, was born in Indiana, educated at Harvard and has taught at Smith for a number of years. At present he is Professor of English at Smith. He is the author of several biographies, including Herman Melville, which won the 1950 National Book Award for non-fiction.
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Adams, Henry. A Henry Adams Reader. Garden City. 1959. Anchor/Doubleday. Edited & With An Introduction by Elizabeth Stevenson. Cover by Leonard Baskin. 381 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A HENRY ADAMS READER - the only collection of its kind - contains generous selections from all of Adams' varied writings, many of which have long been inaccessible. The material has been arranged chronologically to present clearly the important parallel between Adams' personal development and the development of his writing as each reflected the intellectual, spiritual, and political growth of America as it entered the twentieth century. This volume includes a firsthand account of Adams' meeting, as a youth, with the Italian patriot Garibaldi; the famous account of the Gould and Fisk Gold Conspiracy, and an essay on Captain John Smith. There are chapters from Adams' two novels, Democracy and Esther; sect ions of his biographies of Gallatin and John Randolph; and selections from his monumental The History of the United States, dealing with Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolution in Haiti, Tecumseh's attempt to protect Indian land from pioneer settlers, and privateering in the War of 1812. There is a long and beautiful letter from Samoa, which marked the beginning of Adams' recovery from the shock of his wife's suicide. There are three chapters from his classic Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres, and two chapters from his famous The Education of Henry Adams. Also included are ‘The Tendency of History,' ‘The Rule of Phase Applied to History,' and two long poems. This rich cross section of Adams' works, selected and introduced by his foremost biographer, presents for the first time in one volume the whole range of his achievement. The reader becomes fully familiar with the fertile mind and the objective world of one of America's most original and influential nineteenth-century thinkers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
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Adams, Henry. Democracy. New York. 1925. Henry Holt. 374 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Vote-buying and fixed elections, slanderous competition, preposterous graft. this is the Washington of the 1870's which Henry Adams reveals in his famous novel. Democracy is the story of two people who aspire to power. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, a wealthy society widow, wants to align herself with the great lawmakers whom she idealizes. Instead, she becomes involved with Silas Ratcliffe, the most powerful man in the Senate, a leader whose political maneuvers are surpassed only by his courtship tactics. Here is an incisive exposE of corruption-in individuals and in government., an entertaining caricature of government life which may be seen to have its application even today. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
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Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. New York. 1986. Penguin Books. 0140390545. Introduction and Notes by Raymond Carney. 398 pages. paperback. Cover photograph courtesy Colour Library International.
DESCRIPTION - ‘From beginning to end, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres reads as from a man in the fresh morning of life, with a frolic power unusual to historic literature.' - William James. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is a record not of a literal journey but of a meditative journey across time and space into the medieval imagination. Using the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of the two locales as a starting point, Adams breathes life into what others might see merely as monuments of a past civilization. With daring and inventive conceits, Adams looks at the ordinary people, places, and events in the context of the social conventions and systems of thought and belief of the thirteenth century, turning the study of history into a kind of theater. As Raymond Carney discusses in his introduction, Adams' freedom from the European traditions of study lends an exuberance - and a puckish wit - to his writings.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
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Adams, Henry. Novels, Mont Saint Michel, the Education. New York. 1983. Library Of America. 0940450127. 1246 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The major works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful writers of the late nineteenth century, collected in one volume for the first time. Contains ‘The Education of Henry Adams' and ‘Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,' his remarkable works of nonfiction combining philosophical and historical speculation with autobiographical musings on his famous heritage. Also includes his two novels of American politics and religion, ‘Democracy' and ‘Esther.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
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Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston. 1918. Houghton Mifflin. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication of the book had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
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Adams, Jenoyne. Resurrecting Mingus. New York. 2001. Free Press. 0684873524. 1st Novel. 244 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Patti Ratchford.
DESCRIPTION - RESURRECTING MINGUS is the stunning debut novel of a young woman lost - striving to find her own identity while dealing with powerful and painful questions that force her to confront everything and everyone that matters to her. Mingus Browning is a successful, young, beautiful lawyer whose life is falling apart. After a thirty-five-year marriage, Mingus's African-American father has suddenly left her Irish mother for a black woman. A daddy's girl, Mingus is torn between the father she has always been closer to, the mother she may have to defend in divorce proceedings, and a sister hell-bent on winning their lifelong sibling rivalry. Mingus is caught in middle of the three, a woman alone, and, in turn, realizes that she has probably always felt more comfortable that way because she is part of no one group, let alone a united family. Juggling her parents' grief with her own proves to be too much for Mingus as she stumbles from one questionable relationship to another, further complicating her life. After years of isolating herself from those who have tried to care for her, Mingus finally meets someone who rips through her protective defenses and exposes her need to be loved. Eric Simms, a smooth-talking television producer, is through playing dating games and is looking for love for real this time. With Eric, Mingus finally learns to forget the fear of a broken heart and opens herself completely. That is, until word starts circulating that her new love has his secrets as well, and suddenly what was a perfect relationship begins to look like yet another minefield of hurt, as Mingus is forced to choose between her man, her sister, and the truth. After facing a long, sad string of heartaches and betrayals, Mingus finally reaches the point in her life where she realizes who she is, what she wants, and how she doesn't need another man to get it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jenoyne Adams is the author of the bestselling novel Resurrecting Mingus. She is a poet, journalist, PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow, and member of the World Stage Anansi Writer's Workshop in Leimert Park. She has been featured in programs at the National Black Arts Festival, the Schomburg Museum, the Essence Music Festival, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She was born in San Bernardino, California, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, writer Michael Datcher.
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Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes. New York. 0. Signet/New American Library. 0451503481. 320 pages. paperback. CQ348. Signet Classic reprint.
DESCRIPTION - Twenty Years at Hull - House is Jane Addams's graphic account of her famed settlement house in Chicago's West Side slums. Covering the years 1889 to 1909, a time when America was fired with fear of subversives and suspicion of foreigners, this book stands as the immortal testament of a woman who lived and worked among the immigrant settlers, the sweat - shop toilers, the unwed mothers, the hungry, the aged, the sick, to show them in practice what others merely preached: the true concept of American democracy. 'She discerned and revealed the beauty of the cultural life and spiritual value of the immigrant at the time when nothing was so despised and unconsidered in American life as the foreigner.' - Frances Perkins, U. S. Secretary of Labor, 1933 - 1945. 'For the helpless, young and old, for the poor, the unlearned, the stranger, the despised, you have urged understanding and then justice.' - Dr. Marian Parks, former President of Bryn Mawr College.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 - May 21, 1935) was a pioneer American settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped turn America to issues of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.
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Addonizio, Kim. In the Box Called Pleasure. Normal/Tallahassee. 2000. Fiction Collective Two/Florida State University. 1573660817. 150 pages. paperback. Cover photograph by Robert Specter.
DESCRIPTION - These gutsy and post feminist stories will elicit the shock of recognition from women and may reveal to men something about the further regions of the female psyche. By turns graphic and funny, these urban tales present characters who are teetering on the edge. Indifferent or absent lovers, too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, obsession, paranoia, a desire that is always fresh in spite of the facts—this is the macabre landscape of these very unusual and unrestrained works. In "Reading Sontag," Addonizio invades and recasts Susan Sontag's essay "The Pornographic Imagination" while describing a monumentally failed relationship. In "The Gift," a woman finds a dildo on the street and is magically transformed into a man.These are fictions to prepare us for the real millennium.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kim Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones. Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest books are a poetry collection, Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). A new book of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, was published by W.W. Norton (March 2021).
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Adeleke, Tunde. Without Regard To Race: The Other Martin Robison Delany. Jackson. 2004. University Press Of Mississippi. 1578065984. 274 pages. hardcover. Photograph of Martin Delany courtesy of the USA and Military History institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Commandery, Military Order of the Loyal Legion.
DESCRIPTION - Before Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois lifted the banner for black liberation and independence, Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) was at the forefront. He was the first black appointed as a combat major in the Union army during the Civil War. He was a Pan-Africanist and a crusader for black freedom and equality in the nineteenth century. For the past three decades, however, this precursor has been regarded only as a militant Black Nationalist and racial essentialist.' To his discredit, his ideas, programs, and accomplishments have been maintained as models of uncompromising militancy. Classifying Delany solely for his militant nationalist rhetoric crystalizes him into a one-dimensional figure. This study of his life and thought, the first critical biography of the pivotal African American thinker written by a historian, challenges the distorting portrait and, arguing that Delany reflects the spectrum of the nineteenth-century black independence movement, makes a strong case for bringing him closer to the center position of the political mainstream. He displayed a far greater degree of optimism about the future of blacks in America than has been acknowledged, and he faced pragmatic socio-economic realities that made it possible for him to be flexible for compromise. Focusing on neglected phases in his intellectual life, this book reveals Delany as a personality who was neither uncompromisingly militant nor dogmatically conservative. It argues that his complex strategies for racial integration were much more focused on America than on separateness and nationalism. The extreme characterization of him that has been prominent in the contemporary mind reflects ideologies of scholars who came of age during the civil rights era, the period that initially inspired great interest in his life. This new look at him paints a portrait of the ‘other Delany,' a thinker able to reach across racial boundaries to offer compromise and dialogue.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TUNDE ADELEKE, professor of history and director of African American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula, is the author of UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission and editor of Booker T Washington: Interpretive Essays. He is currently editing for publication a collection of Martin Delany's post-Civil War papers.
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Adler, Renata. Gone: The Last Days of THE NEW YORKER. New York. 1999. Simon & Schuster. 0684808161. 256 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A fascinating and sweeping profile of a great magazine captures The New Yorker's last three decades in vivid detail and exposes the truth behind such literary luminaries as Brendan Gill, Calvin Trillin, Hannah Arendt, and Tina Brown, among others.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University. Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life. In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.
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Adler, Renata. Pitch Dark. New York. 1983. Knopf. 0394503740. 144 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - What's new. What else. What next. What's happened here.' Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow up to her prize winning book Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, and moments (conversations, things unsaid, misunderstandings) of that fraught relationship reverberate throughout the novel, following Kate from her house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler's celebrated fragmented style, and constructed from the bare bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of wisdom achievable only after a relentless quest. This new edition of Pitch Dark will include an interview between Renata Adler and Guy Trebay discussing the genesis and composition of the book. 'Renata Adler has succeeded with Kate in creating a character worth the trouble of writing and reading about, because of Kate's lively ideas, her intelligent opinions, her funny narrative style and her wonderful access to her own honesty. We feel for her plight, her broken heart, her love story.' --Muriel Spark, The New York Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University. Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life. In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.
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Adler, Renata. Speedboat. New York. 1976. Random House. 0394488768. 178 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University. Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life. In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.
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Adler, Renata. Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism. New York. 1969. Random House. 285 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Toward a Radical Middle includes essays on national & international social & political issues. Critics applauded the collection, noting that Renata Adler had skillfully chosen details to provide insight into many of the troubling issues of the 1960s & that she had managed to offer meaningful social commentary without intruding on her subject.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University. Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life. In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.
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Adoff, Arnold (editor). Black On Black: Commentaries By Black Americans From Frederick Douglass to Malcom X. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. 265 pages. paperback. 04111.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of articles and excerpts from writings by African Americans spanning a hundred years from the 1860's to the 1960's - from Frederick Douglass on slavery to Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton on black power. Other authors included are W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ted Poston, Gordon Parks, Loften Mitchell, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lerone Bennett Jr., Dick Gregory, Bill Russell, John Oliver Killens, John A. Williams, Malcolm X, Ossie Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Williams LeRoi Jones, and Kenneth B. Clark.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnold Adoff (born July 16, 1935 in Bronx, New York) is an American children's writer. In 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English gave Adoff the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He has said, ‘I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems.' Adoff grew up in the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from a town near the Polish-Russian border. He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Pharmacy but transferred to City College of New York where he received a B.A. in history and literature. He married Virginia Hamilton in 1960 and they lived in Europe briefly before moving back to New York City. Adoff taught social studies in Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York. Adoff and Hamilton eventually moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Adoff still lives. ‘I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.' - Arnold Adoff.
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Adoff, Arnold (editor). Brothers and Sisters: Modern Stories By Black Americans. New York. 1970. Macmillan. 237 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Donald Crews.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of twenty short stories by Black American writers spans a period of over forty years. It begins with the writing of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and includes today's young Nikki Giovanni and John A. Williams whose stories in this volume have not been published before. Whether they are the works of such established writers as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks or of their younger colleagues, all of the stories are concerned with the portrayal of Black youth, it is through these young protagonists children teenagers and young adults, from the South and Harlem, from Chicago and California, that the authors have chosen to reveal the many aspects of Black experience and have re-created a cross-section of the Black World. Readers of all ages, whether Black or white, will respond to the vitality, pertinence and quality of this exciting anthology of American fiction by Black writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnold Adoff (born July 16, 1935 in Bronx, New York) is an American children's writer. In 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English gave Adoff the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He has said, ‘I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems.' Adoff grew up in the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from a town near the Polish-Russian border. He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Pharmacy but transferred to City College of New York where he received a B.A. in history and literature. He married Virginia Hamilton in 1960 and they lived in Europe briefly before moving back to New York City. Adoff taught social studies in Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York. Adoff and Hamilton eventually moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Adoff still lives. ‘I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.' - Arnold Adoff.
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Adoff, Arnold (editor). Celebrations: A New Anthology of Black American Poetry. Chicago. 1977. Follett Publishing. 0695806998. Introduction by Quincy Troupe. 285 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘This anthology presents 240 poems by 85 Black American poets of this century. These are some of the finest poems of several generations of a literature. There is a balance and representation of age and sex, location and style. Major poets and major work alongside newer poets and pieces. Work from published volumes together with poems from manuscript. Much work from chapbooks and publications that no longer exist. The small presses that have presented much of the production of contemporary Black poetry. The sources. The collection has a general purpose and theme. Celebrations sums it up. The past and present. The heroes and heroines. Ordinary people living lives that inspire. That create the myth and method bra people. For all people. The poems are organized into twelve sect ions. Each has a theme and flow that holds the work together. The total of the sections creates a chronological and thematic unity. From ‘The Idea of Ancestry' and ‘Lineage,' through ‘The Southern Road,' ‘Young Soul' and ‘True Love.' ‘A Poem for Heroes.' ‘Shade.' Finally, ‘For Each of You.' ‘In these most difficult of times, this ant hology presents the tradition and future of Black American poetry to young people of every race and background.' - from the Preface by Arnold Adolf. ‘This is a strong anthology. and the strength of the collection - as in almost every anthology of which Arnold Adolf has been the editor - lies in the diversity of the poets chosen and in the various voices by which Adolf has chosen to represent them. All good poets write in more than one voice, and in choosing, in most instances, more than one poem to represent a poet, Adolf has given us a chance to hear those ‘other' voices.' - from the Introduction by Quincy Troupe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnold Adoff (born July 16, 1935 in Bronx, New York) is an American children's writer. In 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English gave Adoff the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He has said, ‘I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems.' Adoff grew up in the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from a town near the Polish-Russian border. He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Pharmacy but transferred to City College of New York where he received a B.A. in history and literature. He married Virginia Hamilton in 1960 and they lived in Europe briefly before moving back to New York City. Adoff taught social studies in Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York. Adoff and Hamilton eventually moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Adoff still lives. ‘I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.' - Arnold Adoff.
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Adoff, Arnold (editor). I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems By Negro Americans. New York. 1968. Macmillan. Drawings by Benny Andrews. 128 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Benny Andrews.
DESCRIPTION - I AM THE DARKER BROTHER: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POEMS BY AFRICAN AMERICANS, first published in 1968, exposes the quintessential African American, a proud, lonely, vulnerable yet independent human being who has forged out of hardship that combination of endurance, understanding, and spirit called soul. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnold Adoff (born July 16, 1935 in Bronx, New York) is an American children's writer. In 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English gave Adoff the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He has said, ‘I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems.' Adoff grew up in the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from a town near the Polish-Russian border. He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Pharmacy but transferred to City College of New York where he received a B.A. in history and literature. He married Virginia Hamilton in 1960 and they lived in Europe briefly before moving back to New York City. Adoff taught social studies in Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York. Adoff and Hamilton eventually moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Adoff still lives. ‘I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.' - Arnold Adoff.
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Adoff, Arnold. Black is brown is tan. New York. 1992. Harper Trophy. 0064432696. Pictures by Emily Arnold McCully. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Brown-skinned momma, the color of chocolate milk and coffee pumpkin pie, whose face gets ginger red when she puffs and yells the children into bed. White-skinned daddy, not white like milk or snow, lighter than brown, With pinks and tiny tans, whose face gets tomato red when he puffs and yells their children into bed. Children who are all the colors of the race, growing up happy in a house full of love. This is the way it is for them; this is the way they are, but the joy they feel extends to every reader of this book. Black is brown is tan is a story poem about being, a beautiful true song about a family delighting in each other and in the good things of the earth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnold Adoff (born July 16, 1935 in Bronx, New York) is an American children's writer. In 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English gave Adoff the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He has said, ‘I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems.' Adoff grew up in the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from a town near the Polish-Russian border. He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Pharmacy but transferred to City College of New York where he received a B.A. in history and literature. He married Virginia Hamilton in 1960 and they lived in Europe briefly before moving back to New York City. Adoff taught social studies in Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York. Adoff and Hamilton eventually moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Adoff still lives. ‘I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.' - Arnold Adoff.
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Agee, James. James Agee: Selected Journalism. Knoxville. 2005. University of Tennessee Press. 9781572334298. 166 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Poet, film critic, screenwriter, and novelist James Agee is best known for his autobiographical Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Yet the journalistic writings of this Knoxville, Tennessee, native established him as an equal of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane. James Agee: Selected Journalism is a collection of his articles published from 1933 to 1947 by Time and Fortune, two of the era’s most influential magazines. This edition of the book includes two new articles from Agee’s school years and a new introduction by editor Paul Ashdown that places Agee’s journalistic work in the context of his entire career. Agee’s readers have often felt that his preoccupation with journalism prevented him from achieving a reputation as a great modern writer. However, Agee valued his articles highly, and so did many influential critics. His magazine work led to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a challenge to the journalism profession. The selections in this volume offer grounds for a fuller reinterpretation of Agee’s career. The articles reproduced here chronicle life at home and abroad during the Depression and the war-torn 1940s. The range of topics is vast—from cockfighting and the racing season at Saratoga, to the devastation of postwar France and the passing of the Roman aristocracy, to the corporatization of a small orchid nursery and the way in which a variety of Americans experienced the death of President Roosevelt. In his journalistic pieces Agee shows a remarkable prescience. For example, he was early to realize the tremendous significance of the atom bomb and the effect of the Tennessee Valley Authority on the mountain regions. In the nineteen essays in this volume, Agee demonstrates his characteristic sensitivity and awareness and provides a keen insight into the culture of this turbulent era.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Paul Ashdown is professor of journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of A Cold Mountain Companion and coauthor of The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest and The Mosby Myth: A Confederate Hero in Life and Legend.
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Agee, James. A Death in the Family. New York. 2009. Penguin Books. 9780143105718. Introduction by Steve Earle. 320 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The classic American novel-winner of the 1958 Pulitzer Prize-now re-published for the 100th anniversary of James Agee's birth One of Time's All-Time 100 Best Novels A Penguin Classic Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident-a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 - May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
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Agee, James. A Death in the Family. New York. 1957. McDowell Obolensky. 339 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by author James Agee, set in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began writing it in 1948, but it was not quite complete when he died in 1955 (with reputedly many portions having been written in the home of his friend Frances Wickes). It was edited and released posthumously in 1957 by editor David McDowell. Agee's widow and children were left with little money after Agee's death and McDowell wanted to help them by publishing the work. Agee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958 for the novel. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. The novel is based on the events that occurred to Agee in 1915 when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel provides a portrait of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, showing how such a loss affects the young widow, her two children, her atheist father and the dead man's alcoholic brother.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 - May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
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Agee, James. Agee On Film. New York. 1958. McDowell Obolensky. Drawings by Tomi Ungerer. 433 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Alfred Manso.
DESCRIPTION - James Agee was one of the most versatile as well as most gifted writers of his time. Though he is now best known for his posthumously published novel, A DEATH IN THE FAMILY - which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 - his name was more associated during his lifetime with the movies. From 1941 to 1948 he was the movie reviewer for Time and from 1942 to 1948 he wrote the film column for The Nation. Agee on Film contains all the Nation articles. In these he was free to write about anything he pleased in any form he chose, and the result is a freewheeling, vital body of work - all of it marked by Agee's creative energy and originality. He sometimes devoted whole columns to memorable films, but sometimes pinioned fifteen or so in a column with a few lines that are marvels of wit and compression. Also included are examples from the Time reviews, shorter and written for a wider, more varied audience. There are two essays which appeared originally in Life, including a classic called ‘Comedy's Greatest Era' which re-creates the age of silent comedy. Agee's writing has an almost cinematic quality, a lens-like precision and immediacy; his perception in all his work was notably visual. He considered the movies as valid an art form as any other, and his interpretive writing on them is central to understanding and enjoying them as art and entertainment. James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and attended St. Andrew's School, outside Sewanee. These two surroundings of his childhood provided the backgrounds for his novels: Knoxville is the scene of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY and THE MORNING WATCH shows the same boy as an adolescent at school - St. Andrew's. Later the family moved North and Agee graduated from Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire. He then went to Harvard where he was Editor of The Advocate. From his graduation from college until 1948, he was connected with Time, Inc., first as a feature writer for Fortune and later as a book and movie reviewer for Time. While at Fortune, he and photographer Walker Evans were assigned to do an article on the sharecroppers in the South. It never appeared in the magazine, but was later published as a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In 1948, Agee left Time, Inc., to work in Hollywood for such directors as John Huston and Charles Laughton. He wrote the scripts for such movies as ‘The African Queen,' ‘The Night of the Hunter,' ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky' (in ‘Face to Face'), as well as several experimental scripts. His death of a heart attack in New York City on May 16, 1955, at the age of forty-five, ended the career of this unique writer. Two years later, the publication of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, brought his work greater recognition than it ever had during his life. Many critics throughout the country when reviewing the book, called for a volume which would bring together his memorable writing on the movies: thus, AGEE ON FILM. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 - May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
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Agee, James. Collected Short Prose of James Agee. Boston. 1968. Houghton Mifflin. Edited and with a memoir by Robert Fitzgerald. 243 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This book contains James Agee's previously uncollected prose: pieces ranging from Harvard days to his last years. In addition to short stories, there are notes for motion pictures (a medium that held deep fascination for him) , scenarios, and plans for projected works which reveal the dizzying way in which fresh ideas competed for Agee's energies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 - May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
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Agee, James. The Morning Watch. Boston. 1951. Houghton Mifflin. 120 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This debut novel is the story of a boy's awakening to the beauty and wonder of life, told through the experiences of a schoolboy, Richard, in a Tennessee mountain school on the morning of Good Friday. To the sharply focused mind of the boy, as he prays in the chapel or swims in the ice-cold forest lake, three mysteries fuse into one - the mystery of the suffering Christ, of the dawn of a spring morning, and of the awakening of manhood in his own body.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 - May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
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Aggeler, Geoff. Confessions of Johnny Ringo. New York. 1987. Dutton. 0525245197. 1st Novel Highly Praised by Anthony Burgess. 310 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The fictional memoir of Civil War guerrilla and Wild West outlaw Johnny Ringo reveals a Faustian struggle between outlaw savagery and book learning, between reckless love and mindless revenge, and between chivalric honor and a life of dissipation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Berkeley, California, in 1939, Geoffrey Aggeler (1939-2018) was educated at the University of Santa Clara and the University of California at Davis, where he earned a doctorate in 1966 with a dissertation on English Renaissance tragedy. He taught at the University of Utah for 32 years, specialising in Renaissance Literature, Modern British Literature, the history of ideas and creative writing. He met Anthony Burgess in Vancouver in 1969 and began writing a book-length study shortly afterwards. Chapters of this work appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, English Studies, and Malahat Review. When the completed book was published by University of Alabama Press in 1979, it was greeted by favourable reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. The chapter on Napoleon Symphony, which includes extracts from Burgess's letters to Aggeler, remains a key reference point for every Burgess scholar. In later years he published important critical essays on Earthly Powers and Any Old Iron. He stayed with Burgess in New York in 1972 and was visited by him in Salt Lake City in 1978, while Burgess was making his documentary about Ernest Hemingway, Grace Under Pressure. In the film's final scene, shot outside Hemingway's home in Ketchum, Idaho, Burgess is seen wearing a hat and coat loaned to him by Aggeler. Aggeler took early retirement from academic life to devote himself to full-time writing. He worked as a freelance editor and was a regular participant at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference. In addition to his critical work, he was the author of two novels: Confessions of Johnny Ringo - highly praised by Anthony Burgess on its first publication in 1987 - and Horses of the Night (2016), a historical novel about the life and death of Christopher Marlowe. He also taught at the Utah State Prison, and was able to draw on his experiences there and as a firefighter and ranger with the US Forest Service for his own fiction. A keen athlete, he ran twelve marathons and recorded a personal best time of 2 hours 52 minutes.
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Agueros, Jack. Dominoes and Other Stories From the Puerto Rican. Willimantic. 1993. Curbstone Press. 188068411x. 149 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘A wonderful collection of stories - full of the particulars of a people's encounter with America, told with persuasive grace, charm, [and] honesty. .' - Robert Coles. DOMINOES & OTHER STORIES FROM THE PUERTO RICAN, the long-awaited debut collection of the fiction of playright and poet Jack Agueros, is a unique window on the untold stories of the lives of Puerto Rican-Americans. With a phenomenal richness of detail, Jack Agueros brings the reality of Puerto Rican experience in New York fully to life. In stories that span the decades of the 1940s through 1990s he recreates the barrio in all its multi-faceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, numbers collectors, tropical fruit vendors and sidewalk games of dominoes, its knife fights and junkies' raps and its successful stories of craftsmen and entrepeneurs. These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet experiences, but throughout, Jack Agueros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion that gloriously affirm quiet moments of grace and triumph in common and ordinary struggles - the real stuff of literature. ‘I don't like the way Latinos often get portrayed. The lives of working people are unheard from because it's hard to write about them. But those lives are frequently heroic and have their drama, too. I'm also interested in what happens to them.' - Jack Agueros. Jack Agueros was born in New York City in 1934. Recipient of numerous awards, he has published poetry, plays and children's stories, and has written works broadcast on television, notably for Sesame Street and WNBC-TV Channel 4. For almost ten years he was director of the Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, the only Puerto Rican Museum in the U.S. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jack Agüeros (September 2, 1934 - May 4, 2014) was an American community activist, poet, writer, and translator, and the former director of El Museo del Barrio.
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Ahad, Badia Sahar. Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture. Urbana. 2010. University of Illinois Press. 9780252035661. 6 x 9 inChes 5 BlACK & White PhotogRAPhs. A volume in The New Black Studies Series, edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride. 216 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives. “An innovative and meaningful addition to recent scholarship on race and psychoanalysis. Badia Sahar Ahad’s work makes a significant historical and theoretical contribution to the study of race, psychoanalysis, African American literature, and American culture.” —Gwen S. Bergner, author of Taboo Subjects: Sex and Psychoanalysis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - BADIA SAHAR AHAD is an assistant professor of English at Loyola University.
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Ai. Fate: New Poems. Boston. 1991. Houghton Mifflin. 0395556368. 77 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - 16 long poems comprise this fourth collection from poet Ai. Fate (1991) and Greed (1993), like Sin before them, contain monologues that dramatize public figures. Readers confront the inner worlds of former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, missing-and-presumed-dead Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, musician Elvis Presley, and actor James Dean as voices from beyond-the-grave who yet remain out of sync with social or ethical “norms.” Noting that Ai “reinvents” each of her subjects within her verse, Duane Ackerson added that, through each monologue, what these individuals say, “returning after death, expresses more about the American psyche than about the real figures.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 - March 20, 2010) was an American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa (Japanese: literally: ‘Love Stream'). She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
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Ai. Greed: Poems. New York. 1993. Norton. 0393035611. 96 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Greed for money, power, sex, and love is the theme of this volume of dramatic monologues by the poet the New York Times Book Review has called 'one of the most singular voices of her generation.' Beginning with 'Riot Act,' a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, Ai explored racial and sexual politics through the voices of diverse characters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 - March 20, 2010) was an American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa (Japanese: literally: ‘Love Stream'). She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
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Ai. Killing Floor. Boston. 1979. Houghton Mifflin. 0395275938. 64 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The second poetry collection by the author of CRUELTY and GREED. This was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection of the American Academy of American Poets.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 - March 20, 2010) was an American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa (Japanese: literally: ‘Love Stream'). She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
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Ai. Sin: Poems. Boston. 1986. Houghton Mifflin. 0395379075. 80 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Sin contains monologues that dramatize public figures. In Ai's poetry readers confront the inner worlds of former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, missing-and-presumed-dead Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, musician Elvis Presley, and actor James Dean as voices from beyond-the-grave who yet remain out of sync with social or ethical “norms.” Noting that Ai “reinvents” each of her subjects within her verse, Duane Ackerson added that, through each monologue, what these individuals say, “returning after death, expresses more about the American psyche than about the real figures.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 - March 20, 2010) was an American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa (Japanese: literally: ‘Love Stream'). She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
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Aiken, Conrad (editor). Modern American Poets. New York. 1927. Modern Library. 367 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - With contributions by Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Anna Hempstead Branch, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Alfred Kreymborg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, John Gould Fletcher, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Maxwell Bodenheim.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 - August 17, 1973) was an American writer, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play, and an autobiography.
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Aiken, Conrad. Great Circle. New York. 1933. Scribner's. 335 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A profound examination of the mysteries of memory and perception from one of the twentieth century's most admired literary artists. The train races from New York to Boston. For Andrew Cather, it is much too fast. He will return home three days early, and he is both terrified and intrigued by what he may find there. He pictures himself unlocking the door to his quiet Cambridge house, padding silently through its darkened halls, and finally discovering the thing he both fears and yearns to see: his wife in the arms of another man. Cather knows that what he finds in Cambridge may destroy his life, yet finally set him free. A masterful portrait of an average man at the edge of a shocking precipice, Great Circle is a triumph of psychological realism. One of Sigmund Freud's favorite novels, it is a probing exploration of the secrets of consciousness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 5, 1889. When he was a small boy, his father killed his mother and committed suicide himself, a tragedy that had a profound impact on Aiken's development. He was raised by a great-great-aunt in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1912, the same period as T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings. During this time, he was also a contributing editor to Dial magazine, where he befriended Ezra Pound. His first collection of poetry, Earth Triumphant, was published in 1914, establishing his reputation as a poet. He avoided military service during World War I by claiming that, as a poet, he was part of an ‘essential industry'. During the 1920s and 1930s Aiken travelled extensively between England and North America and married three times, once to Jessie McDonald, then to Clarissa M. Lorenz and later the artist Mary Hoover. (Joan Aiken, the children's book writer, is Aiken and McDonald's daughter.) Most of Aiken's poetry reflects an intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. Of the many influences Aiken acknowledged, the writings of Freud, William James, Edgar Allan Poe, and the French Symbolists are most evident in his work. The forms and sounds of music pervade all of Aiken's highly introspective poetry, collected in The Jig of Forslin (1916); The Charnel Rose (1918); Selected Poems (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930; Brownstone Eclogues (1942); The Kid (1947); Collected Poems (1953), which won the National Book Award; and Collected Poems 1916-1970 (1970). His work in Collected Novels (1964), including Blue Voyage (1927), shows Aiken to be a master of interior monologue. His novels had a profound influence on the works of many young writers of the day, including his protEgE, Malcolm Lowry. Aiken was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (now the U.S. Poet Laureate) from 1950-52. His other honors included the Bollingen Prize, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Medal for Literature. Aiken's critical essays are compiled in A Reviewer's ABC (1958); his Collected Short Stories appeared in 1960. As editor of Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems (1924), Aiken was largely responsible for establishing her posthumous literary reputation. The Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken (1978) contains correspondence with such literary colleagues as Wallace Stevens, Harriet Monroe, and Edmund Wilson, and his autobiographical book Ushant (1952) affords much insight into other literary figures he knew, mingling personal references with mention of his associates. Conrad Aiken died in Savannah in 1973.
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Aiken, Conrad. John Deth & Other Poems. New York. 1930. Scribner. 140 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Conrad Aiken was an American poet, short story writer, critic and novelist. Most of Aiken's work reflects his intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. As editor of Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems (1924) he was largely responsible for establishing that poet's posthumous literary reputation. From the 1920s Aiken divided his life between England and the United States, playing a significant role in introducing American poets to the British audience. Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. In his childhood Aiken experienced a considerable trauma when he found the bodies of his parents-his physician father, brilliant but unstable, had killed his mother and committed suicide. When reaching the age of his father at the time of the tragedy, Aiken had also difficulties in keeping his depression at bay. In his autobiographical narrative USHANT: AN ESSAY (1952), Aiken confessed that finding his parents dead, he found himself possessed of them forever Aiken was brought up in Massachusetts from the age of eleven by a great-great-aunt. Before entering Harvard Aiken was educated at private schools and at Middlesex School, Concord. In Harvard he shared a class with T.S. Eliot, with whom he edited the Advocate and whose poetry was to influence his own. Aiken graduated in 1912, in the same era as Eliot, Walter Lippman, Van Wyck Brooks, and E.E. Cummings. In the same year he married Jessie McDonald, a graduate student from Canada. After working as a reporter, Aiken devoted himself entirely to writing, along with having a small private income. Of the many influences Aiken acknowledged, the writings of Freud, Havelock Ellis, William James, Edgar Allan Poe, and the French Symbolists are evident in his work. Freud considered Aiken's GREAT CIRCLE a masterpiece of analytical introspection. Aiken's first collection of verse, EARTH TRIUMPHANT (1914) made him known as a poet. He was a contributing editor to Dial, which led to a friendship with Ezra Pound. Aiken's essays, collected in SKEPTICISMS (1919) and A REVIEWER'S ABC (1958), dealt with the questions provoked by his commitment to literature as a mode of self-understanding. During the First World War Aiken claimed that he was in an essential industry because of being a poet, and was granted an exemption for this reason. Aiken's adult life was marked by trans-Atlantic journeys. In 1921 he moved from Massachusetts to England, settling in Rye, Sussex, where Jessie gave birth to their third children. At that time Aiken's marriage began to fall apart; they divorced in 1929. In 1927-28 Aiken was a tutor in English at Harvard. He married Clarissa M. Lorenz in 1930, she was a musician and journalist. During the following years Aiken produced his famous preludes, collected in PRELUDES TO MEMNON (1931) and TIME IN THE ROCK (1936), but there was also a suicide attempt in 1932. He sailed again for Boston in 1933, and then spent two years in Rye (1934-36), writing ‘London Letters' to the New Yorker. He returned to New York and Boston, and travelled in Mexico, where he married in 1937 the artist Mary Hoover after divorcing Clarissa. They returned to Rye in 1937. After the outbreak of World War II, they moved to the United States. In 1930 Aiken was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his collection SELECTED POEMS. Most of Aiken's fiction was written between the 1920s and ‘30s, among others the novels BLUE VOYAGE (1927), in which he used interior monologue, KING COFFIN (1934), and the short story collections BRING! BRING! (1925), and AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE (1934), which contains the classic ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow', a horror story in which the sounds of the falling snow start to haunt a young boy. After staying two years in Rye, Aiken settled in 1947 in Brewster, Massachusetts. He was a consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952. In 1953 he published COLLECTED POEMS, which included the masterwork ‘Preludes to Definition' and ‘Morning Song of Senlin'. Ushant depicted his friendships with Malcolm Lowry, T.S. Eliot, and other figures he knew. It dramatized the attempt of its protagonist, the author's persona, to read the palimpsest of hieroglyphs that constitutes the landscape of his soul, and mingled sketches of the literary generation between the wars with psychoanalytic free association. From 1962 on Aiken wintered in a Savannah house adjacent to that of his childhood. He died in Savannah on August 17, 1973. Posthumously published THE SELECTED LETTERS OF CONRAD AIKEN (1978) contains correspondence with such literary colleagues as Wallace Stevens, Harriet Monroe, and Edmund Wilson. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, Aiken's many honors and awards include National Book Award (1954), Bollinger Prize in 1956, Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1958, and National Medal for Literature in 1969. Aiken was married three times. Two of his daughters from the first marriage became writers: Jane Aiken Hodge (born in 1917), who started to publish popular historical novels and works of romantic suspense from the 1960s, and Joan Aiken. She was born in Sussex in 1924 and educated at home before entering the school at the age of 12. A prolific writer like her sister, Aiken produced more than 30 books for adults and over 60 for children. Her first collection of short stories for children, All You've Ever Wanted, appeared in 1953. Other works include The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), The Silence of Herondale (1964), A Necklace of Raindrops (1968), Midnight is a Place (1974), The Shadow Guests (1980), The Cuckoo Tree (1981), The Way to Write for Children (1982), Mansfield Revisited (1984), Deception (1987), Blackground (1989), Jane Fairfax (1990), Morningquest (1992), Eliza's Daughter (1994), The Winter Sleepwalker (1994), Cold Shoulder Road (1995); The Cockatrice Boys (1996), The Jewel Seed (1997). Her works combine elements from fairy tales, history, horror, supernatural, and adventure. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 - August 17, 1973) was an American writer, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play, and an autobiography.
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Aiken, Conrad. Ushant: An Autobiographical Narrative. New York/Boston. 1952. Duell,Sloan & Pearce/Little Brown. 365 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Ushant by Conrad Aiken is a unique literary work that transcends conventional genres, blending autobiography, confession, and participatory narrative. The book is structured into six sections, guiding readers on a circular journey that reflects Aiken's exploration of memory and self-identity. Central to the narrative is the character D., who serves as both the observer and participant in this voyage, a metaphorical return to his roots and a quest for self-knowledge. The backdrop of the story features a ship at sea, with D. and fellow passengers navigating their pasts and shared human experiences while returning to England after World War II.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 - August 17, 1973) was an American writer, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play, and an autobiography.
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Alarcón, Francisco X. and Rodríguez, Odilia Galván (editors). Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice. Tucson. 2016. University of Arizona Press. 9780816502790. Foreword by Juan Felipe Herrera. Camino del Sol. 6 x 9. 224 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - On April 20, 2010, nine Latino students chained themselves to the main doors of the Arizona State Capitol in an act of civil disobedience to protest Arizona's SB 1070. Moved by the students' actions, that same day Francisco X. Alarcon responded by writing a poem in Spanish and English titled ‘Para Los Nueve del Capitolio/ For the Capitol Nine,' which he dedicated to the students. The students replied to the poem with a collective online message. To share with the world what was taking place, Alarcon then created a Facebook page called ‘Poets Responding to SB 1070' and posted the poem, launching a powerful and dynamic forum for social justice. Since then, more than three thousand original contributions by poets and artists from around the globe have been posted to the page. Poetry of Resistance offers a selection of these works, addressing a wide variety of themes, including racial profiling, xenophobia, cultural misunderstanding, violence against refugees, shared identity, and much more. Contributors include distinguished poets such as Francisco Aragon, Devreaux Baker, Sarah Browning, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Susan Deer Cloud, Sharon Dubiago, Martín Espada, Genny Lim, Pam Uschuk, and Alma Luz Villanueva. Bringing together more than eighty writers, the anthology powerfully articulates the need for change and the primacy of basic human rights. Each poem shows the heartfelt dedication these writers and artists have to justice in a world that has become larger than borders. Poetry of Resistance is a poetic call for tolerance, reflection, reconciliation, and healing. ‘Poetry of Resistance is a timely response (via verse) to the current political climate of Arizona, though what the book ultimately argues is that these injustices have always been taking place - SB 1070 is simply its most recent manifestation.' - Rigoberto González, author of Our Lady of the Crossword.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francisco X. Alarcon is a Chicano poet and educator, and author of twelve volumes of poetry, including From the Other Side of Night: Selected and New Poems. His most recent books are Canto hondo / Deep Song and Borderless Butterflies / Mariposas sin fronteras. He founded the Facebook page ‘Poets Responding to SB 1070' and teaches at University of California, Davis. Odilia Galván Rodríguez, eco-poet, writer, editor, and activist, is the author of four volumes of poetry; her latest is Red Earth Calling: Cantos for the 21st Century. She was the English edition editor of Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba. She facilitates creative writing workshops nationally and is a moderator of ‘Poets Responding to SB 1070' and ‘Love and Prayers for Fukushima,' both Facebook pages dedicated to bringing attention to social justice issues that affect the lives and well-being of many people.
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Alarcón, Francisco X. Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation - Special edition. Tucson. 2019. University of Arizona Press. 9780816538430. Edited by Odilia Galván Rodríguez; Foreword by Juan Felipe Herrera; Translated by David Bowles and Xánath Caraza. 6 x 9. Camino del Sol. 184 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - This special edition of Snake Poems offers Nahuatl, Spanish, and English renditions of 104 poems based on Nahuatl invocations and spells that have survived more than three centuries, with a modern ecopoetic response from the late Francisco X. Alarcón.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The late Francisco X. Alarcón (1954–2016) was an award-winning Chicano poet and educator. He authored fourteen volumes of poetry, published seven books for children through Lee & Low Books, and taught at the University of California, Davis, where he directed the Spanish for Native Speakers Program. He created the Facebook page Poets Responding (to SB 1070) and co-founded Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol / The Writers of the New Sun. Odilia Galván Rodríguez is a poet, writer, editor, and activist. Her latest book, The Color of Light, is an extensive collection of chronicles and poetry honoring the Mexica (Aztec) and Orisha (Yoruba). She is co-editor, along with Francisco X. Alarcón, of the award-winning anthology Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice. She has worked as the editor for several magazines, most recently at Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba, and Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal online.
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Albee, Edward. A Delicate Balance. New York. 1966. Atheneum. 170 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Edwards Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Delicate Balance reveals the emotional savagery of suburbia and the psychological terror of empty lives. First produced in 1966, this dark drawing room comedy may be Albee's masterpiece, as powerful in its 1996 revival as it was thirty years before. Its characters maintain a delicate balance between self-destruction and survival when a bitter 36-year-old daughter returns home to the family nest after the collapse of her fourth marriage. The much wed Julia shatters the uneasy peace of her long-married parents, Agnes and Tobias, and their permanent guest — acerbic, unpredictable, and witty alcoholic sister-in-law Claire. When two lifelong friends gate-crash this impromptu reunion, the masks of civility drop and raw feelings emerge. Filled with shades of meaning, subtleties, and whole paragraphs of brilliant dialogue, A Delicate Balance has become classic theater, a timeless mirror of the worst, and sometimes the best, aspects of modern life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany's an adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
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Albee, Edward. Counting the Ways and Listening: Two Plays. New York. 1977. Atheneum. 0689107854. 152 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An unnerving encounter between He and She takes the form, if not the tone, of a vaudeville, and a much publicized radio play is here presented for the stage
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany's an adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
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Albee, Edward. Seascape. New York. 1975. Atheneum. 0689105398. 158 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Seascape was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1975. On the heels of the success of Edward Albee's The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Overlook brings back--in a stand-alone volume--one of Albee's most cherished plays, a fantastic story of what it means to be alive--winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. On a deserted stretch of beach, a middle-aged couple relaxes after a picnic lunch and converse idly about home, family, and their life together. She sketches; he naps. Then, suddenly, they are joined by two sea creatures, a pair of lizards from the depths of the ocean, with whom they engage in a fascinating dialogue. The emotional and intellectual reverberations of this bizarre conversation will linger in the heart and the mind long after the curtain falls--or the last page is turned.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany's an adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
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Albee, Edward. The Lady From Dubuque. New York. 1980. Atheneum. 0689109253. 161 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Three young couples are playing Twenty Questions. The drinks have been flowing, so the mood has gone from good to bad in a very short time. As it happens, the hostess, who has the most abrasive tongue of all, is dying of cancer, and the party ends when her pain becomes so intense her husband must carry her to bed. After the stage is empty, a handsome, mysterious woman, accompanied by an equally handsome man, enter the house and settle in for the night. In the morning they are still there to greet the baffled young husband and his ailing wife when they come down for breakfast. Unruffled by the young couples questions, the two must also confront the guests of the previous evening. While claims are accepted that the mysterious woman is the mother of the dying wife, intriguing inconsistencies remain: Is she, in truth, the angel of death? In the end there are no neat answers, but questions raised, and debated, will reverberate in the mind long after the play itself has ended.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany's an adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
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Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. New York. 1962. Athemeum. 242 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - "Twelve times a week," answered Uta Hagen when asked how often she'd like to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the same way, audiences and critics alike could not get enough of Edward Albee's masterful play. A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening's end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play's razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as "a brilliantly original work of art--an excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany's an adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
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Albon, George. Aspiration. Richmond. 2013. Omnidawn Publishing / University Press of New England. 9781890650858. 5 1/2 x 7. 76 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - I think of aspiration as the state where a poet's thrown together life-structures both invite and are breached by the poet's preoccupations - known ones, new ones. It's the dream of meaningful placement and the open set.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GEORGE ALBON is the author of the poetry collections Empire Life, Thousands Count Out Loud,Brief Capital of Disturbances, Step, Aspiration, and Momentary Songs. His work has appeared in Hambone, New American Writing, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Bay Poetics, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay 'The Paradise of Meaning' was the George oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002.0He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Albon, George. Brief Capital of Disturbances. Richmond. 2003. Omnidawn. 1890650137. 96 pages. paperback. Cover design by Philip Krayna Design.
DESCRIPTION - Inspired by the journals of Roland Barthes (and by the cahier tradition in general), Albon uses the sentence and short paragraph as subtly syncopated listening devices, sounding for intimate and often surprisingly revelatory details of the daily encounters that comprise urban living. Faithfully rendering each moment's aliveness and attuned to experience as a kind of wordless address, he repeatedly enlarges the parameters of what language can encompass and communicate.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay ‘The Paradise of Meaning' was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Albon, George. Empire Life. Los Angeles. 1998. Littoral Books. 155713376x. 72 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - This much anticipated first full-length edition of Albon's work brings together two long pieces: the title poem, 88 eight-line lyrics, is a workaday fleshing out of time spent under inner and outer American weathers, and Cosmophagy marks a daring incursion into the heart of the sentence. For a reader first encountering this writing, Albon's purposeful and mature technique will make motion/ & emotional/ coffers change. Albon's poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rhizome, The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry, O Anthology, Ribot, and Hambone.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay ‘The Paradise of Meaning' was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Albon, George. Fire Break. Callicoon. 2013. Nightboat Books. 9781937658137. 72 pages. paperback. Cover art: ‘Red Hex’, 2012 (front); ‘Black Line Harmony,’ 2012 (back) by Clare Rojas.design by Philip Krayna Design.
DESCRIPTION - A brilliant new poetic sequence from a leading innovative American poet. FIRE BREAK is a suite of untitled lyric poems which move through a succession of present moments, bringing through the weave both hard-edged engagement and uncommon harmonics. In the mix can be heard messages of desire, physicality, global imbalances, and ultimately, creation. ‘George Albon's admirable body of work functions like a musical backbone, bracing us for and facing us into the world.' - Forrest Gander. ADVANCE PRAISE for Fire Break by George Albon: ‘Like Empedocles said, double is the birth of mortal things; -- and amid the oscillations of Love and Strife George Albon tells ‘the myth in the present tense,' taking lyric stands among the elements an hour before work. Our personal calendars overflow with griefs and attentions George sets to song within these covers. Lacking such doses of 'romanticism through the scientism,' the collective heart starves in the ‘noise and sprawl of willed commerce.' George reminds us yes you can ‘fold your love in' to universal flow. Thank goodness.' - David Brazil. ‘George Albon's utterly distinct poetry takes us through the tactile labyrinth to show us a ‘prehensile glimpse/ on the edge of eternity.' Albon constructs a strange and complex world in the fullness of his inquiry: listening with ‘ears askew,' this poet topples the assumptions with which we typically question and essays a ‘study of the vanished/ overtaken by intensities.' It takes a poet of exceptional skill and attunement to articulate, amid the world's chaos, what the rest of us fail even to register. Fire Break is a consummate demonstration of what poetry can do while ‘inventing/ under/ duress.' - Elizabeth Robinson. ‘Let melody stand for attachment' - as a phrase it's a credo and poetics, at once making melos the means and measure of the poet's relation to his environs. And though George Albon indeed puts language as made thing between observer and world, he does so in order to examine our attachments rather than eschew them. ‘No sooner written,' he writes, ‘than contended.' He crafts poems so perceptually rich and critically canny that they everywhere render the complexities of affect coded as music, ‘resonance merging/ with its being/ struck.' As attuned to ‘the mercantile/ world working' as to the erotics of ‘literal skin' Fire Break reminds us of the important Objectivist legacy Oppen and Rakosi left on the West Coast. Few are more their heir than George Albon.' - Brian Teare.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay ‘The Paradise of Meaning' was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Albon, George. Lyric Multiples: Aspiration, Practice, Immanence, Migration. New York. 2018. Nightboat Books. 9781937658922. 232 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Lyric Multiples comprises four essays written over the last decade. The subject is poetry but the essays range over such topics as the evolution of the human call, ascensional modes of thinking, pop songs, the built environment and its discontents, the post-punk moment, its fruitful aftermath, and much else. Throughout this book, Albon explores unencountered varieties of aesthetic experience and the contributions they make to an ideal of social interconnectivity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay ‘The Paradise of Meaning' was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Albon, George. Momentary Songs. San Francisco. 2008. Krupskaya. 9781928650270. 94 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A moment is an inside flutter, a reflection, a civil relapse. George Albon's MOMENTARY SONGS sound the possibilities of forwardness and hope in a surrounding twilight of unprecedented venality. Using a variety of registers - lyrical inquiry, Blakean exhortation, the satirical spiel of Morgenstern's Gallows Songs - they search for alternative states (public ones, affective ones) as well as offer a probe on what has come to pass: ‘In this eclipse are we the inclement for placing it?' A reading pole can also be a door, a tree trunk, the wall of a barn. It's the itinerant's edge-of town bulletin board, where shared message-symbols are drawn and heeded: Good town, bad town, okay place to stay, don't stop here. The poems of Reading Pole both comment on and embody the heart of these messages - quick news on the open-ended route. In Dorothea Tanning's EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK, an enormous sunflower lays across an upper floor landing. A pubescent girl with undone blouse leans against the landing's wall, enduring an experience, or savoring one. Another girl, her back to the viewer, looks down the hallway, her long tresses freed from gravity and tendriling toward the ceiling. Sunflowers will do that. SEVEN ADMISSIONS offer variations on a name, and revel in the world between the letters. Inspired by Frank O'Hara's acrostic-poems to Edwin Denby, these admissions are playful and austere by turns, but always putting forth Eros as challenge to the death-making predicates of the title sequence. ‘Avuncular spotted drones,' be warned. Not since Guston did Nixon has the resource of art been turned on the throne with such hopeful scurrility. Albon's Momentary Songs are hymns for the unchurched ‘pioneers/of the bottom edge,' who know all midnights are false' and want back their stars. I'm taking my news from the other George - resistance isn't futile, it's the ‘sunlight is information' age and Minerva's owl sings ‘coup due.' Rodney Koeneke Committed to the clamor of a public occasion, Momentary Songs refuses the fashionable stance that would hope to overcome a stultifying noise by amplifying it back to itself in a feedback loop of hip futility. Instead (and often in startling outbursts of rhyme), it reflects a deep historical current of poetry as that which refuses to simply inform, but must sound Taylor Brady. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay ‘The Paradise of Meaning' was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Albon, George. The Built World. Buffalo. 2023. Blazevox [Books]. 9781609644383. 99 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - “In this “nomad music” at once oblique and demotic, worlds come into and out of being. Experimental neighborhoods, queer provinces. Formally immaculate former places: actual sites once occupied by mobile homes, yellow concrete, dust. Not absent now but full of vibrant green and rain puddles, under sky that “gathers like cloud.” In these stellar post-punk Schuyleresque meditations, an island metamorphoses into pearl, and “all our vocations are semi-permeable.” Everywhere these carefully built temporary worlds, this delicate slipshod multiplicity of places. George Albon is right there, he attends it—with focus, clarity, and love. Why what is shelter because what is not.” —Jason Morris. “The Built World creates stately lines of texture and sound in which juxtapositions of various sorts rearrange expectations in exhilarating heady moments of simultaneity. The outside and the inside wonderfully interpenetrate. Words from different registers or wide-ranging disciplines slam together, information engages feeling, sound propels engagement; the ordinary confronts the extraordinary.” —Martha Ronk. “A tremendous scope is needed to imagine the world from as many of its countless angles as poetry can hold—a world made of words and their sounds, maximally gentle and steadfast. In The Built World connection is understood as the spaces between things and scenes that move continuously, resonating underneath with all represented surfaces and experiences. This is a tough, beautiful, provocative, companionable book of poems.” —Anselm Berrigan.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Albon is the author of Lyric Multiples: Aspiration Practice Immanence Migration, Fire Break, Aspiration, Momentary Songs, Step, Brief Capital of Disturbances, Thousands Count Out Loud, and Empire Life. Work of his has appeared in Chicago Review, Hambone, O Anthology 4, New American Writing, Crayon, Poetry Salzburg Review, and elsewhere; and in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, Bay Poetics, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2018. Pieces on Morton Feldman and Otis Redding have appeared in Shuffle Boil. Tunes from George Albon and The Sheaves can be heard on Bandcamp. His essay “The Paradise of Meaning” was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives in San Rafael, California.
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Albon, George. Thousands Count Out Loud. San Francisco. 2000. Lyric& Press. 1889098019. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - THOUSANDS COUNT OUT LOUD takes the sonnet form as its template, but turns each line its own distinct entity--a poem unto itself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GEORGE ALBON is the author of the poetry collections Empire Life, Thousands Count Out Loud,Brief Capital of Disturbances, Step, Aspiration, and Momentary Songs. His work has appeared in Hambone, New American Writing, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Bay Poetics, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay 'The Paradise of Meaning' was the George oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002.0He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Alcott, Louisa May. A Merry Christmas: And Other Christmas Stories. New York. 2014. Penguin Books. 9780143122463. Penguin Christmas Classics. 160 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - One of six beloved Christmas classics in collectible hardcover editions A Merry Christmas collects the treasured holiday tales of Louisa May Alcott, from the dearly familiar Yuletide benevolence of Marmee and her "little women" to the timeless "What Love Can Do," wherein the residents of a boarding house come together to make a lovely Christmas for two poor girls. Wildly popular at the time of their publication-readers deluged Alcott with letters demanding sequels-and drawing on Alcott's family and experiences in the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, these stories have the authentic texture and detail of Christmas in nineteenth-century America, while their emphasis on generosity and charity make them timeless embodiments of the Christmas spirit. Penguin Christmas Classics Give the gift of literature this Christmas. Penguin Christmas Classics honor the power of literature to keep on giving through the ages. The six volumes in the series are not only our most beloved Christmas tales, they also have given us much of what we love about the holiday itself. A Christmas Carol revived in Victorian England such Christmas hallmarks as the Christmas tree, holiday cards, and caroling. The Yuletide yarns of Anthony Trollope popularized throughout the British Empire and around the world the trappings of Christmas in London. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus created the origin story for the presiding spirit of Christmas as we know it. The holiday tales of Louisa May Alcott shaped the ideal of an American Christmas. The Night Before Christmas brought forth some of our earliest Christmas traditions as passed down through folk tales. And The Nutcracker inspired the most famous ballet in history, one seen by millions in the twilight of every year. Beautifully designed hardcovers-with foil-stamped jackets, decorative endpapers, and nameplates for personalization-in a small trim size that makes them perfect stocking stuffers, Penguin Christmas Classics embody the spirit of giving that is at the heart of our most time-honored stories about the holiday. Collect all six Penguin Christmas Classics: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Christmas at Thompson Hall: And Other Christmas Stories by Anthony Trollope The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum A Merry Christmas: And Other Christmas Stories by Louisa May Alcott The Night Before Christmas by Nikolai Gogol The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffmann
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. With her pen name Louisa wrote novels for young adults in juvenile hall. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888.
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Alcott, Louisa May. Jo's Boys. New York. 1987. Signet/New American Library. 0451520890. Afterword By Madeleine B. Stern. 300 pages. paperback. CE2089. Signet Classic original.
DESCRIPTION - The wonderful, warm saga of the March family that began with LITTLE WOMEN and continued with Little Men is here concluded with JO'S BOYS. Ten years after a splendid, romping pack of boys and girls came to Plumfield School and plunged a grown - up Jo into a new series of adventures, we come back to see what has happened. and to discover that life has a way of turning out quite differently from what we expect. Still holding a special place in our hearts with her headstrong acts, the now - famous author Jo March Bhaer is caught in a hilarious misadventure as hoards of autograph seekers invade Plumfield to meet her. But violence, shipwreck, and romance await the Plumfield boys who go out in the world, especially wild Dan, who heads West, and orphaned Nat, who must prove himself as an artist and a man. As poignant as it is delightful, this final book in the March family trilogy is a wonderful chance to revisit the world of America's favorite children's classic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 - March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston.
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Alcott, Louisa May. Little Men. New York. 0. Signet/New American Library. 0451519981. Afterword by Madeline B. Stern. paperback. 1998. Signet Classic original.
DESCRIPTION - With two sons of her own, and twelve orphan boys in the school at Plumfield, Jo March - now Jo Bhaer - couldn't be happier. But there are plenty of troubles and adventures in store for the boys. Fans of Louisa May Alcott's stories will enjoy this third book about the March family and their friends.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 - March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston.
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Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York. 0. Signet/New American Library. 0451518144. paperback. 1814. Signet Classic original.
DESCRIPTION - Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy manage to lead interesting lives despite Father's absence at war and the family's lack of money. Whether they're putting on a play or forming a secret society, their gaiety is infectious. Written from Louisa May Alcott's own experiences, this remarkable novel has been treasured for generations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 - March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston.
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Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York. 1989. Penguin Books. 9780140390698. Introduction by Elaine Showalter. 544 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - One of the best loved books of all time. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all ages have become a part of this remarkable family and have felt the deep sadness when Meg leaves the circle of sisters to be married at the end of Part I. Part II, chronicles Meg's joys and mishaps as a young wife and mother, Jo's struggle to become a writer, Beth's tragedy, and Amy's artistic pursuits and unexpected romance. Based on Louisa May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of nineteenth- century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston.
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Alcott, Louisa May. Louisa May Alcott On Race, Sex, and Slavery. Boston. 1997. Northeastern University Press. 9781555533076. Edited and with an introduction by Sarah Elbert. 6 x 9. 160 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The passionate supporter of abolition and women's rights speaks out on the most controversial issues of the day. Louisa May Alcott championed women's causes in gothic tales of interracial romance and in newspaper articles published during the Civil War. Drawn from her service as a nurse in a Union hospital as well as from her radical abolitionist activities, these writings allow Alcott to comment boldly on unstable racial identities, interracial sex and marriage, armed slave rebellion, war, and the links between the bondage of slaves and the conditions of white womanhood. A comprehensive introduction situates Alcott and her family within the network of antebellum reformers and unmasks her personal and literary struggles with the boundaries of race, sex, and class.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. With her pen name Louisa wrote novels for young adults in juvenile hall. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888.
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Alcott, Louisa May. The Inheritance. New York. 1998. Penguin Books. 9780140436662. Introduction by Joel Myerson. 208 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Her recently discovered first novel, The Inheritance, written when Alcott was just 17, offers readers a fascinating look at the birth of a remarkable career. The Inheritance, set in an English country manor, is the story of Edith Adelon, an Italian orphan brought to England by Lord Hamilton as a companion for his children. With a charm reminiscent of Jane Austen's novels, Alcott's plot sets love and courtesy against depravity and dishonor -- and with the help of a secret inheritance, allows virtue to prevail.In their Introduction, Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy relate their fortuitous discovery of Alcott's manuscript draft of The Inheritance (preserved at the Houghton Library of Harvard). They explore the forces -- both literary and personal -- that shaped the novel, and study how it foreshadowed Alcott's later work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston.
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Alcott, Louisa May. Work: A Story of Experience. New York. 1994. Penguin Books. 9780140390919. Introduction by Joy S. Kasson. 384 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A story about a nineteenth-century woman's search for a meaningful life through work outside the family sphere, Work is at once Alcott's exploration of her personal challenges and a social critique of America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She died in Boston.
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Alegria, Penelope. Milagro. Chicago. 2020. Haymarket Books. 9781642595222. 42 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Penelope Alegria's Milagro is a retracing of parental lineage, a recount of the stories that course through the veins of family. The collection examines the effects of immigration from the perspective of both the immigrant and the immigrant's child, investigating how the act of leaving reverbrates through generations. These poems echoe with fondness and longing, with love and sacrifice that reflects the first-generation American's struggle to belong. Alegria writes about uncles, Peruvian cuisine and first boyfriends to show how what immigrants choose to leave behind is often what their children carry with them.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Penelope Alegria is the 2019 Chicago Youth Poet Laureate and a two-time member of Young Chicago Authors’ artistic apprenticeship, Louder Than a Bomb Squad. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in La Nueva Semana, El Beisman, Muse/A Journal, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, as well as BBC Radio 4 and WBEZ Radio Archives. She is a Brain Mill Press Editor’s Pick, and she was awarded the 2018 Literary Award by Julian Randall and both the 2019 and 2020 Poetry Award by the Niles West English Department. She has performed spoken word at the Obama Foundation Summit, Pitchfork Music Festival, and other venues in the Chicagoland area. She will attend Harvard College in the fall of 2020.
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Alexander, Eleanor. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore. New York. 2002. New York University Press. 0814706967. 243 pages. hardcover. ABOUT THE COVER: Paul Laurence Dunbar, C. 1900. Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society. Alice Moore Dunbar, C. 1900. Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers, University of Delaware library, Newark Delaware.
DESCRIPTION - On February 10, 1906 Alice Ruth Moore, estranged wife of renowned early- twentieth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, boarded a streetcar, settled comfortably into her seat, and opened her newspaper to learn of her husband's death the day before. Paul Laurence Dunbar, son of former slaves, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed 'the most promising young colored man in America,' was dead from tuberculosis at the age of 33. LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW traces the tempestuous romance of America's most noted African American literary couple. Drawing on a variety of love letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographies, Eleanor Alexander vividly recounts Dunbar and Moore's tumultuous affair, from a courtship conducted almost entirely through letters and an elopement brought on by Dunbar's brutal drunken rape of Moore, through their passionate marriage and its eventual violent dissolution in 1902. Moore, once having left Dunbar, rejected his every entreaty to return to him, responding to his many letters only once, with a blunt, one-word telegram (‘No'). This is a remarkable story of tragic romance among African American elites struggling to define themselves and their relationships within the context of post-slavery America. As such, it provides a timely examination of the ways in which cultural ideology and politics shape and complicate conceptions of romantic love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eleanor Alexander (died 2001) was assistant professor of history at Georgia Institute of Technology and has been awarded a Winterthur Fellowship, a Dorothy Danforth Compton Fellowship, and the Drusilla Dunjee Houston Scholarship. She earned her Ph.D. at Princeton and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
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Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior: Essays. Saint Paul. 2004. Graywolf Press. 1555973930. 224 pages. paperback. Cover design by Julie Metz. Cover art: Elizabeth Catlett. ‘The Black Women Speaks’.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Elizabeth Alexander is one of the brightest stars in our literary sky. a poet of poise and power. Now we see that she's also capable of striking prose. These essays speak eloquently not only about literature - especially poetry - but also about life itself and the complicated culture in which we live. Her sharp intelligence and her knowledge of the contemporary arts make her a superb, invaluable commentator on the American scene.' - Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University. ‘When a poet of such declarative distinction as Elizabeth Alexander unfolds her critical wings, she swoops across the landscape of Black cultural thought, making it new, making it her own. This is a work of great generosity and insight that explores the deep springs of African American creativity with a sensibility that is both moving and engaging.' - Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of English, Harvard University. ‘In prose that is both elegant and clear, rigorous and accessible, Elizabeth Alexander illuminates in these essays on art, literature, film and politics, places in African American culture that elude stereotypic representations and the limits of public discourse.' - Valerie Smith, Princeton University. ‘Elizabeth Alexander's keen observations about a broad range of African American artifacts - poems, films, photographs, and conceptual art, for example - offer far more than clever visual analysis. They set cultural objects into their broadest social context. In these perceptive and eloquent essays, Alexander continually reminds us of the power of representation - words, images, indeed art itself - to oppress, to provoke, and ultimately to liberate. THE BLACK INTERIOR represents the best and most resonant form of cultural history writing that tackles life-and-death issues through the lenses of visual and literary culture.' - Maurice Berger, Senior Fellow, The Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New School University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Alexander is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently ANTEBELLUM DREAM BOOK. She has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. Alexander currently teaches English and African American Studies at Yale University.
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Alexander, Elizabeth. The Venus Hottentot. Charlottesville. 1992. University Press Of Virginia. 0813912733. Volume 9 - The Callaloo Poetry series. 53 pages. paperback. Cover art: æBallet DancerÆ by Charles Alston Courtesy Clifford and Adele Alexander. Photograph by Sharon Farmer. Cover design by Diane Nelson.
DESCRIPTION - THE VENUS HOTTENTOT is the first collection of poems, including eight previously unpublished, by this exciting young poet. Elizabeth Alexander's poems are at once private and collective - addressing issues that are public concerns, but driven by private voices. ‘A Poem for Nelson Mandela,' for example, is not so much about the imprisoned South African leader as about the speaker's life and kinship, and about her ruminations on living symbols as power. It is this ability to privatize the most public or collective with a lyricism that contributes something new to African-American poetry. Callaloo Poetry Series. ‘THE VENUS HOTTENTOT is a book filled with dazzling colors and wonderful sounds. The poetry of Elizabeth Alexander embraces ancestry, innocence, love, music, art, heroes, and history. I like how Alexander writes. I like what she is writing about. There is enough intellectual magic in this collection to keep a ‘civilization' of critics talking for years.' - E. Ethelbert Miller, Director African-American Resource Center Howard University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City and grew up in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.A. from Boston University, where she studied with Derek Walcott. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in such prestigious journals as Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Callaloo.
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Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York. 1991. Viking Press. 0670818127. 402 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye Jacket photograph courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University.
DESCRIPTION - Since her suicide at the age of thirty in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become the most widely read poet of her generation, as well as the most wildly misunderstood. The raw, almost woundlike surfaces of Plath's poetry and the tragic manner of her death virtually guaranteed that she would be turned into a series of labels: troubled daughter, abandoned wife, poete maudite. It has taken Paul Alexander to do justice to this complex and fiercely talented woman with his important and long-awaited new critical biography. The details of Plath's life—her father’s early death, her suicide attempts, her lifelong struggle with depression, her volatile marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes—would be easy to turn into melodrama. Paul Alexander resists that temptation. What he does instead is tell the truth, while capturing what it felt like to be Sylvia Plath, a deeply troubled human being who was also a supremely artful poet. There have been other biographies of Plath, but none have employed such a wide array of sources or have probed so deeply into her life. Drawing on extensive and exclusive interviews, as well as exhaustive archival research, Paul Alexander has created the definitive portrait of a brilliant—and tragic—genius.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PAUL ALEXANDER is the editor of Ariel Ascending, a collection of essays about the life and work of Sylvia Plath. A former reporter for the Houston bureau of Time magazine, he has published articles in M inc. and Time and New York Times Magazine. He has taught at the University of Houston and at Hofstra University. He lives in New York City.
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Alexie, Sherman (editor). Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1999. New York. 1999. Scribner. 0684848295. Paperback Original. 365 pages. paperback. Cover design by Richard Pracher.
DESCRIPTION - Selected by bestselling author and American Book Award-winner Sherman Alexie, the freshest and most innovative voices in North America today. This third volume in the acclaimed Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops series contains stories culled from over one hundred prestigious writing programs around the United States and Canada. These nineteen ingenious stories, selected by guest editor Sherman Alexie, are a must read not only for students and teachers of writing but for all short-story lovers who are looking for original, stimulating, and unpredictable storytelling.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. First Indian On the Moon. Brooklyn. 1993. Hangin Loose Press. 1882413024. 116 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - FIRST INDIAN ON THE MOON opens with the section 'Influences': 'where I have been/ most of my lives/ is where I'm going/ - Lucille Clifton'. The stories and poems of Sherman Alexie, an enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpint, Washington, have appeared widely, in such publications as Caliban, Esquire, The World, Beloit Poetry Journal, Red Dirt, Zyzzyva and Story. Alexie has won a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, and lives in Spokane. 'These elegiac poems and stories will break your heart. Watch this guy. He's making myth' - Joy Harjo.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. New York. 1996. Atlantic Monthly Press. 087113652x. 420 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A serial murderer is terrorizing Seattle, hunting and scalping white men. And the crimes of the so-called Indian Killer have triggered a wave of violence and racial hatred. Seattle's Native Americans are shaken and confused, none more so than John Smith. Born Indian, raised white, Smith desperately yearns for his lost heritage and seeks his elusive true identity. He meets Marie, a stormy Indian activist particularly outraged by people like Jack Wilson, the mystery writer who passes himself as part Indian. As a bigoted radio personality incites whites to seek revenge, tensions mount, Smith fights to slake the anger that engulfs him. .and the Indian Killer claims yet another life. Lauded as a poet and author of exceptional lyricism and humor, Sherman Alexie now dips his pen in something stronger-and offers a gritty and eye-opening novel of alienation and justice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. Old Shirts & New Skins. Los Angeles. 1993. American Indian Studies Center. 0935626360. Illustrated by Elizabeth Woody. 94 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Amongst the poems and prose of OLD SHIRTS and NEW SKINS appear illustrations by Elizabeth Woody, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon. In the best tradition of confronting American reality and exacting vision and meaning from it, Sherman Alexie chooses to use poetic power. His vision is an amazing celebration of endurance, intimacy, love, and creative insight; finally, it is a victory that can be known only by a people who refuse to submit to the thieves, liars, and killers that have made them suffer tremendous loss and pain. 'Like the woman who pours her life into a stew of survival, Sherman Alexie has created a meal, not for a reader to consume but for a reader to be changed by. Survival is being documented, changes measured' - Linda Hogan.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues. New York. 1995. Atlantic Monthly Press. 0871135949. 306 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the American Book Award and a critically acclaimed national best seller, Reservation Blues continues to find new and adoring readers in academic and popular circles alike. In 1931, Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, receiving legendary blues skills in return. He went on to record only twenty-nine songs before being murdered on August 16, 1938. In 1992, however, Johnson suddenly reappears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe. When Johnson passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas - lead singer of the rock-and-roll band Coyote Springs - a magical odyssey begins that will take the band from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan. Sherman Alexie imaginatively mixes narrative, newspaper excerpts, songs, journal entries, visions, radio interviews, and dreams to explore the effects of Christianity on Native Americans in the late twentieth century. In addition, he examines the impact of cultural assimilation on the relationships between Indian women and Indian men. Reservation Blues is a painful, humorous, and ultimately redemptive symphony about God and indifference, faith and alcoholism, family and hunger, sex and death.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. Ten Little Indians. New York. 2003. Grove Press. 0802117449. 243 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods. Author photograph by Rob Casey.
DESCRIPTION - Sherman Alexie is one of today's most Captivating and popular writers - The Nation has called him ‘a master of language, writing beautifully, unsparingly, and straight to the heart.' Now with Ten Little Indians he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heart-rending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love. What kind of Indian loses her mind over a book of poems? Well, Corliss was that kind of Indian, she was exactly that kind of Indian, and it was the only kind of Indian she knew how to be. In Alexie's first story, The Search Engine,' Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. When she discovers the poetry of a fellow Native who vanished thirty years earlier after winning the Pulitzer Prize, she makes it her mission to find him. Although he does not prove to be the man Corliss needs him to be, his devastating story will help her in her own struggle to belong. In ‘The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,' an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child, now a grown man who looks back at his life with equal parts fondness, amusement, and regret. In ‘Do You Know Where I Am?' two college sweethearts rescue a lost cat - a simple act that will affect the rest of their lives together. Finally, ‘What You Pawn I Will Redeem' starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawnshop window the fancydance regalia that was stolen fifty years earlier from his I late grandmother. As he tries to raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the outfit, the narrator's misadventure combines bittersweet wit and touching earnestness as only this author can. Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of ourselves, and each other. Ten Little Indians is a great new work from one of today's most original and highly regarded writers of fiction. SHERMAN ALEXIE is the author of the novels RESERVATION BLUES and INDIAN KILLER; the story collection THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD; and the award-winning screenplay for Smoke Signals, a film based on his highly acclaimed short-story collection THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN, as well as several books of poetry. Sherman Alexie's books have won the Pen/Faulkner Foundation's Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award, and the Murray Morgan Prize, among others. Most recently, Alexie wrote and directed The Business of Fancydancing, a feature film. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger & Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York. 1993. Atlantic Monthly Press. 0871135485. 223 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting & design by Wendell Minor.
DESCRIPTION - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, published in 1994, was a citation winner for the PEN/Hemmingway Award for Best First Fiction. In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads ‘From the Death Bed of Jimmy Many Horses III,' even though he actually writes then on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and mostly poetically between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. The Summer of Black Widows. Brooklyn. 1996. Hanging Loose Press. 1882413342. 140 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In 1992, Hanging Loose Press introduced the poetry of Sherman Alexie. His first collection, The Business of Fancydancing, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. 'Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time, ' wrote reviewer James R. Kincaid. Since then, Alexie's poems, stories and novels have brought him many honors and an international following of readers. A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, now living in Seattle, Alexie covers a territory that starts with the minute details of reservation life and reaches out to encompass the world in all its variety. 'Sherman Alexie's recent success as a novelist overshadows the fact that he is one of the best young poets writing in America today. his poems resonate with brutal honesty and tie the reader into knots. (This book) proves Alexie is a poet first and a fiction writer second.' .'. an impressive mosaic of emotions and subjects, deployed with wit, intelligence and haunting insights. Alexie's vision is Whitmanic in his all-embracing love of humanity.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York. 2000. Atlantic Monthly Press. 0871138018. 238 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Sherman Alexie has been acclaimed by Time as 'one of the better new novelists, Indian or otherwise,' and his books have been compared to those of Richard Wright and James Baldwin in their immense lyric power and revolutionary spirit. Now he returns to the short story, in his first new collection since the bestseller The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. In these stories we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature - the upper and middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, the bureaucrats and poets, falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to return from the hospital, listening to his father's friends argue about Jesus' carpentry skills as they build a wheelchair ramp. An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with $42 and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy. Sherman Alexie's is a voice of remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories - between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, The Toughest Indian in the World is a virtuoso performance by one of the country's finest writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Alexie, Sherman. War Dances. New York. 2009. Grove Press. 9780802119193. 209 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods.
DESCRIPTION - With bright insight into the minds of artists, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and sons, Sherman Alexie populates his stories with ordinary men on the brink of exceptional change. In the tour-de-force title story, a son remembers his father slowly dying a ‘natural Indian death' from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor. With ‘The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless,' Alexie dissects a vintage clothing store owner's failing marriage and his subsequent courtship of a Puma-clad stranger in various airports across the country. And ‘Breaking and Entering' recounts a film editor's fateful confrontation with an adolescent who forcibly enters his house to steal his DVD collection. A National Book Award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker, Sherman has been named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and has been lauded by The Boston Globe as ‘an important voice in American literature.' He is one of the most well known and beloved literary writers of his generation, with works such as The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Reservation Blues and has received numerous awards and citations, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Fiction and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SHERMAN ALEXIE has been described as 'one of the major lyric voices of our time' by the New York Times Book Review, which selected his The Business of Fancydancing as a '1992 Notable Book of the Year.' Alexie's several books of poetry include Old Shirts & New Skins, The Summer of Black Widows, and the recently published One Stick Song. Named one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, Alexie competed in and won the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in 1998, 1999 and 2000, becoming the first poet in the history of the Bout to hold the title for three years. Alexie's first screenplay, Smoke Signals, based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, became the first feature film produced, written, and directed by American Indians. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, an award given for works of art 'which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Other works of fiction include Reservation Blues, selected as a Booklist Editor's Choice Award for Fiction; Indian Killer, a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine's 'Best of Pages' choices; and his most recent short story collection, The Toughest Indian in The World, published by Atlantic Monthly press in May 2000. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, with his wife and son, and is working on new poems and stories.
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Algarin, Miguel and Griffith, Lois (editors). Action: The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Theater Festival. New York. 1997. Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster. 0684826119. Paperback Original. 551 pages. paperback. Cover design by Timothy Hsu. Cover photograph by Arlene Gottfried.
DESCRIPTION - For nearly twenty-five years, poets, writers, artists, actors, directors, and an ever-growing audience have flocked to New York's landmark Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a breeding ground and showcase for some of the most original and energetic new works of theater being produced today, as well as a community gathering place. Now, for the first time, twenty original plays, monologues, and performance pieces that debuted at the Nuyorican are gathered together in Action, edited by Cafe founder Miguel Algarin and co-director Lois Griffith. Featuring the works of such well-known writers as Miguel Piñero, lshmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange, as well as emerging names such as Frank Perez, Eugene Rodriguez, Gloria Feliciano, and Janice Astor del Valle, this anthology brings together a dazzling and potent chorus of talented voices. Action gives readers a front-row seat for some of the best theater in America and celebrates diversity in the dramatic arts. ‘The landscape of the 1980s and 1990s has been significantly enriched by the exhilarating voices spawned by the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The vitality of the Cafe's artists and audiences not only has influenced the local cultural community but has defined a national discussion on drama and the spoken word. Action is a fascinating look at the voices and energies that make the Nuyorican a thriving cultural force.' - GEORGE C. WOLFE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MIGUEL ALGARIN, four-time American Book Award winner and Obie-winning founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, is a highly acclaimed poet and an associate professor of writing at Rutgers University. His latest collection of poetry, Love Is Hard Work, is available from Scribner. Lois GRIFFITH, co-director of the Nuyorican and author of the novel Among Others, teaches writing at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. They both live in New York City.
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Algarin, Miguel and Pinero, Miguel (editors). Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. New York. 1975. Morrow. 0688029671. Photos by Gil Mendez. 185 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Karen Thompson. Jacket photograph by Gil Mendez.
DESCRIPTION - The publication of NUYORICAN POETRY marks an important literary and cultural event. Here for the first time is heard the voice of the transplanted Puerto Ricans, a people uprooted from their culture and resettled in a country full of contradictions: frightening and inhospitable in its strangeness, while at the same time offering hope and new opportunities to these most recent immigrants. Nuyorican was forged out of the collision between Spanish and American cultures-and to the writers represented in this exciting collection of poetry and poetic prose, Nuyorican has a twofold meaning. In specific terms, Nuyorican is a new American language, one uniquely suited to express the rawness, beauty, and passion of the new Puerto Ricans; and more generally, Nuyorican describes a people and their experience. Young, old, vibrant, hip, streetwise, touching-the writers here range from a nine-year-old schoolboy to prizewinning playwright Miguel Piñero. The scope of the anthology is equally broad and is divided into three sections. In the first, we hear the voice of the Outlaw Poet: his effort is to communicate the immediate need for open aggression against his condition. In the second part the Evolutionary Poet speaks: he teaches how ‘to live' in an environment that is constantly stifling his will to live. And finally in section three the ‘Dusmic' Poet tells of his struggle to convert the aggressions and hate of others into passions that can be used to construct a new self and a new world. Professor Miguel Algarin of Rutgers University and prizewinning playwright Miguel Piñero have compiled this volume whose emotional integrity and veracity of detail will appeal to readers of all backgrounds. Professor Algarin's introductions and Gil Mendez's photographic essay illuminate the text of this ground-breaking, revolutionary, and stunning collection. CONTENTS: Introduction: Nuyorican Language; Part I OUTLAW POETRY - PEDRO PIETRI - Underground Poetry; A Prayer Backwards; before and after graduation day; Song Without Words; SANDRA MARIA ESTEVES - Ode to a Tequila Head; JOSE-ANGEL FIGUEROA - Felipa-La Filosofa Del Rincon; JORGE LOPEZ - About los Ratones; Pesetas de Embuste; ARCHIE MARTINEZ - Viet-Nam; MARTITA MORALES - The Sounds of Sixth Street; MIGUEL ALGARIN - A Mongo Affair; Inside Control: my tongue; LUCKY CIENFUEGOS - Lolita Lebron, Recuerdos Te Mandamos; MIGUEL PINERO - The Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito; La Metadona Está Cabrona; No Hay Nada Nuevo en Nueva York; Runnin' Scared; A Poem For Joey's Mami's Struggle; Seekin' the Cause; T C. GARCIA - Message of My People; ANGEL BERROCALES - Situation Heavy; The Teacher of Life; AMERICO CASIANO - A day when clinkers, sparrows and canaries jitterbugged down the street with a latin accent; SHORTY BON BON - A junkie's Heaven; DADI PINERO - Puerto Rico's Reply; Life Now; Part II EVOLUTIONARY POETRY - BIMBO - A Job; MIGUEL ALGARIN - Biological; Posed Release; Tangiers; MARTITA MORALES - Teatro; CARLOS CONDE - Asi Era Yo; AMINA MUNOZ - puerto rican graffiti; 149th St. winter; ‘welcome to san juan, oldest city in the u.s.'; a chant; JESUS PAPOLETO MELENDEZ - sister, para nuestras hermanas; T. C. GARCIA - Puerto Rican Epitaph; Under an Apple Tree; AMERICO CASIANO - When was the last time you saw mami smile?; MIGUEL PINERO - Twice a Month Is Mother's Day; PEDRO PIETRI - Love Story; Part III DUSMIC POETRY - SANDRA MARIA ESTEVES - for tito; Blanket Weaver; i look for peace great Graveyard; MIGUEL ALGARIN - Sunday, August 11, 1974; San Juan/an arrest/Maguayo/a vision of Malo dancing; LUZ RODRIGUEZ - i feel the eve; Holding You; PEDRO PIETRI - do not let; Voodoo; LUCKY CIENFUEGOS - The Influence of Don Quixote; High heel, silver shoes; Dedicada a Maria Rodriguez Martinez February 24,l975; The Nerve of Time; My In of Me; CARLOS CONDE - Nocturnos en una Noche Perdida; T. C. GARCIA - Prison Love; ISIDRO GARCIA - Water Figure; JESUS PAPOLETO MELENDEZ - Bruja; MIGUEL PINERO - Una Lágrima en un Cristal; The Records of Time; Afterword; Biographies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel Algarin, four-time American Book Award winner and Obie-winning founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, is a highly acclaimed poet and an associate professor of writing at Rutgers University. Miguel Piñero (December 19, 1946 - June 16, 1988) was a playwright, actor and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He was a leading member of the Nuyorican literary movement.
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Algarin, Miguel. Love Is Hard Work. New York. 1997. Scribner. 0684839997. Poetry From The Founder Of The Nuyorican Poets' Cafe. 155 pages. hardcover. Jacket Design By Timothy Hsu. Jacket Photograph By Arlene Gottfried. Author Photograph By Marlis Momber.
DESCRIPTION - At once a moving personal memoir and a colorful portrait of life in New York's Lower East Side (Loisaida), this masterly collection of poems captures the whirlwind of sights, sounds, celebrations and sorrows of urban life. As father of the contemporary Latino literary movement and founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Miguel Algarin has brought the diverse voices and talents of the downtown New York scene to audiences throughout the world. In these poetic renderings of the lives and deaths of numerous friends, Algarin the poet celebrates both the well known and the obscure - and brings to life private loves, nurtured in both pain and joy, and public collaborations, born in the turbulent excitement of Algarin's cafe. In the centerpiece of the book, the poet offers a searing, unsentimental look at himself and his life. A celebration of the beautiful, the grotesque, the comic and the tragic, these poems resound with honesty, passion and grace - a testament to the extraordinary talent and keen eye of Miguel Algarin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel Algarin is associate professor of English at Rutgers University and founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He has received many awards and honors for both his poetry and his work in the theater, including the Bessie Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement, an OBIE, three consecutive Audelco Awards for Dramatic Production of the Year and four American Book Awards. He is the coeditor of ALOUD: THE NUYORICAN POETS CAFE ANTHOLOGY and ACTION: THE NUYORICAN POETS CAFE THEATER FESTIVAL, published by Touchstone in September 1997. His previous works include Time's Now, Body Bee Callin from the Twenty-First Century and Song of Protest, a translation of Pablo Neruda.
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Alger Jr., Horatio. Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward. New York. 1985. Penguin Books. 9780140390339. Introduction by Carl Bode. 304 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - From the 1860's through the 1890s, Horatio Alger wrote hundreds of novels to teach young boys the merits of honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in the face of adversity. As Carl Bode points out in his introduction, Horatio Alger filled a void in American literature and met scant competition both in the nature and the number of his works. Like his heroes, Alger rose to the top by chance, coincidence, and hard work. The hero of Ragged Dick is a veritable "diamond in the rough"-as innately virtuous as he is streetwise and cocky. Immediately popular with young readers, the novel also appealed to parents, who repsonded to its colorful espousal of the Protestant ethic. Struggling Upward, published nearly thirty years later, followed the same time-tested formulas, and despite critical indifference it, too, had mass appeal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 - July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the 'rags-to-riches' narrative, which had a formative effect on America during the Gilded Age. Alger's name is often invoked incorrectly as though he himself rose from rags to riches, but that arc applied to his characters, not to the author. Essentially, all of Alger's novels share the same theme: a young boy struggles through hard work to escape poverty.
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Algren, Nelson. Nonconformity: Writing On Writing. New York. 1996. Seven Stories Press. 1888363053. Afterword by Daniel Simon. Notes by Daniel Simon & C. S. O'Brien. 130 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers. 'You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich,' writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: 'A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.' Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: 'Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.' And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: 'Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards. [where there] are still. defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope.' In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 - May 9, 1981) was an American writer. He may be best known for The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1949 novel that won the National Book Award and was adapted as a 1955 film of the same name. According to Harold Augenbraum, 'in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the best known literary writers in America.' The lover of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, he was featured as the hero of her novel The Mandarins, set in Paris and Chicago. He is considered 'a bard of the down-and-outer', based on this book and his novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). The latter was adapted as a play of the same name, produced on Broadway. Its fame increased with Lou Reed's song of the same title.
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Algren, Nelson. Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way. New York. 1966. Fawcett. 192 pages. paperback. R973.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.' - Ernest Hemingway. ‘The most stirring adventure with literary asides since Hemingway's own Green Hills of Africa. This is a walk on the wild side with Algren's merchant seamen pals. It is tough, spirited, intelligent. Emotionally, it is for Hemingway, whom Algren suddenly much resembles in this strange, honest, cocky, sardonic and altogether wonderful book.' - San Francisco Chronicle. ‘A rowdy, entertaining volume. Algren's memoirs about China Sea smugglers and the harlots in Bombay are. rife with life.' - The New York Times. ‘An astounding, remarkable book and without question the best thing that has happened to the American literary community in who knows how many years. The book is part-travelogue, part-humor, part-fiction and part-criticism, but it is all Algren, which means it is very good indeed. It could only come from the wild man who wrote THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM. Be prepared to meet a truly unique mind.' - The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 - May 9, 1981) was an American writer. He may be best known for The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1949 novel that won the National Book Award and was adapted as a 1955 film of the same name. According to Harold Augenbraum, 'in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the best known literary writers in America.' The lover of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, he was featured as the hero of her novel The Mandarins, set in Paris and Chicago. He is considered 'a bard of the down-and-outer', based on this book and his novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). The latter was adapted as a play of the same name, produced on Broadway. Its fame increased with Lou Reed's song of the same title.
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Allen, Donald and Creeley, Robert (editors). The New Writing in the USA. London. 1967. Penguin Books. 331 pages. paperback. 2519.
DESCRIPTION - 67 works by 33 writers, from 1958 to 1967. Includes work by: Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, Philip Whalen, William Selby Jr., Leroi Jones, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, and others. Biographical accompany the work of each writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Merriam Allen (Muscatine, Iowa, March 26, 1912 – San Francisco, California, August 29, 2004) was an American editor, publisher and translator of literary works. He is best known for editing the popular anthology of post-WWII avant-garde American poems, The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Robert Creeley (May 21, 1926 - March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.
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Allen, Jeffrey Renard. Harbors & Spirits: Poems. Wakefield. 1998. Asphodel Press. 155921208x. CD Included. 158 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Poet, novelist and critics, Jeffery Renard Allen brings a number of characteristics to his first collection of poems. He adapts jazz and blues forms to lyric poetry and uses a variety of cultural sources to draw together materials that exist in a shared mythology. The result has the directness and clarity of an African-American Homeric hymn. Rich in musicality, Allen's work offers an extra ordinary breadth of reference and discovery.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jeffery Renard Allen (born 1962 Chicago) is an American poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999) and Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007), and three works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2000), a story collection Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008) and a second novel, Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2014). In writing about his fiction, reviewers often note his lyrical use of language and his playful use of form to write about African American life. His poems tend to focus on music, mythology, history, film, and other sources, rather than narrative or autobiographical experiences.
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Allen, Jeffrey Renard. Rails Under My Back. New York. 2000. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374246262. 563 pages. hardcover. Cover: Chris Scott.
DESCRIPTION - An astonishing debut novel, exploring the bonds, boundaries, and bondage of an African American family. Rails Under My Back is a daring work of art that reveals its family theme in a stunning depiction of its paradoxically opposite: abandonment. In this multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel, Jeffery Renard Allen tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: these are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience during the past half-century. Rails Under My Back ranges, as the characters do, from the City, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many 'inner' and 'outer' locales. One image that holds the family together is that of the railroads taking them from place to place-from the South to the North, from their living to their working quarters, from one form of bondage or freedom to another. The McShans and the Joneses somehow prevail, in their bigger-than-life way, and their story has extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power. Allen's voice is unforgettable.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jeffery Renard Allen (born 1962 Chicago) is an American poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist.He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999) and Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007), and three works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2000), a story collection Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008) and a second novel, Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2014). In writing about his fiction, reviewers often note his lyrical use of language and his playful use of form to write about African American life. His poems tend to focus on music, mythology, history, film, and other sources, rather than narrative or autobiographical experiences.
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Allen, Kendra. When You Learn the Alphabet: Essays. Iowa City. 2019. University of Iowa Press. 9781609386290. 151 pages.
DESCRIPTION - “Kendra Allen's When You Learn the Alphabet is a roaring meditation on what black daughters in our nation do with what and how they've been taught. The book brilliantly animates the formal and informal education processes of becoming grown in America. Allen somehow manages to make explorations of colorism, language, trauma, war, and love sit comfortably next to one another. Allen's book is an ambitious, dexterous collection that really obliterates convenient understandings of the sentimental in favor of dynamic, fleshy layers of soulful sincerity. It is a remarkable artistic achievement.” - Kiese Laymon, judge, Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, author, Heavy: An American Memoir. “Kendra Allen will not, as she writes, make anyone feel good at her own expense. Nor will she let herself be comforted at the expense of others. Instead, she brilliantly writes her tender origins into history, creating for future readers a complex sense of self-recognition missing from her own past.” - Hali Felt, University of Alabama. “Every generation has its seer, a writer of radical, fierce talent who tells it true, who writes the being and identity like a punch in the gut. Kendra Allen is this generation's sharpshooter. To think: this is her first book. We are witnessing the birth of this astonishing star.” - Jenny Boully, author, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life. Kendra Allen's first collection of essays - at its core - is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things. These dynamics strive for some semblance of accountability, and the essays within this collection are used as displays of deep unlearning and restoring - balancing trauma and humor, poetics and reality, forgiveness and resentment. When You Learn the Alphabet allots space for large moments of tenderness and empathy for all black bodies - but especially all black woman bodies - space for the underrepresented humanity and uncared for pain of black girls, and space to have the opportunity to be listened to in order to evolve past it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Her work has been published in Brevity, December Magazine, and the Rumpus.
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Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation: Reflections On Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons. Boston. 1998. Beacon Press. 080704640x. 262 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Off the Reservation gives us the best of Allen's political essays, literary criticism, and personal reflections. In section one, 'Haggles/gynosophies' (haggles being a persuasive speech in which a hag engages), Allen offers powerful critiques of the Western social constructs of proprietorship, literacy, individualism, and 'rape culture' contrasted with the communal and spiritual connection to the earth that characterizes native societies. 'Wyrds/orthographies' presents some of the best analysis of Native American literature of the late twentieth century, including the work of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Mary Tallmountain.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 - May 29, 2008) was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American and Native American descent, she identified with the Laguna Pueblo of her childhood years, the culture in which she'd grown up. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction and poetry, and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works, and wrote two biographies of Native American women.
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Allen, Paula Gunn. Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston. 1989. Beacon Press. 0807081000. 320 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Native American scholar, literary critic, poet, and novelist Paula Gunn Allen, who is herself a Laguna Pueblo-Sioux Indian, became increasingly aware in her academic career that the writings of Native Americans, especially women, have been marginalized by the Western literary canon. Allen set out to understand why this was so and, more importantly, to remedy the situation. The result is this powerful collection of traditional tales, biographical writings, and contemporary short stories, many by the most accomplished Native American women writing today, including: Louise Erdrich, Mary TallMountain, Linda Hogan, and many others. According to Cherokee legend, Grandmother Spider brought the light of intelligence to the people. For the first time, Spider Woman's Granddaughters brings to light the original American. It is a unique addition to feminist literatire - and a treasure trove for the ever-increasing audience for Native American works.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 - May 29, 2008) was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American and Native American descent, she identified with the Laguna Pueblo of her childhood years, the culture in which she'd grown up. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction and poetry, and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works, and wrote two biographies of Native American women.
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Allio, Kirstin. Buddhism for Western Children. Iowa City. 2018. University of Iowa Press. 9781609385965. paper original. 5½ × 8 inches. The Iowa Review Series in Fiction - Harilaos Stecopoulos, series editor. 284 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - “Kirstin Allio has written a novel full of indelible characters, wild scenes, incidental wisdom, and the best kinds of surprises. I fell entirely under the spell of her wonderful writing and of her outrageous, shameless guru; I would have followed him anywhere. Buddhism for Western Children is a sparkling, inventive, and deeply entertaining novel. ”—Margot Livesey, author, Mercury. Set on the coast of Maine and in the high desert of New Mexico in the late 1970s through the early 80s, Buddhism for Western Children is a universal and timeless story of a boy who must escape subjugation, tell his story, and reclaim his soul. In search of community and transcendence, ten-year-old Daniel’s family is swept into the thrall of a potent and manipulative guru. To his followers, Avadhoot Master King Ivanovich is a living god, a charismatic leader who may reveal enlightenment as he mesmerizes, and alchemizes, Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Daniel’s family plunges into a world with different rules and rhythms—and with no apparent exit. They join other devotees in shunning the outside world, and fall under the absolutist authority of the guru and his lieutenants. Daniel bears witness to the relentless competition for the guru’s favor, even as he begins to recognize the perversion of his spirituality. Soon, Daniel himself is chosen to play a role. As tensions simmer and roil, darkness intrudes. Devotees overstep, placing even the children in jeopardy. Daniel struggles with conflicting desires to resist and to belong, until finally he must decide who to save and who to abandon. With spiraling, spellbinding language, Allio reveals a cast of vivid, often darkly funny characters, and propels us toward a shocking climax where Daniel’s story cracks open like a kaleidoscope, revealing the costs of submitting to a tyrant and the shimmering resilience of the human spirit. “An incisive look at what it means to be a child dragged along in the undercurrent of one’s parents’ fervor for enlightenment and willful turning away from the outside world. This is a beautifully written and poetic meditation on power, absurdity, community, and manipulation, and how one survives when all things collide in a powerful and threatening way. ”—Brian Evenson, author, A Collapse of Horses.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kirstin Allio is the author of Clothed, Female Figure and Garner, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for first fiction. Her honors include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and a PEN/O. Henry Prize. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York. 1992. Dutton. 0525934251. 309 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye. Jacket photograph by Dorothea Lange, Collection of the Library of Congress.
DESCRIPTION - Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place of black walnut trees and weeping willows, of sweet tea served on shaded porches. It is also home to the Boatwright family - rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly. At the heart of this memorable family - and of this astonishing novel - is Ruth Anne Boatwright, called Bone by her family, a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale. Bone knows what Greenville County thinks of her family, and when she's not defending them passionately, she has to agree: Boatwrights are drunks and thieves, and she'd like nothing more than to escape the life they would make for her. Observing everything with a mercilessly keen eye, Bone sees the legacy of poverty and futility that marks her family's place in this small Southern town - the fierce pride that erupts in rage and violence; the women who ward off loneliness by having more children; the desperation of itinerant souls who scarcely dare to dream of a better life. Bone dreams. She dreams of becoming a gospel singer (despite the fact that she can barely carry a tune), or of living a life out of one of the books she steals from the local library. She dreams of a life not only beyond Greenville but also away from Daddy Glen, the stepfather whose tenderness quickly gives way to a sly, meanspirited jealousy that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney. The edges of this family triangle are sharp enough to draw blood: Glen calls Bone ‘cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty,' yet Anney needs Glen ‘like a strong woman needs meat between her teeth.' At first infinitely gentle with Bone, Daddy Glen becomes steadily colder and more furious - until their final, harrowing encounter, from which there can be no turning back. Written in a mesmerizing voice that mingles the languid rhythms of country music with raw, unsparing
DESCRIPTIONs of emotional and physical violence, Bastard out of Carolina marks the emergence of an extraordinarily gifted writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer. Her writing includes themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards.
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Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. Ithaca. 1994. Firebrand Books. 1563410443. Simultaneous Hardcover Edition. 261 pages. paperback. Cover photograph by Jill Posener.
DESCRIPTION - A fantastic collection of essays, autobiographical narratives, and performance pieces, including updated versions of earlier groundbreaking material with provocative new work by the lifelong feminist activist, controversial sex radical, and Southern expatriate writer with an attitude who brought us BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, TRASH, and THE WOMEN WHO HATE ME. Funny, passionate, and compelling prose on what it means to be queer and happy about it in a world that is still arguing about what it means to be queer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer. Her writing includes themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards.
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Allison, Dorothy. Trash: Stories. Ithaca. 1988. Firebrand Books. 0932379524. 174 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Betsy Bayley.
DESCRIPTION - TRASH, Allison's landmark collection, laid the groundwork for her critically acclaimed BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, the National Book Award finalist that was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as ‘simply stunning.a wonderful work of fiction by a major talent.' In addition to Allison's classic stories, this new edition of Trash features ‘Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories,' an introduction in which Allison discusses the writing of Trash and ‘Compassion,' a never-before-published short story. First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash showcases Allison at her most fearlessly honest and startlingly vivid. The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of storytelling. A book that resonates with uncompromising candor and incandescence, TRASH is sure to captivate Allison's legion of readers and win her a devoted new following. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer. Her writing includes themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards.
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Alonso, Kassten. The Pet Thief. Tuscaloosa. 2013. University of Alabama Press/Fiction Collective 2. 9781573661713. 352 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The Pet Thief is a dystopian fable of science, rebellion, humankind's inhumanity, and the struggle for identity and survival in a post-human world. When scientists, the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans with animals-cats, specifically-for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications, the experiment is an irredeemable failure, producing human-like beings with uncanny abilities who are nonetheless fundamentally defective. Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, "cat people," who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan. Oboy is unable to think or speak except in mimicry, but he is a physical savant, which serves Freda's mission. Enraged at what has been done to her, Freda wants to "rescue" every pet she can. When Oboy returns with a human baby after his first solo outing, their world and the truths of their existence come unraveled.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - KASSTEN ALONSO is a novelist and book critic, but really, is a poet at heart. He was born in Seattle, Washington and grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and Eugene, Oregon. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a whole lot of student debt from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Moving to Portland after college, Alonso worked for Powell's Books and the public library. He sure seems to like books. He wrote his first novel as his senior thesis project and immediately found a literary agent; “how easy this writing biz is,” he thought, until he discovered his agent was a con artist who stole a lot of hopeful writers' money and was eventually arrested and sent to prison. An FBI agent involved in the case wrote a book about this nefarious literary agent's exploits - and published. “How easy this writing biz is - for others,” Alonso thought. It was tough going, but his fourth try at a novel, Core: a Romance, was published by Hawthorne Books in Portland, and was an Oregon Book Awards finalist in 2005. Alonso has previously published in the Portland Mercury, Portland Monthly, the Oregonian, The Organ, and was a contributor to Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon's Sesquicentennial Anthology. He sure seems to like Oregon. Alonso's new novel, The Pet Thief, was published 15 years after he began work on it, in March 2013 by Fiction Collective 2. He still lives and works in Portland. When he's not at the day job, hanging out with his wife and daughter, or writing, he loves to study up on and obsess about finance and investing. While he is a member of the Author's Guild and the National Book Critics' Circle, he doesn't drink coffee, sport tattoos, have a cell phone, nor Facebook or Twitter accounts. He does, however, have this website.
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Alonso, Ricardo. Cimarron. Middletown. 1979. Wesleyan University Press. 0819520942. 75 pages. hardcover. Cover design by William Van Saun.
DESCRIPTION - CIMARRON, in Caribbean Spanish, means runaway slave. In this first book of poems, Ricardo Alonso evokes the memory of the Africans who, centuries ago, repudiated slavery and fled to the hills of the sugar islands. The passionate poems of Cimarron, however, are of today. Their setting is any Street of a back-city barrio-ghetto in the United States, where the descendents of the cimarrones now live. They are composed in the rhythm of sirens, of glass breaking; they are poems to an uprooted people. Alonso writes in the tradition of Afro-American and Caribbean poetry. His poems deal powerfully with the discovery and meaning of identity, of closeness to the people, of exile, of the reality of Latino existence in American cities. Traditional music-the Cuban rumba and the American blues-forms a vital element of the poetry. A poet from outside the Anglo-American tradition, Alonso transforms his adopted language. He writes on the street, picking up the words others drop and turning them into poems. ‘Slender poems. brief, open-hearted, rhythmic, some filled with bitterness at the cruelties of ghetto life, others aching with nostalgia for Puerto Rico: ‘Hey/we are the juice of the rainbow/the palm trees pray/for our return. ‘The book is a delicate jewel.' - Donald D. Walsh. ‘Alonso is a powerful poet of urgent emotion. Receptive readers will be won by his sincerity and will long recall the rhythm of his truncated, fierce lines.' - Library Journal. ‘[CIMARRON] reveals a poet of genuine sensibility, experiential authenticity, subtlety of feeling and perception; a talent and developing sense of vision. The poetry of Ricardo Alonso is rooted in the experience and history of all our Spanish Harlems.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Cuba, RICARDO ALONSO came to the United States in 1965. He has lived in New York, Miami, and Boston.
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Alsous, Zaina. A Theory of Birds: Poems. Fayetteville. 2019. University of Arkansas Press. 9781682261040. Etel Adnan Poetry Series. 88 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. A layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds-particularly extinct species-become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze. Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems-their subjects and their logics-refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind. "A Theory of Birds opens with phrases stitched with commas that are both light and startling: a grammar-flux that produces the effect of something falling out of or off the page. Zaina Alsous: 'I entered through the empty cage, hips first.' Zaina Alsous: 'Can the map eat?' The questions that follow invert their cardinal nouns, reverting to zero each time the next one is asked. I became curious about the nothing-everything of the book itself, the logic of voids and flight. A book that proposes a 'collaboration with the dead' but also a paradise of solar pathways and outcomes (intense joy). Alsous offers the reader a 'previously' as much as an 'almost.' A jar in France, a blonde hair in Fez: foreignness composes fragments in the shape of an ibis, a harp, a broken lantern, pinning them on a sky-red space: the page, which also shakes-shakes so hard that letters lose their place. And what would it be to write anyway? To love anyway? Zaina Alsous: 'When I say home, I mean origin as a transitive verb. / When I say love, I mean these miracles are work.'"-Bhanu Kapil.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zaina Alsous is an abolitionist and a daughter of the Palestinian diaspora. She is a writer, editor at Scalawag Magazine, and grad student worker at the University of Miami. Her work has appeared in The Boston Review, The Offing, and The New Inquiry.
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Alvarez, Julia. A Cafecito Story. White River Junction. 2001. Chelsea Green Publishing Company. 1931498008. Woodcuts by Belkis Ramirez. Afterword by Bill Eicchner. 58 pages. hardcover. Cover: Belkis Ramirez.
DESCRIPTION - Throughout the Dominican Republic and Central America it is a household ritual to offer a ‘cafecito' (a small cup of dark, rich, potent coffee) to any visitor, especially a stranger. Now, in a story spanning Latin America and Nebraska, Julia Alvarez offers us A CAFECITO STORY. In North America, coffee is the morning lifeline between waking and working. In Central and South America, coffee is an economic lifeline, after oil the most important export commodity. Especially when coffee is grown sustainably, it links the First and Third Worlds in ways that are surprising and often delightful. For instance, North American songbirds winter in southern habitats where their survival is directly dependent on coffee farming practices. With lyric simplicity, A CAFECITO STORY tells the complex tale of a social beverage that bridges nations and unites people in trade, in words, in birds, and in love. The story unfolds through the eyes of Joe, a man with farming in his blood but an increasing sense of displacement from the natural world. While on holiday in the Dominican Republic, Joe learns about how coffee is grown and traded from Miguel, a Dominican coffee farmer. It is from Miguel and the other campesinos that Joe comes to understand the role of coffee in global trade, environmental degradation, and endangered songbird habitat. Initially overwhelmed, Joe eventually learns to live compatibly with the natural world. Human communication, in the form of the written word, the spoken word, and the shared cup of coffee gives him the power to face life's challenges one cup at a time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JULIA ALVAREZ was born, as she puts it, ‘by accident,' in New York City, but shortly thereafter her family moved back to their native Dominican Republic. She spent her childhood there until her family was forced to flee due to political pressure. Her first book of poems, HOMECOMING, appeared in 1984. Her first novel, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, was published in 1990, followed four years later by IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also the author of the novel IN THE NAME OF SALOME. She is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. She lives with her husband, Bill Eichner, in the Vermont countryside, but maintains close ties to her homeland through Alta Gracia, their organic coffee farm, established to demonstrate the ideas and principles of sustainable living. BILL EICHNER, an ophthalmologist by trade, comes from Midwestern farm stock. He is also a gardener, chef, and the author of The New Family Cookbook (Chelsea Green, 2000). BELKIS RAMIREZ, who contributed the woodcuts for A CAFECITO STORY, is one of the most celebrated artists in the Dominican Republic.
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Alvarez, Julia. Homecoming: Poems. New York. 1984. Grove Press. 0394620526. Issued Simultaneously In Cloth. 96 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Alvarez's first book. Contains the poems: How I learned to sweep; Dusting; Making our beds; Master bed; Washing the windows; Storm windows; Hanging the wash; Ironing their clothes; Rolling dough; What could it be?; Posture lesson; New clothes; Orchids; Heroines.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York. 1992. Plume/New American Library. 0452268060. 290 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The Garcías - Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía - belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator's daughter. So when Dr. García's part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves - by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father's version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home - and not at home - in America. It's a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it's the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi's old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill. 1991. Algonquin Books. 0945575572. 290 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Garcías - Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía - belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator's daughter. So when Dr. García's part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves - by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father's version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home - and not at home - in America. It's a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it's the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi's old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salome. Chapel Hill. 2000. Algonquin Books. 1565122763. 357 pages. hardcover. Jacket image and design by Honi Werner. Cover photos: courtesy of Julia Alvarez. Author photo: Cameron Davidson.
DESCRIPTION - This novel tells the story of two women - mother and daughter, one a poet, the other a teacher - and how they confronted the machismo in two Caribbean revolutions. Set in the politically chaotic Dominican Republic of the late nineteenth century; on the campuses of three American universities, and in the idealistic Communist Cuba of the 1960s, this story is based on the real lives of a volatile, opinionated, romantic, intrigue-loving family. SalomE Urena's fervent patriotic poems turned her - at seventeen - into the Dominican Republic's national icon. In stark contrast, her daughter, Camila, shy and self-effacing, bent to accommodate the demands of her father and brothers (a president, an ambassador, an international literary star)-trying to hide her preference for women, to stay out of the spotlight, and to offend no one. Whereas her mother dedicated her brief life to educating Dominican girls to serve their turbulent new nation, Camila spent her career anonymously explaining the Spanish pluperfect to upper-class American girls. We meet Camila in 1960 when she is sixty-five years old and about to retire from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. This is Camila's last chance to choose a final destiny for herself In the process of deciding, Camila uncovers first the reality of her mother's tragic personal life and, finally, where she must place her own kind of passion and commitment. Latina poet and university professor Alvarez brings many common bonds to this novel based on ‘La musa de la patria,' SalomE Ureña, and her daughter, Profesora Camila Henriquez-Urena. Not the least of these is an undaunted female stance from inside a powerful Caribbean family. JULIA ALVAREZ is the author of HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES (a National Book Award finalist), and YO! She has also published three collections of poetry and, most recently, SOMETHING TO DECLARE, a collection of essays. She lives in Vermont and in the Dominican Republic, where she and her husband run a coffee plantation. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill. 1994. Algonquin Books. 1565120388. 325 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Eddy Herch. Calligraphy: Carin Goldberg. Cover photograph: by John Blaustein.
DESCRIPTION - It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas - ‘The Butterflies.' Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a daughter of the Dominican Republic and long haunted by these sisters, immerses us in a tangled and dangerous moment in Hispanic Caribbean history to tell their story in the only way it can truly be understood - through fiction. In this brilliantly characterized novel, the voices of all four sisters - Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and DedE - speak across the decades, to tell their own stories - from hair ribbons to gunrunning to prison torture - and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. The Butterflies were extraordinary women. Minerva, once the object of the dictator's desire, had dared to publicly slap his face. Devout Patria found her calling to the uprising through the church. Alluring - and vain - Maria Teresa joined in pursuit of romance. Only DedE, the practical one, the most diligent in her duty to family and tradition, kept apart. And only she survived to see that their names were remembered. Now, through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again. And DedE joins them as a heroine of equal courage.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez was ten years old when her parents were forced to emigrate to the United States from the Dominican Republic, shortly before Trujillo was assassinated. Her first novel, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, published in 1991, was received with delight and acclaim. It was listed by Library Journal as one of the best books of the year, was named a Notable Book of 1991 by the New York Times Book Review and by the ALA, and was awarded the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature. A professor of English at Middlebury College, Alvarez lives with her husband in Vermont.
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Alvarez, Julia. Saving the World. Chapel Hill. 2006. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 9781565125100. 368 pages. hardcover. Design and imaging by Honi Werner from a photo by Stephen Swintek/Stone/Getty Images.
DESCRIPTION - Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer's block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. She promises to work hard and follow him a bit later. The truth is that Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. It's the story of a much earlier medical do-gooder. Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he required live ‘carriers' of the vaccine. Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y Gomez, director of La Casa de Expositos, who was asked to select twenty-two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. She agreed - with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two-year voyage. Her strength and courage inspire Alma, who finds herself becoming obsessed with the details of Isabel's adventures. This resplendent novel-within-a-novel spins the disparate tales of two remark- able women, both of whom are swept along by machismo. In depicting their confrontation bf the great scourges of their respective eras, Alvarez exposes the conflict between altruism and ambition.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. Something To Declare: Essays. Chapel Hill. 1998. Algonquin Books. 1565121937. 300 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Honi Werner. Jacket photo: Daniel Cima.
DESCRIPTION - Julia Alvarez's three bestselling novels-HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, and YO! - have sold over a half million copies in the United States and have been translated into nine foreign languages. Her three prizewinning volumes of poetry have established her as a major American poet. And her remarkably openhearted articles that appear regularly in many national magazines have made her singular voice familiar to many. Now, in her first book of nonfiction, Julia Alvarez offers two dozen personal essays about the two major (and interlocking) issues of her life-growing up with one foot in each of two cultures, and writing. In 1960, when Alvarez was ten years old, her father's participation in a failed coup attempt against Rafael Trujillo, the repressive dictator of the Dominican Republic, resulted in the family's self-imposed exile to New York City, where Dr. Alvarez set up a medical practice in the Bronx while his wife and four daughters set about the serious business of assimilation. That uprooting formed the thematic basis for two of Julia Alvarez's novels. Her father's revolutionary ties inspired the third, the story of one of Trujillo's most infamous atrocities. SOMETHING TO DECLARE is about the influences those experiences have had on her work, and about the practical lessons she's learned on her way to becoming the internationally acclaimed writer she now is. ‘Customs,' the first half of SOMETHING TO DECLARE, examines the specific effects of exile-surviving the shock of New York City public school life; yearning to fit in; watching the Miss America contest for clues to ‘beauty,' American-style; worrying about reactions to her published writing back on the Island. The essays in the second half, ‘Declarations,' are about the writing and range from confession of how she supported her writing habit early on to the gritty details of her own actual writing process. One of the most revealing is ‘In the Name of the Novel' in which she takes the reader along on a scouting trip in search of the subject of her next book. What's unexpected is that she lets us watch as the project falters and then fails. As an experienced teacher of creative writing, Julia Alvarez is a popular speaker on college campuses and famous for her receptivity to probing questions from her audiences and for her generous responses. Something to Declare captures the unique rapport between a writer and her readers. Julia Alvarez lives in Vermont with her husband. A professor of English literature at Middlebuty College, she has also taught at the University of Illinois, George Washington University, and at the Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her novels have received many honors, including ALA Notable Book of the Year and designation as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. The Other Side / El Otro Lado: Poems. New York. 1995. Dutton. 0525939229. 155 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robin Locke Monda. Jacket painting by German Perez, 'Emigrating to the Sky', 1994.
DESCRIPTION - Julia Alvarez has won enormous acclaim for her fiction, which includes HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. ‘But long before Alvarez discovered her novelist's voice, she was producing inspired and engaging poetry that helped launch one of the most vital movements in contemporary American letters: Latina literature. The poems in THE OTHER SIDE/EL OTRO LADO, collected here for the first time, reveal Alvarez's mature voice and the full range of her poetic gift. The New York Times Book Review has praised Alvarez's fiction as ‘powerful. beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant where the past is not yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream.' These same qualities characterize her poetry-from the ‘Making Up the Past' poems, which explore a life of exile as lived by a young girl, to ‘The Joe Poems,' a series of wonderfully sensual and funny love poems celebrating a middle-aged romance. The collection culminates in the twenty-one-part title poem about the poet's return to her native Dominican Republic and the internal conflict and ultimate affirmation that journey occasioned. A final poem, ‘Estele,' addressed to A mute Dominican child, stands as a magnificent coda to the themes that give this collection, so varied in style and tone, its compelling unity. Writing with a mastery of traditional forms coupled with a bold innovation and invention, attuned to the interplay of sound, sense, and the rhythm of two languages, Julia Alvarez here employs all the alchemy of her art to transform precious memory into unforgettable poetry. JULIA ALVAREZ is the author of a 1984 book of poetry, HOMECOMING, and the novels HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES. She is currently professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Alvarez, Julia. Yo!. Chapel Hill. 1997. Algonquin Books. 1565121570. 309 pages. hardcover. Cover: Illustration by: Robbin Gourley. Design by: Gwen Petruska. Author photo: Daniel Cima.
DESCRIPTION - Yolanda Garcia - Yo, for short - is the literary one in the family. Her first published novel, in which she made ‘characters' out of her three sisters, her Mami and Papi, her grandparents, tias, tios, cousins, housemaids, and husbands was a big success. Now she's famous and basking in the spotlight while her ‘characters' find their naked and very recognizable selves dangling in that same blinding light. So what happens? Turnabout is fair play. Yolanda Garcia's family and friends get their chance to tell the truth about Yo: how she's always had to be center stage; that she's been telling lies since the day she was born; about the year she went into therapy with her best friend and how Yo swore off sex; how her college professor kept trying to keep her from ruining her life and throwing away her talent; how she stole a plot for a short story from one of her students; how she fills the house her third husband built for her with voodoo offerings-'little things he mustn't touch'-we]l, you get the idea. Everyone, from her sisters to her fame-obsessed stalker, rips into her. In the process, they create endearing self-portraits, while Yo (which also means ‘I') is herself denied the privilege of speaking in her own defense. This zesty, daring novel is about what happens when an author really does ‘write what she knows.' At once funny and poignant, intellectual and gossipy, lighthearted and layered in meaning, Yo! is, ironically and above all, a portrait of the artist. And with its bright colors, passion, and penchant for controversy, it's a portrait that could come only from the palette of Julia Alvarez. ‘YO! works the same beguiling combination as HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS - a lively and good-natured surface over depths of serious questioning. Sisterhood, daughterhood, friendship, the pain of political exile, the complications of fame, all the hard questions are churned up in the wake of the writer's central paradox: that she must betray secrets on the way to honesty, and tell dangerous lies if she is going to dare approach the truth.' - ROSELLEN BROWN. JULIA ALVAREZ is the author of two previous novels, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, which won the PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Award, and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, an American Library Association Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Julia Alvarez has also published three highly acclaimed books of poetry. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, Allure, The New Yorker, Hispanic Magazine, and USA Weekend. She lives with her husband in Vermont and teaches at Middlebury College. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
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Ames, Jonathan. I Pass Like Night. New York. 1989. Morrow. 0688078044. 167 pages. hardcover. Jacket design & illustration by Bascove.
DESCRIPTION - ‘An authentic voice of youthful suffering. Mr. Ames's antisocial young hero comes as a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield in the age of AIDS. The style is the real achievement: strong, clean, and poker-faced.' PHILIP ROTH. Alexander Vine is a young man who lives in New York and works as a doorman at the city's most exclusive restaurant. He hails cabs with his whistle, tips his hat with grace to the restaurant's wealthy patrons, and when he opens limo doors, he fantasizes that a rich widow laden with pearls will emerge to seduce him. Entering into Manhattan's erotic underworld, he willfully sets out to endanger him- self. He lives in a place of devastation, the Lower East Side of his Jewish immigrant roots. There he consorts with the inhabitants of this down-and-out neighborhood, in its back alleys and bars. In the same dark sidestreets where he courts his self-destruction, Alexander is on a journey that can cost - or win him - his soul.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Ames grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Princeton University in 1987. He is the winner of a Henfield / Transatlantic Review award. He has modeled for Bruce Weber and Horst. I PASS LIKE NIGHT is his first novel. He lives in New Jersey.
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Ames, Jonathan. The Extra Man. New York. 1998. Scribner. 0684845040. 272 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - After unexpectedly losing his job, former Princeton private school teacher Louis Ives is forced to take a room in the dank, cluttered New York apartment of one Henry Harrison, a failed playwright some forty years his senior,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Ames (born March 23, 1964) is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs. He was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time interest in boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring as ‘The Herring Wonder'. In 2009, he created the HBO television series Bored to Death.
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Anaya, Rudolfo. The Essays. Norman. 2022. University of Oklahoma Press. 9780806180694. Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Américas Series. Foreword by Robert Con Davis-Undiano. 332 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - “The storyteller’s gift is my inheritance,” writes Rudolfo Anaya in his essay “Shaman of Words.” Although he is best known for Bless Me, Ultima and other novels, his writing also takes the form of nonfiction, and in these 52 essays he draws on both his heritage as a Mexican American and his gift for storytelling. Besides tackling issues such as censorship, racism, education, and sexual politics, Anaya explores the tragedies and triumphs of his own life. Collected here are Anaya’s published essays. Despite his wide acclaim as the founder of Chicano literature, no previous volume has attempted to gather Anaya’s nonfiction into one edition. A companion to The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories, the collection of Anaya’s short stories, The Essays is an essential anthology for followers of Anaya and those interested in Chicano literature. Pieces such as “Requiem for a Lowrider,” “La Llorona, El Kookoóee, and Sexuality,” and “An American Chicano in King Arthur’s Court” take the reader from the llano of eastern New Mexico, where Anaya grew up, to the barrios of Albuquerque, and from the devastating diving accident that nearly ended his life at sixteen to the career he has made as an author and teacher. The point is not autobiography, although a life story is told, nor is it advocacy, although Anaya argues persuasively for cultural change. Instead, the author provides shrewd commentary on modern America in all its complexity. All the while, he employs the elegant, poetic voice and the interweaving of myth and folklore that inspire his fiction. “Stories reveal our human nature and thus become powerful tools for insight and revelation,” writes Anaya. This collection of prose offers abundant new insight and revelation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) was Professor of English at the University of New Mexico and the award-winning author of numerous books, including the classic Bless Me, Ultima. His work earned multiple awards and honors: the Western Writers of America Owen Wister Award (2018), the National Humanities Medal (2015), the National Medal of Arts (2001), the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes (2012), and others. He lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the Southwest inspired his writing throughout his life. Robert Con Davis-Undiano is Neustadt Professor and Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma and Executive Director of World Literature Today. Among his many publications are The Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture and Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory.
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Anaya, Rudolfo. The Old Man’s Love Story. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 9780806143576. Volume 12 in The Chicana and Chicano Visions Of The Américas Series. 6 × 9. 176 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A DEEPLY PERSONAL TALE OF LOVE AND LOSS. ‘This is a book for everyone who has ever loved, for everyone who has grieved, and for everyone who has ever hoped, in the darkest night, that what is essential goes on. I love this book, and you will, too. ’—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America. ‘Part memoir, part poetry, all heart, The Old Man’s Love Story questions life, love, death, eternity and all parts in between. A must read. ’—Roundup Magazine. ‘There was an old man who dwelt in the land of New Mexico, and he lost his wife. ’ From this opening line, Rudolfo Anaya crafts a tender novella at once universal and deeply personal. The narrator, a writer, shares intimate thoughts about his wife, their life together, and her death. The old man’s story captures the heartaches and ironies of old age as he proceeds through days of grief and memory. He talks with his wife along the way. A year passes. He longs to care for someone, but—to love again? Anaya’s reflections point to the power and importance of love at every stage of life. Lyrical and earthy, sad yet suffused with humor, The Old Man’s Love Story will speak to all readers, especially those who have loved and lost.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rudolfo Anaya is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Premio Quinto Sol and a National Medal of Arts. Anaya resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Andersen, Jon (editor). Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA. Middlebrough. 2008. Smokestack Books. 9780955402821. 175 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Seeds of Fire brings together the work of over fifty poets from the other USA - including Adrienne Rich, Fred Voss, Grace Paley, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez and Mart¡n Espada. Lyrical, satirical, raging and prophetic, they bear witness against the crippling nationalism promoted by the ruling political parties and corporate media in the United States. They seek solidarity with the impoverished and war-torn working classes around the world against the forces of imperial slaughter, environmental catastrophe and social disintegration. Some poems call us to the barricades, some to despair. Some detail the way capitalism can poison even the most intimate aspects of our lives, while others record the bloody consequences of The American Way, from Palestine and Iraq, Vietnam and Chile to the beggars on the streets of Washington. These poets sow their seeds of fire in the hope that the real globalization project is the building of international unity among all those - including the ghosts of John Coltrane, Emmett Till, Tom McGrath, Rachel Corrie, Woody Guthrie, Emma Goldman, Tom Paine and the Blue Cat - who believe that a better world is still possible.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Poet Jon Anderson was born in Somerville, Massachusetts. He earned a BA at Northeastern University and an MFA at the University of Iowa. Anderson’s meditative, lyric poems explore memory, death, and the natural world. “My prime motive for writing is self-confrontation, and I find poems the best way to employ language to do this,” Anderson said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “My poetry isn’t for everyone. It’s for people like myself who want to contend with themselves. I think of my poems as intimate conversations with close friends, to whom I’m not afraid to reveal my vulnerabilities and loneliness.” During his lifetime, Anderson published seven volumes of poetry, including Day Moon (2001), The Milky Way: Poems 1967–1982 (1983), the National Book Award–nominated Death & Friends (1970), and Looking for Jonathan (1968). His poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including The New American Poets (1960), The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985), and The American Poetry Anthology (1983). Anderson’s honors included a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. He taught for nearly 30 years at the University of Arizona as well as at the University of Portland, Ohio University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Iowa.
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Anderson, Edward. Hungry Men. Garden City. 1935. Doubleday Doran. 275 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This depression-era novel tells of young Acel Stecker, an unemployed musician from Oklahoma, who fellows a restless path across America, willing to do anything to earn a living. In a lean, fast-paced style that caused him to be compared to Ernest Hemingway, Edward Anderson reveals an astonishing panorama of rattling freight trains, breadlines, hobo jungles, Hoover hotels, and bloody political demonstrations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Ewell (Eddie) Anderson, novelist, the son of Edward Houston and Ellen Sara (Sexton) Anderson, was born on June 19, 1905, at Weatherford. His father, a country printer, worked in a number of small towns before settling in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where Eddie went through high school before he ran off with the mayor's son to a wheat harvest, fought one professional boxing match, played trombone a season in a carnival band, and, eventually, learned the reporter's trade at the Daily Ardmorite. Anderson worked on newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Tyler, before settling for a time in Abilene in the late 1920s. While working for Max Bentley on the newly established Abilene Morning News, he covered the trial of Marshall Ratliff, ringleader in the Santa Claus Bank Robbery. In 1930 Anderson worked his passage on a freighter to Europe and back. He returned to Abilene, where his parents and three sisters had settled, to try seriously to write fiction. A year later he began collecting material for hobo fiction by riding freight cars across the nation. He returned to write a picaresque novel about an out-of-work musician hoboing aimlessly around the United States. He also wrote short stories about hoboes, and Story magazine accepted two of them. Anderson married Polly Anne Bates in Abilene in 1934. They went to New Orleans, where he sold pieces to detective magazines and worked on a New Orleans newspaper. His hobo novel, Hungry Men, was published by Doubleday, Doran, and Company in 1935. It won the Doubleday-Story Prize that year and was a Literary Guild selection. Anderson returned to Texas and lived in Kerrville, where he began work on a second novel about two desperadoes who resembled Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. By the time this second novel, Thieves Like Us (1937), was published, Anderson was working for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where he also wrote a successful radio series. After good reviews of Thieves Like Us Anderson went to Hollywood, where he worked for B. P. Schulberg at Paramount and for Warner Brothers. When his screenwriting faltered, he worked for the Los Angeles Examiner and the Sacramento Bee. By then the Andersons had three children. Anderson returned to Texas after World War II and worked for the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star Telegram, among other papers. His marriage ended in divorce in 1950. For a time he took to the road again and drifted almost as much as he had during the early 1930s. He wrote for an underground newspaper in New York at one time. He then drifted back to Texas and lived principally at Brownsville, where he eventually married a Mexican national named Lupe. They had a son and a daughter. Anderson's later fiction projects did not reach print. After two years of retirement from newspaper work, he died of heart disease on September 5, 1969, in Brownsville. Thieves Like Us has been made into motion pictures twice, as They Live by Night in 1948 and as Thieves Like Us in 1974. In 1985 Hungry Men was reissued.
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Anderson, Edward. Thieves Like Us. New York. 1937. Frederick Stokes. 314 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When three small-time country gangsters break jail, they return to the only way of life they know - small-town bank-robbing. And when the youngest of them falls in love with one of the older gangster's cousins it becomes a tale of love on the run with nowhere to hide and no hope of reprieve.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Ewell (Eddie) Anderson, novelist, the son of Edward Houston and Ellen Sara (Sexton) Anderson, was born on June 19, 1905, at Weatherford. His father, a country printer, worked in a number of small towns before settling in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where Eddie went through high school before he ran off with the mayor's son to a wheat harvest, fought one professional boxing match, played trombone a season in a carnival band, and, eventually, learned the reporter's trade at the Daily Ardmorite. Anderson worked on newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Tyler, before settling for a time in Abilene in the late 1920s. While working for Max Bentley on the newly established Abilene Morning News, he covered the trial of Marshall Ratliff, ringleader in the Santa Claus Bank Robbery. In 1930 Anderson worked his passage on a freighter to Europe and back. He returned to Abilene, where his parents and three sisters had settled, to try seriously to write fiction. A year later he began collecting material for hobo fiction by riding freight cars across the nation. He returned to write a picaresque novel about an out-of-work musician hoboing aimlessly around the United States. He also wrote short stories about hoboes, and Story magazine accepted two of them. Anderson married Polly Anne Bates in Abilene in 1934. They went to New Orleans, where he sold pieces to detective magazines and worked on a New Orleans newspaper. His hobo novel, Hungry Men, was published by Doubleday, Doran, and Company in 1935. It won the Doubleday-Story Prize that year and was a Literary Guild selection. Anderson returned to Texas and lived in Kerrville, where he began work on a second novel about two desperadoes who resembled Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. By the time this second novel, Thieves Like Us (1937), was published, Anderson was working for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where he also wrote a successful radio series. After good reviews of Thieves Like Us Anderson went to Hollywood, where he worked for B. P. Schulberg at Paramount and for Warner Brothers. When his screenwriting faltered, he worked for the Los Angeles Examiner and the Sacramento Bee. By then the Andersons had three children. Anderson returned to Texas after World War II and worked for the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star Telegram, among other papers. His marriage ended in divorce in 1950. For a time he took to the road again and drifted almost as much as he had during the early 1930s. He wrote for an underground newspaper in New York at one time. He then drifted back to Texas and lived principally at Brownsville, where he eventually married a Mexican national named Lupe. They had a son and a daughter. Anderson's later fiction projects did not reach print. After two years of retirement from newspaper work, he died of heart disease on September 5, 1969, in Brownsville. Thieves Like Us has been made into motion pictures twice, as They Live by Night in 1948 and as Thieves Like Us in 1974. In 1985 Hungry Men was reissued.
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Anderson, Kent. Liquor, Guns and Ammo. Tucson. 1998. Dennis McMillan Publications. 0939767295. 296 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Brings together a diverse group of Anderson's writings: previously unpublished chapters from both "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Night Dogs", non-fiction articles on blood sports and bloodthirsty men as well as an award-winning travel piece on Mexico's Copper Canyon, the screenplay "Shank", and finally, notes toward a novel-in-progress, the third volume of the trilogy that began with "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Night Dogs."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kent Anderson (born August 20, 1945) is an American author, Vietnam War veteran, former police officer and former university professor born in 1945 in North Carolina. He has written novels, various articles and scenarios. Kent Anderson grew up in North Carolina. At age 19 he joined the Merchant navy as an Ordinary seaman for two years. In 1968 he enlisted in the US army and successfully applied and tested for the Special Forces. He was then assigned to Special Forces camp A-101 Mai Loc from 1969 to 1970. He earned two Bronze Star medals for his service in South Vietnam. After his service in Vietnam, he worked as a police officer in Portland, Oregon from 1972 to 1976. Kent Anderson then joined the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Montana where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction in 1978. He worked again as a police officier in Oakland, California in 1983 before resigning to write his first novel, Sympathy for the Devil, about a young Special Forces soldier in the Vietnam War. He then worked as an assistant professor of English at UTEP in El Paso, Texas and at BSU in Boise, Idaho. Kent Anderson also worked as a screenwriter for Newline cinema, for which he wrote the scenario of Motorcycle Gang directed by John Milius. In 1996, Kent Anderson published his second novel, Night Dogs, where the protagonist of his first book joins the Portland Police Bureau as a police officer in the late 70's. This book was selected by the New York Times in the Notable books of the Year in 1998. Nowadays, Kent Anderson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he keeps on writing novels.
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Anderson, Kent. Sympathy For the Devil. Garden City. 1987. Doubleday. 0385239432. 316 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Censured by some critics for its brutality but heralded by others as a modern-day classic, Sympathy for the Devil is a terrifying, intoxicating journey through the violence, madness, and insane beauty of battle. It traces the story of a hardened Green Beret named Hanson, a college student who goes to war with a book of Yeats's poetry in his pocket and discovers the savagery within himself. In this extraordinary novel, we follow Hanson through two tours of duty and a bitter attempt to live as a civilian in between. At one with the lush and dangerous world around him in Vietnam, Hanson is doomed to survive the landscape of devastation he encounters. Sympathy for the Devil contains some of the most vivid, finely etched prose ever written about the actual process of war - from firing a weapon for the first time in battle to the moment a young man knows that he has entered a living hell and found a home. Written by a veteran, here is the highly acclaimed Vietnam novel about a college boy's initiation into the harsh world of battle.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kent Anderson is an American author, Vietnam War veteran, former police officer and former university professor born in 1945 in North Carolina. He has written novels, various articles and scenarios.
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Anderson, Robert A. Service For the Dead. New York. 1986. Arbor House. 0877958122. Author Of Cooks And Bakers. 274 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Dorothy Wachtenheim. Jacket illustration by Christopher Zacharow.
DESCRIPTION - With the publication of Service for the Dead, Anderson, a former Marine lieutenant who served at Hue during the Tet Offensive, demonstrates once again that he is a compelling narrator of men at war. On his way home from Vietnam after having been wounded, and newly immersed in a civilian reality that seems trivial, marine Pfc. Mike Allison tries to make sense of his Vietnam nightmare. In the back seat of his parents' car he drifts in and out of memories of the war: the terror of random death; endless patrols; the booby-trapped landscape; seemingly friendly Vietnamese who harbor Viet Cong; memories , , , dreams. nightmares. Mike and the men in his platoon make dream and reality interchangeable as the only way to make sense of the senseless, cryptic war. In a desperate attempt to control what is beyond their control, they create alternate realities of everything around them. Their company headquarters becomes the Fort, the no-man's land they patrol - and die in - Frontierland, their two sharp-shooting adversaries Zorro and the Cisco Kid - and the war itself a movie in which they are actors. But Mike and his platoon mates also create alternate realities of themselves. Longo, their fire team leader, gives each of them a nickname that mirrors in a cockeyed way their true selves: Pogo, the court jester, speaks wisdom foolishly; Candid Camera, the voyeur, delights in photographing everything, including the dead; the Professor, the intellectual, keeps trying to figure it all out. But this fragile accommodation to the war is shattered by a new platoon leader, leading to one of the most powerful and moving scenes in the literature of war. In a conclusion that will haunt readers long after the book is laid down, Mike is forced to confront himself and what it means to be a soldier.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ROBERT A. ANDERSON is a graduate of Yale, and served in the Vietnam War as a Marine Corps infantry lieutenant. He studied in writing workshops at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University He lives in Massachusetts.
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Anderson, Scott. Triage. New York. 1998. Scribner. 0684846950. 235 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In this critically acclaimed debut novel, the aftermath of war in all its power is revealed in the lives of survivors and their loved ones. Mark, a young war photographer, returns to New York after being injured in a brush fire. Shell-shocked, torn apart by grief and guilt, he finds that his experiences have created a gulf between himself and his loved ones. The first to notice is his girlfriend, Elena, who grows increasingly alarmed as his condition continues to deteriorate. She is the most surprised when her grandfather, Joaquin, the last person from whom Elena wants to accept help, turns out to be the one to understand Mark's trauma. The two men -- bearers of grievously deep secrets -- forge an extraordinary relationship that will ultimately lead to life-altering revelations. This stunning novel is informed by Scott Anderson's experiences reporting on combat around the globe. TRIAGE introduces a major new voice in American fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Scott Anderson is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine and writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of THE MAN WHO TRIED TO SAVE THE WORLD, THE 4 O'CLOCK MURDERS, and co-author of INSIDE THE LEAGUE and WAR ZONES.
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Anderson, Sherwood. Certain Things Last: The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood and erson. New York. 1992. Four Walls Eight Windows. 0941423859. Edited by Charles E. Modlin. 359 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Martin Moskof.
DESCRIPTION - Until now there has never been a selection of Anderson's best short fiction. Certain Things Last is the first one-volume edition of Anderson's stories. But what makes this book truly remarkable is that five of Anderson's very best stories appear in print here for the first time. They are: ‘Certain Things Last,' ‘Fred,' ‘The Red Dog,' ‘Mrs. Wife,' and ‘The Masterpiece.' The discovery of these new stories makes Certain Things Last an unprecedented publishing event. The short story, not the novel or autobiography, was the form in which Sherwood Anderson excelled. And the American short story probably owes more to Sherwood Anderson than to any other American writer. It was Anderson who wrested short fiction from the upbeat conventionality of the popular magazines of the 1920s and ‘30s and molded it to express the isolation of individual people. Certain Things Last contains 30 stories in all, chosen from previously unpublished manuscripts and from Anderson's three story volumes, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, and Death in the Woods. Numerous stories have been meticulously restored to Anderson's original version by Professor Modlin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 - March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three more times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, Dark Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was the only bestseller of his career. He may be most remembered for his influential effect on the next generation of young writers, as he inspired William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. He helped gain publication for Faulkner and Hemingway.
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Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York. 1993. Signet/New American Library. 0451525698. Introduction By Irving Howe. 252 pages. paperback. CE2569. Signet Classic original.
DESCRIPTION - With the publication of WINESBURG I felt I had really begun to write out of the repressed, muddled life about me.' - Sherwood Anderson. A modern American classic, WINESBURG, OHIO mixed Sherwood Anderson's memories of his boyhood in Clyde, Ohio, and his observations in turn - of - the - century Chicago, where he wrote advertising copy. It was a book that, for its time, broke all conventions. It's introduction and twenty - one loosely connected defied the genteel tradition that omitted anything sexual, harsh, or aberrant from print. It embraced frankness and truth and dealt with people whose deeply moving lives were filled with secrets. Here are the inhabitants of small - town America: young George Willard, the newspaper reporter with dreams; Kate Swift, the schoolteacher who nearly seduces him; Wing Biddlebaum, the berry picker whose hands are the source of his renown and shame; Dr. Reely, the physician who loves George's mother; Alice Hindman, who has one last, shocking adventure; and all the other complex human beings whose portraits, rendered in Anderson's masterful prose, brought American literature into the modern age.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 - March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three more times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, Dark Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was the only bestseller of his career. He may be most remembered for his influential effect on the next generation of young writers, as he inspired William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. He helped gain publication for Faulkner and Hemingway.
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Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York. 1992. Penguin Books. 9780140186550. Introduction by Malcolm Cowley. Critical Library, Viking. 256 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - George Willard is a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom, one by one, the inhabitants of Winesburg, Ohio, confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. This town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson's special talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together. In this timeless cycle of short stories, he lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three more times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, Dark Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was the only bestseller of his career. He may be most remembered for his influential effect on the next generation of young writers, as he inspired William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. He helped gain publication for Faulkner and Hemingway.
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Anderson, Timothy G. Lonesome Dreamer: The Life of John G. Neihardt. Lincoln. 2016. University of Nebraska Press. 9780803290259. 6 x 9 • 14 photographs. 328 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - American poet and writer John G. Neihardt (1881–1973) possessed an inquiring and spiritual mind. Both talents came to the fore in Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Lakota holy man Black Elk, for which he is best remembered. Over the course of thirty years he also wrote a five-volume epic poem, A Cycle of the West, which told the story of the settling of the American West. Despite Neihardt's widespread name recognition, the success of Black Elk Speaks, and a list of critically acclaimed books and poems, Lonesome Dreamer is the first biography of Neihardt in nearly forty years. Timothy G. Anderson describes Neihardt's life from his humble beginnings in Illinois, to being named poet laureate of Nebraska in 1921, to his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show at the age of ninety. Anderson also delves into Neihardt's success as a poet far from the East Coast literary establishment, his resistance to modernist movements in poetry, and his wish to understand and describe the experience of the Plains Indians. Offering insight into both his personal and his literary life, this biography reaffirms Neihardt's place in American literary history, his successes and failures, and his unbreakable spirit.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Timothy G. Anderson has taught journalism at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and prior to that worked as an editor and designer for a number of newspapers, including the New York Times and New York Newsday.
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Andrews, Raymond. Appalachee Red. New York. 1978. Dial Press. 0803709161. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. James Baldwin Prize Novel. 283 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting by Benny Andrews.
DESCRIPTION - Appalachee, Georgia, 1917. Little Bit Thompson has to earn a living while her Big Man is serving time for being caught near a local still. Her job working for the town's leading white family has put her in the lustful eye of their eldest son, and she submits to him knowing the benefits of such a union. Her red baby born of this affair must be sent north before Big Man Thompson comes home. 1946. Sheriff Boots White leans against the door of the jailhouse around midnight and sees a large, mysterious red form of a man slip down Back Alley toward Sam's Cafe where Boots keeps Baby Sweet, his unwilling mistress, caged for his regular midnight sadistic two-minute assignation. For the first time in his life, Boots feels apprehension. 1959. Appalachee Red now owns Sam's Cafe and runs the biggest illegal gambling saloon in the county, with Sheriff Boots in his pocket and Baby Sweet by his side. He is king of the county and tastes the sweetness of revenge. APPALACHEE RED is a rambunctious saga that captures the most frustrating half-century in Black history. With warmth, humor, and pathos on every page, Raymond Andrews confronts the reader with the frustration of people learning to define freedom in a world in which they coexist with some strange, white, animal force.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Andrews (June 6, 1934-November 25, 1991) was an African-American novelist. Raymond Andrews was born June 6, 1934 in Plainview, Georgia and grew up in north central Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children. At age fifteen Andrews moved away to Atlanta, Georgia where he began working and attending high school at Booker T. Washington High School. Andrews graduated from Washington High School in 1952. Following his graduation, he served four years in the United States Air Force. After he finished his tour of duty in Korea, he attended Michigan State University before moving to New York City where he held a variety of jobs. Andrews lived in New York City until 1984. While living there he got married and worked numerous of jobs such as an airline agent, air courier, and proofreader. Andrews' first national publication was in an issue of Sports Illustrated and was written about the first time the game of football had ever been played in the Plainview community where he grew up. In the early 1970s he began publishing his Muskhogean trilogy which told about the life of an African American in the south from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1960s. The trilogy consists of Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's. The books written by Raymond Andrews have been applauded by numerous critics and other writers. Novelist Richard Bausch described Andrew's writing as having ‘a smiling generosity of spirit.' Andrews married Adelheid ‘Heidi' Wenger in 1966 in New York City. The couple divorced in 1980. Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia on November 25, 1991.
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Andrews, Raymond. Baby Sweets. New York. 1983. Dial Press. 0385274262. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. 212 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Bawdy and sometimes horrifying, hilarious on the way to being tragic, Raymond Andrews's Muskhogean County novels tell of black life in the Deep South from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1960s, from the days of mules and white men with bullwhips to the moment when the pendulum began to swing. This story tells of a venture between John Morgan Jr., the dissolute heir to Appalachee's leading white family, and Baby Sweet Jackson, owner of the once-vibrant Red's Cafe in Dark Town. On Independence Day, 1966, the partners open Muskhogean County's first bordello, with two dark-skinned black women, Lana Lips and Fig, ready for the expected white clientele. Then a mysterious woman, announcing herself as the 'third whore,' arrives--and proclaims that her body will be 'for colored only.' Raymond Andrews is a native of the Georgia he loves and writes about. BABY SWEET'S, like his previous two novels, is set in Muskhogean County in the Piedmont Belt of north Georgia, and it is populated with characters as lively as their names: Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee, Baby Sweet, Speck, Sugar Boy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Andrews (June 6, 1934-November 25, 1991) was an African-American novelist. Raymond Andrews was born June 6, 1934 in Plainview, Georgia and grew up in north central Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children. At age fifteen Andrews moved away to Atlanta, Georgia where he began working and attending high school at Booker T. Washington High School. Andrews graduated from Washington High School in 1952. Following his graduation, he served four years in the United States Air Force. After he finished his tour of duty in Korea, he attended Michigan State University before moving to New York City where he held a variety of jobs. Andrews lived in New York City until 1984. While living there he got married and worked numerous of jobs such as an airline agent, air courier, and proofreader. Andrews' first national publication was in an issue of Sports Illustrated and was written about the first time the game of football had ever been played in the Plainview community where he grew up. In the early 1970s he began publishing his Muskhogean trilogy which told about the life of an African American in the south from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1960s. The trilogy consists of Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's. The books written by Raymond Andrews have been applauded by numerous critics and other writers. Novelist Richard Bausch described Andrew's writing as having ‘a smiling generosity of spirit.' Andrews married Adelheid ‘Heidi' Wenger in 1966 in New York City. The couple divorced in 1980. Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia on November 25, 1991.
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Andrews, Raymond. Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire. Atlanta. 1991. Peachtree Publishers. 1561450324. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. 203 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Sexy, smart, and sassy, JESSIE AND JESUS AND COUSIN CLAIRE introduces us to some very powerful African-American women, surviving and thriving in the male-dominated world of the rural South. Look out, because here comes Jessie Mitchell Blackshear and her pale but equally dangerous double, Cousin Claire. Their macabre machinations will entertain and amaze you - if they don't swallow you whole! In these two darkly comic episodes, award-winning novelist Raymond Andrews paints the portraits of two very different black women whose means and modes of manipulation are mirror-opposites of each other, but whose motivations are thought-provokingly similar. The results - and their impact on those around them - are equally profound. The indomitable Jessie pursues her desires like a force of nature a veritable tornado of love, lust, and loyalty, while the sweet-smiling Cousin Claire takes the low-keyed, subtle approach. Both women are powers to be reckoned with as they blindly pursue their goals. Enter the humorous, sad, and sexy worlds of Jessie and Claire, and along the way, meet a host of other colorful characters - ‘pale, shy, sweet Reenie,' wandering Jesus, the daughter of GAL!, doomed Candy Man, ever-winking ‘Pig,' TV-addicted Lizzie Lee Lester. all vividly presented in the rambunctious and rollicking prose of a master storyteller and inspired seer into human nature. Blending the sensibilities of Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston, Raymond Andrews has created another work that is uniquely, and wonderfully, his own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Andrews (June 6, 1934-November 25, 1991) was an African-American novelist. Raymond Andrews was born June 6, 1934 in Plainview, Georgia and grew up in north central Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children. At age fifteen Andrews moved away to Atlanta, Georgia where he began working and attending high school at Booker T. Washington High School. Andrews graduated from Washington High School in 1952. Following his graduation, he served four years in the United States Air Force. After he finished his tour of duty in Korea, he attended Michigan State University before moving to New York City where he held a variety of jobs. Andrews lived in New York City until 1984. While living there he got married and worked numerous of jobs such as an airline agent, air courier, and proofreader. Andrews' first national publication was in an issue of Sports Illustrated and was written about the first time the game of football had ever been played in the Plainview community where he grew up. In the early 1970s he began publishing his Muskhogean trilogy which told about the life of an African American in the south from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1960s. The trilogy consists of Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's. The books written by Raymond Andrews have been applauded by numerous critics and other writers. Novelist Richard Bausch described Andrew's writing as having ‘a smiling generosity of spirit.' Andrews married Adelheid ‘Heidi' Wenger in 1966 in New York City. The couple divorced in 1980. Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia on November 25, 1991.
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Andrews, Raymond. Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee. New York. 1980. Dial Press. 0803783361. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. 245 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Benny Andrews. Jacket typography by Francesca Belanger.
DESCRIPTION - In this powerful new novel, Raymond Andrews (his first, APPALACHEE RED, was awarded the James Baldwin Prize in 1978) returns to the rural cotton country of Georgia to chronicle the forty-year reign of Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee - the spiritual and temporal leader of the black community of Appalachee. A beautiful young woman with high cheekbones and ‘Indian-looking' hair, she arrives in town in 1906, inquires simply after ‘the richest white man in this heah town,' and before long has installed herself as housekeeper at Plain View Plantation and mistress of Ira MacAndrew, a shotgun-toting, fiercely independent backcountry aristocrat. The novel traces the fortunes of this remarkable mEnage through the invasion of the boll weevil and the crash of the cotton economy, the hard times of the thirties, and the uncertainty of the war years. On the way we meet Cousin Tater, who lives in an abandoned church with a razorback hog that can tree a possum faster than any pack of hound dogs, Crazy Coot, the only practicing artist, black or white, in Muskhogean County, Sugar Boy, a drag racer, moonshiner and all-round sport, who marries Pecora, an FBI (‘fat, black, and ignorant') country girl, Speck, who loves a slow, sturdy mule as much as Sugar Boy loves his souped-up V-8, Doris Virginia, a log-cabin lady of leisure, who thrills to the hot-blues licks of Tampa Red on the Victrola, and Luvenia, who disappears into her father's white world, returning only on the day the Momma has chosen for her ‘crossing-over' and the revelation of the secret she has guarded for forty years. ROSIEBELLE LEE WILDCAT TENNESSEE is a compelling mixture of bawdy folk myth and the tragic history of sexual and racial politics - and plain hard times - in the rural South. Raymond Andrews has again demonstrated that he is both a master storyteller and a stylist of rare originality and talent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Andrews (June 6, 1934-November 25, 1991) was an African-American novelist. Raymond Andrews was born June 6, 1934 in Plainview, Georgia and grew up in north central Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children. At age fifteen Andrews moved away to Atlanta, Georgia where he began working and attending high school at Booker T. Washington High School. Andrews graduated from Washington High School in 1952. Following his graduation, he served four years in the United States Air Force. After he finished his tour of duty in Korea, he attended Michigan State University before moving to New York City where he held a variety of jobs. Andrews lived in New York City until 1984. While living there he got married and worked numerous of jobs such as an airline agent, air courier, and proofreader. Andrews' first national publication was in an issue of Sports Illustrated and was written about the first time the game of football had ever been played in the Plainview community where he grew up. In the early 1970s he began publishing his Muskhogean trilogy which told about the life of an African American in the south from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1960s. The trilogy consists of Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's. The books written by Raymond Andrews have been applauded by numerous critics and other writers. Novelist Richard Bausch described Andrew's writing as having ‘a smiling generosity of spirit.' Andrews married Adelheid ‘Heidi' Wenger in 1966 in New York City. The couple divorced in 1980. Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia on November 25, 1991.
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Andrews, Raymond. The Last Radio Baby. Atlanta. 1990. Peachtree Publishers. 1561450049. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. 224 pages. hardcover. Cover photograph: Raymond Andrews at six months, who says of the picture-taking session: ‘The only way they could get six-month-old me to sit still and shut up for this picture was to take away my brother Harvey’s lollipop and give it to me. Following the click of the camera, Harvey got his candy back and I went back to crying.
DESCRIPTION - In this lively memoir, award-winning novelist Raymond Andrews vividly recalls the pleasures and pains of growing up black in rural Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s - a time when families gathered together around the radio to listen to mysteries and sports events, when county fairs and revivals provided riotous relief from the daily routine of country living, and when double features cost a dime. With incomparable humor, Andrews describes his preoccupations as a child, such as perfecting the art of running-board jumping, avoiding the local bully, Minnie Pearl Massey, and sneaking peeks into the county jail and the notorious ‘DeMo's” cafe, famous for fried fish, fights, and sin. Along the way, he also supplies a lost segment of American history, describing the manners, mores, and daily lives of rural blacks - not only the prejudice they encountered but also the sports figures who inspired them, the teachers who educated them, the church that bonded them together, and the local characters who both amused and scandalized them, including guitar-picking, fast-driving, hard-drinking ‘Tampa Red' and Old Mrs. Hill, who had been born a slave and in her nineties ran around with a ‘set of fast girls in their sixties.' These and many other intriguing figures people the pages of THE LAST RADIO BABY, an entertaining, informative, and important view of a time and place in our history filtered through the gentle and generous vision of one of its most lovable characters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Andrews (June 6, 1934-November 25, 1991) was an African-American novelist. Raymond Andrews was born June 6, 1934 in Plainview, Georgia and grew up in north central Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children. At age fifteen Andrews moved away to Atlanta, Georgia where he began working and attending high school at Booker T. Washington High School. Andrews graduated from Washington High School in 1952. Following his graduation, he served four years in the United States Air Force. After he finished his tour of duty in Korea, he attended Michigan State University before moving to New York City where he held a variety of jobs. Andrews lived in New York City until 1984. While living there he got married and worked numerous of jobs such as an airline agent, air courier, and proofreader. Andrews' first national publication was in an issue of Sports Illustrated and was written about the first time the game of football had ever been played in the Plainview community where he grew up. In the early 1970s he began publishing his Muskhogean trilogy which told about the life of an African American in the south from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1960s. The trilogy consists of Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's. The books written by Raymond Andrews have been applauded by numerous critics and other writers. Novelist Richard Bausch described Andrew's writing as having ‘a smiling generosity of spirit.' Andrews married Adelheid ‘Heidi' Wenger in 1966 in New York City. The couple divorced in 1980. Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia on November 25, 1991.
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Andrews, William L. (editor). The African-American Novel in the Age of Reaction: Three Classics. New York. 1992. Mentor/New American Library. 0451628497. Edited & With An Introduction by William L. Andrews. Includes-IOLA LEROY by Frances E. W. Harper, THE MARROW OF TRADITION by Charles W. Chesnutt, & THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar. 587 pages. paperback. ME2849.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Out of the race must come its own defenders. With [African-Americans] the pen is mightier than the sword. It is the wagon of civilization, and they must use it in their own defense.' - Frances E. W. Harper. In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the South's ‘separate but equal' racial doctrine. Around this time, three powerful but very different black voices responded in protest, and they did so in the three exceptional novels collected here. Frances E. W. Harper's IOLA LEROY follows the struggles and soul-searching of a light-skinned black woman during the turbulent years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Charles W. Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION knits together the lives of a rich white family and a mixed-race couple who face the violent results of white supremacy in a North Carolina town. Dramatically different is Paul Laurence Dunbar's THE SPORT OF THE GODS, the first extensive portrayal in fiction of twentieth-century Harlem - and a disturbing depiction of the plight of black families in the urban ghetto that anticipates the writings of Richard Wright. Widely read by contemporary audiences, these novels remain significant as works that influenced a nation's conscience as well as fine examples of early African-American fiction whose time has come to be recognized and revered.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Andrews, William L. (editor). Three Classic African-American Novels. New York. 1990. Mentor/New American Library. 0451627881. Introduction by William L. Andrews. Includes - THE HEROIC SLAVE by Frederick Douglas, CLOTEL by William Wells Brown, and OUR NIG by Harriet E. Wilson. 367 pages. paperback. ME2788.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Nothing turns her from her steadfast purpose of elevating herself.' This
DESCRIPTION of Frado, the cruelly mistreated slave in Harriet Wilson's OUR NIG, epitomizes the central theme of that classic African-American novel. This extraordinary volume brings together the first three novels written by African-Americans in the 1850s: THE HEROIC SLAVE, Frederick Douglass's powerful fictional account of an actual mutiny aboard the slave ship Creole in 1841; CLOTEL, a provocative exposE of slavery by William Wells Brown, who was himself a fugitive slave; and the penetrating and eloquent OUR NIG, which focuses on the struggles of one young woman to achieve economic independence and self-respect. The scope and richness of African-American literature are brilliantly exemplified in these three works. Here is a landmark collection that offers an important new perspective on both African-American culture and the literature of the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Andrews, William L. (Introduction). Six Women's Slave Narratives. New York. 1989. Oxford University Press. 9780195060836. 384 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Written by six black women, these stories embody most of the predominant themes and narrative forms found in African-American women's autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Andrews, William L. / Foster, Frances Smith / Harris, Trudier (editors). The Oxford Companion To African American Literature. New York. 1997. Oxford University Press. 0195065107. 866 pages. paperback. Jacket art: Jacob Lawrence: ‘The Library,’ 1960.
DESCRIPTION - THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, INVISIBLE MAN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,' I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, THE PIANO LESSON, BELOVED - the work of African American writers has been a vital part of our nation's literary heritage for over 250 years. Now, THE OXFORD COMPANION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE provides the first comprehensive one-volume reference work devoted to this rich tradition, surveying the length and breadth of black literary history, focusing in particular on the lives and careers of more than 400 writers. Here indeed is the pantheon of African American writers - Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson, Jamaica Kincaid and Gloria Naylor, Stanley Crouch and Cornel West, and hundreds more. Moreover, the COMPANION includes entries on 150 major works of African American Literature (including synopses of novels), from Harriet A. Jacobs's INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, to Richard Wright's NATIVE SON, to Lorraine Hansberry's A RAISIN IN THE SUN; on literary characters, ranging from Bigger Thomas to Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, and Sula Peace; on character types, such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster; and on such icons of black culture as Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on the traditional literary genres, such as poetry, fiction, and drama; on genres of special import in African American letters, such as autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday school literature, and oratory; and on a wide spectrum of related topics, including journalism, the black periodical press, major libraries and research centers, religion, literary societies, women's clubs, and various publishing enterprises. There are also entries on customs (such as conjuring and signifying), cultural expression (such as dance, blues, and dress), and on unique aspects of black experience (such as the Middle Passage, passing, and blue vein societies). Finally, the five-part, fifteen-page essay, Literary History, captures the full sweep of African American writing in the United States, from the colonial and early national eras right up to the present day. THE COMPANION also features a comprehensive subject index; extensive cross-referencing; and bibliographies after almost every article. With contributions by more than 300 scholars - including such noted authorities as Gerald Early, Nell Irvin Painter, Arnold Rampersad, Claudia Tate, and Craig H. Werner - who offer criticism that is historically informed, thoughtfully researched, and fair-minded, this superb volume presents a gold mine of information to the student and the scholar, to the seeker of particular information and the browser intent on opening up her or his intellectual horizons.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Frances Smith Foster is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies at Emory University. Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Angelou, Maya (Introduction). Time To Greez!: Incantations From the Third World. San Francisco. 1975. Glide Publications/Third World Communications. 0912078448. 211 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Now in this book, TIME TO GREZZ! ,we hear the truth - Blacks, Browns, Reds, Yellows telling their story. The poetry sings and the total effect is harmony. There is hurt, humor and hope in these pages. The hurt of concentration camp, cockroaches, and drugs; of broken treaties and promises; of old men living dried old lives in the blazing sun of California farmlands. There is enchantment of the beauty in Blackness and the searing awareness that Beauty is not enough. There is the wry chuckle of cooking chitlins in a newly integrated white suburbia, the simple appreciation of Pablo Neruda's human-ness, and the American Indian selection that comes like a faintly heard chant late at night. These colors have come together in a rainbow. This, too, is America - where she has come from - and a close and honest look will inform the reader where she is going, and, probably saddest of all, why.' - from the Introduction by Maya Angelou, author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS. The Editors of TIME TO GREEZ! have come together from the respective Third World cultures/races represented in this anthology. We feel it is a many-sided mirror of our lives, reflecting the colors, shapes and sounds, tastes, smells, touch of our homes, the rhythms of our music, the music of our food, the food of our lives. Share in the Feast with us. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Angelou, Maya. All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. New York. 1986. Random House. 0394521439. 210 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - Poet, musician, performer - Maya Angelou once again resumes one of the great personal narratives of our time: the narrative that began with I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, SINGIN' AND SWINGIN' AND GETTIN' MERRY LIKE CHRISTMAS, GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME, and THE HEART OF A WOMAN. In this continuation, Angelou relates how she joins a ‘colony' of Black American expatriates in Ghana - only to discover ‘you can't go home again!' Initially, there is the joy of being Black in a place where everyone is Black; the fun of politics and parties, and the sheer, exotic excitement of a magic land. With her poet's voice, Angelou brings alive the accents, colors, and feelings of Africa: the moon ‘red as fire over black hills'; the laughter-loving young woman whose death proves the reality of the African illusion. A terrifying, inexplicable moment of racial memory on a crumbling bridge. There is a fresh, telling portrait of Malcolm X; a romance with a handsome Muslim; a near tragedy, when Angelou's son is injured in an accident. And at the end, there is an unsettling ache, ‘The ache for home which lives in all of us, the place where we can go as we are.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York. 1969. Random House. 281 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In the first volume of an extraordinary autobiographical series, one of the most inspiring authors of our time recalls--with candor, humor, poignancy and grace--how her journey began. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Angelou, Maya. Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?. New York. 1983. Random House. 0394521447. 47 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - Lyrical and cadent, dramatic and sometimes playful, these poems speak of love, longing, parting; of freedom and shattered dreams; of Saturday-night partying and the smells and sounds of Southern cities.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Angelou, Maya. Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. New York. 1976. Random House. 0394405455. 271 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - Here Maya Angelou, dazzling entertainer, casts the spotlight on her show business career - a pageant of international scope. Maya, the woman, shares her sad, failed marriage to a white man, her early motherhood and achingly sensitive relationship with her young son, and her bone-deep, painful suspicion of the white world that welcomes her talent so dramatically.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Angelou, Maya. The Heart of a Woman. New York. 1981. Random House. 0394512731. 273 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, THE HEART OF A WOMAN, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for writing blazes anew. Her compassion and commitment lead her to respond to the fiery times by becoming the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest. A tempestuous, earthy woman, she promises her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her wedding day, by a passionate African freedom fighter. Filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous characters, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, THE HEART OF A WOMAN sings with Maya Angelou's eloquent prose -- her fondest dreams, deepest disappointments, and her dramatically tender relationship with her rebellious teenage son. Vulnerable, humorous, tough, Maya speaks with an intimate awareness of the heart within all of us.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Angelou, Maya. Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now. New York. 1993. Random House. 0679427430. 143 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Andy Carpenter.
DESCRIPTION - Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this best-selling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power do spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou's latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth on every page.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
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Anonymous (Gladys Huntington). Madame Solario. New York. 1956. Viking Press. 374 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Irv Docktor.
DESCRIPTION - A novel of period and place, of mood and manners, tells its story in three the first and third, through Bernard Middleton, a young Englishman on tour, which sees the beginning and the end of Madame Solario's stay at Cadenabbia, on Lake Como; and the second through the unrelenting questioning of Madame Solario by her brother, Eugene Harden. It is 1906 and Cadenabbia's visitors are ending the summer, their many nationalities, titles, money, idle chatter making a new world for Bernard, while Count Kavonski's pursuit of Madame Solario gives him a chance to protect the woman who has infatuated him. The antagonism between the two is dissolved when Eugene appears, and envelops Madame in his plans for an opportunist alliance with wealth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gladys Huntington (1887-1959), née Parrish, was an American writer. Huntington's works include the novel Carfrae's Comedy, the play Barton's Folly, and the bestselling book Madame Solario.
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Ansa, Tina McElroy. Baby of the Family. San Diego. 1989. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 015110431x. 1st Novel. 265 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Varnette Honeywood.
DESCRIPTION - An evocative, delicately comic story of a girl's coming of age. From the moment of her birth in a rural black hospital in Georgia, Lena McPherson is recognized as a special child, with the power to see ghosts and predict the future. Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tina McElroy Ansa (born November 18, 1949) is an African American novelist, filmmaker, teacher, and journalist. Born Tina McElroy to Walter J. and Nellie McElroy in Macon, Georgia, where she grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood. After graduating from Spelman College and working for several years in a variety of positions at the Atlanta Constitution, she has written several novels and has been a frequent contributor to numerous periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She instructs writing workshops at Spelman College, Emory University, and Coastal Georgia Community College. She lives with her filmmaker husband Jonee Ansa on St. Simons Island, Georgia where they collaborate on making movies and are active in community events to promote the arts. Ansa's fiction portrays a variety of Black women in the recent and modern American South, with a blend of the supernatural and traditional superstition. Her first novel, Baby of the Family, was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Baby of the Family was also on the African-America Best-seller List for Paperback Fiction. In October 2001, Baby of the Family was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of the ‘Top 25 books Every Georgian Should Read.' The book was selected for the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults in 1990, and won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award.
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Ansa, Tina McElroy. The Hand I Fan With. New York. 1996. Doubleday. 0385475993. 463 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Varnette P. Honeywood.
DESCRIPTION - Bestselling author Tina McElroy Ansa is back with another tale from Mulberry, Georgia, the richly drawn fictional town and home of the extraordinary Lena McPherson. Lena, now forty-five and tired of being ‘the hand everyone fans with,' has grown weary of shouldering the town's problems and wants to find a little love and companionship for herself. So she and a friend perform a supernatural ritual to conjure up a man for Lena. She gets one all right: a ghost named Herman who, though dead for one hundred years, is full of life and all man. His love changes Lena's life forever, satisfying as never before both her physical and spiritual needs. Filled with the same ‘humor, grace, and great respect for power of the particular' (The New York Times Book Review) as her previous critically acclaimed novels, BABY OF THE FAMILY and UGLY WAYS, THE HAND I FAN WITH is yet another memorable and life-affirming tale from one of America's best-loved authors.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tina McElroy Ansa (born November 18, 1949) is an African American novelist, filmmaker, teacher, and journalist. Born Tina McElroy to Walter J. and Nellie McElroy in Macon, Georgia, where she grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood. After graduating from Spelman College and working for several years in a variety of positions at the Atlanta Constitution, she has written several novels and has been a frequent contributor to numerous periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She instructs writing workshops at Spelman College, Emory University, and Coastal Georgia Community College. She lives with her filmmaker husband Jonee Ansa on St. Simons Island, Georgia where they collaborate on making movies and are active in community events to promote the arts. Ansa's fiction portrays a variety of Black women in the recent and modern American South, with a blend of the supernatural and traditional superstition. Her first novel, Baby of the Family, was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Baby of the Family was also on the African-America Best-seller List for Paperback Fiction. In October 2001, Baby of the Family was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of the ‘Top 25 books Every Georgian Should Read.' The book was selected for the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults in 1990, and won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award.
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Ansa, Tina McElroy. Ugly Ways. New York. 1993. Harcourt Brace. 0151925534. 277 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The bestselling tale-powerful, compassionate, humorous-of the three Lovejoy sisters reunited in their hometown of Mulberry, Georgia, on the occasion of their mother's death. As the emotionally scarred Lovejoys prepare for their mother's funeral, the spirit of the selfish and manipulative Mudear hovers above them, complaining about her daughters' “ugly ways” in death as she did in life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tina McElroy Ansa (born November 18, 1949) is an African American novelist, filmmaker, teacher, and journalist. Born Tina McElroy to Walter J. and Nellie McElroy in Macon, Georgia, where she grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood. After graduating from Spelman College and working for several years in a variety of positions at the Atlanta Constitution, she has written several novels and has been a frequent contributor to numerous periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She instructs writing workshops at Spelman College, Emory University, and Coastal Georgia Community College. She lives with her filmmaker husband Jonee Ansa on St. Simons Island, Georgia where they collaborate on making movies and are active in community events to promote the arts. Ansa's fiction portrays a variety of Black women in the recent and modern American South, with a blend of the supernatural and traditional superstition. Her first novel, Baby of the Family, was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Baby of the Family was also on the African-America Best-seller List for Paperback Fiction. In October 2001, Baby of the Family was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of the ‘Top 25 books Every Georgian Should Read.' The book was selected for the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults in 1990, and won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award.
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Anselmo, Reverge. The Cadillac of Six-Bys. New York. 1997. Harper Collins. 0061012092. 193 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Carl D. Galian. Front cover photo courtesy of the author.
DESCRIPTION - On the shore of the great sea which is the cradle of civilization, under the shadow of towering cedars, lies the rubble of a once majestic city. The gazes of native eyes, friend and enemy, calculate the tricks of living in a hot zone of the Cold War. Strange, imponderable loves rise in a falling city, and the death gong tolls with the sounds of timeless song. The Levant. An ancient land of battle and deception. After ten years of civil war, U.S. Marines land in the chaos. Factional fighting rips the city, and the Marines hold out in the cross fire. For Cazetti, a young Intelligence man with a bad record, it is a world of the war-wise: spies and survivors, innocents and wounded. Those like Hitman Hitchins, a loose agent with a lurking in his heart; Sardine, a treacherous vamp; Philomena, a direct, endearing nun determined to save Cazetti's soul; Cercio, a playboy lieutenant; and Minovich and Davey, hanging on since Vietnam to do it all again. With enemy artillery raining down on all sides, and the perimeter lines pinned down, nothing, it seems, can save these men from the apocalyptic specter they know is coming. A dramatic, vivid story of love and war in a devious and bloody world, THE CADILLAC OF SIX-BY'S brings you into the hearts of men who lived and died by fire, in a place and time now faint in the wake of history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Reverge Anselmo was born in Mexico City in 1962. He served three years in the U.S. Marine Corps and is a survivor of the Expedition sent to Lebanon. He graduated the Erv Malnarich Outfitters and Guides School in Hamilton, Montana, and attended St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He lived for many years in Paris and was a businessman in Europe and Latin America. He is the son of the late Rene Anselmo, the communications tycoon. THE CADILLAC OF SIX-BY'S is his first novel.
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Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. New York. 2012. Penguin Books. 9780143106777. Introduction and notes by Werner Sollors. 416 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - For the centennial of its first publication: a new edition of a seminal work on the American immigrant experience Weaving introspection with political commentary, biography with history, The Promised Land, first published in 1912, brings to life the transformation of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant into an American citizen. Mary Antin recounts "the process of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development that took place in [her] own soul" and reveals the impact of a new culture and new standards of behavior on her family. A feeling of division-between Russia and America, Jews and Gentiles, Yiddish and English-ever-present in her narrative is balanced by insights, amusing and serious, into ways to overcome it. In telling the story of one person, The Promised Land illuminates the lives of hundreds of thousands.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Antin (born Maryashe Antin; June 13, 1881 – May 15, 1949) was an American author and immigration rights activist. She is best known for her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land, an account of her emigration and subsequent Americanization. Mary Antin was the second of six children born to Israel and Esther Weltman Antin, a Jewish family living in Polotsk, in the Vitebsk Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus). Israel Antin emigrated to Boston in 1891, and three years later he sent for Mary and her mother and siblings. She married Amadeus William Grabau, a geologist, in 1901, and moved to New York City where she attended Teachers College of Columbia University and Barnard College. Antin is best known for her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land, which describes her public school education and assimilation into American culture, as well as life for Jews in Czarist Russia. After its publication, Antin lectured on her immigrant experience to many audiences across the country. During World War I, while she campaigned for the Allied cause, her husband's pro-German activities precipitated their separation and her physical breakdown. Amadeus was forced to leave his post at Columbia University to work in China, where he became "the father of Chinese geology." She was never physically strong enough to visit him there. During World War II, Amadeus was interned by the Japanese and died shortly after his release in 1946. Mary Antin died of cancer on May 15, 1949.
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Apollo. Concrete Candy. New York. 1996. Anchor/Doubleday. 0385477805. Paperback Original. 134 pages. paperback. Cover design by C.M.O.N.
DESCRIPTION - CONCRETE CANDY marks the debut of an astonishing new writer - notable both for the authenticity and immediacy of his voice and for his age: fifteen. Three years ago, Apollo, a child of the inner city and a protege of the acclaimed novelist Jess Mowry, began writing stories that reflect the tension, drama, and pathos of the urban reality he has lived and witnessed. The result is this collection of six powerful, haunting tales of boys dangerously adrift in the 'hood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY -
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Apple, Max. Free Agents. New York. 1984. Harper & Row. 0060152826. 197 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Author's third book. This collection of stories features a freewheeling version of the creation of the Disney empire--young Walt liked to sketch little animals and his brother Will was a nascent Alexander the Great of entertainment--and a story about primal therapy and circumcision.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Max Apple, in full Max Isaac Apple (born October 22, 1941, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.), American writer known for the comic intelligence of his stories, which chronicle pop culture and other aspects of American life. Apple's first language was Yiddish. Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1970), Apple taught at Reed College, Portland, Ore., from 1970 to 1971 and at Rice University, Houston, Texas, from 1972. Apple's satire is distinguished by its gentle spoofing. His cast of characters often includes a mix of historical figures and fictional creations, as in The Oranging of America (1976), with its stories about materialism that feature such historical figures as cereal manufacturer C.W. Post, restaurant and motor-lodge entrepreneur Howard Johnson, and novelist Norman Mailer. In Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978), a Jewish man from Detroit manages the career of a middleweight Puerto Rican boxer named Jesus Goldstein, and brief appearances are made by J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, and Jane Fonda. His subsequent works include the collection of short stories Free Agents (1984) and The Propheteers (1987), a colourful satire of the entrepreneurs who shaped American fast-food culture. Apple's later novels Roommates: My Grandfather's Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story (1998) are highly autobiographical narratives about growing up in the United States with first-generation Jewish grandparents. The Jew of Home Depot, and Other Stories (2007) is a collection of eclectic stories whose characters range from a disabled little girl who bonds with the mute characters of Disneyland to a teenage girl with a passion for shot put.
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Apple, Max. The Oranging of America and Other Stories. New York. 1976. Grossman/Viking. 0670528013. 152 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Author's first book. The author of these short stories focuses his attention on Monte Hall, nuclear physics, Howard Johnson, and a national leader from Grand Rapids. "It was my fascination itself with the English language that made me a writer," Apple wrote in an essay for the New York Times Book Review. Its endless suggestiveness has carried me through many a plot, entertained me when nothing else could." Growing up in a Yiddish-speaking family, Apple writes a prose that is remarkably attuned to America's cultural and linguistic With the 1976 publication of The Oranging of America, and Other Stories, Apple established himself as one of America's most affectionate, humorous, and astute critics. Like other postmodernist writers, Apple describes famous historical figures and American pop cultural heroes mingling with his fictional characters. Howard Johnson, Norman Mailer, Fidel Castro, and J. Edgar Hoover are but some of the figures that have all turned up in Apple's fiction. One critic stated that Apple creates "the literary equivalent of a Magritte painting.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Max Apple, in full Max Isaac Apple (born October 22, 1941, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.), American writer known for the comic intelligence of his stories, which chronicle pop culture and other aspects of American life. Apple's first language was Yiddish. Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1970), Apple taught at Reed College, Portland, Ore., from 1970 to 1971 and at Rice University, Houston, Texas, from 1972. Apple's satire is distinguished by its gentle spoofing. His cast of characters often includes a mix of historical figures and fictional creations, as in The Oranging of America (1976), with its stories about materialism that feature such historical figures as cereal manufacturer C.W. Post, restaurant and motor-lodge entrepreneur Howard Johnson, and novelist Norman Mailer. In Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978), a Jewish man from Detroit manages the career of a middleweight Puerto Rican boxer named Jesus Goldstein, and brief appearances are made by J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, and Jane Fonda. His subsequent works include the collection of short stories Free Agents (1984) and The Propheteers (1987), a colourful satire of the entrepreneurs who shaped American fast-food culture. Apple's later novels Roommates: My Grandfather's Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story (1998) are highly autobiographical narratives about growing up in the United States with first-generation Jewish grandparents. The Jew of Home Depot, and Other Stories (2007) is a collection of eclectic stories whose characters range from a disabled little girl who bonds with the mute characters of Disneyland to a teenage girl with a passion for shot put.
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Apple, Max. The Propheteers. New York. 1987. Harper & Row. 0060550562. 306 pages. hardcover. Cover: Steven Guarnaccia.
DESCRIPTION - Howard Johnson and Walt Disney are determined to acquire land near Orlando, Florida from Margery Post Merriweather, heiress of the family cereal fortune.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Max Apple, in full Max Isaac Apple (born October 22, 1941, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.), American writer known for the comic intelligence of his stories, which chronicle pop culture and other aspects of American life. Apple's first language was Yiddish. Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1970), Apple taught at Reed College, Portland, Ore., from 1970 to 1971 and at Rice University, Houston, Texas, from 1972. Apple's satire is distinguished by its gentle spoofing. His cast of characters often includes a mix of historical figures and fictional creations, as in The Oranging of America (1976), with its stories about materialism that feature such historical figures as cereal manufacturer C.W. Post, restaurant and motor-lodge entrepreneur Howard Johnson, and novelist Norman Mailer. In Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978), a Jewish man from Detroit manages the career of a middleweight Puerto Rican boxer named Jesus Goldstein, and brief appearances are made by J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, and Jane Fonda. His subsequent works include the collection of short stories Free Agents (1984) and The Propheteers (1987), a colourful satire of the entrepreneurs who shaped American fast-food culture. Apple's later novels Roommates: My Grandfather's Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story (1998) are highly autobiographical narratives about growing up in the United States with first-generation Jewish grandparents. The Jew of Home Depot, and Other Stories (2007) is a collection of eclectic stories whose characters range from a disabled little girl who bonds with the mute characters of Disneyland to a teenage girl with a passion for shot put.
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Apple, Max. Zip. New York. 1978. Viking Press. 0670796921. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Max Apple, author of "The Oranging of America" has written one of the most original, funny and touching novesl of his generation. What's a nice Jewish boy like Ira Goldstein doing managing a flashy Puerto Rican middleweight named Jesus?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Max Apple, in full Max Isaac Apple (born October 22, 1941, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.), American writer known for the comic intelligence of his stories, which chronicle pop culture and other aspects of American life. Apple's first language was Yiddish. Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1970), Apple taught at Reed College, Portland, Ore., from 1970 to 1971 and at Rice University, Houston, Texas, from 1972. Apple's satire is distinguished by its gentle spoofing. His cast of characters often includes a mix of historical figures and fictional creations, as in The Oranging of America (1976), with its stories about materialism that feature such historical figures as cereal manufacturer C.W. Post, restaurant and motor-lodge entrepreneur Howard Johnson, and novelist Norman Mailer. In Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978), a Jewish man from Detroit manages the career of a middleweight Puerto Rican boxer named Jesus Goldstein, and brief appearances are made by J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, and Jane Fonda. His subsequent works include the collection of short stories Free Agents (1984) and The Propheteers (1987), a colourful satire of the entrepreneurs who shaped American fast-food culture. Apple's later novels Roommates: My Grandfather's Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story (1998) are highly autobiographical narratives about growing up in the United States with first-generation Jewish grandparents. The Jew of Home Depot, and Other Stories (2007) is a collection of eclectic stories whose characters range from a disabled little girl who bonds with the mute characters of Disneyland to a teenage girl with a passion for shot put.
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Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik. The Book of Kane and Margaret: A Novel. Tuscaloosa. 2020. University of Alabama Press/Fiction Collective 2. 9781573661843. 298 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven's wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It's also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes. In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is the author of The Book of Kane and Margaret(FC2 / UAP) and Disintegration Made Plain and Easy (1913 Press). He was a community college student, a transfer student, attended two graduate programs in writing, was a writing tutor, was an adjunct instructor, and worked as college staff before joining WWU as faculty (i.e. went to college and never left). He is excited to talk and work with WWU students on a number of topics, including: first-year student transitions, transfer student transitions, first-generation student transitions, creative writing practice, poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, humor writing, standup comedy, submitting work for publication, graduate school preparation, and graduate school survival.
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Ardizzone, Tony. The Evening News. Athens. 1986. University of Georgia Press. 0820308609. Flannery O'Connor Award Winner. 162 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Tony Ardizzone writes of the moments in our lives that shine, that burn in the dim expanse of memory with the intensity and vivid light of the evening news. The men and women in these stories tend to arrange their days, order their pasts, plan their futures in the light of such moments, finding epiphanies in the glowing memory of a father's laugh or a mother's repeated story, in a broken date or a rained-out ball game. Set mostly in Chicago's blue-collar neighborhoods, these stories focus on subjects that concern us disease and death, vandalism and sacrilege, rape and infidelity, lost love. The husband and wife in the title story look at their pasts -- his as an activist in the sixties and hers as a believer in reincarnation and the tarot -- in light of the news stories they watch on television each evening, and question whether they should bring a child into the world. And in "The Walk-On," a bartender and former varsity pitcher for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini finds the actual events of the most cataclysmic day in his past unequal to their impact on his life and so rewrites them in his mind, adding an ill-placed banana peel, a falling meteor, and a careening truck in order to create a more fitting climax and finally to leave those memories behind him. Searching their pasts for clues to the present, searching the horizons of their days for love, the characters in The Evening News seek, and sometimes find, redemption in a world of uncertainty and brightly burning emotions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tony Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago. He is the author of seven books of fiction, including The Arab’s Ox, an updated edition of his previously published interconnected collection of stories set in Morocco, Larabi’s Ox. The February 2018 release of The Arab’s Ox marks the 25th anniversary of the book’s publication. Ardizzone is also the author of four novels: The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. His short story collections include The Evening News and Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood. Ardizzone has been awarded two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction sponsored by the Friends of Literature, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Award, the Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize, the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award, the Black Warrior Review Literary Award in Fiction, and the Cream City Review Editors' Award in Nonfiction. Ardizzone also edited the anthology The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop. Previously he served as the managing editor of three volumes of the Intro series, published by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. After the series became dormant, as a member of AWP’s Board of Directors Ardizzone founded and launched the organization’s Intro Journals Project and served as its managing editor for the project’s first two years. In 2010 he wrote the foreword to the newly released paperback edition of Raymond DeCapite's classic novel The Coming of Fabrizze.
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Arensberg, Ann. Group Sex. New York. 1986. Knopf. 0394553101. 177 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Philippe Weisbecker.
DESCRIPTION - Frances Girard is a young editor at a publishing house-attractive, respected. and undeniably bored. Tired of hearing everyone else's fascinating story, Frances longs to star in her own. So when she meets the brazen, renegade avant-garde theater director Paul Treat, Frances unwittingly jumps at the chance to break away from the cozy decorum of her class and career. Life with Paul is different from anything Frances has ever experienced. Unlike the civilized literati that comprise her circle, Paul is all action-unpredictable and wildly brilliant. Suddenly her humdrum life is swept away by the bohemian whirlwind of Paul's world. But how long can Frances sustain this vicarious connection? The answer becomes shockingly clear one hilarious evening when the topic of conversation turns to group sex. For after that night, this unlikely pair embark upon an uproarious ride that will change their lives forever. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ann Arensberg was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Havana, Cuba. She is the author of Sister Wolf, which won the National Book Award for Best First Novel in 1981; Group Sex; and Incubus. She and her husband, Richard Grossman, are residents of Salisbury, Connecticut.
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Arensberg, Ann. Incubus. New York. 1999. Knopf. 0394556968. 322 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Dry Falls, Maine was a simple farming town. Its residents lived innocently in sync with the seasons--honest churchgoing folk who looked to the land for a living and to tiny St. Anthony's church for spiritual sustenance. Until the spring of 1974, when a premature, blistering heat wave envelops the vicinity. along with something far more sinister. As crops wither, livestock birth only deformed offspring, and husbands lose all desire for sex, an ancient, unholy evil hungry for lust, an Incubus, secretly begins to prey on the town's women. As one female after another falls victim to erotic nightmares and dark violations, Cora Leiber, the wife of St. Anthony's rector, must look for answers in the depths of faith-- and her own tormented soul.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ann Arensberg was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Havana, Cuba. She is the author of Sister Wolf, which won the National Book Award for Best First Novel in 1981; Group Sex; and Incubus. She and her husband, Richard Grossman, are residents of Salisbury, Connecticut.
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Arensberg, Ann. Sister Wolf. New York. 1980. Knopf. 0394510216. 209 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser.
DESCRIPTION - In the picturesque Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, Marit Deym lives alone on a thousand-acre inheritance from her aristocratic Hungarian parents. Though bright and attractive, she is a stranger to the complexities of human relationships. She keeps to herself, venturing out only to defend her one passion: the care of her wild animals - the lynx, bears, fox, and family of wolves for whom she has established a sanctuary on her land. Then the wolves bring to her door Gabriel Frankman - a thoughtful young teacher at the nearby school for the blind, lost hiking in the woods. Despite his fear of the wild creatures, Gabriel seems oddly calm in their presence. For Marit, too, there is an immediate, consuming connection to the stranger - the first of her life. But it is a dangerous one. Soon her love of Gabriel will bring forth an unspeakable tragedy: to an innocent life, herself, and her precious animals.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ann Arensberg was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Havana, Cuba. She is the author of Sister Wolf, which won the National Book Award for Best First Novel in 1981; Group Sex; and Incubus. She and her husband, Richard Grossman, are residents of Salisbury, Connecticut.
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Ariss, Bruce. Inside Cannery Row: Sketches From the Steinbeck Era. San Francisco. 1988. Lexikos. 0938530453. 119 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Inside Cannery Row is a rare view of Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck. It is a wild and warm account of Cannery Row by a crony of John Steinbeck, Doc Rickets, and the other characters of this incomparable era. Includes sketches of their trip to Mexico and other experiences that helped shape Steinbeck's future writings.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bruce Wallace Ariss, Jr. (October 10, 1911 – September 11, 1994) was an American painter, muralist, writer, illustrator, editor as well as theater and set designer, amateur playwright and actor, and overall icon on the Monterey Peninsula, California.
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Armantrout, Rae. Entanglements. Middletown. 2017. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819577399. 52 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Entanglements is the product of a years-long interest in science, particularly physics by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Rae Armantrout. The collection includes poems from her previous books, as well as four new poems. Armantrout delved into books intended to make science accessible for the average person, as well as engaged in conversations with physicists. The title is inspired by the way particles can become so entangled that any space between them becomes irrelevant, but also by the way in which the author's daily life became entangled with the exploration of physics.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rae Armantrout (Born: April 13, 1947) is a professor of writing at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of ten books of poetry. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Armantrout, Rae. Finalists. Middletown. 2022. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819580689. 192 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With The Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rae Armantrout (born April 13, 1947) is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
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Armantrout, Rae. Itself. Middletown. 2015. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819574671. Wesleyan Poetry .6 x 9. 99 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Deft and audacious new poems from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. What do "self" and "it" have in common? In Rae Armantrout's new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem "Price Points" where a man conducts an imaginary orchestra but "gets no points for originality." In their investigations of the cosmically mundane, Armantrout's poems use an extraordinary microscopic lens―even when she's glancing backwards from the outer reaches of space.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rae Armantrout is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Versed, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.
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Armantrout, Rae. Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015. Middletown. 2016. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819576552. Wesleyan Poetry Series. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: Goya, 'The Drowning Dog.' Jacket design: Mindy Basinger Hill.
DESCRIPTION - Rae Armantrout's poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout's mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, Partly affirms Armantrout's reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers. An online reader's companion is available at raearmantrout.site.wesleyan.edu.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - RAE ARMANTROUT is professor emerita of writing at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of thirteen previous books of poetry.
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Armantrout, Rae. Wobble. Middletown. 2018. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819578235. 6 x 9. Wesleyan Poetry. 160 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. If anyone could produce a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin's playful “Little Tramp” and Charlize Theron's fierce “Imperator Furiosa,” it would be Armantrout. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of “the natural world,” the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. No one's senses are more acutely attuned than Armantrout's, which makes her an exceptional observer and reporter of our faults. She leaves us wondering if the American Dream may be a nightmare from which we can't awaken. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom. “The fact that she is able, in book after book, to write her own - and very realistically American - version of “sinking into / what happens” is also no small achievement. She is a poet who in the short lines of her brief, fragmented verse has given us a lot of possibilities, all of them charged with language that aims to contain multitudes.” Ilya Kaminsky, Boston Review “Armantrout's poetry has always been turned to the present moment. Its formal lineage is from William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists, with their enjambments of modern experience. Poetically, Armantrout has always aimed at knowing life by isolating it from narrative.” Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rae Armantrout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fourteen books of poetry. She has published nine books with Wesleyan University Press, including Entanglements, Partly, and Versed.
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Armstrong, David Michael. Missives from the Green Campaign. Richmond. 2017. Omnidawn. 9781632430441. The Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Prize. 64 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Selected by Brian Evenson as winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Prize. In a future short on fossil fuels and flora, the military compels its soldiers to carry houseplants wherever they go. To allow a plant to die is treason. Hershel Boyd is by all accounts a poor soldier, a frail, overeducated believer in the fading freedoms of a dying country. The narrator, a fellow recruit, makes it his mission to protect Hershel against all dangers. From the hazings of basic training to a botched invasion of the rainforests of South America, the two men must fight for a future where hope, not savagery, still springs eternal in the human breast.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Armstrong is the author of the story collections Going Anywhere and Reiterations (forthcoming in 2017). He is a professor of creative writing at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.
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Arteaga, Alfred. House With the Blue Bed. San Francisco. 1997. Mercury House. 1562791060. 120 pages. paperback. Cover: Mireya Arteaga.
DESCRIPTION - In HOUSE WITH THE BLUE BED, Alfred Arteaga reflects on being Chicano, poet, father, race car driver, musician, world traveler, professor. Themes of violence, change, cultural conflict, racism, and human vulnerability are united by lean and lyrical prose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Arteaga (1950 – July 4, 2008) was a Mexican-American poet, writer, and scholar. He was noted as an important poet of the Chicano Movement, who also contributed to the foundations postcolonial and ethnic studies.
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Arthur, Elizabeth. Bad Guys. New York. 1986. Knopf. 0394554426. 261 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In Bad Guys the highly acclaimed author of Island Sojourn and Beyond the Mountain gives us for the first time a novel in the comic mode - a tale at once farcical in its invention, lyric in its painting of the northern wilderness, and fiercely touching in its advocacy of the human spirit. Played out against the backdrop of the Gulf of Alaska, “where rocks are really rocks,” this is a novel full of “bad guys”: the inhabitants - and the strange invaders - of Chenega, an island work camp for juvenile delinquents. Among them are the fifteen-year-old half Aleut camper Harry, educated into a piercing purity of heart by the longtime need to keep his crazy brother from killing. and the intruders: Spike, a graduate of Chenega, educated into muddled vengefulness by prison after prison; his enormously fat and naive companion, Wesley, a drifter who is guided in his travels by the World Spirit; and Wesley’s driven, anorexic daughter, Amolia. As, with wild ineptitude, the three “terrorists” make their way toward Chenega to lay siege to the camp; as Harry scours the dictionary for language (“you noxious miasma, you pusillanimous pismire”) that will permit self-expression in the face of the No Swearing rule; and as the on-island director’s wistful game plan of teaching the campers Trust metamorphoses into a mass breakout, Bad Guys careens through an absurd and heart-stopping moment of violence to a climax that is a celebration of innocence and courage. Readers of Island Sojourn and Beyond the Mountain will find the same pleasures here: textured and cadenced prose, resonant imagery, sharply and lovingly defined characters, a powerful evocation of the sometimes terrible beauty of the natural world. But in Bad Guys, as never before in her work, Elizabeth Arthur depicts the intricate interweaving of comedy with tragedy that is the core of life. This is a wonderfully funny and deeply moving book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953, the daughter of two writers, Robert Arthur and Joan Vaczek Arthur. Arthur and her parents lived in Yorktown Heights, New York until her parents divorced in 1959. In June of 1960 Arthur's mother married John Atlee Kouwenhoven, a Professor of English and an American Studies scholar, and Arthur lived with her mother and stepfather in Pleasantville, New York until 1967, at which time her mother and stepfather moved to Rupert, Vermont. From 1967-1968 Arthur attended the Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, New York, transferring to Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts in the fall of 1968. In May of 1969, Arthur's father died. In the summer of 1970 she became a volunteer with the Student Conservation Association, working at Mount Rainier in the state of Washington, and in the winter of 1971, she attended an Outward Bound course run out of Dartmouth College into the White Mountains. Arthur graduated from Concord Academy in June of 1971, and in the autumn of 1971 began to attend the University of Michigan, her father's alma mater. In 1973, she dropped out of college and moved to Lander Wyoming, to teach at the National Outdoor Leadership School. At NOLS, Arthur met her first husband, Robert Gathercole, whom she married in Seattle, Washington on May 2, 1974, shortly afterwards emigrating to British Columbia, where Arthur and Gathercole lived until 1979. In British Columbia, Arthur and Gathercole bought a small island and built a house on it between 1974 and 1976. In the autumn of 1976, Arthur went back to college, to Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, which she attended from the autumn of 1977 until the college was closed down by the B.C. government in the summer of 1978. Arthur then transferred to the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, and in 1978 received a B.A. in English with Distinction from Victoria. In 1979, she received a Diploma in Education. In that same year, 1979, Arthur and her first husband separated, and she moved back to Vermont, where, on the strength of her first memoir Island Sojourn, she was invited to be a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in August of 1980. Arthur was divorced from Robert Gathercole in September of 1980, and on June 19, 1982 she married Steven Bauer, a fellow writer whom she had met at Bread Loaf. She and Bauer were married in Dorset Vermont, and then moved together to Ohio, soon buying a Victorian farmhouse in rural Indiana. Arthur was awarded a Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts for the year 1982-1983. Her first novel, Beyond the Mountain was published in 1983, with her novel Bad Guys following in 1986. During these years, Arthur also taught creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, from 1983-1984, and at Miami University from 1984-1985. In 1985 Arthur became a full time professor at Indiana University/ Purdue University of Indianapolis, where she was the Director of Creative Writing. In 1988 her novel Binding Spell was published, and in 1993, her second memoir, Looking for the Klondike Stone came out. In 1983 and 1987 she was a Staff Associate at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and in 1989 she was awarded a Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, Arthur became an Associate professor at IUPUI and was awarded tenure, and in 1993 her second memoir, Looking for the Klondike Stone was published. In 1994 she was on Senior Staff at Bread Loaf, and in 1996, after the publication of her novel Antarctic Navigation Arthur resigned from her position at IUPUI. Since that time has devoted herself full time to writing.
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Arthur, Elizabeth. Beyond the Mountain. New York. 1983. Harper & Row. 060151897. 201 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Elizabeth Arthur’s first book, Island Sojourn, won her acclaim for its extraordinary subtlety and depth. Beyond the Mountain, her first work of fiction, will mark another kind of beginning - the arrival of an important novelist whose new book is as vivid as her last, but even more finely hewn in its subtlety and violence. Original and unforgettable images mark this novel about guilt, desire, and passion. Its beautifully crafted observations reveal, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe.” Why climb a mountain? Because it’s there. Sir George Leigh Mallory’s famous explanation has haunted the imagination since its utterance, yet for those who have never climbed, its meaning remains as inscrutable, as tantalizing, as enigmatic as the jutting snow-shrouded palisades of the mountain at the heart of this novel. On that mountain’s slopes is set the story of a climber and her ascent to escape from her past. Artemis Phillips has been a climber for most of her life. With her brother Orion and her husband Nicholas Rhodes she has traveled to some of the world’s great ranges and achieved fame as an accomplished mountaineer. When she joins a women’s expedition in Nepal, she is only dimly aware of the forces which push her up the slopes, but it becomes clear that she desires atonement. For Temis, the ascent becomes a series of confrontations - with those strangers who make Nepal their home, with the challenge of snow and ice, with memory and desire. The simplicity of the mountain symbolizes everything Temis wants to be - and her odyssey is largely a journey into the past and into her electric, obsessive, passionate marriage to Nicholas, a marriage that has almost destroyed her. Elizabeth Arthur proves again that she is a writer of formidable talent. Beyond the Mountain shows us people in extremis and illuminates the complexities of our lives. In the end, the novel is an affirmation - of independence and the fellowship of man.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953, the daughter of two writers, Robert Arthur and Joan Vaczek Arthur. Arthur and her parents lived in Yorktown Heights, New York until her parents divorced in 1959. In June of 1960 Arthur's mother married John Atlee Kouwenhoven, a Professor of English and an American Studies scholar, and Arthur lived with her mother and stepfather in Pleasantville, New York until 1967, at which time her mother and stepfather moved to Rupert, Vermont. From 1967-1968 Arthur attended the Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, New York, transferring to Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts in the fall of 1968. In May of 1969, Arthur's father died. In the summer of 1970 she became a volunteer with the Student Conservation Association, working at Mount Rainier in the state of Washington, and in the winter of 1971, she attended an Outward Bound course run out of Dartmouth College into the White Mountains. Arthur graduated from Concord Academy in June of 1971, and in the autumn of 1971 began to attend the University of Michigan, her father's alma mater. In 1973, she dropped out of college and moved to Lander Wyoming, to teach at the National Outdoor Leadership School. At NOLS, Arthur met her first husband, Robert Gathercole, whom she married in Seattle, Washington on May 2, 1974, shortly afterwards emigrating to British Columbia, where Arthur and Gathercole lived until 1979. In British Columbia, Arthur and Gathercole bought a small island and built a house on it between 1974 and 1976. In the autumn of 1976, Arthur went back to college, to Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, which she attended from the autumn of 1977 until the college was closed down by the B.C. government in the summer of 1978. Arthur then transferred to the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, and in 1978 received a B.A. in English with Distinction from Victoria. In 1979, she received a Diploma in Education. In that same year, 1979, Arthur and her first husband separated, and she moved back to Vermont, where, on the strength of her first memoir Island Sojourn, she was invited to be a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in August of 1980. Arthur was divorced from Robert Gathercole in September of 1980, and on June 19, 1982 she married Steven Bauer, a fellow writer whom she had met at Bread Loaf. She and Bauer were married in Dorset Vermont, and then moved together to Ohio, soon buying a Victorian farmhouse in rural Indiana. Arthur was awarded a Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts for the year 1982-1983. Her first novel, Beyond the Mountain was published in 1983, with her novel Bad Guys following in 1986. During these years, Arthur also taught creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, from 1983-1984, and at Miami University from 1984-1985. In 1985 Arthur became a full time professor at Indiana University/ Purdue University of Indianapolis, where she was the Director of Creative Writing. In 1988 her novel Binding Spell was published, and in 1993, her second memoir, Looking for the Klondike Stone came out. In 1983 and 1987 she was a Staff Associate at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and in 1989 she was awarded a Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, Arthur became an Associate professor at IUPUI and was awarded tenure, and in 1993 her second memoir, Looking for the Klondike Stone was published. In 1994 she was on Senior Staff at Bread Loaf, and in 1996, after the publication of her novel Antarctic Navigation Arthur resigned from her position at IUPUI. Since that time has devoted herself full time to writing.
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Arthur, Elizabeth. Binding Spell. New York. 1988. Doubleday. 038524844x. 372 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The New Yorker called Elizabeth Arthur’s first novel, Beyond the Mountain, “stunning - stark and subtle,” and described her second, Bad Guys, as “inspired tragicomedy.” Now in her most audacious and accomplished novel yet, Arthur gives the reader a special gift: a comedy set in America’s heartland that evokes with pathos and hilarity the condition in which we as a nation find ourselves on the edge of the century’s final decade. Howell Bourne believes an international banking conspiracy is causing American farms to fail, and when two professors from Russia visit a nearby college,. he thinks God has encouraged him to kidnap them. His sister Bailey, an aspiring witch, and Maggie Esterhaczy, a beautiful psychologist obsessed with the threat of nuclear war, are two of the characters who get swept up in the ensuing events, which change the lives of all concerned: Ryland Guthrie, the hypochondriacal manager of an elegant furniture store - ”the finest store in Felicity, Indiana”; his brother Peale, whose lifelong run of good luck has recently ended when he won election as the sheriff of Rock County; the ebullient Ada Esterhaczy, an eighty-six- year-old Hungarian herbalist who is determined to get her granddaughter Maggie pregnant; and a large cast of canines with whom the humans’ lives are intertwined. During the sweep of several days in spring, these characters and the two Russians - as unlikely a pair as Laurel and Hardy - discover the beauty of the threads that bind them and their still-lovely planet together. Wildly funny in her details and deeply loving toward her characters and their foibles, Elizabeth Arthur here again tackles the possibilities of change and the choices we all have to make. Effervescent as mineral water, subtle in its design as a hand-stitched quilt, Binding Spell is a consummate American tale, whose characters wrest fulfillment through a new vision of things that have been there all along - who, in a world fraught with real and imagined danger, find a way to live happily ever after.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953, the daughter of two writers, Robert Arthur and Joan Vaczek Arthur. Arthur and her parents lived in Yorktown Heights, New York until her parents divorced in 1959. In June of 1960 Arthur's mother married John Atlee Kouwenhoven, a Professor of English and an American Studies scholar, and Arthur lived with her mother and stepfather in Pleasantville, New York until 1967, at which time her mother and stepfather moved to Rupert, Vermont. From 1967-1968 Arthur attended the Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, New York, transferring to Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts in the fall of 1968. In May of 1969, Arthur's father died. In the summer of 1970 she became a volunteer with the Student Conservation Association, working at Mount Rainier in the state of Washington, and in the winter of 1971, she attended an Outward Bound course run out of Dartmouth College into the White Mountains. Arthur graduated from Concord Academy in June of 1971, and in the autumn of 1971 began to attend the University of Michigan, her father's alma mater. In 1973, she dropped out of college and moved to Lander Wyoming, to teach at the National Outdoor Leadership School. At NOLS, Arthur met her first husband, Robert Gathercole, whom she married in Seattle, Washington on May 2, 1974, shortly afterwards emigrating to British Columbia, where Arthur and Gathercole lived until 1979. In British Columbia, Arthur and Gathercole bought a small island and built a house on it between 1974 and 1976. In the autumn of 1976, Arthur went back to college, to Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, which she attended from the autumn of 1977 until the college was closed down by the B.C. government in the summer of 1978. Arthur then transferred to the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, and in 1978 received a B.A. in English with Distinction from Victoria. In 1979, she received a Diploma in Education. In that same year, 1979, Arthur and her first husband separated, and she moved back to Vermont, where, on the strength of her first memoir Island Sojourn, she was invited to be a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in August of 1980. Arthur was divorced from Robert Gathercole in September of 1980, and on June 19, 1982 she married Steven Bauer, a fellow writer whom she had met at Bread Loaf. She and Bauer were married in Dorset Vermont, and then moved together to Ohio, soon buying a Victorian farmhouse in rural Indiana. Arthur was awarded a Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts for the year 1982-1983. Her first novel, Beyond the Mountain was published in 1983, with her novel Bad Guys following in 1986. During these years, Arthur also taught creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, from 1983-1984, and at Miami University from 1984-1985. In 1985 Arthur became a full time professor at Indiana University/ Purdue University of Indianapolis, where she was the Director of Creative Writing. In 1988 her novel Binding Spell was published, and in 1993, her second memoir, Looking for the Klondike Stone came out. In 1983 and 1987 she was a Staff Associate at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and in 1989 she was awarded a Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, Arthur became an Associate professor at IUPUI and was awarded tenure, and in 1993 her second memoir, Looking for the Klondike Stone was published. In 1994 she was on Senior Staff at Bread Loaf, and in 1996, after the publication of her novel Antarctic Navigation Arthur resigned from her position at IUPUI. Since that time has devoted herself full time to writing.
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Ashbery, John and Schuyler, James. A Nest of Ninnies. New York. 1969. Dutton. 191 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by James McMullan.
DESCRIPTION - ‘James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance,' writes John Ashbery. ‘We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat. Jimmy said, 'Why don't we write a novel?' And how do we do that, I asked. 'It's easy - you write the first line,' was his reply.' The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history, a verbal tour de force of suburban Americana. First published in 1969, A Nest of Ninnies is a true gem-in-the-rough, the decades-long collaborative project from two of the great poetic minds of the twentieth century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 - September 3, 2017) was an American poet. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery stated that he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism." James Marcus Schuyler (November 9, 1923 - April 12, 1991) was an American poet. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem. He was a central figure in the New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest.
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Ashton, Susanna (editor). Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt. New York. 2017. Modern Language Association. 9781603293327. Approaches to Teaching World Literature. 190 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d'état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt's works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt's works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University. She has held a teaching and research Fulbright fellowship in Ireland and in 2011 was awarded Clemson University's Provost Prize for Mentoring and Teaching with Creative Inquiry. She has authored and edited a number of books about American Literary Culture and African American writing, including "I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives (and with coeditor Rhondda R. Thomas), The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought both from the University of South Carolina Press. Her research has been published in College English, MELUS, Commonplace, Symploke, Biography, Studies in the Novel and others. Currently she is at work on A Plausible Man--a biography of fugitive slave, activist and author, John Andrew Jackson.
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Askew, Rilla. Strange Business. New York. 1992. Viking Press. 0670842591. 208 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Lyla Mae Muncy meets her first love at Falls Creek Baptist Assembly Summer Bible Church Camp—and regrets it on their awkward first date. After years of being nagged about lumpy gravy, abused wife Lois pulls out a shotgun to wrap up breakfast her way. In a tender moment, an old man speaks from beyond the grave about his wife’s final goodbye at his funeral. Experience, memory, and town-consciousness bind this collection of ten stories spanning twenty-five years in fictitious Cedar, Oklahoma. From the fears and discoveries of childhood, through the revelations of adolescence, into the troubled years of adulthood and decline into old age and death, Rilla Askew uncannily makes each of her characters’ experiences our own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY -
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Atlas, James. The Great Pretender. New York. 1986. Atheneum. 0689118007. 277 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Ben Janis, innocent and erudite, has two fiercely opposed dreams.One is to become a famous writer. The other is to obey the dictum of Henry "Live all you can." A Byron of the suburbs, obsessed with poetry and girls, Ben responds to "The Wasteland" and the Beach Boys with the same intense, ecstatic fervor; his touchstones are "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and the Top Forty list. Growing up in the middle-class college town of Evanston, Illinois, Ben struggles to keep up with the intellectual demands of his father, a doctor with a taste for chamber music and James Joyce. But sex keeps getting in the way. It's the Sixties, when ever seventeen-year-old is licensed to behave like Henry Miller. Do your own only Ben's thing is browsing second-hand bookshops and scribbling villanelles. While he memorized French verbs in his bedroom after dinner, adolescent temptresses in cut-off blue jeans wait outside in their parents' cars, luring him into sin. Admitted to Harvard, Ben never quite manages to locate the college life he'd read about in the cheerful brochure. Instead of enjoying autumn football games and bracing seminars on the great books, he finds himself wandering on the fringes. He beseeches a famous poet to read his own fledgling efforts ('Put on a tie! my father cried at noon/I loitered in the bathroom, pale, jejune'); joins a club for rejects from other clubs; becomes editor of the literary magazine only to discover that he's the whole staff. And he falls in love with Eleanor Josephs, an aspiring writer at Radcliffe, who becomes both his Muse and his Nemesis as she teaches him more about reality than he cares to know. After he wins a fellowship to Oxford, Ben and Eleanor embark on their year abroad.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Robert Atlas (March 22, 1949 – September 4, 2019) was an American writer, biographer, editor, and publisher. He was the president of Atlas & Company and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.
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Atsitty, Tacey M. Rain Scald: Poems. Albuquerque. 2018. University of New Mexico Press. 9780826358677. Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. 6 × 9. 88 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - “Narrative, lyric, and deeply human, Tacey's poems open to a world of folk and spirit where so few of us have ever dwelled. Her songs waste no words. Her stories are the stuff of hallowed ground. It is with a wonder of word and image that she shows us the strength and beauty of the Diyin DinE'E way.” - Jim Barnes , author of The American Boo k of the Dead: Poems. In this innovative debut collection, Tacey M. Atsitty employs traditional, lyric, and experimental verse to create an intricate landscape she invites readers to explore. Presented in three sections, TsEyi', Gorge Dweller, and Tohee', the poems negotiate between belief and doubt, self and family, and interior and exterior landscapes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tacey M. Atsitty, DinE, is TsEnahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta'neeszahnii (Tangle People) from Cove, AZ. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and the Philip Freund Prize. She holds bachelor's degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, New Orleans Review, New Poets of the American West Anthology, and other publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (UNM Press, 2018). She lives in Utah.
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Attaway, William. Blood On the Forge. New York. 1970. Collier/MacMillan. Introduction by Edward Margolies. Collier African American Library. 237 pages. paperback. 04828.
DESCRIPTION - From down south to up south - They came north with the Great Black Migration during World War I, literally shanghaied by boxcar-load, with empty promises of wealth, hope and a new life. But the three Moss brothers, as countless black men before and since, discovered only squalor, depravity, madness and death. Big Mat, Melody and Chinatown Moss fled a dying farm in the Kentucky hills for the promised land of the steel mills in Pennsylvania. They plunged into their new, backbreaking work in the white-hot furnaces that made steel and destroyed men. The money they earned bought them corn likker, women and forgetfulness until the day that cold, gray town with its blazing furnaces swallowed the last of their illusions in an orgy of violence, revenge and ultimate despair. Introduction by Edward Margolies, author of Native Sons, A Critical Study.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Attaway (1911–1986) was born in Mississippi, the son of a physician who moved his family to Chicago to escape the segregated South. Attaway was an indifferent student in high school, but after hearing a Langston Hughes poem read in class and discovering that Hughes was black, he was inspired with an urgent ambition to write. Rebelling against his middle-class origins, Attaway dropped out of the University of Illinois and spent some time as a hobo before returning to complete his college degree in 1936. He then worked variously as a seaman, a salesman, a union organizer, and as part of the Federal Writers' Project, where he made friends with Richard Wright. Attaway moved to New York, published his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy, and quickly followed it with Blood on the Forge (1941), about the fate of three African-American brothers in the Great Migration to the North. Attaway never produced another novel, but went on to prosper as a writer of radio and television scripts, screenplays, and numerous songs, including the ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O),' which was a hit for his friend Harry Belafonte. A resident for many years of Barbados, Attaway returned to the United States toward the end of his life. He died in Los Angeles while working on a script.
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Attaway, William. Let Me Breathe Thunder. Garden City. 1939. Doubleday Doran & Company. 267 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - William Attaway's first novel, LET ME BREATHE THUNDER, published in 1939, is the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy in the Depression Era West. Step and Ed, young men with no childhood behind them and no security before them are too young as yet to know complete despair, but old in the ways of hard, precarious living. Along the way they encounter Hi Boy, a little Mexican boy of ten, who brings to them a glimpse of unguessed integrities, and give meaning to their lives. At twenty-five, his feet dusty from wandering, William Attaway has brought to his publishers a book as poised, as perceptive, as honest and tender as many an older writer with a solid list of books behind him would be proud to claim.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Attaway (1911–1986) was born in Mississippi, the son of a physician who moved his family to Chicago to escape the segregated South. Attaway was an indifferent student in high school, but after hearing a Langston Hughes poem read in class and discovering that Hughes was black, he was inspired with an urgent ambition to write. Rebelling against his middle-class origins, Attaway dropped out of the University of Illinois and spent some time as a hobo before returning to complete his college degree in 1936. He then worked variously as a seaman, a salesman, a union organizer, and as part of the Federal Writers' Project, where he made friends with Richard Wright. Attaway moved to New York, published his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy, and quickly followed it with Blood on the Forge (1941), about the fate of three African-American brothers in the Great Migration to the North. Attaway never produced another novel, but went on to prosper as a writer of radio and television scripts, screenplays, and numerous songs, including the ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O),' which was a hit for his friend Harry Belafonte. A resident for many years of Barbados, Attaway returned to the United States toward the end of his life. He died in Los Angeles while working on a script.
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Auchincloss, Louis. False Gods. Boston. 1992. Houghton Mifflin. 0395604753. 214 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Blends ancient Greek myths with the contradictions of modern New York society--Hermes is a Jewish lawyer, and Hephaestus in a designer of Palladian villas--to create six fables that comment on how impulse and desire can weaken moral sensibilities.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Auchincloss, Louis. Narcissa & Other Fables. Boston. 1983. Houghton Mifflin. 0395331145. 213 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Eleven stories, each of which is a moral fable, focus on the sophisticated and the privileged, including a beautiful woman blackmailed by an old friend and a lawyer who breaks a confidence to help a friend.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Auchincloss, Louis. Powers of Attorney. Boston. 1963. Houghton Mifflin. 280 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Tales that take you behind the scenes of a powerful New York law firm, from the New York Times -bestselling author of The Partners. Ambition, jealousy, desire, hatred, deceit--they're all there inside the Wall Street law offices of Tower, Tilney & Webb, the setting for these interwoven stories set in the 1960s from Louis Auchincloss, who practiced law while also writing acclaimed and bestselling fiction. Senior partner Clitus Tilney is not about to let a detestable, hard-drinking partner make a mockery of all he's worked for. Harry Reilley is a clerk who pines for Tilney's daughter. Jake Platt is an associate willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goals, including setting a rival up for failure. Rutherford Tower struggles with the fact that he owes his position with the firm to nepotism and not hard work. And then there's Mrs. Abercrombie, who's waiting for her sixty-fifth birthday, when she plans to retire--and get her revenge. These twelve linked stories capture the struggles, rivalries, victories, disappointments, and compromises in the day-to-day lives of lawyers, and a portrait of professional men and women in mid-century New York.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Auchincloss, Louis. The Cat and the King. Boston. 1981. Houghton Mifflin. 0395302250. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An elegant, fictive portrait of the glittering court at Versailles under the powerful monarchy of Louis XIV evokes the complex intrigues, both amorous and political, of his legendary courtiers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Auchincloss, Louis. The House of the Prophet. Boston. 1980. Houghton Mifflin. 0395290848. 275 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The House of the Prophet is about the life of Mohamed, the founder of Islam. The book follows his life from childhood to old age and covers a wide range of topics, including his interactions with other prophets and his followers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Auchincloss, Louis. The Lady of Situations. Boston. 1990. Houghton Mifflin. 0395544114. 274 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This novel centers on a woman, Natica Chauncey, whose family has los its money and social pretensions in the Depression. Headstrong and ambitious, Natica is determined to claw her way back into the social world from which her parents have complacently fallen. As this is the 1930s, the only route available to her is marriage, first to the Assistant Chaplain of a celebrated prep school, then, after a brief affair and pregnancy, to a dreamy young man who comes from a wealthy Hudson River valley clan.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Auchincloss, Louis. The Partners. Boston. 1974. Houghton Mifflin. 0395182794. 254 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - From a renowned chronicler of American high society, this is a novel set in the small but distinguished New York law firm of Shepard, Putney & Cox in the early 1970s. The son of a rich mother and a socially ambitious father, Beekman “Beeky” Ehninger makes a successful career for himself in the narrow upper echelons of his profession. For years, he has quietly guided his firm through numerous periods of transition—not to mention marital strife, forgery, and fraud. But as times have changed, Beeky and his colleagues must decide whether to join forces with a new and different breed—tough, but undeniably successful. The Partners is a masterful characterization of moral men navigating an amoral world, of lawyers, their families, and the rich and powerful people they serve.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 - January 26, 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a prolific novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Gore Vidal said of his work: 'Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.'
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Augenbraum, Harold and Stavans, Ilan (editors). Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories. Boston. 1993. Houghton Mifflin. 0395661242. 344 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - From the mean streets of the barrio to the house on Mango Street, from the Mambo Kings to the Garcia Girls, the authors who contribute to this volume transport us across geographies and through cultures in an attempt to articulate the joys, struggles, defeats, and triumphs of the Latino experience in the United States. Growing Up Latino offers, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of classic and recent Latino writing in English, converging in sometimes shocking, often funny, and always stirring memoirs and stories. Religion, sex, love, language, and family are some of the topics explored in this compelling anthology of fiction and nonfiction. With its laughter and tears, its beauty and power, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book and an unforgettable contribution to the Latino tradition of letters. This diverse collection shatters the myth of a singular U.S.- Latino experience, proving the existence of a rich tradition whose writers, active for more than forty years, are only now being recognized by a rapidly growing audience. From the mean streets of the barrio to the house on Mango Street, from the Mambo Kings to the Garcia Girls, the authors who contribute to this shocking, funny collection of fiction and nonfiction transport us across the geographies and through the cultures in an attempt to articulate the joys, struggles, defeats, and triumphs of growing up Latino in the U.S.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harold Augenbraum (born March 31, 1953) is an American writer, editor, and translator. He is the former Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and former vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. Before taking up his position at the National Book Foundation in November 2004, for fifteen years Augenbraum was Director of The Mercantile Library of New York (now the Center for Fiction), where he established the Center for World Literature, the New York Festival of Mystery, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Proust Society of America. He has been awarded eight grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, received a Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America for distinguished service to the mystery field, and coordinated the national celebration of the John Steinbeck Centennial. He is on the advisory board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. In 2016, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is co-founder, with Alice Kaplan, of the Yale Translation Initiative at Yale University, where he is Associate Director, and from 2017 to 2019 was Acting Editor of The Yale Review. Augenbraum has published six books on Latino literature of the United States. He has translated new editions of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, and Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El filibusterismo for Penguin Classics. He also edited the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust. Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky on April 7, 1961, in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American, essayist, lexicographer, cultural commentator, translator, short-story author, TV personality, and teacher known for his insights into American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures.
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Auster, Paul (editor). I Thought My Father Was a God: and Other True Tales From NPR's National Story Project. New York. 2001. Henry Holt. 0805067140. 416 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The true-life stories in this unique collection provide 'a window into the American mind and heart' (New York Daily News). One hundred and eighty voices-male and female, young and old, from all walks of life and all over the country-talk intimately to the reader. Combining great humor and pathos, this remarkable selection of stories from the thousands submitted to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project gives the reader a glimpse of America's soul in all its diversity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. City of Glass. New York. 2004. Picador. 0312423608. Adaptation by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli. New Introduction by Art Speigelman. 138 pages. paperback. Cover design by Mazzucchelli & Karasik.
DESCRIPTION - A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art Spiegelman. Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a ‘post-existentialist private eye.' An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print. Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language. Paul Auster is the author of eleven novels, most recently Oracle Night. His previous two novels, The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu, were national bestsellers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. City of Glass. Los Angeles. 1985. Sun & Moon Press. 0940650533. 203 pages. hardcover. Cover by Katie Messborn.
DESCRIPTION - Described by Sulfur magazine as the most singular prose stylist of his generation. Paul Auster has created in CITY OF GLASS a haunting and mysterious tale that moves at the breathless pace of a good thriller. Receiving a phone call from a stranger in the middle of the night, a writer of detective stories becomes embroiled in a case more puzzling and complex than any book he might have written. Who is Peter Stillman? And why is his father trying to kill him? Or is the father really someone else? And if so, who is the person about to he murdered? For Quinn, who goes out in search of the answers to these questions, the city becomes an inexhaustible space. a labyrinth of endless steps.' as ordinary clues lead to extraordinary coincidences in the universe and the simple act of trailing a man ends in a startling investigation of what it means to be human. Written with an hallucinatory clarity, this first volume of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY combines a dark Kafka-like humor with the suspense of a Hitchcock film. CITY OF GLASS represents the most ambitious work to date by a uniquely gifted American writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Ghosts. Los Angeles. 1986. Sun & Moon Press. 0940650703. 96 pages. hardcover. Cover by Katie Messborn.
DESCRIPTION - The fable that stands at the center of Paul Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY, GHOSTS is a story of deception and hidden violence that loops back on itself like a Moebius strip. A private detective named Blue is hired to watch a man named Black, and little by little he is led into an intricate game of hide and seek that culminates in an inevitable but totally unexpected shattering of the case. Set in the 1940s, the narrative of GHOSTS evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of film noir. Lured into the trap of Auster's meticulous present-tense prose, the reader, like Blue, becomes a victim of the plot's irresistible force. GHOSTS is a book of footsteps that continue to echo long after the walker has vanished.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings 1979-2012. New York. 2020. Picador. 9781250245809. 656 pages. paperback. Cover designed Mary Albanese.
DESCRIPTION - Even before the publication of his earliest novels, Paul Auster was exploring what he has called "the mechanics of reality," or, quite simply, "the strange things that happen to us" in the two works that comprise The Invention of Solitude: "Portrait of an Invisible Man" and "The Book of Memory." After the release of the groundbreaking New York Trilogy in the mid-eighties, Auster as gone on with his lyrical, speculative, and often humorous investigations of the real world in several sequences of true Red Notebook," "Why Write?," "Accident Report,' and "It Don't Mean a well as in three books. Hand to Mouth chronicles Auster's struggles as a young writer with empty pockets bouncing from one odd job to another and trying to solve the eternal problem of how to live on next to nothing. The much lauded Winter Journal is an unorthodox, beautifully wrought tracing of the journey from youth to old age as seen through the history of one man's body, and Report from the Interior delves into the inner world of boyhood, a dogged excavation of buried memory-fragments that plowed the emotional ground for Auster's 2017 masterpiece, 4 3 2 1. All true, and yet often so startling as to challenge the notion of truth, the nine works gathered in this collection spring from personal experiences but cannot be read as traditional autobiographies or memoirs. Auster's aim is not to tell the story of himself so much as to use himself as an example of anyone - or everyone - to grapple with the mysteries of human life that are common to us all. Groundwork presents the full range of discoveries made by this essential American writer on his long quest to penetrate the workings of the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. In the Country of Last Things. New York. 1987. Viking Press. 0670814458. 188 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Anna Blume comes to an unnamed city in search of her brother. In her struggle to survive, Anna becomes a scavenger in search of objects from the past to sell for food and shelter. But she will also find friendship-even love-in this devastated world. In the Country of Last Things is a tour-de-force that reaffirms Paul Auster as one of the most accomplished and singular talents of his generation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Leviathan. New York. 1992. Viking Press. 0670846767. 288 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. .The explosion that detonates the narrative of Paul Auster's remarkable novel also ends the life of its hero, Benjamin Sachs, and brings two FBI agents to the home of one of Sachs' oldest friends, the writer Peter Aaron. What follows is Aaron's story, an intricate, subtle and gripping investigation of another man's life in all its richness and complexity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Man in the Dark. New York. 2008. Harper & Row. 9780805088397. 181 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'. So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is at war not with Iraq but with itself. In this other America, the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus's death. Passionate and shocking, MAN IN THE DARK is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Moon Palace. New York. 1989. Viking Press. 0670825093. 307 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by John George.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there.' Thus begins the mesmerizing narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the sixties, a quester by nature, both spiritually and physically. MOON PALACE is his story, a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and that moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies, and marvelous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco on his search for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origin and his fate. The metaphorical richness and literary accomplishment of Moon Palace is astonishing. In territory and spirit, it recalls the great novels of Dickens, Fielding, and Twain, yet it is also unmistakably the work of a marvelously original modern writer whose every sentence reverberates with rich harmonies of meaning. Already acclaimed for his ‘brilliance and wild imagination' (Washington Post Book World), his ‘love of lore and language' (Russell Banks), and his ‘intelligence and originality' (Don DeLillo), Paul Auster has now written a novel of such power and radiance that it marks him as one of the great American writers of our time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Mr. Vertigo. New York. 1994. Viking Press. 0670852090. 304 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An octogenarian narrator recounts his extraordinary childhood during the second quarter of the century - the era of Prohibition, Babe Ruth, and Lindbergh - when Master Yehudi rescued him from the streets and taught him to fly and walk on water.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Oracle Night. New York. 2003. Henry Holt. 0805073205. 245 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Raquel Jaramillo.
DESCRIPTION - Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Gobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. B. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the here can predict the future? At what point dues animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book-Only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, ORACLE NIGHT is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Paul Auster’s City of Glass. New York. 1994. Avon Books. 038077108x. 138 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - From the creator of the highly acclaimed, widely successful graphic novels Maus and Maus II comes Neon Lit, an innovative series of graphic crime novels. First in the series is City of Glass, universally praised as a contemporary classic upon its publication in 1985. A film based on the novel is currently in pre-production. Described by Sulfur magazine as the most singular prose stylist of his generation. Paul Auster has created in CITY OF GLASS a haunting and mysterious tale that moves at the breathless pace of a good thriller. Receiving a phone call from a stranger in the middle of the night, a writer of detective stories becomes embroiled in a case more puzzling and complex than any book he might have written. Who is Peter Stillman? And why is his father trying to kill him? Or is the father really someone else? And if so, who is the person about to he murdered? For Quinn, who goes out in search of the answers to these questions, the city becomes an inexhaustible space. a labyrinth of endless steps.' as ordinary clues lead to extraordinary coincidences in the universe and the simple act of trailing a man ends in a startling investigation of what it means to be human. Written with an hallucinatory clarity, this first volume of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY combines a dark Kafka-like humor with the suspense of a Hitchcock film. CITY OF GLASS represents the most ambitious work to date by a uniquely gifted American writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Smoke & Blue in the Face. New York. 1995. Miramax/Hyperion. 0786880988. Preface by Wayne Wang. 304 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - An array of New Yorkers become involved with a mom-and-pop cigar shop in Brooklyn in an acclaimed short story, presented here along with interviews with the author and the film's actors and a
DESCRIPTION of the process of creating a film. Original. Movie tie-in.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Art of Hunger and Other Essays. London. 1982. Menard Press. 0903400782. 96 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of eleven essays on various literary subjects.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Book of Illusions. New York. 2002. Henry Holt. 0805054081. 323 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929.' ‘Who was Hector Mann? An Argentinian-born comic genius, with a signature white suit and fluttering black mustache, a master of ‘backpedals and dodges.sudden torques and lunging pavanes.double takes and hop-steps and rhumba swivels.' Presumed dead for sixty years, he had flashed briefly across American movie screens, tantalizing the public with the promise of a brilliant future, and then, just as the silent era came to an end, he walked out of his house one January morning and was never heard from again.' Zimmer's research leads him to write the first full-length study of Hector's films. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico - supposedly written by Hector's wife: ‘Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?' Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Brooklyn Follies. New York. 2006. Henry Holt. 0805077146. 307 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, retired, estranged from his only daughter, the former life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Glass encounters his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, who is working in a local bookstore-a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the colorful and charismatic Harry Brightman-aka Harry Dunkel-once the owner of a Chicago art gallery, whom fate has also brought to the ‘ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York.' Through Tom and Harry, Nathan's world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances-not to mention a stray relative or two-and leads him to a reckoning with his past. Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a double-edged scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge from the unbearable realities of modern life. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Glass has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes ‘to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and check- ered career as a man.' But life takes over instead, and Nathan's despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the sorrows and struggles of others. With THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES, the always astonishing Paul Auster has written what is undoubtedly his warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving, unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. New York. 1982. Sun. 0915342375. 174 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In his first full-length prose work Paul Auster has created a distinctive form through which he probes the elusive materials which compose a life. ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man,' the first section of THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE is a meditation on the life and sudden death of his father. In the course of sifting through his effects, attending to business affairs, and remembering as he goes, Auster accidentally uncovers a sixty year old family murder mystery which comes to shed light on his father's character. The perspective shifts from identity as son to the anomalies of fatherhood in ‘The Book of Memory' a scrupulously-constructed mosaic of images, coincidences, and associations, as ‘A.' broods over his separation from his young son and nurses his dying grandfather, the amateur magician.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Locked Room. Los Angeles. 1986. Sun & Moon Press. 0940650762. 179 pages. hardcover. Cover by Katie Messborn.
DESCRIPTION - THE LOCKED ROOM is the eagerly awaited final volume of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, Paul Mister's remarkable series of interconnecting novels that began with CITY OF GLASS and GHOSTS. As with the previous novels, The Locked Room begins with a mystery, but this time it is told in the first person - in a brilliant, searching prose that carries all of the urgency of someone trying to reconstruct a dream. What has happened to Fanshawe, and why has his wife suddenly called upon the narrator to decide the fate of his missing childhood friend? Bit by bit, the nameless hero is lured into Fanshawe's past, all the while struggling to keep himself free of its entanglements. But it is a losing battle, and as he undertakes the demands of an inescapable journey into the unknown, the narrator discovers the strange and terrible secret that is hidden behind the door of every locked ROOM. In this extraordinary conclusion to THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, Paul Auster reinforces his reputation as one of the most original and exciting novelists in the United States today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Music of Chance. New York. 1990. Viking Press. 0670835358. 224 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Nashe comes into an inheritance and decides to pursue a life of freedom. He meets Pozzi, a gambler, who exerts a terrible fascination over him, and together they take a desperate gamble. By the author of 'The New York Trilogy', 'Moon Palace' and 'The Invention of Solitude'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York. 2006. Penguin Books. 9780143039839. Introduction by Lucy Sante. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. 320 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Lucy Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. "Exhilarating. a brilliant investigation of the storyteller's art guided by a writer-detective who's never satisfied with just the facts."-The Philadelphia Inquirer City of Glass: As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Ghosts: Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his own window. The Locked Room: Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened to him and why is the narrator, Fanshawe's boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life? Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this is a uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existential private eye. It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, the Locked Room. Los Angeles. 1994. Sun & Moon Press. 155713166x. 472 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. The Red Notebook: True Stories. New York. 2002. New Directions. 0811214982. 96 pages. paperback. Cover: Drawing of the author by Sam Messer (ink on paper, 1996). Design by Erik Rieselbach.
DESCRIPTION - Paul Auster has earned international praise for the imaginative power of his many novels, including THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, MOON PALACE, THE MUSIC OF CHANCE, MR VERTIGO, and TIMBUKTU. He has also published a number of highly original nonfiction works: THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, HAND TO MOUTH, and THE ART OF HUNGER. In THE RED NOTEBOOK, Auster again explores events from the real World - large and small, tragic and comic - that reveal the unpredictable, shifting nature of human experience. A burnt onion pie, a wrong number, a young boy struck by lightning, a man falling off a roof, a scrap of paper discovered in a Paris hotel room - all these form the context for a singular kind of ars poetica, a literary manifesto without theory, cast in the irreducible forms of pure story telling. ‘A literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own.' - The Wall Street Journal. ‘He can write with the speed and skill of a self-assured pool player, sending one bizarre event ricocheting neatly and unexpectedly into the next. creating a narrative that continually manages to elude our expectations.' - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. ‘Our pre-eminent novelist of ideas.' - Kirkus Reviews. ‘One of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.' - The London Times Literary Supplement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Timbuktu. New York. 1999. Henry Holt. 0805054073. 181 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Meet Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's remarkable new novel, Timbuktu. Mr. Bones is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled, and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure, heading for Baltimore, Maryland in search of Willy's high school teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who knew him in his previous incarnation as William Gurevitch, the son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs. Swanson still alive? And if she isn't, what will prevent Willy from vanishing into that other world known as Timbuktu? Mr. Bones is our witness. Although he walks on four legs and cannot speak, he can think, and out of his thoughts Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in recent American fiction. By turns comic, poignant, and tragic, Timbuktu is above all a love story. Written with a scintillating verbal energy, it takes us into the heart of a singularly pure and passionate character, an unforgettable dog who has much to teach us about our own humanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Translations. New York. 1997. Marsilio Publishers. 1568860331. 408 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of works edited and translated by Paul Auster. Like Auster's own writings, each of these works in its own way conjures the complexities of language, art, and the nature of human experience. Taken together, they offer a stunning portrait of Auster's sensibility.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Travels in the Scriptorium. New York. 2007. Henry Holt. 0805081453. 147 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A man pieces together clues to his past - and the identity of his captors - in this fantastic, labyrinthine novel. An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues. Determining that he is locked in, the man - identified only as Mr. Blank - begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn't recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. As the day passes, various characters call on the man in his cell - vaguely familiar people, some who seem to resent him for crimes he can't remember - and each brings frustrating hints of his identity and his past. All the while an overhead camera clicks and clicks, recording his movements, and a microphone records every sound in the room. Someone is watching. Both chilling and poignant, TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor. And yet, as we discover during one day in the life of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Auster, Paul. Why Write?. Providence. 1996. Burning Deck. 1886224161. 1 Of 500 Hardback Copies. 58 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Through childhood memories, stories about his children and anecdotes drawn from his career, novelist Auster (Moon Palace) searches for the motivation that forces him to write. Whether he's recalling his disappointment when Willie Mays refused to give an autograph or the disbelief following the death of a fellow sleepaway camper, Auster's vibrant prose holds the reader's attention and brings into brilliant focus both the tender and the tragic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
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Austin, Doris Jean. After the Garden. New York. 1987. New American Library. 0453005381. 1st Novel. 324 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Jacqueline Schuman.
DESCRIPTION - This brilliantly imagined, achingly alive novel about the pain and joy of a black woman's life captures the textures and tensions, love and rage, of the black experience in America. The urban North is the setting of AFTER THE GARDEN: jersey City, New Jersey, where the beautiful but inwardly divided heroine, Elzina Tompkins, learns the lessons of life and love in 1940s and ‘50s. Elzina's search for happiness and fulfillment is a journey on a tightrope stretched to the breaking point between two opposing poles. One is that of the woman who has raised her, her grandmother Rosalie, strong, proud, fiercely righteous, for whom any weakness is an unpardonable sin. The other is that of the exquisitely graceful, handsome, and free-spirited high school athlete, Jesse James, who becomes Elzina's husband and great love. Elzina, loving her husband for the very qualities she has been taught to condemn, is a superbly complex, heartbreakingly real creation. Unforgettable too, is Jesse, who, wild as his namesake, cannot understand the core of resistance in Elzina that his charm and passion cannot melt. As Elzina and Jesse struggle to balance the strength of their love against the weight of their differences, their emotional fallout reaches an explosive intensity in their son, Charles. Finally only Elzina can heal the wounds of her family as she overcomes conflict, abandonment, heartbreak, and near-madness to emerge into stunning and triumphant womanhood. Probing relationships seared and ignited by love and sacrifice, joy and despair, this emotionally charged novel brings to life a cast of wonderful characters whose individuality and strength give them a special, tough beauty. Doris Jean Austin, prize-winning writer, tells us a fascinating story that vibrates with power and daring.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - DORIS JEAN AUSTIN was a former Colony fellow and in 1984 received the DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Award for Literary Excellence. Her articles have appeared in Essence magazine, and one of her notable short stories, ‘Rosalie Tompkins', was featured in the recent Mentor anthology BLACK SOUTHERN VOICES. She was a member of the New Renaissance Writers Guild and a former member of the Harlem Writers Guild. Originally from Alabama, she lived and wrote in New York City.
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Austin, Dorisjean and Simmons, Martin (editors). Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience. New York. 1996. Penguin Books. 0140174710. Paperback Original. 515 pages. paperback. Cover design by Paul Buckley/Cover photo by Andrew Marks.
DESCRIPTION - An astonishing anthology capturing the array of voice on the urban American landscape. From contemporary Black writers both established and up-and-coming, here are nearly fifty moving, insightful works covering a wide range of human experiences. There are stories of poverty and wealth, love and hate, fulfilled dreams and dashed hopes. There are stories of physical and psychological survival in often inhospitable environments. And finally, there are stories of triumph - and the failure to triumph - over fear, lust, isolation, corruption, and greed. Whether written by long-time urban dwellers or people just passing through American cities, they are all rooted in the ethnicity of their authors as it intersects with contemporary urban America, at one of the most terrifying and exciting places in the world. Includes work by - Amiri Baraka, Yolanda Barnes, Bebe Moore Campbell, Steven Corbin, Louis Edwards, Arthur Flowers, Marita Golden, Safiya Henderson-Holmes, Edward P. Jones, Marie La Forest, J. R. McKie, Terry McMillan, D. S. Modupe, Kalamu ya Salaam, Fatima Shaik, Martin Simmons, Orlando Warren, Leslie Woodard.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - DORIS JEAN AUSTIN was a former Colony fellow and in 1984 received the DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Award for Literary Excellence. Her articles have appeared in Essence magazine, and one of her notable short stories, ‘Rosalie Tompkins', was featured in the recent Mentor anthology BLACK SOUTHERN VOICES. She was a member of the New Renaissance Writers Guild and a former member of the Harlem Writers Guild. Originally from Alabama, she lived and wrote in New York City.
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Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. New York. 1997. Penguin Books. 9780140249194. Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams. Penguin Nature Classic. 128 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - "Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite-east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert" is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders of this region, Austin generously shares "such news of the land, of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another." Her vivid writings capture the landscape-from burnt hills to sun-baked mesas-as well as the rich variety of plant and animal life, and the few human beings who inhabit the land, including cattlemen, miners, and Paiute Indians.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Hunter Austin (September 9, 1868 – August 13, 1934) was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora, and people of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California.
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Axelrod, George. Where Am I Now When I Need Me?. New York. 1971. Viking Press. 0670760498. 177 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Dudley Gray & Mel Williamson.
DESCRIPTION - The story of Harvey Bernstein - failed poet, failed novelist, failed family, failed man, failed drunk, failed suicide. By the celebrated author of many plays and screenplays, including ‘The Seven Year Itch', ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's' and ‘The Secret Life of an American Wife.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Axelrod (June 9, 1922 - June 21, 2003) was an American screenwriter, producer, playwright and film director, best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch (1952), which was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Axelrod was born in New York City, the son of Beatrice Carpenter, a silent film actress, and Herman Axelrod, a Columbia graduate who had worked on the school's annual Varsity Show and who later went into real estate. His father was Russian Jewish and his mother was of Scottish and English descent. He was the father of lawyer Peter Axelrod, painting contractor and writer Steven Axelrod, actress Nina Axelrod and stepfather of screenwriter Jonathan Axelrod (who married the actress Illeana Douglas). He was a grandfather of actor Taliesin Jaffe. After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, the New York-born Axelrod found work writing scripts for radio programs, including The Shadow, Midnight and Grand Ole Opry, eventually branching into television. He said he contributed to or collaborated on more than 400 TV and radio scripts and wrote for top comedians, including Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin before earning breakout success with his 1952 stage comedy, The Seven Year Itch, a risquE social satire about a middle-class man who has an affair while his wife and children are on vacation. The Seven Year Itch was first presented by Courtney Burr and Elliot Nugent at the Fulton Theatre, New York City, on July 15, 1952. Axelrod's overnight success prompted him to write a seriocomic teleplay, Confessions of a Nervous Man, starring Art Carney as a playwright waiting anxiously in a Theater District bar for the newspaper reviews of his first play to hit the streets. Based on his own experiences on the opening night of The Seven Year Itch, the one-hour play was presented as the November 30, 1953 episode of Studio One. He appeared on television himself occasionally as a guest panelist on What's My Line? The Broadway success of The Seven Year Itch led to the successful 1955 film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe. The plot was altered so that the husband (Tom Ewell) only fantasizes about having an affair. Axelrod's next stage hit was Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a Faustian comedy about a fan magazine writer (Orson Bean) selling his soul to the Devil (in the guise of a literary agent) to become a successful screenwriter. It ran for more than a year on Broadway in 1955–56 and received much attention in the national press thanks to its star, Jayne Mansfield. The screen rights were bought by 20th Century Fox, but the studio had director/screenwriter Frank Tashlin change the story to a satire on television advertising and throw out all of Axelrod's characters except Rita Marlowe (with Mansfield recreating her stage role). Axelrod was contemptuous of the 1957 film version, saying that he did not go to see it because the studio "never used my story, my play or my script." In 1959–60, Lauren Bacall starred in his comic play Goodbye Charlie which ran for 109 performances, followed by a film version with Debbie Reynolds. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Axelrod was one of the best paid screenwriters in Hollywood, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. He was highly regarded for his adaptation of Richard Condon's novel for director John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. Axelrod, who co-produced, considered it his best screen adaptation. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the movie was taken out of circulation and wasn't re-released until 1988, when it became a box office hit and was deemed by critics to be a classic of American cinema. Axelrod wrote the original screenplay for How to Murder Your Wife (1965), directed by Richard Quine with Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi and Terry-Thomas. Axelrod directed Lord Love a Duck (1966), and two years later, he directed The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968). After a decade hiatus, he returned to films providing the screenplay for an unsuccessful remake of The Lady Vanishes (1979). Subsequent contributions include the scripts for Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and The Fourth Protocol (1987). Axelrod was also an author of three novels: Blackmailer, a comic mystery; Beggar's Choice, a comedy of role reversal; and Where Am I Now When I Need Me?, a humorous overview of the Hollywood scene. On June 21, 2003, at the age of 81, Axelrod died quietly in his sleep. He was at home, under hospice care after a lingering illness. His body was cremated.
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Babb, Sanora. Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel. Norman. 2006. University of Oklahoma Press. 9780806137124. 5.5 x 8.5. 240 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author's firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt's father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Duanne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless 'Okies' and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can't possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb wrote Whose Names are Unknown in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this 'exceptionally fine' novel but when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those 'whose names are unknown. ' In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sanora Babb (April 21, 1907 - December 31, 2005) was born in Oklahoma Territory and lived in Red Rock. All her life she identified with the Native American beliefs and community life, based on the Otoes she knew there. She liked to tell how the Indian chief gave her a pony and wanted to adopt her. She was proud of the name he gave her: "Little Cheyenne Who Rides Like the Wind." In 1909, the Babbs moved to Waynoka and her sister Dorothy was born. After a brief return to Red Rock, the family then moved to Two Buttes, Baca County on the High Plains of Colorado in 1913. There they lived in a dugout with the grandfather (recounted in her memoir An Owl on Every Post) and struggled to grow broomcorn. Four years later, having failed at homesteading, they returned to the Oklahoma Panhandle area to live in Elkhart, Kansas, Forgan, Oklahoma (where Sanora graduated from Forgan High Schooll), and Garden City, Kansas. Although Sanora graduated high school as valedictorian, she was not allowed to give her speech because her father was a gambler. Disapproval of his profession also necessitated their itinerant lifestyle. When Sanora was 22, she moved to Los Angeles to further her career as a journalist and explore the wider world. And, she did just that.
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Babitz, Eve. Eve's Hollywood. New York. 1974. Delacorte Press. 0440023394. 296 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eve Babitz (May 13, 1943 – December 17, 2021) was an American author and visual artist best known for her semi-fictionalized memoirs and her involvement in the cultural milieu of Los Angeles in the 1970s.
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Babitz, Eve. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. New York. 1977. Knopf. 0394409841. 178 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of L.A. in the1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her first hand experiences in the L.A. cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eve Babitz (May 13, 1943 – December 17, 2021) was an American author and visual artist best known for her semi-fictionalized memoirs and her involvement in the cultural milieu of Los Angeles in the 1970s.
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Bachmann, Beth. Do Not Rise. Pittsburgh. 2015. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822963288. Pitt Poetry Series. 72 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Fiercely distilled and haunted by the cruelties of war, Do Not Rise is compressed, imperative, disquieting, and compassionate.' - Edward Hirsch. ‘The collection's conceptual center - and its most insistent word - is ‘open.'. The resulting gaps open the poem to a meaningful range of pauses, hesitations, delays, sonic mutations, reconsiderations. There is so much seeing in its listening.' - Elizabeth Willis. ‘Beth Bachmann's Temper was the last time [in forty years] I remember reading a first book by a poet so prodigally and - the word that came to my mind was - severely gifted. The new poems in Do Not Rise are a quantum leap forward with all the metaphorical leaps, adumbrations, dizzyings, deft, brief knottings that make the poems in Temper so dazzling. A remarkable young talent, and a scary one.' - Robert Hass.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Beth Bachmann's previous poetry book, Temper, received the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Do Not Rise received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and Southern Review and have been anthologized in The Best New Poets 2005 and 2007. Her honors also include the American Poet Prize and fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writer's Conference. Bachmann teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.
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Badanes, Jerome. The Final Opus of Leon Solomon. New York. 1989. Knopf. 039457221. 1st Novel. 272 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In an autobiographical novel, Leon Solomon, a Jewish historian, plans to commit suicide after being caught stealing priceless documents on Judaica but instead writes of his life--his internment in Auschwitz, the losses he has suffered, and his loves.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - erome Badanes, the author of the cult novel, The Final Opus of Leon Solomon, makes a posthumous appearance with this immensely powerful poetry collection. Written at the height of the anti–Vietnam War movement, these poems bring together disparate threads of this century’s historical epochs—World War II, the rhythms of the post-Beat era, and the atmosphere of 1960s and ’70s America. These moments are reanimated by Badanes’s poems, which continue to resonate with today’s political and cultural climate. This timeless and haunting volume, assembled by Badanes himself, gives us another chance to experience the work of this compassionate existentialist. Jerome Badanes was a novelist, poet, and screenwriter who died in 1995 at age fifty-eight. A professor at Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and SUNY Purchase, Badanes was born and raised in Brooklyn. He won an Avery Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan, and spent much of the sixties as an antiwar activist, staging street theater.
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Baird, Thomas. Losing People. New York. 1974. Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. 0151534683. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION -
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - THOMAS BAIRD was a native Nebraskan (born 1923) and the author of many novels. He received his BA (1946) and MFA (1950) from Princeton University, where he taught art history for several years. He later lectured at the Frick Collection and, until 1970, served as curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He then taught art history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, retiring in 1989. He died of a heart attack in 1990. His many novels include Triumphal Entry (1962), The Old Masters (1963), People Who Pull You Down (1970), Poor Millie, (1978), and Villa Aphrodite (1984). He was an inveterate backpacker, which provided material for much of his fiction. His manuscripts and papers are held at the Princeton University Library.
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Baird, Thomas. Poor Millie. New York. 1979. Harper & Row. 0060102020. 244 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION -
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - THOMAS BAIRD was a native Nebraskan (born 1923) and the author of many novels. He received his BA (1946) and MFA (1950) from Princeton University, where he taught art history for several years. He later lectured at the Frick Collection and, until 1970, served as curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He then taught art history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, retiring in 1989. He died of a heart attack in 1990. His many novels include Triumphal Entry (1962), The Old Masters (1963), People Who Pull You Down (1970), Poor Millie, (1978), and Villa Aphrodite (1984). He was an inveterate backpacker, which provided material for much of his fiction. His manuscripts and papers are held at the Princeton University Library.
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Baird, Thomas. The Way To the Old Sailors Home. New York. 1977. Harper & Row. 0060101733. 259 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION -
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - THOMAS BAIRD was a native Nebraskan (born 1923) and the author of many novels. He received his BA (1946) and MFA (1950) from Princeton University, where he taught art history for several years. He later lectured at the Frick Collection and, until 1970, served as curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He then taught art history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, retiring in 1989. He died of a heart attack in 1990. His many novels include Triumphal Entry (1962), The Old Masters (1963), People Who Pull You Down (1970), Poor Millie, (1978), and Villa Aphrodite (1984). He was an inveterate backpacker, which provided material for much of his fiction. His manuscripts and papers are held at the Princeton University Library.
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Baker, Calvin. Dominion. New York. 2006. Grove Press. 0802118291. 368 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Nicole Caputo.
DESCRIPTION - With Calvin Baker's first two novels, NAMING THE NEW WORLD and ONCE TWO HEROES, he has continued to be acclaimed by the major media from the Los Angeles Times to Esquire. Now, with DOMINION, Baker has written a lush, incantatory novel about three generations of an African American family in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. DOMINION tells the story of the Merian family who, at the close of the seventeenth century, settle in the wilderness of the Carolinas. Jasper is the patriarch, freed from bondage, who manages against all odds to build a thriving estate with his new wife and two sons - one enslaved, the other free. For one hundred years, the Merian family struggles against the natural (and occasionally supernatural) world, colonial politics, the injustices of slavery, the Revolutionary War and questions of fidelity and the heart. Footed in both myth and modernity, Calvin Baker crafts a rich, intricate and moving novel, with meditations on God, responsibility, and familial legacies. While masterfully incorporating elements of the world's oldest and greatest stories, the end result is a bold contemplation of the origins of America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Calvin Baker (born in Chicago) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, and futurist who has chronicled the African American experience from the Colonial era to the present, centering the Black voice and perspective within the context of multicultural, global history. Among his concerns are American identity, cosmopolitanism, race, post-colonialism, the collapse of modernism, geography, and science. His work is often praised for its expansiveness and richness of language. His first novel, Naming the New World, was sold to A Wyatt Books for St. Martin's Press when he was 23. The novel begins in Africa before contact with Europe and ends in recent America. The narrative employs postmodern techniques to unify a single consciousness across time. It was hailed by numerous publications, including Time Magazine, as the beginning of a major new voice in American letters. His second novel, Once Two Heroes, employs a dual narrative structure, one white, one black, to explore the midcentury connection between America and Europe and 20th century violence through the prism of World War II and the American phenomenon of racial lynching. His third novel, Dominion, is concerned with the promise and potentialities of pre-Revolutionary America, the birth of a racial caste system, and the ghost of loss that haunted the early settlers both black and white. His most recent novel, Grace, is concerned with the Black Atlantic, the intersection of identity and geography, the interplay of logical and emotional systems, the tension between public and private selves, and possibilities for unity. Esquire named him one of the best young writers in America in 2005. Dominion was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award as well as one of New York Newsday's Best Books of the Year. His work has been widely acclaimed by critics as well as writers as diverse as Joseph O'Neill, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Francisco Goldman, Dale Peck, Maud Newton, and Hannah Tinti. Peck, widely known for his critical takedowns, has called Baker one of his favorite living writers, saying of Grace, "He works in a rarefied strain of literature whose practitioners include Faulkner, Morrison, Calvino and Cormac McCarthy." Newton has praised Baker's Dominion for "richness of language that recalls the King James." Baker recently teamed with Peck and publisher John Oakes to relaunch the Evergreen Review, the literary journal founded by Barney Rosset, which was influential in bringing attention to writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sarte, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Albee, and Leroi Jones. Early in his career he worked as a journalist at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Time Inc., and The Village Voice. He also published a Kindle Single with Amazon entitled Notes for a Spanish Odyssey about race and migration in Europe. Baker attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools and graduated from Amherst College, where he received his degree in English with highest honors in the major. He has taught in the English Department at Yale, Columbia University's MFA Program, and the American Studies Department at [[the University of Leipzig, Germany. Baker is also a technology entrepreneur - notably as co-founder of the digital content platform ScrollMotion, with Josh Koppel and John Lema. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Baker, Calvin. Naming the New World: A Novel. New York. 1997. St Martin's Press. 0312151780. African American's Debut Novel. 118 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - From time to time a single voice surfaces: ‘It is all one life and one memory.' It sings of Ampofo, human cargo brought across the seas, of Sally, enslaved as a breeder of slaves, of Tomas, the master's banished son, of Antoinette, summoned by angels, of Robert, unseeing tourist in his ancestral land, and of Brenndan, imprisoned and damned by his violence. And all the voices belong to Calvin Baker, whose tautly lyrical Naming the New World brings the horror and healing of a people to our national literature. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Calvin Baker (born 1972) is an American novelist, essayist, and editor who has chronicled the African-American experience from the colonial era to the present, centering the Black voice and perspective within the context of trans-Atlantic history. Among his concerns are constructions of American identity, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, modernity, geography, and science. His work is often praised for its expansiveness and richness of language. He has taught at Yale College, and Columbia University's Graduate Center for the Arts. Born in Chicago, Baker attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools and graduated in 1994 from Amherst College, where he received his degree in English with highest honors in the major. His first novel, Naming the New World (1998), was sold to A Wyatt Books for St. Martin's Press when he was 23. The novel begins in Africa before contact with Europe and ends in recent America. The narrative employs postmodern techniques to unify a single consciousness across time. It was hailed by numerous publications, including Time Magazine, as the beginning of a major new voice in American letters. His second novel, Once Two Heroes (2003), employs a dual narrative structure, one white, one black, to explore the mid-century connection between America and Europe and 20th-century violence through the prism of World War II and the American phenomenon of racial lynching. His third novel, Dominion, is concerned with the promise and potentialities of pre-Revolutionary America, the birth of a racial caste system, and the ghost of loss that haunted the early settlers both black and white. Grace, published in 2015, is concerned with the intersection of interior identity and geography, the interplay of logical and emotional systems, and the tension between public and private selves. Esquire named him one of the best young writers in America in 2005. Dominion was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award as well as one of New York Newsday′s Best Books of the Year. His work has been widely acclaimed by critics as well as writers as diverse as Joseph O'Neill, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Francisco Goldman, Dale Peck, Maud Newton, and Hannah Tinti. Peck, widely known for his critical takedowns, has called Baker one of his favorite living writers, saying of Grace: "He works in a rarefied strain of literature whose practitioners include Faulkner, Morrison, Calvino and Cormac McCarthy." Newton has praised Baker's Dominion for "richness of language that recalls the King James." In 2017 Baker teamed with Peck and publisher John Oakes to relaunch the Evergreen Review, the literary journal founded by Barney Rosset, which was influential in bringing attention to writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Albee, and Leroi Jones. Early in his career Baker worked as a journalist at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Time Inc., and The Village Voice. His work has also appeared in Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. His longform piece, Notes for a Spanish Odyssey, about race and migration in Spain, was published as a Kindle Single with Amazon, and is part of the New York Public Library's permanent digital collection. He has taught in the English Department at Yale, Columbia University's MFA Program, and the American Studies Department at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He also co-founded the digital content platform ScrollMotion, with Josh Koppel and John Lema. Baker lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Baker, Houston A. Jr. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville/London. 1990. University Press of Virginia. 0813913012. 156 pages. paperback. Front cover art courtesy of Terry Dintenfass Gallery.
DESCRIPTION - ‘LONG BLACK SONG ought to be read by those who are interested in the black experience and to be pondered over by those who wish really to know the American experience Mr. Bakers restatement of the roles of religion and education in black American life is emphatic, but explanation of the significance of the oral tradition in black culture, from slavery to the ghetto. from the field-hand to contemporary blacks, is dramatic and will come as an eye-opener to many readers.' - American Literature. ‘These essays, which inaugurated one of the most distinguished careers in American literary and cultural criticism, are as valuable and compelling as when they first appeared almost a generation ago. They reflect not only a keen intelligence and critical acumen but also a deep knowledge of and affection for black American culture. This new edition is a welcome event for all students and scholars of American literature.' - Arnold Rampersad, Princeton University. ‘For almost two decades, Houston A. Baker. Jr. has served as a tutelary spirit for black cultural studies. Without his role as intellectual mentor as well as inspiring example, many of us would never have made bold to embark upon the academic study of black culture in the first place. His intensity of engagement never puts him beyond self-scrutiny, and his critical intelligence leads always to the most embracive, richly contextual mode of reading. Bakers work survives the changing fashions of critical idiom: and LONG BLACK SONG shows why.' - Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Duke University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. (born March 22, 1943) is the Director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania He is the author of a number of studies of African-American literature including: BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE: A VERNACULAR THEORY, and AFRO-AMERICAN POETICS: REVISION OF HARLEM AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC. He is also a published poet whose volumes include SPIRIT RUN and BLUES JOURNEYS HOME.
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Baker, James Robert. Boy Wonder. New York. 1988. New American Library. 0453005977. 470 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In a turbo-charged romp through the Hollywood of everyone's wildest dreams, Boy Wonder follows the career of Shark Trager--rebel filmmaker and megasuccessful producer--from his birth in 1950 at a drive-in movie theater and his meteoric rise to the pinnacle of Hollywood power, to his equally spectacular descent into obscurity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Robert Baker (October 18, 1947 – November 5, 1997) was an American author of sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction. A native Californian, his work is set almost entirely in Southern California. After graduating from UCLA, he began his career as a screenwriter, but became disillusioned and started writing novels instead. Though he garnered fame for his books Fuel-Injected Dreams and Boy Wonder, after the controversy surrounding publication of his novel, Tim and Pete, he faced increasing difficulty having his work published. According to his life partner, this was a contributing factor in his suicide. Baker's work has achieved cult status in the years since his death, and two additional novels have been posthumously published. First-edition copies of his earlier works have become collector's items. His novel Testosterone was adapted to a film of the same name, though it was not a financial success. Two other books have been optioned for films, but they have not been produced.
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Baker, James Robert. Fuel-Injected Dreams. New York. 1986. Dutton. 0525244174. 323 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the cult classic whose central character is based on the legend of Phil Spector. So there’s this record producer Dennis Contrelle who was huge in the early 1960s, creating epic trash masterpieces from girl groups and surf bands, a veritable Wagner of pop, but he retired at the end of the decade and disappeared into his mansion of tack somewhere in L.A. He’s still there, still married to the singer with his biggest group, a woman effectively held prisoner by the drug-damaged Svengali who can’t let her go. But “This novel is a work of fiction. any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.” Our narrator is a hip late-night DJ, Scott Cochrane, who grew up on the music of Dennis Contrelle, and had a teenage crush on Sharlene, the singer for the Stingrays, whose classic ’60s pop album, Fuel Injected Dreams, is tied up in his mind with his first girlfriend, Cheryl, who mysteriously disappeared the summer of the album’s release. When the DJ belittles one of his tunes, the producer phones in a complaint, and Cochrane is soon lured into the Contrelles’ world of sadomasochistic sexual intrigue.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Robert Baker (October 18, 1947 – November 5, 1997) was an American author of sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction. A native Californian, his work is set almost entirely in Southern California. After graduating from UCLA, he began his career as a screenwriter, but became disillusioned and started writing novels instead. Though he garnered fame for his books Fuel-Injected Dreams and Boy Wonder, after the controversy surrounding publication of his novel, Tim and Pete, he faced increasing difficulty having his work published. According to his life partner, this was a contributing factor in his suicide. Baker's work has achieved cult status in the years since his death, and two additional novels have been posthumously published. First-edition copies of his earlier works have become collector's items. His novel Testosterone was adapted to a film of the same name, though it was not a financial success. Two other books have been optioned for films, but they have not been produced.
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Baker, Nicholson. Room Temperature. New York. 1990. Grove Weidenfeld. 0802112242. 117 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration & design by Dave Calver.
DESCRIPTION - In his second novel, Baker turns a young father's feeding-time reverie into a catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful
DESCRIPTION and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
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Baker, Nicholson. The Fermata. New York. 1994. Random House. 0679415866. 303 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish ‘X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay' (Seattle Times). ‘Sparkling.' - San Francisco Chronicle.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful
DESCRIPTION and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
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Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. New York. 1988. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1555842585. 137 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration & design by Dave Calver.
DESCRIPTION - THE MEZZANINE is the remarkable portrait of one young man's day at the office - actually, his lunch hour and, more exactly, his escalator ride back to his office on the mezzanine level, after purchasing shoelaces. Nicholson Baker's novel is fiction of an astonishing new and original variety. The seemingly small and inconsequential events of the narrator's life - breaking both shoelaces within a day of each other - assume the narrative weight of major discoveries, significant events in a straight-faced comedy of the quotidian. Pushing at the boundaries of supposedly average thoughts - why the spout on the milk carton? is the hot air blower in the men's room really more sanitary? - the tale uncovers the strange and wonderful parameters of the everyday. Complete with footnotes, lists, and charts, THE MEZZANINE marks Nicholson Baker's inspired debut as novelist.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful
DESCRIPTION and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
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Baker, Nicholson. The Size of Thoughts: Essays & Other Lumber. New York. 1996. Random House. 0679439323. 355 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Blue Design.
DESCRIPTION - Novelist Nicholson Baker, author of THE MEZZANINE and VOX and called by Vanity Fair ‘the best American writer of his generation,' here collects over a decade's worth of essays and journalism, including his controversial and highly praised 1994 article on the destruction of library card catalogs. His subjects range from the internals of the movie projector to the emotional tribulations of reading aloud; from the disappearance of hybrid punctuation to the mechanics of changing one's mind; from the lexicography of dirty talk to the manufacture of the fingernail clipper. There is a wedding address, a study of the not-so-random books that are used as props in mail-order catalogs, and a recipe. The final essay, which appears in print here for the first time, pursues through several centuries of prose and poetry the vagaries of the word lumber as a metaphor for the contents of the human mind, in what becomes in the telling a dazzlingly pedantic case study of the fanaticism of scholarship and the beauty that can reside within a piece of ordinary language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful
DESCRIPTION and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
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Baker, Nicholson. U and I: A True Story. New York. 1991. Random House. 0394589947. 181 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Steve Snider.
DESCRIPTION - Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful
DESCRIPTION and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
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Baker, Nicholson. Vox. New York. 1992. Random House. 0394589955. 167 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Deborah Aiges, Deborah DeStaffan, & Eric Leonard.
DESCRIPTION - Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex - solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, VOX is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful
DESCRIPTION and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
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Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs. New York. 1997. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374189870. 1st Novel. 320 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Debra LIll. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell.
DESCRIPTION - When a race of elegant, superintelligent dogs arrives in twenty-first-century New York, they become instant celebrities, but, unable to adjust to the modern world and confronted with an incurable disease, they construct a fantastic castle and barricade themselves inside. A first novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kirsten Bakis (born 1967 Switzerland) is an American novelist. Bakis was raised in Westchester County, New York, and graduated from New York University in 1990. She is a recipient of a Teaching/Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, a grant from the Michener/Copernicus Society of America. She has taught at Hampshire College and was a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York in 2005. She is currently living in Croton-on-Hudson, New York with her husband, their two children, and two dogs, and is at work on her second novel. Lives of the Monster Dogs received mostly positive reviews. Critics praised it for its originality, while also noting some of its drawbacks as science fiction.
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Bakken, Christopher. Eternity & Oranges. Pittsburgh. 2016. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822964049. Pitt Poetry Series. 72 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘This is a beautiful collection of poems: half-cryptic, half-open; half based on ancient myths, half on actual life. There's almost always Greece as the backdrop, olives and the sea but also a human drama. Christopher Bakken proves that what's ancient is also modern and vice versa. We live between times; only poetry can make it palpable.' - Adam Zagajewski.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Christopher Bakken is Department Chair and Frederick F. Seeley Professor of English at Allegheny College. He is the author of the poetry collections After Greece and Goat Funeral. He is also co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios, and the author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table.
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Balaban, John. Coming Down Again. New York. 1985. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151195196. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - From The New Yorker: "[Balaban] has thought about America and the American Vietnam War, and his reflections and his art have transformed a fine adventure story into a very fine novel--a Conradian novel, with a Conradian theme of integrity, a novel rich in language of action and of
DESCRIPTION, which is used to achieve the Conradian aim 'to make you see.' And see we do."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John B. Balaban (born December 2, 1943) is an American poet and translator, an authority on Vietnamese literature. Balaban was born in a housing project neighborhood in Philadelphia to Romanian immigrant parents, Phillip and Alice Georgies Balaban. His father taught himself calculus, invented a model airplane, and studied engineering in Romania, while his mother was a peasant with 'almost no education'. Balaban wrote his first poem at the age of eight or nine, and cites the influence of show tunes that his elder sisters used to sing while washing the dishes after dinner. He became a Quaker at the age of sixteen, while searching for alternatives to the violence in his neighborhood. He obtained a B.A. with highest honors in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1966. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that he received in his senior year at the university allowed him to study English literature at Harvard University, where he received his A.M. During the Vietnam War, Balaban was a conscientious objector; He went to Vietnam with the International Volunteer Services where he taught at a university until it was bombed in the Tet Offensive. He was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and evacuated; after his recovery, he worked to save burned and injured children from the war. He left Vietnam in 1969, but returned in 1971 to work on Ca Dao Viet Nam, a collection of poems in the Ca Dao folk tradition. Balaban's first published collection of verse, After Our War (1974), was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. In 2000, he released Spring essence, a collection of poems by Hồ Xuân Hương, an 18th-century poet and the preeminent woman poet of Vietnam. The book included English translations and versions in both the current Vietnamese alphabet and the historical Chữ Nôm writing system. Balaban has written other works that draw on his experiences in Vietnam. His anthology Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award. He is currently the Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English in the creative writing program of North Carolina State University.
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Balaban, John. Path, Crooked Path. 2006. Copper Canyon Press. 9781556592386. 77 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Guided by an acute moral urgency, Path, Crooked Path opens on Highway 61 and keeps moving across America and throughout the world. Juxtaposing his experiences in eastern Europe and southeast Asia against contemporary life in the United States, Balaban illuminates the humor and hypocrisy that often percolates when individuals are thrust into the mix of cultures. Whether driving past Bush’s Texas ranch, sitting at a café in Vietnam, or trading swigs of vodka with a Bulgarian exile, his poems look beyond the personal to help make sense of an often chaotic world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Balaban is the author of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and Vietnamese translations whose accolades include two National Book Award nominations, the Lamont Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His translation Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong was featured on NPR's Fresh Air. Balaban teaches at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh.
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Baldwin, James. Blues For Mister Charlie. New York. 1964. Dial Press. 123 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bernard Brussel-Smith.
DESCRIPTION - James Baldwin's new play is one of the major theatrical and literary events of the year. With the recent publication of THE FIRE NEXT TIME - hailed as a classic and a masterpiece - James Baldwin permanently established his reputation as a leading figure in the literature of our times. BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE is set in a small town in the Deep South. Before the play begins, a twenty-year-old Negro, who has been living in the North since he was fourteen and who has become a drug addict, comes home to recover and rebuild his life. He is killed, and the play pivots on his murder. Built on the testimony service of the Negro church, BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE reconstructs the crime and examines the ways in which both the whites and the Negroes in the town had, without knowing it, made the death inevitable. In BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE, James Baldwin has combined all his talents as novelist and essayist to write a dynamic and powerful play.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Go Tell It On the Mountain. London. 1954. Michael Joseph. 256 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Peter Rudland.
DESCRIPTION - The crises and joys of adolescence have inspired some remarkable novels in our time - Forrest Reid's PETER WARING and Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, for instance, come readily to mind. Now James Baldwin, a new American writer, has made this difficult but deeply rewarding theme the subject of his first novel. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN takes us into the world of a young Negro boy who is approaching manhood. His mind is full of the echoes of childhood and magic, and those memories of parents and kinsfolk that have gone into making the boy himself and the world that presses in on him. The Deep South, Harlem, and their people are the raw material of this individual universe but the essential story is that of John Grimes, wrestling with the crises of growth: his father's terrifying power, his agonised discovery of sin, and his experience of ecstatic faith. This novel has already had an exciting reception In America. Orville Prescott, reviewing it in the New York Times, said: ‘As individually and authentically talented as Ralph Ellison, author of last year's THE INVISIBLE MAN, Mr Baldwin has made an equally auspicious debut. Readers interested in Negro fiction, an increasingly large number, will not want to miss GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN'; while John H. Hutchens wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that it is ‘A work of such insight and authoritative realism that it brings into focus an experience of life that outsiders can have been aware of only dimly.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Go Tell it on the Mountain. New York. 1954. Signet/New American Library. 191 pages. paperback. 1138.
DESCRIPTION - The crises and joys of adolescence have inspired some remarkable novels in our time - Forrest Reid's PETER WARING and Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, for instance, come readily to mind. Now James Baldwin, a new American writer, has made this difficult but deeply rewarding theme the subject of his first novel. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN takes us into the world of a young Negro boy who is approaching manhood. His mind is full of the echoes of childhood and magic, and those memories of parents and kinsfolk that have gone into making the boy himself and the world that presses in on him. The Deep South, Harlem, and their people are the raw material of this individual universe but the essential story is that of John Grimes, wrestling with the crises of growth: his father's terrifying power, his agonised discovery of sin, and his experience of ecstatic faith. This novel has already had an exciting reception In America. Orville Prescott, reviewing it in the New York Times, said: ‘As individually and authentically talented as Ralph Ellison, author of last year's THE INVISIBLE MAN, Mr Baldwin has made an equally auspicious debut. Readers interested in Negro fiction, an increasingly large number, will not want to miss GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN'; while John H. Hutchens wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that it is ‘A work of such insight and authoritative realism that it brings into focus an experience of life that outsiders can have been aware of only dimly.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Going To Meet the Man. New York. 1965. Dial Press. 251 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - It will come as no surprise to the readers of James Baldwin that he has been writing consistently brilliant and important short fiction for well over a decade. But with this volume they will have a chance to measure and assess the truly astonishing range and intensity of his gifts: GOING TO MEET THE MAN is the first collection of Mr. Baldwin's stories. It includes three recent works never before published. A young girl attempts to accept the impending departure of her lover; a Negro entertainer who has made his name in Europe faces the prospect of returning to the United States; a young man who has achieved middle-class status has to accommodate his brother's life of jazz, dope addiction, and prison; a white policeman in a southern town recalls the mutilation and lynching of a Negro: Mr. Baldwin's situations are always ruthlessly spare. Every situation is firmly rooted in the world as we know it today, and the characters are so accurately perceived and truthfully rendered that the over-all effect is almost musical - in that we may still hear music long after it is played. Here is an author who writes about what matters, and with a capacity for honesty that may be unrivaled by any contemporary practitioner on the American scene.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. If Beale Street Could Talk. New York. 1974. Dial Press. 0803741693. 197 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lynn Braswell.
DESCRIPTION - If Beale Street could talk, it might tell the following story: Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, is in love with Fonny, a sculptor. She is pregnant by him, and they have pledged to get married. But he is falsely accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman and sent to prison. Both families set out to find evidence that will free him, a search that takes them throughout New York and San Juan. And while they search, Tish and Fonny can only wait, all the time with love, with hatred, with despair, with courage, with hope. Mr. Baldwin lets us see this story through Tish's eyes and hear it through Tish's voice. It is a story evocative of the Blues, a combination of the sweet and the sad; it will make you cry, but you will feel its passion and its hope. IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK contains anger and pain; but it is first of all a love story, free of polemics, and in Tish and Fonny, Mr. Baldwin has given us two characters so alive and so profoundly realized that you will come to love them as deeply as they love each other. This is a superb book, perhaps the finest novel Mr. Baldwin has ever written. It is a masterpiece.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. New York. 1979. Dial Press. 0385270747. 597 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to a church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It On The Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land. 'A work of passion. Glimpses of family life in Harlem, rapturous music-making in the churches, movements of uneasiness in even the most casual meetings between whites and blacks--scenes that Baldwin seems preternaturally gifted in understanding.'--The New York Times Book Review.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. New York. 1976. Dial Press. 0803748590. Illustrated by Yoran Cazac. 96 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - TJ plays ball with his friends outside; he grazes his knee, then hurts his buttocks. A police car drives by, looking for a man; they run away. TJ's father then invites WT over for cocoa. Later, TJ goes shopping for Miss Lee, under the aegis of WT. TJ is then summoned by Miss Beanpole; she wants him to go shopping for her; he goes with his three friends. They go to a store whose owner is Puerto Rican. On the way back, while playing ball again, WT hurts his foot and starts bleeding - a bottle fell down from a window and the shards hurt him. They go to Mr Man's and Miss Lee covers up his gash, starts crying, then gives him a Pepsi Cola. In the end, Blinky dances to Mr Man's record, to the delights of Miss Lee and Mr Man. 'Little man, little man' is what Miss Lee calls WT after covering up his gash.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. New York. 1972. Dial Press. 197 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bob Korn. Jacket photo by Bob Adelman.
DESCRIPTION - His remembrance shall perish from the earth and He shall have no name in the street. He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world. This is James Baldwin's long-awaited statement on what has happened to America through the political and social agonies of her recent history. The prophecies of THE FIRE NEXT TIME have tragically been realized - through assassinations, urban riots and increased polarization of her deepest paranoias - and the hopes of justice, of simple human allowance of identity and needs, are more elusive than ever. Baldwin's apprehension of America's crisis in this wholly new work is generated by his own life - with remarkable candor, he tells of his years of self-exile and renewal abroad, of his participation in the civil rights movement in a southland of nightmarish identities, and, following the deaths of so many leaders and the passing of their hopes, of his painful route back to engagement, now with political realities that negate nonviolence and are played out in our courts and penitentiaries as well as our streets and legislatures. NO NAME IN THE STREET is James Baldwin's most eloquent, personal and complete expression on the subject of his times and society.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. New York. 1961. Dial Press. 241 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Jonas. Photograph by Roy Hyrkin.
DESCRIPTION - NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, James Baldwin writes, is ‘part of a private log-book. It was written over the last six years, in various places, and in many states of mind.' It records the last months of a major American writer's long self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem. and his first trip South at the time when the school integration battle was exploding. It contains, too, Mr. Baldwin's controversial profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman, a well as his vigorous attack on Faulkner's defense of the old South, his portrait of Harlem which brought cries of outrage from those within Harlem and those without, and his essay prompted by the riot at the United Nations the day after Lumumba's murder - 'a very small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world.' ‘The question of color takes up much space in these pages. Mr. Baldwin writes, and many themes weave through NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME - the relations between blacks and whites, the role of the Negro in America and in Europe, the facing of truths about oneself and others, the question of sexual identity, and other themes the reader will discover for himself. And though the subjects Mr. Baldwin treats range wide, the entire book is informed by Mr. Baldwin's passion, his sense of controversy, and his instinct for truth - no matter who may be may be made uncomfortable by it. In the six years since the appearance of his book of essays, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, James Baldwin has, through the reception of GIOVANNI'S ROOM and the magazine publication of his essays, established himself beyond doubt as one of the leading writers of his time. NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME further enhances that reputation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York City, where he grew up and attended school, graduating from De Witt Clinton High School in 1942. He has, he reports, held ‘all kinds of jobs, mostly in New York, but one job in Paris, where I lived for nearly ten years.' Mr. Baldwin is the winner of a number of literary fellowships - a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Art and Letters Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant-in-Aid. He is the author of many novels, including GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. His stories and essays have appeared in leading magazines here and in Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston. 1955. Beacon Press. 175 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - NOTES OF A NATIVE SON is a non-fiction book by James Baldwin. It was Baldwin's first non-fiction book, and was published in 1955. The volume collects ten of Baldwin's essays, which had previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's Magazine, Partisan Review, and The New Leader. The essays mostly tackle issues of race in America and Europe. Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. ‘A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.' - Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review. ‘Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.' - Time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. One Day, When I Was Lost. New York. 1973. Dial Press. A Scenario Based On Alex Haley's The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. 280 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bob Korn. Woodcut by Lynn Braswell.
DESCRIPTION - This is James Baldwin's screenplay based on Alex Haley's now famous THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X - written with all the passion, eloquence, insight, and provocativeness that are the hallmarks of Baldwin's work. The ‘story' of Malcolm's life is faithfully followed, but with emphasis on two important turning points: first, his rejection of his wild, crime-ridden youth for a life guided by the precepts of Allah; and second, his rejection of the Black Muslim movement in favor of the faith of true Islam. Malcolm's dramatic, tragic story is part not only of black history, but of the history of 20th-century America and the 20th-century world. It is obvious why it was an inspiration to Baldwin. The screenplay is gorgeously written, deeply moving, alive. Malcolm's greatness is captured fully here by one of the few truly great writers of our time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. New York. 1968. Dial Press. 485 pages. hardcover. jacket design by Paul Bacon Studio.
DESCRIPTION - Here is James Baldwin's new novel - his first since ANOTHER COUNTRY. It is the life story of Leo Proudhammer, a black American actor at the peak of his career; it is the story of a man who realizes at a critical moment in his life that he may be required not merely to survive history but to change it. Told with that intensity that is now the familiar hallmark of all Mr Baldwin's writing, it is the story of a famous American Negro, Leo Proudhammer, who has suffered a serious collapse at the age of 39 in San Francisco. During a period of enforced immobilization, he and we examine what Leo considers to have been a misspent life, involving his white mistress, who is also his co-star, his ruined older brother and a young Negro lover-protector. Furthermore, he has to face up to the problems of his future: having reached a pinnacle of fame, can he ever come down - can he bear what might even mean obscurity? And there are other tremendous themes running through the book. How, for instance, can one be a Negro and fight for America? Is the Christian concept of God a white man's creation? James Baldwin sensitively and beautifully describes Leo's childhood in Harlem, and the boy's hero-worship of his brother which in later years provides the clue to his need for a sort of insulation in his love-hate with success. There are clashes, described with bitterness and ice-cold realism, with white thugs and police, and we watch with fascination Leo's inevitable, steep climb to stardom. No wonder a reviewer prophesied of ANOTHER COUNTRY: ‘Let our novelists (and our moralists) read Mr Baldwin and tremble. There is a whirlwind loose in the land.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. The Amen Corner. New York. 1968. Dial Press. 91 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by The Dillons.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the text of the James Baldwin play that toured Europe and the Near East and was acclaimed from Tel Aviv to Edinburgh. Another production played for one year in Los Angeles and on Broadway. Everywhere it has been seen, THE AMEN CORNER elicits tremendous response, as well it might - it is one of the most brilliant, heart-rending works Baldwin has written. This is the moving story of members of a Harlem storefront church and their spiritual leader, Sister Margaret, who has rejected her husband and dominated her son in order to answer what she believes to be the call of the Lord. With dramatic eloquence, Mr. Baldwin shows how the poverty and frustrations of life in Negro ghettos cause many of their inhabitants to turn to religion as an evasion of reality. Sister Margaret harangues her flock and her family, but gradually they turn away from her, and in the end she loses everything. The closing scene is one of the most daring and effective in American drama, combining, as it does, Sister Margaret's desperation and tears with the recognition of her farcical pretense. She is left disillusioned but joyously fortified. This is a beautiful play, so visual, so musical, that it need not be seen to be effective. It is a magnificent reading experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York. 2010. Pantheon. 9780307378828. Edited and With An Introduction by Randall Kenan. 307 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Carl Mydans. Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde.
DESCRIPTION - THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of tile past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in society. Prophetic and bracing, THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, ‘If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Baldwin was born in 1924 and died in 1981. Among his more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction are GIOVANNI'S ROOM, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and THE FIRE NEXT TIME. Randall Kenan is the author of, among other books, the novel A VISITATION OF SPIRITS and the short story collection Let THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. New York. 1976. Dial Press. 0803719167. 122 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jack Ribik.
DESCRIPTION - In THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, Baldwin turns his ever-perceptive eye to American film, offering us insights into the very nature of our society - its history, its culture, its people. Throughout the book, Baldwin gives us his personal reactions to the films discussed, revealing himself as well as the movies. In so honestly sharing with us that which he calls ‘the cinema of my mind,' he enlarges our scope and allows us to see things in a new light: in the light of a small black child from Harlem awed by Joan Crawford's presence on the screen; in the light of a somewhat older child elated to find that Bette Davis too has ‘pop eyes' like his own; in the light of the still older child who knows too well the violence and hatred of the angry mob in A TALE OF TWO CITIES; in the light of the mature adult watching The Exorcist, perceiving that ‘the devil. does not levitate beds, nor fool around with little girls: we do.' In this provocative study, Baldwin speaks with the voice of the teacher, revealing and challenging the underlying assumptions of such films as In the Heat of the Night:, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and The Exorcist - assumptions so long deemed true in American society that we do not question them; indeed, we do not even see them. Offering us his vision, Mr. Baldwin forces us to see ourselves more clearly; we confront, as it is revealed in our films, the depth of our passion - our loves and hates, our biases, cruelties, fears, and ignorance. Written with Baldwin's superb style, this book offers new horizons in the understanding of American culture. Other books by James Baldwin - GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN; NOTFS OF A NATIVE SON; GIOVANNI'S ROOM; NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME; ANOTHER COUNTRY; THE FIRE NEXT TIME; NOTHING PERSONAL (with Richard Avedon); BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE; GOING TO MEET THE MAN; TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE; THE AMEN CORNER; A RAP ON RACE (with Margaret Mead); A DIALOGUE (with Nikki Giovanni); NO NAME IN THE STREET; ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS LOST; IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York. 1985. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 0030055296. 125 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘In June, 1981, after twenty-two months and twenty-eight corpses, Wayne Bertram Williams, then twenty-three, was arrested for murder. That he is Black is important, since the Administration of the city is Black, and all of the murdered children were Black.' Using the Wayne Williams/ Atlanta child-murder case both as subject and springboard, one of America's major writers assesses, in his own terms and from his own viewpoint, the State of the Union in the mid-1980s. Taking his title from St. Paul: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,' Baldwin ranges over the whole spectrum of American life, with the focus on the problems - and in his opinion continuing plight - of Blacks in White America. It is a book about memory and the inability to remember (‘What one does not remember is the serpent in the garden of one's dreams.'); about terror (‘Sometimes I think, one child in Atlanta said to me, that I'll be coming home from baseball or football practice and somebody's car will come behind me and I'll be thrown in the trunk of the car and it will be dark and he'll drive the car away and I'll never be found again. Never be found again: that terror is far more vivid than the fear of death.'); about justice and the lack thereof (Beneath the microscope of the inquisition. everything this creature [Wayne Williams] does is suspect.'); about guilt and innocence; about fear and anger. Its burning pages raise crucial questions about basic relationships: between men and women, parents and children Blacks and Whites. Baldwin uses fact and documentary evidence as a basis for searing speculation and thoughtful analysis, in a constant search for larger truths. It is his update on the progress - or lack of progress - of the American Dream. As such, it deserves a careful reading by all Americans regardless of race or creed. James Baldwin is equally powerful as novelist and essayist, as poet and polemicist. His many works include THE FIRE NEXT TIME, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York. 1963. Dial Press. 122 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. Photograph by Mottke Weissman.
DESCRIPTION - James Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME is a plea and a warning - a plea that all Americans look to the true state of their land one hundred years after Emancipation - a warning of what may happen if they do not. ‘If we,' James Baldwin writes, ‘do not falter in our duty now, we may be able. to end the racial nightmare. and change the history of the world.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Baldwin was born in New York City, where he grew up and attended school, graduating from De Witt Clinton High School. He is the author of the controversial, best-selling novel ANOTHER COUNTRY and two other novels, GIOVANNI'S ROOM and GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN. Mr. Baldwin is also the author of two books of essays, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME and NOTES OF A NATIVE SON. NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was honored with a Certificate of Recognition from the National Conference of Christians and Jews and was selected by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 1961. Mr. Baldwin is the winner of a number of literary fellowships and awards - a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant-in-Aid. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, Partisan Review, Commentary, The Reporter, The New Leader, Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and many other magazines both here and abroad.
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Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985. New York. 1985. St Martin's Press. 0312643063. 690 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Andy Carpenter.
DESCRIPTION - James Baldwin is one of the major American voices of this century. Nowhere is this more evident than in THE PRICE OF THE TICKET, which includes virtually every important piece of nonfiction, short and long, that Mr. Baldwin has ever written. With total truth and profound insight, these personal, prophetic works have awakened our nation to the black experience. It is safe to say that white Americans would have understood far less about what it means to be black, and blacks about themselves, without Mr. Baldwin to guide us. The book contains the full texts of Baldwin's three great book-length essays, THE FIRE NEXT TIME, NO NAME IN THE STREET, and THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of RAINTREE COUNTY to a magnificent introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr. Baldwin's works do, combines his intensely private experience with the deepest examination of black-white relations today. In a way, the book is an intellectual history of the twentieth-century black American experience (and, by extension, of the white American experience); in another, it is autobiography of the highest order. There are scenes so vivid, so beautifully realized and evoked, that to read them is to remember them forever. There is anger and profound pain. But there is always the redemptive force of a humanity that, Baldwin suggests, lies at the core of all of us, black and white. No one writes more beautifully than James Baldwin. The power of his words reveals this country's soul.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,' the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI'S ROOM was staged by the Actor's Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
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Ball, Angela. Talking Pillow. Pittsburgh. 2017. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822965152. Pitt Poetry Series. 72 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Talking Pillow celebrates love as amazement, sustenance, and the progenitor of scarce-believable loss. The book centers around the sudden death of the author's long-time partner and travels outward to events in the world at large. Imagining themselves into multiple times, places, and lives, the poems comically explore the possibilities of attachment between people and the absurdity of death's sudden intrusion. Antic and often funny, these poems converse with all that we care about, fear, and fail to understand.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Souther Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of four previous poetry collections: The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. She is the recipient of an NEA grant and has twice won the Poetry Prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry, on the Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and has been frequently anthologized.
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Ball, Pamela. Lava. New York. 1997. Norton. 0393040240. 192 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Richard Poulin, Amy Kwon, Poulin & Morris.
DESCRIPTION - At the novel's beginning, Kinau says of her husband, gone five years and with another woman, ‘I could not tell if I was more possessed by Ivan's absence than by the man himself.' But then a bizarre incident brings Ivan back, and a new chain of passion and leavetaking inevitably spins itself out. Kinau's life is shaped by the stories and feral energy of her mother (a woman of many husbands) and by the always hovering and jealous presence of the gods. Revenge for a boy's accidental death calls for a bounty on sharks and results in a fishing frenzy. Tidal waves have wreaked havoc, and will again. A volcano carries its own portentous message. And finally, there is Hawaii itself, source of loss, of risk, and possibly of salvation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pamela Ball lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she teaches creative writing at Florida State University. She was born and raised in Oahu, Hawaii. She has published fiction in literary magazines and won a Hemingway short fiction award.
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Ballard, Allen B. Where I'm Bound. New York. 2000. Simon & Schuster. 0684870312. 317 pages. hardcover. Jacket design By Patti Ratchford. Jacket illustration By Peter Fiore.
DESCRIPTION - WHERE I'M BOUND, a stunning and engaging Civil War novel, is the first work of fiction to focus solely on the soldiers of an African-American regiment. Throughout the war, more than 180,000 African-American men fought for the Union Army. Many were escaped slaves, others were freed men; yet all voluntarily enlisted for one cause: freedom. For the first time in fiction, their experiences are successfully portrayed in a manner befitting the grandeur and scope of their contributions. Inspired by the true story of a black cavalry unit in Mississippi, renowned African-American historian Allen Ballard weaves factual events with the fictional account of an escaped slave, Joe Duckett, who flees to join the Northern Arm. When Duckett escapes his life of bondage to become a cavalry scout, he grows to be more than a free man - he becomes a hero. Duckett and his hard-riding regiment roam the Mississippi Delta, freeing slaves and keeping vital waterways open for the Union. As the war approaches its final, tragic days, Duckett embarks on his most dangerous mission yet: to return to the plantation from which he escaped in order to reunite with his wife and daughter. More than just an account of the Civil War, WHERE I'M BOUND is an affecting portrayal of the psychological effects of war. Through the character Duckett, some of war's greatest tragedies are painfully evoked - the agonizing separation from family, the horrendous mission of having to kill another man, and the cruelty and moral corruption that occur when men's passions are their greatest weapons against one another.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ALLEN B. BALLARD teaches history and African-American studies at the State University of New York at Albany. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio and holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Dr. Ballard has published two nonfiction books, and his articles have appeared in popular journals and newspapers, including The New York Times, which just recently published his reflections on the Battle of Gettysburg. He lives in Clifton Park. New York.
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Ballentine, Lee. Phase Language. Berkeley. 1995. Pantograph Press. 1880766078. 90 pages. paperback. Cover design by Robert Frazier.
DESCRIPTION - ‘As the empires wend their way, both glittering and dark, toward the ‘end' or ‘turn of the century' poet Lee Ballentine records the procession in scenarios that project the ‘information age' onto archetypal screens. The resulting double exposures reveal a sensibility in touch with its dreams, fears, joys, and pratfalls, in fearless command of a legion of lexicons, and in sympathy with the individual trying to make sense of it all.' - Anselm Hollo, about PHASE LANGUAGE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lee Ballentine's poems of science and surrealism have appeared in 26, Abraxas, ACM, Caliban, Drive They Said, Exquisite Corpse, Mississippi Mud, Painted Bride, Portland Review, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. He's the author of eight poetry monographs, and edited the anthology POLY: New Speculative Writing, which James Laughlin wrote was "pushing up the Amazon of the new poetry" and which was an Anatomy of Wonder Best Book, to date having received more than 60 reviews worldwide. Lee edits the journal of new surrealism and found photography, UR-VOX.
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Bambara, Toni Cade (editor). Tales and Stories For Black Folks. Garden City. 1971. Zenith Books/Doubleday. Published Simultaneously In Paperback. 164 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Fred Troller.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It is a funny thing about the living history you hear in the family kitchen among the elders - it doesn't always match what you are supposed to learn from the books you read and the films you see and the people you meet. So, while it is very, very important for young folks to learn how to read, to read well, to read everything in sight, it is equally important for young folks to learn to listen, to be proud of our oral tradition, our elders who tell their tales in the kitchen. For they are truth.' So writes the editor of this anthology, and her selections reflect the influence of oral tradition on Black writers. From the tales in fable form to the short stories which bounce with the rhythm of the Black tongue, it is clear that these authors have listened to their elders. The writers chosen cover a wide range of Black experience. They vary from Langston Hughes, one of the first widely accepted Black men of letters, to some of the latest - youngsters from the Fort Greene Young Writers Project in Brooklyn, New York. They encompass not only Birago Diop and James Aggrey who both contributed to Black independence and pride in Black culture on the African continent, but also Pearl Crayton, Ernest J. Gaines and Albert Murray, all from southern states. And finally, there are the stories from a group the editor affectionately calls the ‘Newark Mamas' - mothers back in school, working for their college degrees at Livingston College and bursting with talent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The editor of this anthology is Toni Cade Bambara, a writer, educator and mother who taught at Livingston College of Rutgers University). She has been published in magazines (Black World, Massachusetts Review and Prairie Schooner) and in anthologies (BLACK AND WHITE IN AMERICAN CULTURE, WHAT'S HAPPENING, SOMETHING ELSE and BLACK EXPRESSION) and has edited THE BLACK WOMAN, an anthology of poems, stories and essays.
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Bambara, Toni Cade. Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations. New York. 1996. Pantheon Books. 0679442502. Edited & With a Preface by Toni Morrison. 255 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Joyce Middler. Jacket design by Marjorie Anderson.
DESCRIPTION - On December 9, 1995, Toni Cade Bambara died at the age of fifty-six, a profound loss to American Culture. In its obituary the New York Times called her ‘a major contributor to the emerging genre of black women's literature, along with the writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.' The author of many acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, among them three pioneering and timeless volumes: GORILLA, MY LOVE and THE SEABIRDS ARE STILL ALIVE, both collections of stories, and THE SALT EATERS, a novel, Bambara had not published a new book in the fourteen years prior to her death. She developed during that time a keen interest in film - as a scriptwriter, filmmaker, critic, and teacher - and collaborated on several television documentaries, including The Bombing of Osage Avenue, about the police assault on the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia, and on the W. E. B. Du Bois Film Project. Bambara also helped to launch the careers of many other black women filmmakers. DEEP SIGHTINGS AND RESCUE MISSIONS is a brilliant distillation of Bambara's original sensibility and a confirmation of her status as one of America's great post - World War II writers. Here is a rich selection of her writings, many of which have never before appeared in print: stories (‘Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain,' ‘Ice,' ‘Luther on Sweet Auburn'), essays (‘Language and the Writer,' ‘The Education of a Storyteller.'), film criticism (‘School Daze'), and a revealing interview. DEEP SIGHTINGS AND RESCUE MISSIONS is an unexpected treasure not only to those who are already familiar with Bambara's work, but to a new generation of readers who will recognize in her writing a strong precursor to much of contemporary American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TONI CADE BAMBARA is the author of two short-story collection, GORILLA, MY LOVE and THE SEABIRDS ARE STILL ALIVE, and a novel, THE SALT EATERS. She edited THE BLACK WOMAN and TALES AND SHORT STORIES FOR BLACK FOLKS. Bambara's works have appeared in many periodicals and have been translated into several languages.
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Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love. New York. 1972. Random House. 0394482018. 177 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Karin Gurski Batten.
DESCRIPTION - No writer anywhere understands controls, and expresses better than Toni Cade Bambara the Black Style - a style at once ineffable and immediately recognizable. Survivalist, graceful, hip, human, ironic, generous, tortured - such terms only approximate its essence. In these fifteen superb stories, her touch is so sure, her ear so keen, we are turned up, on, and inside out as we move from uptown New York to small-town North Carolina, from sassy black girls to cunning old men, from basements to F.A.O. Schwartz. Sharing the world of what she calls her ‘straight-up fiction' is a stunning experience. ‘She has captured it all, how we really talk, how we really are; and done it with both love and respect. I laughed until I cried, then laughed again. I loved it! She must love us very much.' - Lucille Clifton. ‘You'd hardly call them ‘stories.' These are shavins off our Black experience - like chocolate. Bittersweet, that is.' - Mari Evans.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TONI CADE BAMBARA was a New Yorker who grew up in Harlem, Bedford-Stuy, Jersey City and attended several public, private, and boarding schools in New York State, Jersey, and the South. She once described herself as ‘the mother of Karma (who will be two in the spring), the sister of Walter Cade the painter, and a writer since childhood who nevertheless planned to be a doctor, lawyer, artist, musician, and everything else.' The name Bambara she took from a signature on a sketchbook she found in her great grandmother's trunk.
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Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. New York. 1980. Random House. 0394507126. 297 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: The Artworks.
DESCRIPTION - Second of all is Velma: daughter, mother, wife, friend, worker - and an attempted suicide. She has survived self-slashed wrists and gassed lungs and now she sits on a stool in the Southwest Community Infirmary. For some reason she is not sure of, she did not die. And for another reason she is also not sure of, she is sitting on this stool in a radical medical center listening to a faith healer asking her ‘Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?' Thirdly is Minnie Ransom - fabulous healer in beige T-strap shoes - love and wisdom incarnate who (with her spirit-guide, Old Wife) marshals all of her gifts to help Velma deal with the things that made her thirsty for death: Was it Obie who did not love her well or enough? the friends who misunderstood her? the haunted quality of life itself since the bottoming-out of the Movement? But first of all are the Salt Eaters - the Black people who inhabit a city somewhere in the South called Claybourne, and who are connected to the healing taking place and who witness an event that alters their lives forever. M'Dear Sophie, Velma's godmother; Doc Serge, ex-pimp and neighborhood sage; Palma, Velma's sister and member of a singing troupe called the Seven Sisters of the Grain; Obie, head of the ominous 7 Arts Academy; Fred Holt, bus driver and mourner; Dr. Meadows, a ‘redbone' Black who is terrified of his own people. Whether Toni Cade Bambara sits us down at a healing, or moves us through Claybourne at carnival time or chills us with a mysterious thunderstorm, she locks us into the lives of the Salt Eaters. Some of them are centered, some are off balance; some are frightened, some are daring. But all are brilliantly drawn representatives of a people searching for the healing properties of salt. Equally as stunning as her characters is Ms. Bambara's vision. From the boymen who live off welfare women, to the primordial mud mothers who carry their children in their hides, to a little girl watching her godparents dance in the sand, the author explores the narcissistic qualities of despair and the tremendous responsibility of being a well person. (As Minnie Ransom says, ‘Sweetheart, wholeness is no trifling matter.') As always Ms. Bambara's style is comedy with a knife's edge, and tragedy with balm. After years of acclaim as one of our finest short-story writers, Toni Cade Bambara has written a show-stopper of a first novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995)was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Toni Cade Bambara was born in New York City to parents Walter and Helen (Henderson) Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens and New Jersey, NJ. In 1970 she changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group Bambara. Bambara graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English Literature in 1959, then studied mime at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, France. She also became interested in dance before completing her master's degree in American studies at City College, New York (from 1962), while serving as program director of Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn. She has also worked for New York social services and as a recreation director in the psychiatric ward of Metropolitan hospital. From 1965 to 1969 she was with City College's Search for Education, Elevation, Knowledge-program. She taught English, published material and worked with SEEK's black theatre group. She was made assistant professor of English at Rutgers University's new Livingston College in 1969, was visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at Emory University and at Atlanta University (1977), where she also taught at the School of Social Work (until 1979). She was writer-in-residence at Neighborhood Arts Center (1975–79), at Stephens College at Columbia, Missouri (1976) and at Atlanta's Spelman College (1978–79). From 1986 she taught film-script writing at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. Bambara participated in several community and activist organizations, and her work was influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s. She went on propaganda trips to Cuba in 1973 and to Vietnam in 1975. She moved to Atlanta, GA with her daughter, Karma Bene, and became a founding member of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers. Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died of it in 1995, at age 56. Her first book was, Gorilla, My Love (1972), collected fifteen short stories, written between 1950 and 1960. Most of the stories in Gorilla, My Love are told through a first-person point of view. The narrator is often a sassy young girl who is tough, brave, and caring. Bambara called her writing upbeat fiction. Included were ‘Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird‘ as well as ‘Raymond's Run.' Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts movement and the emergence of black feminism. Her anthology The Black Woman (1970) with poetry, short stories, and essays by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and herself, as well as work by Bambara's students from the SEEK program, was the first feminist collection to focus on African-American women. Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971) contained work by Langston Hughes, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Crayton, Alice Walker and students. She wrote the introduction for another groundbreaking feminist anthology by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. While Bambara is often ascribed as a ‘feminist,' in her chapter titled ‘On the Issue of Roles', she writes, ‘Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood.' Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) is centered around a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. The novel Those Bones Are Not My Child or If Blessings Come (title of the manuscript), was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of forty black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations. (Vintage, 1996). Her work was explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular, esp. The Salt Eaters. Her script for two awards-winning Louis Massiah film The Bombing of Osage Avenue dealt with the massive police assault in Philadelphia on the headquarters of MOVE, at 6221 Osage Ave., on May 13, 1985. Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writings, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. She was always influenced by the people of Harlem and by her strong-willed mother, Helen Bent Henderson Cade Brehon, who urged her and her brother Walter (an established painter) to be proud of African American culture and history. Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with ‘Midnight Ramble': Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. She also was one of four filmmakers who made the collaborative 1995 documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.
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Bambara, Toni Cade. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. New York. 1977. Random House. 0394481437. 209 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser.
DESCRIPTION - Ten stories of Black life written with Ms. Bambara's characteristic vigor, sensibility and winning irony. The stories range from the timid and bumbling confusion of a novice community worker in ‘The Apprentice' to the love-versus-politics crisis of an organizer's wife, to the dark and bright notes of ‘The Sea Birds Are Still Alive,' about the passengers of a refugee ship from a war-torn Asian nation. Young girls, weary men, lovers, frauds and revolutionaries - Toni Cade Bambara handles them all with expertise, passion and huge talent. As the Chicago Daily News said, ‘Ms. Bambara grabs you by the throat. she dazzles, she charms.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995)was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Toni Cade Bambara was born in New York City to parents Walter and Helen (Henderson) Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens and New Jersey, NJ. In 1970 she changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group Bambara. Bambara graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English Literature in 1959, then studied mime at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, France. She also became interested in dance before completing her master's degree in American studies at City College, New York (from 1962), while serving as program director of Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn. She has also worked for New York social services and as a recreation director in the psychiatric ward of Metropolitan hospital. From 1965 to 1969 she was with City College's Search for Education, Elevation, Knowledge-program. She taught English, published material and worked with SEEK's black theatre group. She was made assistant professor of English at Rutgers University's new Livingston College in 1969, was visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at Emory University and at Atlanta University (1977), where she also taught at the School of Social Work (until 1979). She was writer-in-residence at Neighborhood Arts Center (1975–79), at Stephens College at Columbia, Missouri (1976) and at Atlanta's Spelman College (1978–79). From 1986 she taught film-script writing at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. Bambara participated in several community and activist organizations, and her work was influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s. She went on propaganda trips to Cuba in 1973 and to Vietnam in 1975. She moved to Atlanta, GA with her daughter, Karma Bene, and became a founding member of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers. Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died of it in 1995, at age 56. Her first book was, Gorilla, My Love (1972), collected fifteen short stories, written between 1950 and 1960. Most of the stories in Gorilla, My Love are told through a first-person point of view. The narrator is often a sassy young girl who is tough, brave, and caring. Bambara called her writing upbeat fiction. Included were ‘Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird‘ as well as ‘Raymond's Run.' Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts movement and the emergence of black feminism. Her anthology The Black Woman (1970) with poetry, short stories, and essays by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and herself, as well as work by Bambara's students from the SEEK program, was the first feminist collection to focus on African-American women. Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971) contained work by Langston Hughes, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Crayton, Alice Walker and students. She wrote the introduction for another groundbreaking feminist anthology by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. While Bambara is often ascribed as a ‘feminist,' in her chapter titled ‘On the Issue of Roles', she writes, ‘Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood.' Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) is centered around a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. The novel Those Bones Are Not My Child or If Blessings Come (title of the manuscript), was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of forty black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations. (Vintage, 1996). Her work was explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular, esp. The Salt Eaters. Her script for two awards-winning Louis Massiah film The Bombing of Osage Avenue dealt with the massive police assault in Philadelphia on the headquarters of MOVE, at 6221 Osage Ave., on May 13, 1985. Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writings, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. She was always influenced by the people of Harlem and by her strong-willed mother, Helen Bent Henderson Cade Brehon, who urged her and her brother Walter (an established painter) to be proud of African American culture and history. Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with ‘Midnight Ramble': Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. She also was one of four filmmakers who made the collaborative 1995 documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.
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Bambara, Toni Cade. Those Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel. New York. 1999. Pantheon Books. 0679442618. 676 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by CORBIS/Galen Rowell. Jacket design by Marjorie Anderson.
DESCRIPTION - THOSE BONES ARE NOT MY CHILD is a staggering achievement: the novel that Toni Cade Bambara worked on for twelve years until her death in 1995 - a story that puts us at the center of the nightmare of the Atlanta child murders. It was called ‘The City Too Busy To Hate,' but two decades ago more than forty black children were murdered there with grim determination, their bodies found - in ditches, on riverbanks - strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time, and THOSE BONES ARE NOT MY CHILD is the result of her painstaking first-hand research, as she delved into the murders and the world in which the occurred. Evoking the culture of the late 1970s and early ‘80s with a keen eye - the Iranian hostage crisis, disco, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver - THOSE BONES ARE NOT MY CHILD powerfully dramatizes the story of one black family surviving on the margins of a seemingly prosperous city. On Sunday morning, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer awakens to find that her teenage son has gone missing, even as the Atlanta child abductions are beginning to be reported. As she and her estranged husband frantically search for their son, the story moves with authority through the full spectrum of Atlanta's political, social, and cultural life, illuminating the vexing issues of race and class that bedevil the city. Suspenseful, richly dramatic, profoundly affecting, THOSE BONES ARE NOT MY CHILD explores the complex relationships within one family in dire crisis. And as Toni Morrison, who edited Bambara's manuscript, has observed, it is also ‘the narrative revelation of a major Southern city of the ‘80s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of ‘The City Too Busy To Hate:'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TONI CADE BAMBARA was the author of two short story collections, GORILLA, MY LOVE and THE SEABIRDS ARE STILL ALIVE; a novel, THE SALT EATERS; and a collection of fiction, essays, and conversations, DEEP SIGHTINGS AND RESCUE MISSIONS. Her writings continue to appear in literature anthologies throughout the world. A noted documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, Bambara's film work includes the documentaries The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.
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Banks, Russell. Affliction. New York. 1989. Harper & Row. 0060161426. 355 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. Continental Drift. New York. 1985. Harper & Row. 0060153830. 366 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - After his ill-fated pursuit of the American dream, Bob Dubois finds employment on a fishing boat off the Florida Keys where he becomes involved in a plot to smuggle two Haitians into Florida.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. Family Life. New York. 1975. Avon Books. 0380002582. Paperback Original Of Author's 1st Book. 118 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In Family Life, Russell Banks's first novel, he transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom. Life inside this kingdom includes the king (dubbed "the Hearty" or "the Bluff"), who squeals angrily as is his wont; the queen, who, while pondering the mirror in her chambers, decides to write a book; three adolescent princes who are, respectively, a superb wrestler, a fanatical sports car driver, and a sullen drunk. Then there are the mysterious Green Man with a thing for princes; the Loon, who lives in a tree house designed by Christopher Wren; and a whole slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love and loss and laughter.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. Hamilton Stark. Boston. 1978. Houghton Mifflin. 0395264715. 309 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. Searching For Survivors. New York. 1975. Fiction Collective. 0914590065. 153 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A book of fourteen stories by Russell Banks.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. Success Stories. New York. 1986. Harper & Row. 0060155671. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In Success Stories, an exceptionally varied yet coherent collection, Russell Banks proves himself one of the most astute and forceful writers in America today. Queen for a Day, Success Story, and Adultery trace fortunes of the Painter family in their pursuit of and retreat from the American dream. Banks also explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of contemporary moral fables. The Fish is an evocating parable of faith and greed set in a Southeast Asian village, The Gully tells of the profitability of violence and the ironies of upward mobility in a Latin American shantytown, and Children's Story explores the repressed rage that boils beneath the surface of relationships between parents and children and between citizens of the first and third worlds.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. The Book of Jamaica. Boston. 1980. Houghton Mifflin. 0395290856. 326 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In The Book of Jamaica , Russell Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean and its ever-present racial conflicts. His narrator, a thirty-five-year-old college professor from New Hampshire, goes to Jamaica to write a novel and soon becomes embroiled in the struggles between whites and Blacks. He is especially interested in an ancient tribe called the Maroons, descendants of the Ashanti, who had been enslaved by the Spanish and then fought the British in a hundred-year war. Despite this history of oppression, the Maroons have managed to maintain a relatively autonomous existence in Jamaica. Partly out of guilt and an intellectual sense of social responsibility, Banks's narrator gets involved in reuniting two clans who have been feuding for generations. Unfortunately, his attempt ends in disaster, and the narrator must deal with his feelings of alienation, isolation, and failure.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. The Relation of My Imprisonment. Washington DC. 1983. Sun & Moon Press. 0940650258. 121 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An experimental piece of fiction using a form invented in the 17th century by imprisoned Puritan divines. When any work connected with coffins, gravestones, or vestments for the dead becomes heresy, a young coffin-maker faces long years in prison for conscientiously following his craft
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. The Sweet Hereafter. New York. 1991. Harper Collins. 0060167033. 257 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Four narrators--bus driver Dolores, upright Bill, shrewd Mitchell, and teenaged Nichole--address agonizing questions as they describe an accident that killed fourteen children and the effects of the tragedy on themselves and their town
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Banks, Russell. Trailerpark. Boston. 1981. Houghton Mifflin. 0395315476. 242 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Interrelated stories set in the small, symbolic trailer park just off an American highway, portray individuals who are alone and who take on the attributes of specific archetypes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty'. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters'. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships'.
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Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones). The Motion of History & Other Plays. New York. 1978. Morrow. 0688032729. 225 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Amiri Baraka’a play The Motion of History addresses not only the issue of racial discrimination, but is more or less a discussion of the social issues and concerns of the day which added to their woes and anguish. He has touched upon certain historical events associated with the liberation of the Blacks and hence the title The Motion of History - how certain events set the history in motion. Though violent in tone, Baraka has taken heed to see that direct depiction of brutal aggressiveness stays away from the stage. The stage setting, scattered and broken dialogues and the inclination towards addressing the burning topics of the day makes the play postmodern
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) is a writer and critic, the poet laureate of New Jersey, and Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His many books include Blues People, Black Music, and The Music.
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Baraka, Amiri. The Sidney Poet Heroical. New York. 1979. I. Reed Books. 0918408121. Illustrated by C. K. Conridge. 106 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Amiri Baraka's ninth published play. A political play about Sidney Poet, "a strong black dude", who comes from the West Indies to make it as actor inn Hollywood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) is a writer and critic, the poet laureate of New Jersey, and Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His many books include Blues People, Black Music, and The Music.
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Baraka, Imamu Amiri (LeRoi Jones). The System of Dante's Hell. New York. 1963. Grove Press. 154 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Kuhlman Associates.
DESCRIPTION - This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet’s skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul―lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) is a writer and critic, the poet laureate of New Jersey, and Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His many books include Blues People, Black Music, and The Music.
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Barba, Susan. Fair Sun. Boston. 2017. David Godine. 9781567926019. 85 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The three interrelated sections of poetry in Fair Sun explore the primary importance of connection, both with other human beings and with the natural world. In the first section, poems are wide-ranging in locale and reference, exploring the acquisition of language, specifically the ways in which the experience and distance embedded in language darken and threaten the edenic, prelapsarian qualities of a childhood spent close to the natural world. There are poems that enact the sudden possibilities of speech, the complexities of translation, the bewilderment of the bilingual speaker, both fluent and tongue-tied. The second section consists of a series of prose poems titled "Andranik." In these poems, a child is speaking with her grandfather who relates, in answer to her questioning (she knows what to ask, his answers are as familiar to her as nursery rhymes), the details of his survival during the Armenian Genocide: his escape, the murder of his father, the suicide of his sister, the death of his best friend, forced marches, enslavement - all punctuated by memories of an earlier boyhood spent chasing ducks, swimming in the river, sleeping on mats under the stars. The final section contains shorter lyric poems set mainly in New England, poems that explore the proximity of life and death, the complicity and interdependency of the individual in the collective, and the redemptive possibilities of sympathy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Barba's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry Daily. She has published book reviews in Boston Review and translations from Armenian in Words Without Borders and Ararat. She participated in Consenses, a multi-genre, interactive art installation which opened in West Tisbury, Massachusetts and is now touring the country. She recently received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in poetry.
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Barich, Bill. Hard To Be Good. New York. 1987. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374168121. 180 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The first short story collection from the acclaimed non-fiction writer contains eight stories, six of which were originally published in the New Yorker. From a mildly troubled adolescent who moves from innocence to experience over the course of a summer with his estranged mother ('Hard to Be Good') to a former rock musician protecting himself against the bitterness of a failed romance ('Too Much Elecrticity'), Barich treats his characters with loving empathy and gentle humor. His eye for the specific and the delightful ease of his prose style allow him to find the extraordinary in the lives of ordinary Americans. Bill Barich's first books established him as one of the finest, most appealing, writers of the literature of fact. Now, with this first collection of short fiction, readers have cause to celebrate a prose stylist who can gracefully cross the boundaries of genre.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bill Barich (born 1943 in Winona, Minnesota) is an American writer. He grew up on Long Island and graduated from Colgate University in 1965. Subsequently, he served in the U.S. Peace Corps in eastern Nigeria (Biafra), then settled in northern California where many of his books are set. He published Laughing in the Hills, his first book, a classic account of racetrack life, in 1980. William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, ran a two-part excerpt from the book and appointed Barich a staff writer. His contributions over the next fifteen years fall into three categories: travel and the sporting life; reportage; and short fiction. Traveling Light, his account of a sojourn abroad in Italy and England, appeared in 1984, after which he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. His other books include Hard to Be Good (stories); Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California (travel); Carson Valley (novel); Crazy for Rivers (angling/autobiography); and A Fine Place to Daydream (travel/racing). Barich's work has been included in Best American Short Stories and many other anthologies. In addition to The New Yorker, he has contributed to Esquire, Sports Illustrated, American Poetry Review, Salon, Narrative, and other magazines and journals, and he is a Literary Laureate of the San Francisco Public Library. He travels between Santa Monica, California and Dublin, Ireland. He has also written a book entitled A Pint of Plain, an account of his setting out to find a traditional authentic Irish pub. It is a lament of sorts as he is seeking the famous Pat Cohan-type pub of the John Wayne film "The Quiet Man." In 2010, Barich published Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America his account of a 5,943-mile cross-country trip undertaken in the autumn of 2008 just prior to the presidential election. He assesses the state of the nation in much the same way John Steinbeck did almost fifty years ago in Travels With Charley. From 2010 through 2012 he worked as the lead writer on the HBO series Luck, about horses and racing, created by David Milch and starring Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. In 2016, Barich published An Angle on the World, a collection of reporting from The New Yorker, travel pieces, personal essays, and book reviews.
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Barich, Bill. Traveling Light. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 0670724777. 226 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Here is a travel book with a difference: ten chronological chapters from a year of wandering, from the Pacific Northwest to Tuscany and back again to the trout-laden streams of California. Join Barich as he travels the globe, from the trout streams of Northern California to the auction ring at Saratoga, where millions of dollars may be gaveled away for a yearling thoroughbred; from seedy London pubs to a run-down Florentine palazzo during a glorious Italian spring. Learn the science of English beer brewing, the art of fly tying, how to generate hydroelectric power, the proper analysis of the Daily Racing Form, and the best way to eat artichokes. Freshness, wit and Barich's distinctive voice create a luminous travelogue crackling with an inimitable curiosity and an elegance of style that marks every step of this remarkable journey.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bill Barich (born 1943 in Winona, Minnesota) is an American writer. He grew up on Long Island and graduated from Colgate University in 1965. Subsequently, he served in the U.S. Peace Corps in eastern Nigeria (Biafra), then settled in northern California where many of his books are set. He published Laughing in the Hills, his first book, a classic account of racetrack life, in 1980. William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, ran a two-part excerpt from the book and appointed Barich a staff writer. His contributions over the next fifteen years fall into three categories: travel and the sporting life; reportage; and short fiction. Traveling Light, his account of a sojourn abroad in Italy and England, appeared in 1984, after which he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. His other books include Hard to Be Good (stories); Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California (travel); Carson Valley (novel); Crazy for Rivers (angling/autobiography); and A Fine Place to Daydream (travel/racing). Barich's work has been included in Best American Short Stories and many other anthologies. In addition to The New Yorker, he has contributed to Esquire, Sports Illustrated, American Poetry Review, Salon, Narrative, and other magazines and journals, and he is a Literary Laureate of the San Francisco Public Library. He travels between Santa Monica, California and Dublin, Ireland. He has also written a book entitled A Pint of Plain, an account of his setting out to find a traditional authentic Irish pub. It is a lament of sorts as he is seeking the famous Pat Cohan-type pub of the John Wayne film "The Quiet Man." In 2010, Barich published Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America his account of a 5,943-mile cross-country trip undertaken in the autumn of 2008 just prior to the presidential election. He assesses the state of the nation in much the same way John Steinbeck did almost fifty years ago in Travels With Charley. From 2010 through 2012 he worked as the lead writer on the HBO series Luck, about horses and racing, created by David Milch and starring Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. In 2016, Barich published An Angle on the World, a collection of reporting from The New Yorker, travel pieces, personal essays, and book reviews.
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Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New York. 1937. Harcourt Brace & Company. 211 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Published in 1937, Djuna Barnes's novel NIGHTWOOD was immediately recognized as a great work of art, a masterpiece comparable, T.S. Eliot argued in his enthusiastic introduction, to the finest Elizabethan tragedy. In complex, dense, and stunningly beautiful prose, Barnes delineates the lives of her characters: the mysterious expatriate American Robin Vote, her Viennese husband Felix Volkbein, her lover Nora Flood, and their loquacious, outrageous friend Dr. Matthew O'Connor. As a meditation on love, loss, language, and identity, NIGHTWOOD invites study from a variety of literary, linguistic, and philosophical perspectives. Moreover, readers interested in history and religious studies will find much to repay their attention. Set mostly in Paris between the world wars, the novel has been seen as both a prescient critique of fascism and a trenchant deconstruction of the illusions of historical progress and historiography. Religious as well as national differences among the characters occupy much of the text's attention: Felix is a self-hating Jew, Nora a puritan Protestant, Matthew an Irish Catholic sinner, and Robin a Catholic convert.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 - June 18, 1982) was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th-century English-language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. As a roman à clef, the novel features a thinly veiled portrait of Barnes in the character of Nora Flood, whereas Nora's lover Robin Vote is a composite of Thelma Wood and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Since Barnes' death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.
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Barnett, Cameron. The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water. Pittsburgh. 2017. Autumn House Press. 9781938769269. 96 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Cameron Barnett's poetry collection, The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water (winner of the 2017 Rising Writer Contest), explores the complexity of race and the body for a black man in today's America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CAMERON BARNETT earned his MFA in poetry at The University of Pittsburgh, where he was poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge literary magazine and co-coordinator of the Pitt Speakeasy Reading Series. His honors include the O'Donnell Award for Excellence in Poetry from Duquesne University and The Academy of American Poets Graduate Poetry Award from The University of Pittsburgh. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he works as a middle school language arts teacher, and is an associate poetry editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Review. The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water is his first book.
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Barnstone, Aliki. Dwelling: Poems. Riverdale-On-Hudson. 2016. Sheep Meadow Press. 9781937679637. 110 pages. paperback. Cover image: Aliki Barnstone.
DESCRIPTION - Praise for Aliki Barnstone: 'All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstone's poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most - shall we call her master - that Emily Dickinson! Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet.' - Gerald Stern. 'For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.' - Robert Pinsky.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ALIKI BARNSTONE'S eight books of poetry include Bright Body and Dear God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009). The translator of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, she is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
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Barnstone, Willis. Moonbook and Sunbook. North Adams. 2014. Tupelo Press. 9781936797424. 101 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Willis Barnstone's new volume of poetry offers two sequences paired, pivoting on lunar and solar consciousness and comprised mostly of multiplying sonnets, two per page and mirrored typographically across the page-spreads. Elegant in erudition but always fluently conversational, this book is an homage to the poet's father and moving proof of an astonishingly productive life in letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willis Barnstone (born November 13, 1927) was born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the Sorbonne, Columbia and Yale, taught in Greece at end of civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and in China during Cultural Revolution, where he was later a Fulbright Professor in Beijing(1984-85) Former O'Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. A Guggenheim fellow, he has received the NEA, NEH, Emily Dickinson Award of the PSA, Auden Award of NY Council on the Arts, Midland Authors Award, four Book of the Month selections, four Pulitzer nominations, and Lanner Poetry Award for Border of a Dream: The Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper Canyon). His work has appeared in APR, Harper's, NYRB, Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, TLS. Author of seventy books, recent volumes are Poetics of Translation (Yale, 1995), The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala, 2003), Life Watch (BOA, 2003), Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (2004), Restored New Testament (Norton, 2009), Stickball on 88th Street (Red Hen Press, 2011), and Dawn Cafe in Paris (Sheep Meadow, 2011), The Poems of Jesus Christ (Norton, 2012), ABC of Translation (Black Widow Press, 2013), Borges at Eighty (New Directions Press, 2013).
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Barnum, P. T. Struggles and Triumphs: Or, Forty Years' Recollections of P.T. Barnum. New York. 1981. Penguin Books. 9780140390049. Introduction by Carl Bode. 400 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Written with the same energy and imagination Barnum brought to all his endeavors, this autobiography is a manual on getting rich, an occasional sermon on the merits of Christianity, and a survey of popular entertainment. When the first version was published in 1855, it became an immediate bestseller. Read today, it is not only a wonderful portrait of the most colorful figure in nineteenth-century American life but also a fascinating document of his times. He schemed to entrance the American people-to shock, amuse, and surprise them. And he succeeded. P.T. Barnum introduced the American public to Tom Thumb, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind. He made Americans open their eyes in amazement at thousands of "oddities," some real, some manufactured. Struggles and Triumphs is the life story of America's first purveyor of pop culture-a man who indulged in outright chicanery and yet managed to retain an image (most of the time) of unassailable moral rectitude.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman, businessman, and politician, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus (1871–2017) with James Anthony Bailey. He was also an author, publisher, and philanthropist, though he said of himself: "I am a showman by profession. and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me". According to his critics, his personal aim was "to put money in his own coffers." He is widely credited with coining the adage "There's a sucker born every minute", although no proof can be found of him saying this. Barnum became a small business owner in his early twenties and founded a weekly newspaper before moving to New York City in 1834. He embarked on an entertainment career, first with a variety troupe called "Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater", and soon after by purchasing Scudder's American Museum which he renamed after himself. He used the museum as a platform to promote hoaxes and human curiosities such as the Fiji mermaid and General Tom Thumb. In 1850, he promoted the American tour of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, paying her an unprecedented $1,000 a night for 150 nights. He suffered economic reversals in the 1850s due to bad investments, as well as years of litigation and public humiliation, but he used a lecture tour as a temperance speaker to emerge from debt. His museum added America's first aquarium and expanded the wax-figure department. Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican for Fairfield, Connecticut. He spoke before the legislature concerning the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude: "A human soul, 'that God has created and Christ died for,' is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit". He was elected in 1875 as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut where he worked to improve the water supply, bring gas lighting to streets, and enforce liquor and prostitution laws. He was also instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital in 1878 and was its first president. Nevertheless, the circus business, begun when he was 60 years old, was the source of much of his enduring fame. He established "P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome" in 1870, a traveling circus, menagerie, and museum of "freaks" which adopted many names over the years. Barnum was married to Charity Hallett from 1829 until her death in 1873, and they had four children. In 1874, a few months after his wife's death, he married Nancy Fish, his friend's daughter who was 40 years his junior. They were married until 1891 when Barnum died of a stroke at his home. He was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, Bridgeport, which he designed himself.
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Barrera, Cordelia E. The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature. Lubbock. 2021. Texas Tech University Press. 9781682831250. 224 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In the American Southwest, Hispano, Indian, and Euro-American cultures display conflicting and competing avenues for legitimacy. Examining literature of the region, The Haunted Southwest makes use of theories of place, space, and haunting to show how memory instills an ethic and orientation tied to embodied knowledge. American modernist ideologies accelerated the erasure of indigenous histories and ways of being-in-the-world. The Haunted Southwest digs under spatial geography to expose sites where colonial and colonized cultures intersect and overlay to create a palimpsest haunted by history. These sites emerge as environments of memory—places of synthesis and renewal for indigenous and mestiza/o subjects. Pressing the need to disturb narratives within the “bordered frontier” foregrounds a moral imperative for place-making in the US-Mexico Borderlands. In this way, this book situates region and place as generative sites of ideology and ethnic identity that more broadly signify sustainable practices on the Borderlands. A primary goal is to demonstrate how a focus on the political and social forces of haunting embeds a moral and ethical framework that speaks to our most pressing contemporary environmental and social justice concerns. Through analysis and resituation of border rituals and celebrations, alongside works by Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others, author Cordelia E. Barrera argues that an eco-spatial poetics attuned to multivocality within postmodern narratives breaks open haunted sites and allows us to re-map landscapes as a repository of ancestral traces and on ethical grounds.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cordelia E. Barrera is associate professor of English at Texas Tech University, specializing in Latina/o literatures and the American Southwest as well as US border theory, third space feminist theory, popular culture, and film. She writes movie reviews for the borderlands journal LareDOS.
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Barresi, Dorothy. What We Did While We Made More Guns. Pittsburgh. 2018. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822965237. Pitt Poetry Series. 6 x 9. 104 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The poems in What We Did While We Made More Guns investigate the place where economic failure meets a widening acculturation of violence - a kind of Great Acceleration of soul extinction set in this spectacularly uneasy moment in American history. Cutting, comic, sorrowful, at times terrified, at times resolute, the poems tilt along the high cliff's edge of identity anxiety and American moral uncertainty, where each of us plays our part in the business of dispossession or resistance. Building themselves out of jazzed-up verbal velocities and wounded (in)sincerity, the poems counsel resilience against all forms of battery, mortal, spiritual, financial. They are pattern-makers in the dark. They talk back to God. They take into themselves what cannot be taken back: the news that forty-six million Americans have “slipped” below the poverty line; that guns discharge monstrously banal virility; that a black woman pulled over for a routine traffic violation dies by strangulation in her jail cell; that we buy and sell the myth of the American Dream as though our lives depended on it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dorothy Barresi is the author of four previous books of poetry: American Fanatics; Rouge Pulp; The Post-Rapture Diner, winner of an American Book Award, and All of the Above, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is professor of English and creative writing at California State University, Northridge.
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Barrett, Andrea. Lucid Stars. New York. 1988. Delta. 0440550009. 328 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - What begins as a classic boy-meets-girl tale in 1955 becomes something far different when marriage and two children do not bring a family closer together. Lucid Stars is the moving story of how one family learns to survive by becoming a planetary system that just happens to be missing its sun.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel was a finalist for the 2013 Story Prize. Barrett was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown until the publication of Ship Fever, a collection of novella and short stories that won the National Book Award in 1996. Barrett's work has been published in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review, among other places. Her fiction and essays have been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and other anthologies. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Her work reflects her lifelong interest in science, and women in science. Many of her characters are scientists, often 19th-century biologists. As in the work of William Faulkner, some of her characters have appeared in more than one story or novel. In an appendix to her recent novel, The Air We Breathe (2007), Barrett supplied a family tree, making clear the characters' relationships that began in Ship Fever. Although each novel and story is self-contained, the reader comprehends an added dimension when familiar with the characters' previous histories. Barrett teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina. She was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts. Barrett also teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
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Barrett, Andrea. Secret Harmonies. New York. 1989. Delacorte Press. 0385297718. 245 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Andrea Barrett creates a wonderful portrait of a family struggling to make sense of their lives in western Massachusetts. When childhood sweethearts Reba Dwyer and Luke Wyatt marry, they expect no surprises. But now that Luke is her husband, discord Reba's life. An utterly absorbing, moving story of a couple and the eccentric constellation of loved ones swirling around them. To coincide with the release of her new novel The Middle Kingdom, here is Barrett's second novel available in paperback. Hailed as 'remarkably touching' (The Los Angeles Times), this is a portrait of people struggling to make sense of their lives in the rural hills of western Massachusettes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel was a finalist for the 2013 Story Prize. Barrett was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown until the publication of Ship Fever, a collection of novella and short stories that won the National Book Award in 1996. Barrett's work has been published in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review, among other places. Her fiction and essays have been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and other anthologies. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Her work reflects her lifelong interest in science, and women in science. Many of her characters are scientists, often 19th-century biologists. As in the work of William Faulkner, some of her characters have appeared in more than one story or novel. In an appendix to her recent novel, The Air We Breathe (2007), Barrett supplied a family tree, making clear the characters' relationships that began in Ship Fever. Although each novel and story is self-contained, the reader comprehends an added dimension when familiar with the characters' previous histories. Barrett teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina. She was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts. Barrett also teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
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Barrett, Andrea. The Middle Kingdom. New York. 1991. Pocket Books. 0671729608. National Book Award Winning Author. 279 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A woman attending an international science conference falls forever out of love with her husband and very much in love with China and its magnificent culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel was a finalist for the 2013 Story Prize. Barrett was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown until the publication of Ship Fever, a collection of novella and short stories that won the National Book Award in 1996. Barrett's work has been published in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review, among other places. Her fiction and essays have been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and other anthologies. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Her work reflects her lifelong interest in science, and women in science. Many of her characters are scientists, often 19th-century biologists. As in the work of William Faulkner, some of her characters have appeared in more than one story or novel. In an appendix to her recent novel, The Air We Breathe (2007), Barrett supplied a family tree, making clear the characters' relationships that began in Ship Fever. Although each novel and story is self-contained, the reader comprehends an added dimension when familiar with the characters' previous histories. Barrett teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina. She was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts. Barrett also teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
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Barry, Lynda. Cruddy. New York. 1999. Simon & Schuster. 0684829746. 305 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping acid, a sixteen-year-old curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom and begins to write. Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. The girl is Roberta Rohbeson, and her rant against a world bounded by 'the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road' soon becomes a detailed account of another story, one that she has kept silent since she was eleven. Darkly funny and resonant with humanity, Cruddy, masterfully intertwines Roberta's stories - part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz. These stories, the backbone of Roberta's short life, include a one-way trip across America fueled by revenge and greed and a vivid cast of characters, starring Roberta's dangerous father, the owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar-cum-slaughterhouse, and runaway adolescents. With a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lynda Barry (born Linda Jean Barry; January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist, author, and teacher. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999. Three years later she published One! Hundred! Demons!, a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography". What It Is (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity; it won the comics industry's 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, Comics Alliance listed Barry as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition, and she received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. In July 2016, she was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Barry, Quan. Asylum. Pittsburgh. 2001. University of Pittsburgh Press. 0822957698. Pitt Poetry Series. 75 pages. paperback. Cover art: ‘De materia medica’ of Dioscorides, c. 512 A.D.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and 2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland Authors. Quan Barry's stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath's Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix. Asylum is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced--both real and fictional. In 'some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked' the piano player from Casablanca is fleshed out in ways the film didn't allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems. Barry engages with the world--the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war--but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual's existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, 'Where is it written that we should want to be saved?' Ultimately, Asylum finds a haven by not looking away.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You're Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Barry, Quan. Controvertibles. Pittsburgh. 2004. University of Pittsburgh Press. 0822958600. Pitt Poetry Series. 61 pages. paperback. Cover art (overall and detia;l views): ‘St. George,’ Dosso Dossi, 1513-1515, Cover design by Amanda Okopski.
DESCRIPTION - Controvertibles features more of the refined brilliance and delicate lyricism of this poet, cast in a more meditative mode. Throughout, she examines cultural objects by lifting them out of their usual settings and repositioning them in front of new, disparate backdrops. Doug Flutie's famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bob Beamon's world-record-setting long jump in the 1968 Olympics is slowed down and examined in the style of The Matrix's revolutionary bullet time. Samantha Smith, Richard Nixon, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, the largo from Handel's Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are among the many disparate people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of existence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You're Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Barry, Quan. Loose Strife. Pittsburgh. 2015. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822963295. Pitt Poetry Series. 80 pages. paperback. Cover art: Michael Velliquette, ‘Chromasoul I,’ 2012. Cover design by Joel W. Coggins.
DESCRIPTION - Past praise for Water Puppets: ‘The vocabulary [Barry] employs. is stark and stunning, a victory against these brutal themes. There can be no denial: the winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry is a demanding, worthwhile read.' - TriQuarterly. ‘Above all, [Barry] forces us to remember what we don't want to see, to hold our inhumanity up against the ‘shards of beauty' in the world, so that we may not forget what it is that gives our lives meaning.' - Iowa Review. ‘Some will find Barry's subjects - genocidal war, pornography, the slaughter of Thanksgiving turkeys - disconcerting, but she treats them with a candor, persistence, and tonal control that aims to question and comprehend rather than simply indict or dismiss. An engrossing collection.' - Library Journal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You're Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Barry, Quan. She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. New York. 2015. Pantheon. 9780307911773. 273 pages. hardcover. jacket image based on a woodcut print by Biho Takahashi. Jacket design by Joan Wong.
DESCRIPTION - Quan Barry's luminous fiction debut brings us the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the country's reunification, a child gifted with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead. At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River on the night of the full moon. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam we've never encountered before: through Rabbit's inexplicable but radiant intuition, we are privy to an intimate version of history, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations through the chaos of postwar reunification. With its use of magical realism - Rabbit's ability to ‘hear' the dead - the novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one woman's struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You're Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Barry, Quan. Water Puppets. Pittsburgh. 2011. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822961604. Pitt Poetry Series. 74 pages. paperback. Cover art by Glow Images. Cover design by Joel W. Coggins.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. In her third poetry collection, Quan Barry explores the universal image of war as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Vietnam, the country of her birth. In the long poem “meditations” Barry examines her own guilt in initially supporting the invasion of Iraq. Throughout the manuscript she investigates war and its aftermath by negotiating between geographically disparate landscapes - from the genocide in the Congo - to a series of pros poem “snapshots” of modern day Vietnam. Despite the gravity of war, Barry also turns her signature lyricism to other topics such as the beauty of Peru or the paintings of Ana Fernandez.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You're Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Barth, John. Chimera. New York. 1972. Random House. 0394481399. 309 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by George Giusti.
DESCRIPTION - In CHIMERA John Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called ‘stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,' Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths' relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, ‘there's every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.'. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. Giles Goat-Boy. Garden City. 1966. Doubleday. 744 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is the 4th novel by American writer John Barth. It's metafictional comic novel in which the world is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of the Cold War. Its title character is a human boy raised as a goat, who comes to believe he is the Grand Tutor, the predicted Messiah. The book was a surprise bestseller for the previously obscure Barth, & in the 1960s had a cult status. It marks Barth's leap into American postmodern Fabulism. In this outrageously farcical adventure, hero George Giles sets out to conquer the terrible Wescac computer system that threatens to destroy his community in this brilliant "fantasy of theology, sociology & sex"--Time
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. Garden City. 1968. Doubleday. 201 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. Sabbatical: A Romance. New York. 1982. Putnam. 0399127232. 266 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Subtitled "a romance", Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature - part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe - and her husband Fenwick Scott Key Turner, a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers, a direct descendant of the author of "The Star Spangled Banner" and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Seven years into their marriage, they decide to take a sabbatical, a sailboat journey on which they sum up their years together and try to make important decisions about the years ahead.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. The Friday Book. New York. 1984. Putnam. 0399129979. 281 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - John Barth's first work of nonfiction is what he calls "an arrangement of essays and occasional lectures, some previously published, most not, most on matters literary, some not, accumulated over thirty years or so of writing, teaching, and teaching writing." With the full measure of playfulness and erudition that he brings to his novels, Barth glances into his crystal ball to speculate on the future of literature and the literature of the future. He also looks back upon historical fiction and fictitious history and discusses prose, poetry, and all manner of letters: "Real letters, forged letters, doctored letters. and of course alphabetical letters, the atoms of which the universe of print is made."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston. 1991. Little Brown. 0316082511. 573 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - While retracing the legendary voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, journalist Simon William Behler finds himself in Sindbad's household in medieval Baghdad and competes with Sindbad in a storytelling marathon in the hopes of finding a way back to the modern world
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. The Sot-Weed Factor. Garden City. 1960. Doubleday. 806 pages. hardcover. Jacket by Edward Gorey.
DESCRIPTION - Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem. On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has a lasting relevance for readers of all times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barth, John. The Tidewater Tales. New York. 1987. Putnam. 0399132473. 655 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - As they cruise around Chesapeake Bay aboard their sailboat, Peter Sagamore and his very pregnant wife, Katherine, reveal the stories of their past and present.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack', was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration' at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,' he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction' of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist' novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist' novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [. .] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.' In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.' While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up' tradition; Barth's
DESCRIPTION of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author'.
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Barthelme, Donald. Amateurs. New York. 1976. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374103798. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of stories by a master of deadpan wit and magical mockery.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. City Life. New York. 1970. Farrar Straus Giroux. 168 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Donald Barthelme's third collection of short stories, and an example of a strand of American writing that draws on surrealism, Kafka and Borges. Barthelme uses exact and simple language to describe dreamlike rearrangements of private, literary and public situations, in a play of elegant anachronisms and ambiguities. Includes: Views of my father weeping.-- Paraguay.--The falling dog.--At the Tolstoy Museum.--The policemen's ball.--The glass mountain.--The explanation.--Kierkegaard unfair to Schlegel.--The phantom of the opera's friend.--Sentence.--Bone bubbles.--On angels.--Brain damage.--City life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Garden City. 1965. Anchor/Doubleday. 138 pages. paperback. Cover Design By Edward Gorey.
DESCRIPTION - Donald Barthelme's first short story collection, for which he received critical acclaim for his original take on the short story style and form.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Boston. 1964. Little Brown. 183 pages. hardcover. Dust jacket designed by Milton Glaser.
DESCRIPTION - In 1964, Barthelme collected his early stories in Come Back, Dr. Caligari, for which he received considerable critical acclaim as an innovator of the short story form. His style (fictional and popular figures in absurd situations, e.g., the Batman-inspired "The Joker's Greatest Triumph"), spawned a number of imitators and would help to define the next several decades of short fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Forty Stories. New York. 2005. Penguin Books. 9780142437810. Introduction by Dave Eggers. 272 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Donald Barthelme is a master of the unexpected, a writer who bends fiction into strange and exhilarating shapes. In Forty Stories, the companion to Sixty Stories, he delivers a dazzling collection of tales―each one a collision of wit, absurdity, and sharp social insight. With a signature postmodern style that blends pastiche, collage, and metafiction, Barthelme reinvents storytelling at every turn. He takes on subjects as varied as Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood, modern courtship, marriage, divorce, and armadillos, but his true fascination lies in language itself―how it twists, contradicts, and reveals the absurdity of contemporary life. Packed with irony, surreal imagery, and deadpan humor, these stories probe authority, relationships, and existential anxieties, all while keeping the reader deliciously off-balance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Forty Stories. New York. 1987. Putnam. 0399132996. 256 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - William H. Gass has written of Donald Barthelme that "he has permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short fiction." In Forty Stories , the companion volume to Sixty Stories , we encounter a dazzling array of Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood , modern courtship, marriage and divorce, armadillos, and other unique Barthelmean flights of fancy. These pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces tangle with the ludicrous, pose questions that remain unresolved, and challenge familiar bits of language heretofore unexamined. Forty Stories demonstrates Barthelme's unrivaled ability to surprise, to stimulate, and to explore. CONTENTS: Chablis; On the deck; The genius; Opening; Sindbad; The explanation; Concerning the bodyguard; Rif; The palace at four A.M.; Jaws; Conversations with Goethe; Affection; The new owner; Paul Klee; Terminus; The educational experience; Bluebeard; Departures; Visitors; The wound; At the Tolstoy Museum; The flight of pigeons from the palace; A few moments of sleeping and waking; The temptation of St. Anthony; Sentence; Pepperoni; Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby; Lightning; The catechist; Porcupines at the university; Sakrete; Captain Blood; 110 West Sixty-first Street; The film; Overnight to many distant cities; Construction; Letters to the editore; Great days; The baby; January.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Great Days. New York. 1979. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374166285. 172 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of stories marks a departure in Barthelme's work with the introduction of a new mode in which he abandons all forms of characterization other than dialogue in an attempt to shift and alter reader expectations and perceptions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Guilty Pleasures. New York. 1974. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374167370. 165 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Donald Barthelme’s first book of non-fiction which consists of parodies, political satire, and fables.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Overnight To Many Distant Cities. New York. 1983. Putnam. 0399128689. 174 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of eleven astonishing short stories focus on a group of people facing unusual situations or turning-points in their lives and the diverse consequences and alternatives of their futures.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Paradise. New York. 1986. Putnam. 0399129219. 208 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - As a ghost for a year, Simon, a fifty-year-old man, wanders through New York City holding an imaginative conversation with the idea of Paradise and encountering such purposeful individuals as an angry lawyer, a sensual poet, and his own illegitimate half-brother.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Sadness. New York. 1972. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374253331. 183 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Masterpieces of wit, whimsy and satire - A saint struggling with the greatest of all temptations: daily life; A genius proposes a world inventory of genius to create a better life, but he cannot bear the company; Family life trembles with enough animus to bring down an elephant; A woman leaves her husband and enters the red velvet map of new life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Sixty Stories. New York. 2003. Penguin Books. 9780142437391. Introduction by David Gates. 480 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Sixty Stories. New York. 1981. Putnam. 0399126597. 457 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A retrospective collection of Donald Barthelme's most notable writings includes "Me and Miss Mandible," "Views of My Father Weeping," "The King of Jazz," nine new stories, and other outstanding selections
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. New York. 1975. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374135355. 177 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - THE DEAD FATHER is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. The King. New York. 1990. Harper & Row. 0060161957. Illustrated by Barry Mosher. 159 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In The King, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur, Donald Barthelme moves the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table to the cruelty of the Second World War. Dunkirk has fallen, Europe is at the breaking point, Ezra Pound and Lord Haw-Haw are poisoning the radio waves, Mordred has fled to Nazi Germany, and King Arthur and his worshipful Knights are deep in the fighting. When the Holy Grail presents itself--which is, in this version, the atomic bomb, "a superweapon if you will, with which we can chastise and thwart the enemy"--they must decide whether to hew to their knightly ways or adopt a modern ruthlessness. Barthelme makes brilliant comic use of anachronism to show that war is center stage in the theater of human absurdity and cruelty. But Arthur, in deciding to decline the power of the Grail, announces his unwillingness to go along: "It's not the way we wage war. The essence of our calling is right behavior, and this false Grail is not a knightly weapon."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. The Teachings of Don B. New York. 1992. Turtle Bay Books. 0679409823. Editied by Kim Herzinger. Introduction by Thomas Pynchon. 352 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of writings by the late author features previously unpublished works, including stage and radio plays, collage stories, and other short works
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Donald. Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. New York. 1968. Farrar Straus Giroux. 170 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - "Fragments are the only forms I trust" is one fat clue the reader might net as to the run of the current in these strange, witty, surreal short stories. At first bewildered glance, each piece seems a montage of floating, congruent, non-congruent, time-dandling events, words, things; a montage of meaningless (for the moment) souvenirs. A mammoth balloon is inflated over the city with much talk by the natives after the artifact; Indians storm the city in spite of the excellent hand-sanded table (birch veneer on black wrought iron legs); two emphatic creatures named Edward and Pia exist in instant replays and talk in stereo static: a tiny President (forty-eight inches tall at the shoulder) may or may not cause intermittent and mass unconsciousness; and Kellerman, "gigantic with gin, runs through the park at noon with his naked father slung under one arm." Meaning may emerge, blur forth, but in this glittering clatterbang of existence no overview is possible ("The moon hates us"). With elegance and wicked glee, the author has produced hitherto buried delights in the "Isle of Vernacular." Each fragment has its visual and verbal surprise. Baffling, brilliant, and very special, this is Bertie Wooster's "Guernica."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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Barthelme, Frederick. Chroma. New York. 1987. Simon & Schuster. 0671542559. 173 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Barthelme creates an unforgettably wistful cast of characters, ordinary people moving carefully and curiously through a gently painful world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Frederick. Moon Deluxe. New York. 1983. Simon & Schuster. 0671472682. 240 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of eighteen stories depicts in clearly observed detail the texture of modern life, while illuminating the pathos and strangeness that subtly permeates the everyday.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Frederick. Natural Selection. New York. 1990. Viking Press. 0670831131. 211 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Barthelme's classic novel about love, marriage, and one man's search for something more. Peter Wexler is unhappy. He's forty and obsessed with what's wrong in the world, including his marriage, a 'thirtysomething' version of Ozzie and Harriet. Deciding a change of scenery might help put his life back in order, Peter leaves his wonderful wife and their ten-year-old son in search of a resolution to the confusion, estrangement, fatigue, and adultery that have confounded his life. Natural Selection is an intimate novel about a man getting smart, and getting there a little later than he should have. It's caustic and subtle, slick and funny, charming, deeply melancholy, and more than anything else, true.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Frederick. Second Marriage. New York. 1984. Simon & Schuster. 0671474413. 217 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The marriage of Henry and Theo--her first, his second--falls on strange times and the two learn the virtues of patience and understanding as they grow into a mature relationship.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Frederick. The Brothers. New York. 1993. Viking Press. 0670832421. 262 pages. hardcover. Cover: Michael Ian Kaye/Melissa Hayden.
DESCRIPTION - After Del Tribute almost sleeps with his brother's sexually edgy wife, Margaret, The Brothers sets out to trace and detail the intricate pattern of consequence of this near-indiscretion. In a remarkable performance that redefines and extends the territory of Frederick Barthelme's fictions, the love and desire of these brothers is laid open, explored, experienced. Along with his new girlfriend, Jen, a rough kid who publishes her own little terrorzine and just finished living in the back of a van with a guy who sells bikinis to tourists, Del tries to repair the damage he imagines is done to his relation with his brother Bud, and in the process tries to recapture and reinvent the sense of family long missing from his life. This all happens in Biloxi, on the dirty, soured, dinky coast of Mississippi, pretty much as it is right now: blisteringly hot, sandy, under construction, but still oddly foreign and magical. With these middle-class folks as his primary cast, Barthelme deftly demonstrates that there is enough beauty and wonder in ordinary life to satisfy all of us, if we only watch out for it-watch out for the light decaying over black trees, the raid that creeps up windshields, the sight and sound and smell of everyday. In The Brothers, bit players skewer the stiffs of the culture, the runaways add runaway priests, the do-gooders, the way-too-earnest and the way-too-cynical, the fairly smart, the broadcast morons who for God knows what reasons we attend night after night. And when they drive in this novel-and they do drive-the highway is a big sculpture, a stage for drifters, boneheads, self-parodies, error-handlers, a ride-through zoo where we witness the many edges of cultural disenchantment, where we are the exhibit and the sightseer, too. At heart The Brothers is concerned with loyalty, fidelity, decency. It is a work as rich in depth and detail as it is reflective on its jewel-like, sun-splintered surface.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Frederick. Tracer. New York. 1985. Simon & Schuster. 0671542532. 126 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Weaves a tale of tangled loves and desires in the story of a newly divorced man named Martin who decides to spend a weekend with his ex-sister-in-law Dominica, and promptly becomes her lover.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Frederick. Two Against One. New York. 1988. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1555842143. 270 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When his estranged wife, Elise, arrives unannounced on Edward's fortieth birthday, a series of events are set in motion that reveal the workings of a twenty-year marriage.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
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Barthelme, Peter. Push, Meet Shove. New York. 1987. St Martin's Press. 0312010648. 200 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION -
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PETER ROHE BARTHELME was an advertising executive, an entrepreneur, and a writer who published 3 novels and countless shorter works. He asked for little and gave much. Born in Houston in 1939 where he remained until he escaped the "Rat Race" in 1996 by moving to Seadrift TX to pursue redfish, whooping cranes and holes in one. Barthelme died Friday, June 11, 2010. He was 71.
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Barthelme, Peter. Tart, With a Silken Finish. New York. 1988. St Martin's Press. 0312018320. 199 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When Beaumont sees a certain balance sheet on a banker's desk, his concern for getting an advertising account becomes a battle to save his life, as some very powerful people are out to destroy him.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PETER ROHE BARTHELME was an advertising executive, an entrepreneur, and a writer who published 3 novels and countless shorter works. He asked for little and gave much. Born in Houston in 1939 where he remained until he escaped the "Rat Race" in 1996 by moving to Seadrift TX to pursue redfish, whooping cranes and holes in one. Barthelme died Friday, June 11, 2010. He was 71.
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Barthelme, Steve. And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story. Baltimore. 1987. Johns Hopkins University Press. 0801835437. 1st Book. 160 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of stories profiles America's aging young, overeducated and undermotivated desperate characters whose relationships fall apart, explode in violence, or simply, slowly slide away
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steven Barthelme (born 1947) is the author of numerous short stories and essays. He was born to Donald Barthelme Snr. and mother Helen Bechtold of Philadelphia who had four other children. His father was a modernist architect in Houston. Steven Barthelme attended Johns Hopkins University. His brothers Donald Jnr. and Frederick also became notable authors. His published works include, And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss (with brother Frederick Barthelme), and The Early Posthumous Work (essays which originally appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford American, Elle Decor, and other publications). Barthelme is said to write in a distinctive "post-Southern" style. He is the former director of The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He won Pushcart Prizes in 1993 and 2005, and in 2004 he won the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award for work published in Yale Review.[3]
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Bartlett, Jennifer. History of the Universe. New York. 1985. Moyer Bell/Nimbus Books. 0918825121. 12 black and white photographs. 197 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Jennifer Bartlett’s first published novel, History of the Universe, has many remarkable qualities, the least being that it is one of the few autobiographical fictions, a roman à clef, by a practicing American artist. But Bartlett’s novel is remarkable neither for this reason nor for its being an artist’s fiction—a place it shares with fictions of such other artist writers as André Breton, Wyndham Lewis, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. History of the Universe is simply in and of itself a striking, mature literary work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jennifer Bartlett (née Losch; March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022) was an American artist and novelist. She was best known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism. Many of her pieces were executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works.
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Bartlett, Jennifer. Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner. Tuscaloosa. University of Alabama Press. 9780817360818. Modern and Contemporary Poetics. 20 b&w figures(18 captions). 200 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The poet Larry Eigner (1927–1996) was a key figure in New American poetry, which grew out of the Black Mountain School and San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the Language poets. Eigner also had cerebral palsy as the result of an accident at birth. It is fortuitous that the poet lived his life in two locations vibrant in both poetics and disability activism. Except for brief periods attending camp and school, he lived with his parents in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until the age of 51. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, at the height of the disability rights movement. In the 1950s, Eigner attended Camp Jened, which later became famous in the film Crip Camp. Bartlett’s biography covers every significant phase of Eigner’s life: his childhood and young adulthood when he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with poets of the era; and after his move to Berkeley, the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators he established there. The result is a deeply insightful account of an utterly distinctive voice whose influence widens and deepens with each new generation that encounters him.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jennifer Bartlett is the author of four books of poetry. With Sheila Black and Michael Northen, she coedited Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Bartlett’s poetry, nonfiction, and curatorial work has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Typo, and many other places. With George Hart, she edited Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner.
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Bartlett, Mary Dougherty (editor). The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress. Albuquerque. 1986. New America In Association With The University of New Mexico Press. 0826308538. 132 pages. paperback. Cover: Sam English-'Himself and Others'.
DESCRIPTION - The 1970s and 1980s have witnessed a flowering of Native American literature. This collection of current works shows the astonishing variety of contemporary Indian fiction. Some of these pieces are deeply personal and direct; some are difficult and experimental. Several demonstrate the rich and often overlooked humor so pervasive in American Indian culture. Together, these excerpts present fascinating variations on the great themes of both Indian mythology and mainstream American literature. Some of the contributors are distinguished prize winners; some are better known as poets, critics, or scholars. They represent many tribes and many parts of the country" Includes selections by Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Paula Gunn Allen, Louis Owens and others.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY -
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Bashir, Samiya A. Field Theories. Callicoon. 2017. Nightboat Books. 9781937658632. 117 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings, Newports, and love, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption vs. the whitebody's idealized reflection) with live Black bodies. Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love, intent, identity, hybridity, and how we embody these interstices. Albert Murray said, "The second law of thermodynamics ain't nothin' but the blues." So what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, and the world, and of how the world treats us?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body, and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman to receive the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Bashir moved to Los Angeles where she became involved in theatre, before pursuing a career in writing. She attended the University of California and became the institution's poet laureate in 1994. After leaving California and moving east, Bashir worked in magazine publishing and briefly taught high school. After moving to New York City in 1997, she continued to write poetry and essays, publishing three full-length collections of poetry.
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Bass, Rick. Oil Notes. New York. 1989. Houghton Mifflin. 0395486750. Drawings by Elizabeth Hughes. 20 line drawings. 173 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Rick Bass brings a lyric imagination to the oil geologist's craft. Digging for oil is a way of digging deep into human experience, a subterranean exploration of self. And nothing escapes this writer's eye or imagination.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rick Bass (born March 7, 1958) is an American writer and an environmental activist.
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Bass, Rick. Platte River. New York. 1994. Houghton Mifflin. 0395680808. 145 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Rick Bass is one of the foremost writers of his generation. His astonishing work charges headlong past the hard surface of modern life to illuminate man and his relationship to the natural world. Platte River is a collection of three novellas, each a singular exploration of the human heart set against the backdrop of God's creation. Filled with arresting images-chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river-'Mahatma Joe' is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who grows obsessed with his vision of the world. In 'Field Events,' a woman falls in love with a man even more enormous than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, 'Platte River,' portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and his quest for love. In his latest literary effort, the award-winning author of The Ninemile Wolves explores the human heart amid the beauty and brutality of the natural world--a stunning achievement in the tradition of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rick Bass (born March 7, 1958) is an American writer and an environmental activist.
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Bass, Rick. The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness: Novellas. Boston. 1997. Houghton Mifflin. 0395717582. 189 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - GQ called the three short novels in this collection 'wondrous.' A woman returns to live on her family's west Texas ranch. .a man tracks his wife through a winter wilderness. .an ancient ocean buried in the foothills of the Appalachians becomes a battleground for a young wildcat oilman and his aging mentor. Here is Bass at his magical, passionate, and lyrical best.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rick Bass (born March 7, 1958) is an American writer and an environmental activist.
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Bass, Rick. The Watch. New York. 1989. Norton. 039302623x. 190 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In a collection of stories exploring the meaning of time in human encounters, some characters fight against it, others strive to recapture more innocent times, and still others create their own time and place.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rick Bass (born March 7, 1958) is an American writer and an environmental activist.
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Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Berkeley. 1986. University of California Press. 0520058224. Illustrated by Barry Moser. 268 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Barry Moser.
DESCRIPTION - Since it first appeared in 1900, THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ has brought wonderment and joy to succeeding generations of adults and children alike. In it all the special fears and delightful fantasies of a child's dreamworld come to life as the cyclone lifts Dorothy from Kansas and deposits her in the enchanted country of the Munchkins. Here she meets the famous Oz characters: the Scarecrow the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wicked Witch of the West. And here her adventures along the Yellow Brick Road on the way to the Emerald City and the Wizard himself evoke the rich, universal appeal of a classic fairytale. THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ Is Indeed a cherished part of our national heritage. ‘I have never known or heard of an American man or woman who has started to read THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ and put it down without finishing it. I hope there will never be one.' - JAMES THURBER.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 - May 6, 1919) was an American author of children's books, best known for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen novel sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a host of other works (55 novels in total, plus four ‘lost' novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings), and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen. His works anticipated such century-later commonplaces as television, augmented reality, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), women in high risk, action-heavy occupations (Mary Louise in the Country), and the ubiquity of advertising on clothing (Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work).
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Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays On Fiction. Saint Paul. 1997. Graywolf Press. 155597256x. 245 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - As much a rumination on the state of literature as a technical manual for aspiring writers, Burning Down the House has been enjoyed by readers and taught in classrooms for more than a decade. Readers are rewarded with thoughtful analysis, humorous one-liners, and plenty of brushfires that continue burning long after the book is closed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West. Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the Creative Writing MFA program. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
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Baxter, Charles. First Light. New York. 1987. Viking Press. 0670817015. 286 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Hugh Welch has cared for his little sister Dorsey ever since they were children, when Dorsey looked at him as though he were a god. But when Dorsey returns to their small Michigan hometown with a successful career as an astrophysicist and a happy family life, Hugh, who has a long habit of worrying about his sister, realizes that it’s his own life he has to cure, not Dorsey’s. As they explore their complicated history over one hot Fourth of July weekend, they’ll come to terms with the experiences that put such distance between them and discover the imperfect love that ties them as siblings.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West. Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the Creative Writing MFA program. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
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Baxter, Charles. Through the Safety Net. New York. 1985. Viking Press. 0670804770. 216 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Baxter dives into the undercurrents of middle-class American life in these eleven arresting, often mesmerizing stories. Whether they know it or not, Baxter's characters are floating above an abyss of unruly desire, inexplicable dread, unforeseen tragedy, and sudden moments of grace. A drunken graduate student hurtles cheerfully through a snowstorm to rescue a fiancee who no longer wants him. A hospital maintenance worker makes a perverse bid for his place in the sunlight of celebrity. A man and a woman who have lost their only child cling fiercely to the one thing they have left of her--their grief. Lit by the quiet lightning of Baxter's prose, Through the Safety Net is filled with rare artistry and feeling.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West. Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the Creative Writing MFA program. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
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Bayliss, John F. (editor). Black Slave Narratives. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by John F. Bayliss. Collier African American Library. 221 pages. paperback. 04850.
DESCRIPTION - "THE SLAVE NARRATIVES ARE THE BLUES IN PROSE." - John F. Bayliss, in the Introduction. Many are familiar with the name of Nat Turner, but few have read his original confession, which is included in Black Slave Narratives - the most extensive collection of slave memoirs ever published in paperback. Dating from 1788 to retrospective reminiscences recorded in 1937, this fascinating, relevant, and totally authentic anthology stands as a literary as well as a historical event. More than twenty contributors depict a panorama of slave life from Africa to the U.S., among them: the Africans Gustavus Vassa and Venture Smith; famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass; the first black novelist, William Wells Brown; possibly the original Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson; and the indomitable Harriet Tubman. Elizabeth Keckley, maid and confidante to Mrs. Lincoln, tells of life in White House and the assassination of President Lincoln, James Weldon Johnson recalls his escape to the sea - and whaling - at the time Melville sailed the oceans. Harriet Jacobs tells of the aftereffects of Nat Turner's rebellion, and Henry "Box" Brown remembers his fabled flight to freedom in a small box. The book is a picture of slavery seen from all perspectives: "The Africans," "Master and Slave," "Slaveholder Brutality," "The Family," "The Women," "Superstition," "Adventure," "Revolt," and "Escape.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOHN F. BAYLISS is the internationally known editor of Negro American Literature Forum and a lecturer in English at Indiana State University.
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Beachy-Quick, Dan. gentlessness: Poems. North Adams. 2015. Tupelo Press. 9781936797578. 104 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Describing his new book as “an intimate primer to a history of literary epochs,” Dan Beachy-Quick summons his belief that tradition and experiment are mutually embracing, and his curiosity about humble forms of song and rhyme as figures of enchantment that induce the most primal modes of perception. gentlessness is the work of a poetic archaeologist who finds relict layers of meaning still alive in traditional measures and forms. “By means both gentle and less than gentle, these poems make space for us to consider our ideas of ourselves, of the divine, of our cultural and literary inheritances, and the language we use to create and hold them. Uncannily beautiful.” - Mary Szybist. “These are lines to be read in all the stillness you can find.” - Jean Valentine.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Author or co-author of fourteen books of poetry, exploratory prose, and fiction, Dan Beachy-Quick's previous Tupelo volumes are Mulberry (2006), This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009), and Circle's Apprentice (2011). His work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, and he has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his family.
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Beatty, Jan. Jackknife: New and Selected Poems. Pittsburgh. 2017. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822964490. Pitt Poetry Series. 168 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Beatty's lyric comes from the edge of a knife that continues to carve honest beauty from an America we learn only from gifted hands. The arc of this poet's brave heart moving through her life brings back to us the song of who we are. This is a fabulous collection.' - Afaa M. Weaver. ‘A jackknife is a large pocket-knife. The bend of cab and trailer. A V-shaped dive. The sharp turn of language into bastard diaries in ‘Lake is a red pigment,' pure lineage from the furnace of the word. With volcano, rail car, humor and pain, Beatty is a throne of fire on blotter-acid imagery.' - Diane Glancy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jan Beatty's fourth full-length collection, The Switching/Yard, was named one of ‘30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry' by Library Journal. The Huffington Post named her as one of ten women writers for ‘required reading.' Her other books include Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Beatty is host and producer of Prosody, on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring the work of national writers. She is director of Creative Writing at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and teaches in the MFA program.
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Beatty, Jan. The Switching/Yard. Pittsburgh. 2013. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822962410. Pitt Poetry Series. 85 pages. paperback. Cover art by James Weeks, 'Winter Lights, edmonton, Alberta, Canada.'.
DESCRIPTION - In Jan Beatty's fourth collection, The Switching/Yard, she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey--now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended
DESCRIPTION of ghost explorers. We see the open truck cab, the farm workers on the corner waiting for pick-up; we see the speaker returning west to find the long-abandoned story of the birthfather. There is no stable landscape here except the horizontal action of moving through. Landscape becomes story. In this extended tale of the idea of family, we find stand-ins for the father in the form of a hit man, Jim Morrison, and ultimately the unyielding road takes the place of the body. The Switching/Yard is at once the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where gender routinely shifts and switches, and the actual switching yard of the trains that run the inevitable tracks of this book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jan Beatty is the author of three previous poetry collections: Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2013, among other honors. Beatty is cohost and producer of Prosody, a weekly radio program featuring the work of national writers. She is the director of the creative writing program at Carlow University.
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Beatty, Paul. Slumberland. New York. 2008. Bloomsbury Books. 9781596912403. 245 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Patti Ratchford.
DESCRIPTION - The breakout novel from a literary virtuoso about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger. Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his incisive eye to man's search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world. After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little-known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic - and spiritual - other. Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born and raised in West Los Angeles. Paul Beatty (born June 9, 1962) received an M.A. in psychology from Boston University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. His first volume of poetry, BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK, was greeted enthusiastically by critics and was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 1991. His second, JOKER, JOKER, DEUCE, received similar acclaim. His work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including the Norton anthology NEXT: YOUNG AMERICAN WRITERS ON THE NEW GENERATION. Beatty received a New York State Fellow of the Arts Award for Poetry in 1993 and has just been awarded a S25,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. He has made several appearances on MTV, has been profiled in magazines ranging from Newsweek to Vibe to Harpers Bazaar, was the winner of the 1990 New York Poetry Slam, and has read from his work around the United States and in Europe.
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Beatty, Paul. The White Boy Shuffle. Boston. 1996. Houghton Mifflin. 0395742803. 1st Novel by Acclaimed African American Poet. 226 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michaela Sullivan. Jacket illustration by Calef Brown.
DESCRIPTION - Paul Beatty, on the basis of two slim collections of poetry - BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK and JOKER, JOKER, DEUCE - has been called ‘a West Coast word wizard' and the poet laureate of Generation X. He has performed his poetry on college campuses throughout the United States and Europe as well as on MTV; he has been lauded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and at thirty-three he has been deemed heir to Allen Ginsberg's oral tradition. His cultural landscape summons up music, sound bites, cartoons films, and video games. He uses the terms of pop culture to reveal its nonsense, and in his astonishing, partly autobiographical first novel, he brings his extraordinary talent for image, cadence, and rhythm to fiction. THE WHITE BOY SHUFFLE is a moving, deft satire on issues of race as well as the tale of the coming of age of Gunnar Kaufman a contemporary African American who is in no way typical. Unequivocally and without apology, Gunnar states that he is not the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. Indeed, he wishes he were, but fate has shorted him by six brothers and three uncles, cruelly cheating him out of his mythological inheritance. And thus, unforgettably, begins the story of Gunnar's rocky expedition to manhood. With his unparalleled ability to recreate the rhythms of everyday speech, to cut, mix, and re-combine language in order to evoke a whole new world of experience, Paul Beatty here establishes himself as one of the most original and inventive writers of our time. A combination of literary and street, at once intimate and breathtakingly expansive, THE WHITE BOY SHUFFLE is a multicultural, multi-generational epic that is exuberant, engaging, and in the moment. ‘In the aftermath of slavery, black Americans found little freedom. The shackles were off our ankles and wrists, but the they were not forgotten; our minds wore chains, even as our bodies mimed freedom. Paul Beatty's fiction breaks these spiritual shackles that so many of us wear. His irreverent and daring prose challenges our vision of ourselves and when his characters win the game of freedom, they won't be going to some Florida theme park.' - Walter Mosley.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born and raised in West Los Angeles. Paul Beatty (born June 9, 1962) received an M.A. in psychology from Boston University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. His first volume of poetry, BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK, was greeted enthusiastically by critics and was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 1991. His second, JOKER, JOKER, DEUCE, received similar acclaim. His work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including the Norton anthology NEXT: YOUNG AMERICAN WRITERS ON THE NEW GENERATION. Beatty received a New York State Fellow of the Arts Award for Poetry in 1993 and has just been awarded a S25,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. He has made several appearances on MTV, has been profiled in magazines ranging from Newsweek to Vibe to Harpers Bazaar, was the winner of the 1990 New York Poetry Slam, and has read from his work around the United States and in Europe.
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Beatty, Paul. Tuff. New York. 2000. Knopf. 0375401229. 262 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Alex Knowlton. Jacket design by Archie Ferguson.
DESCRIPTION - Fueled by the ferocious wit, outrageous come& and flat-out rage that made his debut novel, THE WHITE BOY SHUFFLE, one of the most passionately reviewed books of 1996 (‘A blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of Black American life' - New York Times; ‘As much in the tradition of Richard Pryor as Ralph Ellison' - The Village Voice), TUFF unleashes Paul Beatty's verbal dazzle and nothing-sacred sensibility on the story of a young black man coming of age on the streets and stoops of Spanish Harlem. Nineteen-year-old 320-pound Winston ‘Tuffy' Foshay - player king of a motley crew that includes his scheming, disabled best friend, Fariq, otherwise known as Smush; his Beat-poet, Black Panther father, Clifford; Inez, the unreconstructed Marxist revolutionary who raised him; and his bewildered mentor from the Big Brother program, the hapless African-American rabbi Spencer Throckmorton - is ready to make a change. So when Inez offers him $20,000 to run for city council, Tuffy gamely embarks on one of the most outlandish campaigns in political history, one that topples both his vision of the world and his place in it. Beatty's fierce gifts have never been more apparent: TUFF marks the return of one of this generation's freshest voices.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born and raised in West Los Angeles. Paul Beatty (born June 9, 1962) received an M.A. in psychology from Boston University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. His first volume of poetry, BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK, was greeted enthusiastically by critics and was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 1991. His second, JOKER, JOKER, DEUCE, received similar acclaim. His work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including the Norton anthology NEXT: YOUNG AMERICAN WRITERS ON THE NEW GENERATION. Beatty received a New York State Fellow of the Arts Award for Poetry in 1993 and has just been awarded a S25,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. He has made several appearances on MTV, has been profiled in magazines ranging from Newsweek to Vibe to Harpers Bazaar, was the winner of the 1990 New York Poetry Slam, and has read from his work around the United States and in Europe.
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Beaumont, Charles. Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories. New York. 2015. Penguin Books. 9780143107651. 322 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories - including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes - with a foreword by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by William Shatner. That Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone is only natural: for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. So take one uneasy step and fall headlong into his world: a world where lions stalk the plains, classics cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the Devil himself. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five stories that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes. This volume contains an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by William Shatner, two fellow science fiction luminaries who counted themselves among Beaumont's close friends.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 - February 21, 1967) was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, among them 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death. Novelist Dean Koontz has said, "Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre." Beaumont is also the subject of the documentary, Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man, by Jason V Brock. Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, the only child of Charles Hiram Nutt (an auditor of freight accounts for a railroad) and Violet "Letty" (Phillips) Nutt, a homemaker who had been a scenarist at Essanay Studios. His father was 55 when Charles was born; Letty, his mother, was nearly 20 years her husband's junior. Letty is known to have dressed young Charles in girls' clothes, and once threatened to kill his dog to punish him. These early experiences inspired the celebrated short story "Miss Gentilbelle", but according to Beaumont, "Football, baseball, and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world". School did not hold his attention, and his last name exposed him to ridicule, so Charles Nutt found solace as a teenager in science fiction. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade to join the army. He also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, disc jockey, usher, and dishwasher before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. During his time as an illustrator, he briefly used the pseudonyms Charles McNutt (circa 1947/48) and E.T. Beaumont (inspired by the city of Beaumont, located in East Texas), before settling on the name Charles Beaumont. He soon adopted this name legally and used it both personally and professionally for the rest of his life. In 1954, Playboy magazine selected his story "Black Country" to be the first work of short fiction to appear in its pages. It was also at about this time that Beaumont started writing for television and film. His cautionary fables include "The Beautiful People" (1952), about a rebellious adolescent girl in a future conformist society in which people are obligated to alter their physical appearance (adapted as an episode of Twilight Zone, "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"), and "Free Dirt" (1955), about a man who gorges on his entire vegetable harvest and dies from having consumed the magical soil he used to grow it. His short story "The Crooked Man" (also published by Playboy, in 1955) presents a dystopian future wherein heterosexuality is stigmatized in the same way that homosexuality then was, with heterosexual people living furtively like pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian people. In the story, a heterosexual man meets his lover in a gay orgy bar; they try to have sex in a curtained booth (she dressed in male drag) and are caught. Beaumont wrote several scripts for The Twilight Zone, including an adaptation of his own short story, "The Howling Man", about a prisoner who might be the Devil, and the hour-long "Valley of the Shadow", about a cloistered Utopia that refuses to share its startlingly advanced technology with the outside world. Beaumont scripted the film Queen of Outer Space from an outline by Ben Hecht, deliberately writing the screenplay as a comedic parody. According to Beaumont, the directorial style is not informed by his satiric intent. He penned one episode of the Steve Canyon TV show, "Operation B-52", in which Canyon and his crew attempt to set a new speed record in a B-52 accompanied by a newsman who hates Air Force pilots. Beaumont was much admired by his colleagues (Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Roger Corman). Many of his stories have been re-released in the posthumous volumes Best of Beaumont (Bantam, 1982) and The Howling Man (Tom Doherty, 1992), and a set of previously unpublished tales, A Touch of the Creature (Subterranean Press, 1999). In 2004, Gauntlet Press released the first of two volumes collecting Beaumont's Twilight Zone scripts. In 1963, when Beaumont was 34 and overwhelmed by numerous writing commitments, he began to suffer the effects of "a mysterious brain disease" which seemed to age him rapidly. His ability to speak, concentrate, and remember became erratic. While some people attributed all of this to Beaumont's heavy drinking, his friend and colleague John Tomerlin disagreed: "I was working closely with Chuck at the time, and we were good enough friends for me to know that alcohol by itself could not possibly account for the odd mental state that he was in." "He was rarely well," his friend and colleague William F. Nolan would later recall. "He was thin, and kept having headaches. He used Bromo-Seltzer like most people use water. He had a big Bromo bottle with him all the time". The disease also affected his work. "He could barely sell stories, much less write. He would go unshaven to meetings with producers, which would end in disaster. [A script writer has] got to be able to think on your feet, which Chuck couldn't do anymore; and so the producers would just go, 'We're sorry, Mr. Beaumont, but we don't like the script'." The condition might have been related to the spinal meningitis he suffered as a child. His friend and early agent Forrest J Ackerman has asserted an alternative, that Beaumont suffered simultaneously from Alzheimer's disease and Pick's disease. This claim was supported by the UCLA Medical Staff, who subjected Beaumont to a battery of tests in the mid-1960s that indicated that it might be either Alzheimer's or Pick's. Nolan recalls that the UCLA doctors sent Beaumont home with a death sentence: "They said, 'There's absolutely no treatment for this disease. It's permanent and it's terminal. He'll probably live from six months to three years with it. He'll decline and get to where he can't stand up. He won't feel any pain. In fact, he won't even know this is happening'." In Nolan's own words: "Like his character 'Walter Jameson,' Chuck just dusted away". Several fellow writers, including Nolan and friend Jerry Sohl, began ghostwriting for Beaumont during 1963/64, so that he could meet his many writing obligations. Privately, he insisted on splitting these fees. By 1965, however, Beaumont was too ill to even create or sell story ideas. His last on-screen writing credit was for the 1965 film Mister Moses, officially a screenplay written with (but more likely written by) Monja Danischewsky. Charles Beaumont died in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 38. His son Christopher later said that "he looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch". Beaumont's last residence was in nearby Valley Village, California. He was survived by his wife Helen, two sons and two daughters. One son, Greg, worked in sound on television and was nominated for a Grammy. Greg died from colon cancer at the age of 34. The other son, Christopher, is a writer.
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Becker, Geoffrey. Bluestown. New York. 1996. St Martin's Press. 0312142234. 280 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Evan Gaffney. Jacket photograph by Jason Langer.
DESCRIPTION - In the first chapter of Bluestown-which as a short story appeared in the 1995 Drue Heinz Prize-winning collection Dangerous Men-Geoffrey Becker emerges as a writer of unusual imagination and talent. Spencer Markus at fifteen wants to believe in his dad, Spider, a local musician whose life and career seem to be going nowhere. So when his dad shows up and pulls Spencer from school one afternoon, inviting him on a road trip, he is eager to go along. But the trip turns out to be Spider's strange way of saying good-bye, rather than facing up to the lies he's told, both to his son and to himself. Seven years later, Spencer is living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and a roommate, and working in Manhattan answering letters for Mutronics, a musical-effects company under siege from both its unhappy customers and a union that wants to organize it. In the midst of an imminent breakup with his girlfriend, and with the labor dispute growing uglier and more violent daily, Spencer suddenly hears from his father. As they try to reestablish some kind of relationship, Spencer must once again confront Spider's essentially unreliable nature, recognize that they may have more in common than he'd care to admit, and get on with his own life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Geoffrey Becker (born 1959) is an American short story writer, and novelist. He teaches at Towson University. His work appeared in Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Crescent Review, Florida Review, Gettysburg Review, Kansas Quarterly, North American Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Roanoke Review, Sonora Review, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Beckett, Larry. Paul Bunyan. Middlesbrough. 2015. Smokestack Books. 9780992958176. Includes CD. 110 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Larry Beckett's songs have been recorded by musicians all over the world. 'Song to the Siren' alone has been covered by David Gray, This Mortal Coil, Robert Plant, Bryan Ferry, George Michael, and Sinead O'Connor. Beckett is also a widely respected poet who has been writing, for over forty years, a series of long poems exploring the intersections of North American history, myth, and song. Drawing on logger folklore, James Stevens' stories, and the Davy Crockett almanacs, Larry Beckett's poem is a modern epic in ‘long-winded' blank verse.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Larry Beckett (born 4 April 1947, Glendale, California) is a poet and songwriter, best known for his collaborations with Tim Buckley in the late-1960s. In the 21st century, he is emerging as a poet and literary critic.Beckett was born in Glendale, California where his father was an English and speech teacher and his mother worked in the career counseling industry. The Becketts moved around for the first decade of Larry Beckett's life, first to Ashland, Oregon, then back down south to Downey, California and eventually settling in nearby Anaheim when Larry was 10 years old. Larry Beckett attended Loara High School where he developed a passion for writing and poetry. While attending high school Larry Beckett befriended classmates Tim Buckley and Jim Fielder, a relationship that would launch Beckett into music songwriting. The adolescent friends would frequent Hollywood where they were introduced to the area's art and music scene. Buckley and Beckett started writing together in the mid-1960s, when both were members of Southern California group The Bohemians, in which Beckett played drums and Jim Fielder (later of Blood, Sweat & Tears) played bass. They recorded a demo for Elektra Records, but the company was only interested in Buckley as a solo artist, not the group. Beckett contributed to Buckley's first two albums, Tim Buckley and Goodbye and Hello, both as co-songwriter and as a collaborator on arrangements. The songs which Beckett co-wrote, such as "Morning Glory" and "Song to the Siren", were characterised by the literary tone of his lyrics. The title track of "Goodbye and Hello" was originally constructed by Beckett as a piece in which two voices would sing different words and melodies. Beckett and Buckley resumed their songwriting partnership for Starsailor in 1970, and Beckett was sporadically involved in Buckley's later work until Buckley's death in 1975. He has remained a poet and songwriter while working as a computer programmer and analyst, based in Portland, Oregon. He reads two of his 1966 poems, “Found at the Scene of a Rendezvous that Failed” and “Birth Day”, on the Rhino Handmade reissue of Tim Buckley, to which he contributed liner notes. He recites “Song to the Siren” and an essay on its composition on the MVDvisual DVD Tim Buckley: My Fleeting House. Beckett is married to photographer Laura Fletcher and they have two children - Susannah Beckett (born 1990) and Liam Beckett (born 1999). Beckett's lyrics and poems were published in Songs and Sonnets, 2002, by Rainy Day Women Press. Beat Poetry, 2012, from Beatdom Books, included Beat Generation poems with his commentaries. Beckett's translations include The Way of Rain, a reconstruction of the lost order of the Tao Te Ching; Poems After Li Po,; Poems After Li Shang-yin; The Wisewoman's Song, from the Poetic Edda; The Logos, by Heraclitus; East-West Divan, by Johann Goethe; Heroic Sonnets, by Jose-Maria de Heredia. American Cycle. For 44 years, Beckett has been at work on American Cycle, a series of long poems: U. S. Rivers: Highway 1, Old California, Paul Bunyan, Chief Joseph, Wyatt Earp, P. T. Barnum, Amelia Earhart, Blue Ridge, U. S. Rivers: Route 66.
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Belfer, Lauren. City of Light. New York. 1999. Dial Press. 038533401x. 528 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - It is 1901 and Buffalo, New York, stands at the center of the nation's attention as a place of immense wealth and sophistication. The massive hydroelectric power development at nearby Niagara Falls and the grand Pan-American Exposition promise to bring the Great Lakes 'city of light' even more repute. Against this rich historical backdrop lives Louisa Barrett, the attractive, articulate headmistress of the Macaulay School for Girls. Protected by its powerful all-male board, 'Miss Barrett' is treated as an equal by the men who control the life of the city. Lulled by her unique relationship with these titans of business, Louisa feels secure in her position, until a mysterious death at the power plant triggers a sequence of events that forces her to return to a past she has struggled to conceal, and to question everything and everyone she holds dear. Both observer and participant, Louisa Barrett guides the reader through the culture and conflicts of a time and place where immigrant factory workers and nature conservationists protest violently against industrialists, where presidents broker politics, where wealthy 'Negroes' fight for recognition and equality, and where women struggle to thrive in a system that allows them little freedom. Wrought with remarkable depth and intelligence, City of Light remains a work completely of its own era, and of ours as well. A stirring literary accomplishment, Lauren Belfer's first novel marks the debut of a fresh voice for the new millennium and heralds a major publishing event.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lauren Belfer is an American author of four novels: City of Light, A Fierce Radiance, And After the Fire and Ashton Hall, which was published in June 2022. Lauren Belfer was born in Rochester, New York and grew up in Buffalo, New York, where she attended the Buffalo Seminary. The school would later serve as the basis for the girls' school depicted in her debut novel, City Of Light, about Buffalo, NY during the Pan-American Exposition.
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Belin, Esther G. Of Cartography: Poems. Tucson. 2017. University of Arizona Press. 9780816536023. Sun Tracks. 88 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - One of our generation's most important literary voices, Esther G. Belin was raised in the Los Angeles area as part of the legacy following the federally run Indian relocation policy. Her parents completed the Special Navajo Five-Year Program that operated from 1946 to 1961 at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. Drawing from this experience, her poetry, activism, and multimedia work speaks to larger issues of urban Indian identity, acceptance, adaptation, and cultural estrangement. In this long-anticipated collection, Belin daringly maps the poetics of womanhood, the body, institution, family, and love. Depicting the personal and the political, Of Cartography is an exploration of identity through language. With poems ranging from prose to typographic and linguistic illustrations, this distinctive collection pushes the boundaries of traditional poetic form. Marking territory and position according to the DinE cardinal points, Of Cartography demands much from the reader, gives meaning to abstraction, and demonstrates the challenges of identity politics.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - A Diné (Navajo) multimedia artist and writer, Esther Belin grew up in Los Angeles, California. She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. Her poetry collection, From the Belly of My Beauty (1999), won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Belin’s parents were relocated from the Southwest in the 1950s as part of the federal Indian relocation policy, and her work reflects the experience of a Native American living in urban Los Angeles. She often addresses the attempts to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American culture, as well as larger themes of racism, alienation, and substance abuse. In a 2000 interview for SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literatures), Belin stressed the connection between writing and the oral tradition. She elaborated: “I see myself as an interpreter of what happened in my parents’ generation, and I want to let people know about their experiences, especially with boarding schools and relocation. I see my books as an anthropological text—telling what it’s like for Native people.” Belin lives in Durango, Colorado, with her husband and children.
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Bell-Scott, Patricia (editor). Life Notes: Personal Writings By Contemporary Black Women. New York. 1994. Norton. 039303593x. 429 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - LIFE NOTES is the first collection devoted exclusively to writings from the journals, diaries, and personal notebooks of contemporary Black women by the author of the best-selling DOUBLE STITCH: BLACK WOMEN WRITE ABOUT MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS. In her foreword to this volume Marcia Ann Gillespie writes, ‘Keeping a journal is an extraordinarily intimate activity, sharing what we write is to allow another to peer through a delicate window where we stand without covers.' In this beautiful collection of intensely personal testimonies, 50 courageous writers illuminate the complexities of Black women's lives, offering unique reflections about self, family, intimacy, work, politics, life transitions, violation, and recovery. Among the contributors are well-known writers as well as emerging and previously unpublished writers. A diverse group, they are native daughters from three continents and the Caribbean, the youngest an eight-year-old Nigerian girl and the oldest a sixty-five-year-old retired African American telephone operator. Some of the contributors include - Ai, Pearl Cleage, Toi Derricotte, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Jamaica Kincaid, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, Rita Dove, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Belvie Rooks, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Glenda P. Simms. ‘Life Notes is a groundbreaking anthology - a treasure chest of personal and cultural empowerment in which Black Diaspora women define and affirm life on their own terms, and more importantly, in their own words.' - Brenda Mitchell-Powell, editor-in-chief, MultiCultural Review. ‘What a remarkable, warm collection of voices! A loving mirror in a warring world.' - Patricia Williams, author of THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patricia Bell-Scott (born 1950), professor of child and family development, women's studies, and psychology at the University of Georgia, is senior editor of DOUBLE STITCH: BLACK WOMEN WRITE ABOUT MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, for which she won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize. She is also cofounder of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women and coeditor of the prize-winning BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE (Feminist Press, 1981). She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her spouse. Arvin Scott, a jazz percussionist and educator. Jacket design by Debra Morton Hoyt. Jacket art/photo by Albert Chong
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Bell, Derrick. Afrolantica Legacies: A Geneva Crenshaw Book. Chicago. 1998. Third World Press. 0883781999. 186 pages. hardcover. Cover art & design by Niki M. Mitchell.
DESCRIPTION - ‘My friends, there is no easy answer to the monster that race has been and remains in our society. Perhaps, nothing that I can do will ease or eliminate the danger it poses for all of us. But I will try, not through new civil rights legislation, or court law suits, although I will take action to insure that the laws against unlawful discrimination are fully enforced. But the basic work must be done by every white person. We must each of us ask ourselves: What can I do to ease the danger of racial conflict that threatens us all? What can I do to make Afrolantica a less attractive alternative for African Americans? My friends, we can no longer afford whiteness as an assumed right of citizenship.' - The President of the United States of America, ‘Racial Liberation Day Address.' ‘Derrick Bell's AFROLANTICA LEGACIES continues Bell's critical multi-layered dialogue initiated in his earlier work. Bell's conversations with Geneva Crenshaw, the otherworldly Chiara and others are a vehicle for Bell's contestations and conversations with the white power structure, ordinary white people, with the Black community and its ‘talented tenth,' with all those who hope and believe that there must be a better way and, most crucially, with himself.' - Cheryl I. Harris, Associate Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law. ‘Imagine. that the President of the United States apologizes not for slavery but for his own behavior toward black people. Now why stop there, imagine. that he calls for a national conversation about whiteness and that he declares a day of racial liberation and healing. Can it be? This book might just be the sort of irreverent meditation that renders the imaginary a little bit more possible.' - Patricia Williams, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. ‘Derrick Bell's work challenges so-called white Americans aside their whiteness in order to realize their humanity.' - Noel Ignatiev, Author of HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Derrick Albert Bell, Jr. (November 6, 1930 - October 5, 2011) was the first tenured African-American Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and is largely credited as one of the originators of critical race theory. He was a Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law from 1991 until his death. He was also a former Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. All Souls' Rising. New York. 1995. Pantheon Books. 0679439897. 530 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In this first installment of his epic Haitian trilogy, Madison Smartt Bell brings to life a decisive moment in the history of race, class, and colonialism. The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s. A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising successfully transformed Haiti from a European colony to the world's first Black republic. From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture-a loyal, literate slave and both a devout Catholic and Vodouisant-emerges as the man who will take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality. Bell assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of this seminal movement through a tableau of characters that encompass black, white, male, female, rich, poor, free and enslaved. Pulsing with brilliant detail, All Soul's Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution. This National Book Award finalist and PEN/Faulkner Award nominee presents 'a remarkable feat of historical imagination' (The Washington Post). The horrific slave rebellion of the 1790s in Haiti is the focus of this epic historical novel of astonishing depth and range. Bell has broughtthese events viscerally to life, making them vivid, resonant, and believable for all readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Barking Man and Other Stories. New York. 1990. Ticknor & Fields. 089919835x. 230 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In ten sharply drawn tales, Madison Smartt Bell expands his masterly, inventive, and deftly textured fictional landscape to portray a collection of America's dispossessed characters. "Barking Man is a humane and mature book, the work of an important and talented writer."--The New York Times Book Review. Includes the stories: "Holding Together," "Finding Natasha," "Move On Up," "Mr. Potatohead in Love," and more.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Doctor Sleep. San Diego. 1991. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151261008. 290 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Madison Smartt Bell is one of the most versatile and gifted authors of his generation, a literary stylist with few peers. Doctor Sleep, one of his best novels, is a taut and satisfying psychological thriller planned to be released as a major motion picture under the title Hypnotic. Adrian Strother is a hypnotherapist who, paradoxically, can't get to sleep. He plies his trade in a depressed section of London, doing the occasional job for Scotland Yard, which brings him into contact with an unsavory drug trafficker. As little girls become the target of a serial killer, Adrian treads the line between tortured wakefulness and surreal sleep, and the gifts of his insomnia are called upon to unlock the secrets of a man who believes he has discovered the key to immortality. Part spiritual pilgrimage, part thriller, Doctor Sleep is witty, menacing, and deeply satisfying, a bravura performance by one of today's finest writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Master of the Crossroads. New York. 2000. Pantheon Books. 0375420568. 752 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - With the publication of All Souls' Rising, Madison Smartt Bell was immediately acclaimed as being 'as remarkable a historical novelist as we have in this country' (Harold Bloom). The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and was praised by writers as 'a triumph of storytelling and inspired historical analysis' (Robert Stone) and by reviewers as 'one of the year's most substantial literary accomplishments' (The New Yorker). Now, with Master of the Crossroads, Bell achieves an even greater accomplishment: he brings to life the rise to power of the great Haitian military general Toussaint Louverture and the story of the only successful slave revolution in history. Beginning in 1794, Toussaint led his troops to victory over English and Spanish invaders, over the French political establishment, and in a civil uprising for control of the infant island republic. He extended the ideological triumph of the French and American revolutions by offering universal liberty and human rights to all races. In chronicling Toussaint's victory and its aftermath, Bell gives us a kaleidoscopic portrait of this extraordinary figure as seen through the eyes of the men and women whose paths he crossed. English, French, Spanish, and African - the intersection of peoples who inhabited this war-torn island creates a rich social canvas against which the astonishing story of Toussaint Louverture - his beliefs, passions, and compulsions - unfolds over the course of nine tumultuous years.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Soldier's Joy. New York. 1989. Ticknor & Fields. 0899198368. 465 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A man returns home from Vietnam to his now abandoned family homestead outside of Nashville, suffering from a serious psychological wound incurred in combat. He meets up with a childhood friend who is black, and together they battle against a platoon of Klansmen for the literal salvation of a local preacher.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Straight Cut. New York. 1986. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194389. 230 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A freelance film editor, Tracy Bateman goes where the work is. So when his old partner calls with an assignment, Tracy finds himself on a plane to Rome. But there are surprises waiting for him--deadly surprises that will lead him on a desperate chase across Europe, into the hands of a pair of brutal drug smugglers, and back to New York City, where the greatest betrayal of all awaits.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. The Washington Square Ensemble. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 0670750050. 342 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Madison Smartt Bell's debut a story of drifters, outcasts, junkies, and dealers surviving in the heart of 1980s New York City Over one busy weekend, small-time heroin dealer Johnny B. Goode and his alliance of fellow pushers work their trade amidst students, businessmen, and assorted sewer rats while avoiding the law. Narrated from the separate perspectives of each member of the gang, "The Washington Square Ensemble" follows the twisted paths that have led the seven men through the grittyNew York underworld and towards a fragile alliance at Washington Square. With humor, compassion, and an uncanny ear for voices of the streets, Madison Smartt Bell delivers a stunning indictment--and occasional celebration--of a blighted New York landscape.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. The Year of Silence. New York. 1987. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194907. 194 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The death of Marian, a modestly successful illustrator in Manhattan, touches the lives of many people in surprising ways.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Waiting For the End of the World. New York. 1985. Ticknor & Fields. 0899193773. 322 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - With no particular motive and a goal of total destruction, Larkin, an epileptic drunk, and four other derelicts plot an insane terrorist attack upon Manhattan.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bell, Madison Smartt. Zero Db & Other Stories. New York. 1987. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194893. 179 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Presents eleven short stories of irrationality and madness set in the ramshackle South, lower Manhattan, and the Great Plains of nineteenth-century America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
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Bellamy, Edward. Equality. London. 1897. William Heinemann. 365 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Equality is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, and the sequel to Looking Backward: 2000–1887. It was first published in 1897. The book contains a minimal amount of plot; Bellamy primarily used Equality to expand on the theories he first explored in Looking Backward.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 - May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of over 160 ‘Nationalist Clubs‘ dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality.
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Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. New York. 1982. Penguin Books. 9780140390186. Introduction by Cecelia Tichi. 240 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - It is the year 2000-and full employment, material abundance and social harmony can be found everywhere. This is the America to which Julian West, a young Bostonian, awakens after more than a century of sleep. West's initial sense of wonder, his gradual acceptance of the new order and a new love, and Bellamy's wonderful prophetic inventions - electric lighting, shopping malls, credit cards, electronic broadcasting - ensured the mass popularity of this 1888 novel. But however rich in fantasy and romance, Looking Backward is a passionate attach on the social ills of nineteenth-century industrialism and a plea for social reform and moral renewal. In her introduction, Cecelia Tichi discusses how the novel echoes the anguish and hopes of its own age while it embodies a sustaining myth of the American literary tradition-that man's perfectibility is attainable in the New World.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 - May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of over 160 ‘Nationalist Clubs‘ dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality.
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Bellow, Saul. Dangling Man. New York. 2006. Penguin Books. 9780143039877. Introduction by J. M. Coetzee. 160 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Expecting to be inducted into the army to fight in World War II, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Saul Bellow's first novel documents Joseph's psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King. New York. 2012. Penguin Books. 9780143105480. Introduction by Adam Kirsch. 352 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Saul Bellow evokes all the rich colors and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this acclaimed comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson's awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life win him the admiration of the tribe-but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story, Henderson the Rain King is also a profound look at the forces that drive a man through life. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Adam Kirsch.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York. 2003. Penguin Books. 9780142437292. Introduction by Philip Roth. 400 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - This is the story of Moses Herzog-a great sufferer, joker, mourner, charmer, serial writer of unsent letters, and a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, the novel was hailed as "a masterpiece" (The New York Times Book Review). This beautifully designed Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Herzog features an introduction by Bellow's longtime friend Philip Roth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Humboldt's Gift. New York. 2008. Penguin Books. 9780143105473. Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides. 512 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Saul Bellow's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Dleisher. At the time of Humboldt's death, Charlie's life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic Mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. New York. 2018. Penguin Books. 9780143106685. Introduction by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. 384 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In It All Adds Up, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary America over a forty-year period. In sentence after sentence, page after page, readers are offered brilliant perceptions and unusual insights into everyday life in America and the life of the mind. Moving from political figures like Roosevelt and Khrushchev to artists like Mozart, Dostoevsky, and John Cheever, from New York and Chicago to Paris-and including the deeply personal "Autobiography of Ideas"-Bellow, with great humor and wisdom, records the enduring thoughts and opinions of a lifetime of observation, thoughts that speak to us with renewed energy for our times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. New York. 1996. Penguin Books. 9780140189452. Penguin 20th-Century Classic. 192 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In six darkly comic tales, Saul Bellow presents the human experience in all its preposterousness, poignancy, and pathos. In the title story, a professor well-known for his wit struggles to animate his memoirs as he teeters on the brink of despair; in "the old System," a distinguished biochemist tries to find room in his life for love; and in "A Father to Be," a man is startled to find himself seated next to his future adult son on a New York subway. The other stories, too, reflect Bellow's special ability to depict men and women confronting, in highly idiosyncratic ways, the enigmas and oddities of existence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler's Planet. New York. 2004. Penguin Books. 9780142437834. Introduction by Stanley Crouch. 288 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler-who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings-a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him." To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Ravelstein. New York. 2015. Penguin Books. 9780143107576. Introduction by Gary Shteyngart. 224 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Deeply insightful, Saul Bellow's moving last novel is a journey through love and memory, an elegy to friendship, and a poignant meditation on death. Told in memoir form, it follows two university professors, one of whom is succumbing to AIDS, as they share thoughts on philosophy and history, loves and friends, mortality and art. This Penguin Classics edition commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of Viking's first publication of Ravelstein. Featuring a new introduction by Gary Shteyngart,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York. 2003. Penguin Books. 9780142437612. Introduction by Cynthia Ozick. 144 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once cast him as the "type that loses the girl"), and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales. New York. 2012. Penguin Books. 9780142422182. Introduction by Nicole Krauss. 256 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - While Saul Bellow is known best for his longer fiction in award-winning novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, Something to Remember Me By will draw new readers to Bellow as it showcases his extraordinary gift for creating memorable characters within a smaller canvas. The loss of a ring in A Theft helps an oft-married woman understand her own wisdom and capacity for love. In The Bellarosa Connection, Harry Fonstein has escaped from Nazi brutality with the help of an underground organization masterminded by the legendary Broadway impresario Billy Rose, and his story continues in America. In the title story, seventeen-year-old Louie—whose mother is dying of cancer—strays far from home and finds not solace but humiliation and, ultimately, the blessing of his father's wrath.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. The Actual: A Novella. New York. 2009. Penguin Books. 9780143105848. Introduction by Joseph O'Neill. 96 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In this dazzling work of fiction, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow writes comically and wisely about the tenacious claims of first love. Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman, has never belonged anywhere and is as awkward in his human attachments as he is gifted in observing the people around him. But Harry's observational talents have not gone unnoticed by "trillionaire" Sigmund Adletsky, who retains Harry as his advisor. Soon the old man discovers Harry's intense forty-year passion for a twice-divorced interior designer, Amy Wustrin. At the exhumation and reburial of her husband, Harry is provided, thanks to Sigmund, perhaps the final means for disclosing feelings amassed over a lifetime. Written late in Bellow's career, The Actual is a maestro's dissection of the affairs of the heart.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York. 2006. Penguin Books. 9780143039570. Introduction by Christopher Hitchens. 608 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this novel by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero, is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Deptression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for a series of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as unworthy. His own oddity is reflected in the companions he encounters-plungers, schemers, risk-takers, and "hole-and corner" operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures. This Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by celebrated writer and critic Christopher Hitchens, makes a literary masterpiece available to a new generation of readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York. 1953. Viking Press. 536 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Hallock.
DESCRIPTION - This National Book Award-winning novel takes place in Depression-era Chicago and is not only a testimony on human nature but also of the drive to succeed. The novel follows the adventures of a lifelong dreamer named Augie March, who only through failure after failure finally succeeds in the end. The novel recreates life during the Depression and is filled with memorable characters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. The Victim. New York. 2010. Penguin Books. 9780143106104. Introduction by Norman Rush. 272 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In this unique noir masterpiece by the incomparable Saul Bellow, a young man is sucked into the mysterious, heat-filled vortex of New York City. Asa Leventhal, a temporary bachelor with his wife away on a visit to her mother, attempts to find relief from a Gotham heat wave, only to be accosted in the park by a down-at-the-heels stranger who accuses Leventhal of ruining his life. Unable to shake the stranger loose, Leventhal is led by his own self-doubts and suspicions into a nightmare of paranoia and fear. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by National Book Award winner Norman Rush.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Bellow, Saul. To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. New York. 1998. Penguin Books. 9780141180755. Penguin 20th-Century Classic. 192 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A powerful, stimulating testament, To Jerusalem and Back is a rigorous attempt to come to grips with Israel's history and future. Immersing himself in the landscape and culture of this "small state in perpetual crisis," Bellow records the opinions, passions, and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints-Yitzak Rabin, Amos Oz, the editor of the largest Arab-language newspaper in Israel, a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto-and adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Saul Bellow's journey is not merely an exploration of a very beautiful and very troubled city; it is a major literary work, and an urgently important one.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.' His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.' Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,' was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked' rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.' Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December') called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.' This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal' (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning' (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Benfey, Christopher. The Double Life of Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York. 1992. Knopf. 0394568648. 294 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.
DESCRIPTION - ‘No less finely tuned to Stephen Crane's art than to his psyche, Christopher Benfey convincingly breaks the autobiographical codes of Crane's writing. More than that, his startling key to Crane's career amounts to a new theory of literary biography. This uncommonly clever and sensitive Life is packed with surprises.' KENNETH SILVERMAN, author of Edgar A. Poe. This is the first reassessment in more than a quarter of a century of one of the most brilliant and fascinating figures in American literature - the novelist-journalist born in 1871, six years after the war he memorialized in his universally acclaimed The Red Badge of Courage, and dead of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. Recounting Stephen Crane's brief life (a life crammed with incident and mystery), Benfey identifies a curious pattern: Crane tried to live what he had already written. Barely twenty-two when he wrote The Red Badge, he later became the leading war-correspondent of his time - in order to see, he told Joseph Conrad, whether The Red Badge was ‘all right.' He wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets more out of curiosity than knowledge; a few years later he took as his common-law wife the madam of a Jacksonville whorehouse. He made a life with her in England, where their circle of good friends included Conrad, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and H. G. Wells. Christopher Benfey has given us as full an account of Crane's life as we can ever have - and an inspired reading of his astonishingly multifaceted work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Christopher Benfey (born October 28, 1954) is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana and attended The Putney School. He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his B.A. at Guilford College. Benfey holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.
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Benitez, Sandra. A Place Where the Sea Remembers. Minneapolis. 1993. Coffee House Press. 156689011x. 160 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Winner, Discover Great New Writers Award. Winner, Minnesota Book Award for Fiction. 'Profound. a quietly stunning work that leaves soft tracks in the heart.' - The Washington Post BookWorld 'Merits placement beside some of the mesmerizing new literature with its roots in Latin America.' - The New York Times Book Review. In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Sandra Benitez invites us into a mesmerizing world filled with, love and betrayal, tragedy and hope. This rich and bewitching story is a bittersweet portrait of the people in Santiago, a Mexican village by the sea. Chayo, the flower seller, and her husband Candelario, the salad maker, are finally blessed with the child they thought they would never have. Their cause for happiness, however, triggers a chain of events that impact the lives of everyone in their world. The hopes, triumphs, failures, and shortcomings of the novel's enchanting array of characters create a graceful picture of life that is both a universal portrait and an insider's look at life in Latin America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Benitez (March 26, 1941 in Washington D.C.) is an American novelist. Her twin sister, Susana, died just 37 days after their birth. A year later, her father, who worked for the U.S. State Department, was assigned to Mexico, where her sister, Anita, was born. He was transferred to El Salvador where Sandra lived for most of the next 20 years. She lived with her grandparents in northeastern Missouri, and attended Unionville high school, returning each summer to El Salvador. In 1997 she was selected as the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Writer in Residence. In 1998 she did the Writers Community Residency for the YMCA National Writer's Voice program. In the spring of 2001 she held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of San Diego. She lives with her husband, Jim Kondrick, in Edina, Minnesota.
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Benitez, Sandra. Bitter Grounds. New York. 1997. Hyperion. 0786861576. 445 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 1998 American Book Award. Spanning the years between 1932 and 1977, this beautifully told epic is set in the heart of El Salvador, where coffee plantations are the center of life for rich and poor alike. Following three generations of the Prieto Clan and the wealthy family they work for, this is the story of mothers and daughters who live, love, and die for their passions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Benitez (March 26, 1941 in Washington D.C.) is an American novelist. Her twin sister, Susana, died just 37 days after their birth. A year later, her father, who worked for the U.S. State Department, was assigned to Mexico, where her sister, Anita, was born. He was transferred to El Salvador where Sandra lived for most of the next 20 years. She lived with her grandparents in northeastern Missouri, and attended Unionville high school, returning each summer to El Salvador. In 1997 she was selected as the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Writer in Residence. In 1998 she did the Writers Community Residency for the YMCA National Writer's Voice program. In the spring of 2001 she held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of San Diego. She lives with her husband, Jim Kondrick, in Edina, Minnesota.
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Bennett, Gwendolyn. Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett’s Selected Writings. University Park. 2018. Penn State University Press. 9780271080963. Edited by Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola. 7 illustrations. 6 × 9. 248 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Poet, columnist, artist, and fiction writer Gwendolyn Bennett is considered by many to have been one of the youngest leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and a strong advocate for racial pride and the rights of African American women. Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond presents key selections of her published and unpublished writings and artwork in one volume. From poems, short stories, and reviews to letters, journal entries, and art, this collection showcases Bennett’s diverse and insightful body of work and rightfully places her alongside her contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance— figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. It includes selections from her monthly column “The Ebony Flute,” published in Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League, as well as newly uncovered post-1928 work that proves definitively that Bennett continued writing throughout the following two decades. Bennett’s correspondence with canonical figures from the period, her influence on Harlem arts institutions, and her political writings, reviews, and articles show her deep connection to and lasting influence on the movement that shaped her early career. An indispensable introduction to one of the era’s most prolific and passionate minds, this reevaluation of Bennett’s life and work deepens our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and enriches the world of American letters. It will be of special value to scholars and readers interested in African American literature and art and American history and cultural studies. “This superbly edited collection will introduce many readers to a more versatile and accomplished Gwendolyn Bennett than they have known before. It includes the unpublished political poetry that extends her range and impact, making her a key figure of the 1930s. ” —Cary Nelson, author of Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gwendolyn B. Bennett (July 8, 1902 – May 30, 1981) was an American artist, writer, and journalist who contributed to Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which chronicled cultural advancements during the Harlem Renaissance. Though often overlooked, she herself made considerable accomplishments in poetry and prose. She is perhaps best known for her short story "Wedding Day", which was published in the first issue of Fire!! Bennett was a dedicated and self-preserving woman, respectfully known for being a strong influencer of African-American women rights during the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her dedication and perseverance, Bennett raised the bar when it came to women's literature, and education. One of her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her literary acclaimed short novel "Poets Evening"; it helped the understanding within the African-American communities, resulting in many African-Americans coming to terms with identifying and accepting themselves. Belinda Wheeler is Associate Professor of English at Claflin University and the editor of several books, most recently A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature. Louis J. Parascandola is Professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and the editor of several books, most recently Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the Negro World, 1923–1928.
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Benson, Ariana. Black Pastoral: Poems. University of Georgia Press. 9780820365183. The Cave Canem Poetry Prize Series. Selected by Willie Perdomo. 94 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Black Pastoral explores the complex duality of Black peoples’ past and present relationship with nature. It surveys the ways in which our histories (both Black histories and natural/ecological histories), our suffering and our thriving, are forever wound around one another. They are painful at times and act as a salve at others. Ariana Benson’s poems meditate upon the violence and tenderness that simultaneously characterize the entangling of the two, taking the form of a series of ecopoetic musings that re-envision these confluences. Moreover, Benson’s poems illustrate the beauty inherent to Blackness, to nature, to the remarkable relationship they share, while also refusing its permission to collect idly, like an opaque skein of film obscuring uglier, necessary truths. Black Pastoral seeks to be both love letter and elegy, both flame to raze the field and flood to nourish the land anew.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ARIANA BENSON's poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Recipient of the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Benson serves as a nonfiction editor of Auburn Avenue Literary Journal. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York. 1984. Viking Press. 0670166855. 1116 pages. hardcover. Photograph on front of jacket by Sonia Noskowiak.
DESCRIPTION - The works of John Steinbeck are among the best known and best loved in American literature. In short books such as Of Mice and Men and The Long Valley and in the epics The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, Steinbeck created characters that have touched readers around the world for years. But while thousands have come to know and acclaim his fiction, few really know the man himself; although Steinbeck appeared in the public spotlight, he was a shy, private individual who felt that attention should be focused on his work rather than on himself. In this volume, Jackson Benson, who had full access to Steinbeck's papers and photographs and who interviewed scores of individuals in his decade of research for this book, reveals the dimensions of the man and the events of his life as he pursued his artistic vocation. Above all, Steinbeck was a writer. From his youth in California's Salinas Valley, through his college days at Stanford, to the early success of Tortilla Flat, Benson notes the influences on Steinbeck's later novels, which were to become celebrated as archetypal depictions of American culture. In exploring the environments that were so important to Steinbeck, from California's valleys and waterfront to New York's East Side, Benson allows us to feel the attachment Steinbeck had for these places and for the people who lived in them. These humanistic concerns were the underpinning of a life that included notoriety and celebrity: Steinbeck was attacked by the Right for his depiction of the plight of migrant workers and his campaigns for the rights of the 'little people,' and by the Left for his failure to embrace communism and for his stand on the Vietnam War; he wrote Hollywood film scripts and won the Nobel Prize for literature. Benson's interpretive biography recounts these details with unprecedented depth and brings to life an extraordinary writer whose love for people, places, and writing earned him an esteem unparalleled in American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jackson J. Benson teaches American Literature at San Diego State University. His biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, won the PEN USA West award for nonfiction. He lives in La Mesa, California.
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Berger, Thomas. Adventures of the Artificial Woman: A Novel. New York. 2004. Simon & Schuster. 0743257405. 199 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Fulbrook III.
DESCRIPTION - Fed up with the sarcastic, opinionated and disrespectful women he comes across, Ellery Pierce decides his only choice is to build the perfect woman. A technician at an animatronics firm, Ellery has the experience and tools ready at his fingertips. After years of experiments and fine-tuning, Ellery feels he finally has created an artificial woman who can pass as real - Phyllis. According to Ellery, Phyllis is the perfect wife, fulfilling his every wish, from gourmet meals to sexual pleasure. Unfortunately for Ellery, he may have made her too closely in his image for his own good. Yearning to make it big in show business, Phyllis leaves Ellery with dreams of Hollywood. She works her way up from a strip club, a phone sex operation, a pornography website, and a small town playhouse to a gig in the movies. Soon she s a bona fide box office sensation. Eventually, Phyllis sets her sights on the ultimate goal - presidency of the United States. By now, after completely falling apart upon Phyllis s departure, Ellery has pulled himself together and is back with Phyllis to steer her along her course, or so he thinks. It s no surprise when Phyllis wins the election, but it s too late when Ellery begins to wonder if this time she s gone too far.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Being Invisible. Boston. 1987. Little Brown. 0316091588. 262 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Things are not going well for Fred Wagner. His wife has left him, his job as a catalog copywriter for a mail-order catalog that sells things like obscene beer mugs and ballpoint pens that double as flashlights is becoming increasingly unsatisfying. And, his novel, after six years, has not progressed beyond the opening pages. Out of shear desperation, he wishes himself invisible. To his amazement, his wish begins to come true. As Wagner tries do make the best of this unique gift, he finds invisibility has its drawbacks.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Best Friends. New York. 2003. Simon & Schuster. 0743241835. 211 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Fulbrook III.
DESCRIPTION - Roy Courtright is good-looking, healthy, independent, well liked, and the owner of a successful classic car dealership. His best friend, Sam Grandy, is the near inverse: married, a spendthrift, overweight, needy, and near bankruptcy. Yet they've been inseparable best friends since childhood. As best friends, they share a close and loving bond, often stronger than the relationships other men share with their girlfriends, siblings, even wives. But in the twenty years since their friendship began, those fundamental differences have become more apparent and their relationship has grown strained. When the two friends encounter serious problems, they're forced to reckon with each other. Do these differences threaten their friendship - or are the dissimilarities what make it possible? Can they escape the ties of their past, or are they intrinsically bound until death? When Sam's health begins to falter, he draws Roy into his life again - and into a chain of deceit, sex, delusion, death, and love such as only a best friend could. With exquisite wit and insidious wisdom, BEST FRIENDS weaves a powerful tale about friendship -- and the complex loyalties involved.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Changing the Past. Boston. 1989. Little Brown. 0316091499. 285 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - The author of Little Big Man and The Feud here explores the shifting and elusive line between fantasy and reality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Crazy in Berlin. New York. 1958. Scribners. 439 pges. hardcover. Jacket design by Sydney Butchkes.
DESCRIPTION - This startlingly original novel manages to be at once dramatic, intellectually stimulating, and very funny. The story takes place in Berlin during the early days of the American-Russian occupation; but Mr. Berger is first of all concerned with individuals - with Germans and Americans, moving in a pattern of loyalty and betrayal, guilt and redemption. The individuals he deals with are extraordinary. Carlo Reinhart holds the central place: a German-American obsessed by the Nazi crimes against the Jews, stationed now in Berlin as an army medic, a physically powerful fellow, good-hearted, and something of a fool. Mr. Berger's skillfully worked-out plot involves Reinhart with a strange assortment, each of whom contributes to his education as a human being. The intelligence officer Nathan Schild is an American Communist who finds himself befriending a Russian deserter named Lichenko. The little German Schatzi, a charter-member Nazi, now acts as a Russian courier and can procure anything from the black market. There is the large, cheery, handsome nurse, Veronica Very, who runs the hospital psychiatric ward; and there is the German girl Lori with her incredibly erudite husband, Bach, who delights in the odor of decaying fruit. Each of these people has a story to be revealed, and their play upon Carlo Reinhart makes something different of him. He is shaped by irony, comedy, and violence. Thomas Berger has a style of his own - packed, idiomatic, alive with ironic contrast. He begins with this book an important career as a novelist. A native of Ohio, Thomas Berger was born in 1924, and educated at the, University of Cincinnati and Columbia. He enlisted in the Army at eighteen and served in Europe during World War II. A veteran of the first occupation of Berlin in 1945, he revisited the city in 1956. For some years Mr. Berger was on the staff of the Rand School of Social Science in New York; he has also worked in journalism and book publishing. He and his wife, Jeanne Redpath, an artist, now live in a little town on the west bank of the Hudson River. CRAZY IN BERLIN, the result of more than four years' work, is Mr. Berger's first novel. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Killing Time. New York. 1967. Dial Press. 372 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - KILLING TIME is a psychological novel about crime. The hero, Joseph Detweiler, is the world's most courteous, sensitive, sincere and likable killer. He is even innocent of the fact that a crime has been committed. This tough and bizarre story breaks all the rules. It is not a whodunit, because the killer is already known. It is not a detective story or a sociological treatise on crime, because it is told from the point of view of the criminal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York. 1964. Dial Press. 440 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Little Big Man is a 1964 novel by American author Thomas Berger. Often described as a satire or parody of the western genre, the book is a modern example of picaresque fiction. Berger made use of a large volume of overlooked first-person primary materials, such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, to fashion a wide-ranging and entertaining tale that comments on alienation, identity, and perceptions of reality. Easily Berger's best known work, Little Big Man was made into a popular film by Arthur Penn. It has been called "Berger's response to the great American myth of the frontier, representing as it does most of the central traditions of American literature." ‘A brilliant novel about the Western frontier written with immense gusto, cynical humour and absolute historical accuracy.' ‘ In about the same way that Faulkner delivers the old South to the ken of a jaded but renewable imagination, Berger delivers the West. He took on an apparently impossible task and made the dead bones live.' These comments on LITTLE BIG MAN appeared in the New York Times and Herald Tribune and everywhere in America the book has been acclaimed as one of the very small number that make the West a theme for serious literature. (That it is serious does not make it any the less exuberant or entertaining.) It is the story of one Jack Crabb who, at the age of 111, tells of his youthful experiences on the frontier. His memories cover the whole sweep of frontier life. At the age of ten, largely owing to the incompetence of his father, he is captured by a band of Cheyenne Indians and brought up as one of them. His boyhood is spent in this way but as a young man he returns to the white men and afterwards passes more than once between the white and the Indian worlds. In this way Jack Crabb finds himself at a staggering number of famous occasions. (The man to whom he tells his story reckons him ‘either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions'.) He meets, and cheats, Wild Bill Hickok, runs foul of Wyatt Earp, fights at the massacre of the Washita and is the only white survivor of Ouster's last stand. His story is a panorama of Western history at its most turbulent period and through it Thomas Berger brings the whole scene alive in a way that has never been achieved before. It is almost incredible that a setting which has so often been pawed by the second-rate should spring up so freshly. This, one is convinced, is how it was. The secret is in the author's absolute honesty. There is no romantic haze round his vision. What was grotesque, foolish, funny or pointless appears so here, and he has a wonderfully deflating eye for the practical details of how things must have happened. This honesty is also an essential part of the book's deepest achievement, its portrayal of Indian life. Because he never for a moment attempts to hide the inconsequence, the cruelty, the stink, the plain damn silliness of much in Indian life, because even at the most dramatic moments he is prepared to find them funny, Thomas Berger wins the right to his admiration. Against the scurrying, acquisitive life of the white men, obsessed with time, numbers and progress, he sets the timelessness, the acceptance and the virile simplicity of the Indians. For a short time their way of life, little changed since the stone age, confronted modern civilization and was destroyed by it. At the end of LITTLE BIG MAN the ancient chief and magic-maker, Old Lodge Skins, faces, in the moment of his own death, the knowledge that his people is doomed. Without sentimentality, without for a moment losing his clear-sighted irony, Thomas Berger shows how tragic a loss that was. It is a deeply moving ending to an outstanding book. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Meeting Evil. Boston. 1992. Little Brown. 0316092584. 220 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - MEETING EVIL tells an adrenaline-pumped, genuinely frightening tale of malevolence that swerves swiftly and irrevocably to a catastrophic climax. John Felton meets evil late one Monday morning when the doorbell rings. Standing on the front porch is a stranger. He wears expensive running shoes and a baseball cap and calls himself Richie. He tells John his car has stalled and asks for help. An altercation at the gas station leads to a shocking crime as violence begets violence. At the end of this harrowing day, John returns home to find Richie ensconced in his living room, chatting up his wife. The evil has somehow seeped into his life. Thus begins the transformation of an unremarkable husband and father of two into a desperate man willing to go to any length to protect his family from the darkness that threatens them. This is an extraordinary masterpiece and a chilling portrait of mounting menace played out against an everyday world of domestic routine, personified in a protagonist of basic decency grappling with both the immediate and existential meaning of true evil.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Neighbors. New York. 1980. Delacorte Press. 0440065569. 275 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Suburban regular guy Earl Keese confronts the yawning pit of chaos in the persons of Harry and Ramona, a younger couple who have just moved into the only other house on their dead-end street. Literally overnight, Earl's painstakingly controlled world is turned upside down. Soon he is engaged in guerilla warfare with his new neighbors, who seem to threaten the very fabric of his carefully constructed reality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Nowhere. New York. 1985. Delacorte Press. 0385294018. A Seymour Lawrence book. 190 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration & design by Fred Marcellino.
DESCRIPTION - Detective Russel Wren takes a case in what just might be the oddest country on earth. A phone call warning of a bomb threat is all Detective Russel Wren needs to get out the door. He makes it to the next block before an enormous explosion destroys his entire building. Without his Manhattan office, Wren finds himself forced to accept a strange mission to the tiny central European nation of Saint Sebastian. Saint Sebastian is unlike any country Wren has ever seen, and as his stay there continues, its oddities merely multiply: blond-haired citizens are consigned to the underclass; rudeness is a capital crime; and the Ministry of Clams is the go-to for any problem that can't be solved by the Ministries of Hoaxes, Disaffection, Irony, or Allergies. No matter where Wren finds himself, he stumbles upon something puzzling, hilarious, and extraordinary - all leading up to a stunning turn of events.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Orrie's Story. Boston. 1990. Little Brown. 0316092207. 276 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A retelling of the Greek Oresteia trilogy through the lives of a seemingly ordinary small-town American family. When a returning WWII hero is murdered by his adulterous wife and her lover, his son Orrie slays them both in this darkly intriguing and mysterious work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Regiment of Women. New York. 1975. Simon & Schuster. 0671214926. 349 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - It is the 21st century. In New York City the worst fears of future shock have become daily realities for its inhabitants. There are frequent pollution alerts and detention centres are located. Georgie Cornell goes to work in a white tailored blouse and pleated skirt. Only Georgie is a man. Once again, Thomas Berger brings a satiric and irreverent perspective to the human experience, evoking a world that most dare not even imagine and effectively dismantling all existing definitions of sex and gender. 'Imagined with such ferocity and glee that we assent to it almost in spite of ourselves. a brilliant accomplishment by one of out best novelists.'--New York Times Book Review.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Reinhart in Love. New York. 1962. Scribners. 438 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Carlo Reinhart returns home from service in occupied Germany and finds the postwar U.S. a different world: housing developments, gadget technology, a physical and spiritual malaise that boom times evoke. Good-hearted and intelligent, sympathetic but cynical, Reinhart is a participant who nevertheless remains a spectator. This gives the story its piquancy. Imagine going full throttle for success, simultaneously riding the brakes in apprehension. ‘Picture Fielding's Tom Jones in a 20th century landscape and you'll have some idea of REINHART IN LOVE.' (The New York Times).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Reinhart's Women. New York. 1981. Delacorte Press. 0440074088. 295 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino.
DESCRIPTION - In this novel Carl Reinhart, a large but sensitive man who has been fascinated with women ever since having been born of one, finds himself at close quarters with a variety of female persons. Among them are his daughter, Winona, once pudgy and plain, but now a beautiful model; the dynamic executive Grace Greenwood, who is passionate in her private life; his colleague Helen Clayton, remarkable for her generosity to men; Mercer, his wellborn but distraught daughter-in-law; a young, gentle, unusually tall neighbor named Edie Mulhouse; and, wielding as sharp a blade as ever, his wife of twenty years, his ex of ten, the redoubtable Genevieve. But Reinhart is at last old enough to have removed his heart from sleeve to inside pocket, and he has furthermore become proficient at that craft in which male prowess is always encouraged by women, namely cookery. In fact he is so good at it as to attract an offer of fame and fortune on television! Meanwhile his male offspring, the embittered Blaine, having made the typical transition from hippie to stockbroker, endures an endless domestic crisis, and a friend's son - who, when last seen, was a black-power activist - is of course now the ascetic leader of a religious cult. While telling a tale that is complete within its pages, REINHART'S WOMEN is the fourth volume in the fictional series that begins with CRAZY IN BERLIN, continues through REINHART IN LOVE and VITAL PARTS, and spans the career of Thomas Berger, whose other books include LITTLE BIG MAN, ARTHUR REX, and NEIGHBORS. Earlier reviewers of Reinhart novels have used the terms ‘masterpiece' (Harper's), ‘ennobling' (The New York Times), ‘wonderfully generous' (Newsweek), and of the series as a whole, ‘a great and unique achievement' (The Washington Post).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Robert Crews. New York. 1994. Morrow. 0688119204. 240 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In a modern Robinson Crusoe tale by the author of Little Big Man, Robert Crews, a middle-aged alcoholic, embarks on a mythic survival adventure when his plane crashes and he encounters Friday, running from her husband. With the humor, irony, and veteran story-telling that have made him one of America's most respected novelists, Thomas Berger has written a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. In his latest work, Thomas Berger takes us on an odyssey in the wilderness that becomes a mythic adventure. Robert Crews, middle-aged, alcoholic, his life in shambles, joins three pals on a fishing expedition that meets with catastrophe. The plane that was to take them to a northern fishing lodge crashes. Robert Crews is the sole survivor. In a wilderness for which he has no preparation, Crews must become Crusoe. Forced into sobriety, he must confront not only an alien environment, but all the specters of his past: his broken marriages, his aimlessness, his profound loneliness, his failed existence. As he taps into resources he didn't know he had, Crews gradually becomes, for the first time, committed to his survival - and, eventually, to the survival of his companion, Friday. The accidental encounter with Friday, who is on the run from her violent husband, elicits Crews's feelings of protectiveness and compassion, and also love. Through her, Crews discovers his competence and manhood. This is a tale of more than survival - it is about transformation, commitment, and the possibility of redemption
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Sneaky People. New York. 1975. Simon & Schuster. 0671218972. 315 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The time is the 1930s. Buddy Sandifer, dressed in his natty white flannels, baby-blue shirt, striped tie, tan-and-white shoes, and coconut-straw hat with polka-dot band, is falling into one of his moods. Owner of a used-car lot and father of a fifteen-year-old son with a penchant for sex manuals, Buddy has decided to murder his wife and marry his mistress, Laverne, a robust blonde who cooks his favorite meal of fried pork chops, fried potatoes, and fried apples while wearing a short pink apron over black-lace step-ins and brassiere, long-gartered silk stockings, and platform shoes. The only problem is how to arrange the crime.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Suspects. New York. 1996. Morrow. 0688119255. 294 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When a mother and daughter--both paragons of virtue--are savagely killed in their home an investigative frenzy ensues. In traditional Berger style, what is a murder mystery on the surface reveals itself to be a tale of much deeper meaning. Here Berger takes on friendship, family loyalty, and the American dream.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. The Feud. New York. 1983. Delacorte Press. 0440028337. 265 pages. hardcover. Cover: Fred Marcellino.
DESCRIPTION - In THE FEUD Thomas Berger returns to the era and milieu that he knows best-small-town America in the 1930s. THE FEUD chronicles encounters, hostile and amorous, between members of the Bellers of Hornbeck and Bullards of Millville. The trouble begins when Dolf Beller, on an innocent mission for paint remover, chews an unlit cigar in Bud Bullard's hardware store, where no smoking is allowed. Within 24 hours the store burns down. Dolf's car blows up-and the feud begins.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. The Houseguest. Boston. 1988. Little Brown. 0316091634. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Chuck Burgoyne is no ordinary houseguest. The Graveses (father Doug; wife Audrey; son Bobby; and daughter-in-law Lydia) have gotten used to his polite manners and gourmet breakfasts. But one morning at the Graveses' summer home, Chuck fails to appear. When Chuck finally does surface, he is no longer sweet and charming, but rather has become aggressive and arrogant, abusing each family member in turn. Each family member that is, except the fellow outsider, Lydia. Once Chuck rescues her from the dangerous undertow of the ocean, Lydia can't help but feel obligated to him, even after his uninvited advances to her while she's half asleep. Slowly it becomes apparent to the family that Chuck isn't anyone's guest but rather a perfect stranger who wormed his way into their home. Yet the Graveses are so concerned with not offending him by being impolite that they willingly accept the abuse he freely dishes out. In private, however, they all scheme for his undoing. But will anyone muster up the courage? An eerie and clever novel, The Houseguest introduces one of Berger's most dangerous and compelling villains.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. The Return of Little Big Man. Boston. 1999. Little Brown. 0316098442. 432 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Leslie Goldman.
DESCRIPTION - In 1964, LITTLE BIG MAN gave us the reminiscences of Jack Crabb - a white orphan raised among the Cheyenne - who returns to ‘civilized' society, where (among other things) he tangles with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, and ends up as the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand Now in The Return of Little Big Man, the sequel to that bestselling literary classic, Jack Crabb, the foremost chronicler of the American West, continues his fabulous adventures. At the end of LITTLE BIG MAN, Jack's supposed death at age 111 cut short his tale. A Newly discovered manuscript, however, reveals that Jack had faked his death to get out Of his publishing contract, and he now picks up the story of his extraordinary action-packed life. Back in the saddle again, Jack gives a blow-by-blow eyewitness account of the assassination of Wild Bill Hickok, and reveals what really happened at the O.K. Corral. He meets, shoots, drinks, and rides with Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, Doc Holliday, and dozens of ordinary Western folk: teachers, bargirls, saloon owners, cowboys, trappers, and gunslingers. Jack even travels to Europe with Buffalo Bill Cody in his Wild West show, where he is embraced by Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. And in a gut-wrenching final, Jack witnesses the murder of one of America's greatest heroes - Sitting Bull. As in LITTLE BIG MAN, Thomas Berger's meticulous research enriches his story with authenticity and historical accuracy. THE RETURN OF LITTLE BIG MAN is an astonishing literary achievement and a rollicking good read.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Vital Parts. New York. 1970. Richard Baron. 432 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This completes Thomas Berger's Reinhart trilogy. The 44-year-old Carlo Reinhart is now a liberal, disdained by his wife, and reviled by his long-haired son, but adored by his overweight teenage daughter. Can a fat, forty-plus average guy make it in the hippie-dippie world of the 70's? Will a Middle-American shlump like Carlo Reinhart find his karma amidst revolutionaries, rock-freaks, dope, a discotheque call The Gastrointestinal System, spaced-out checks, orgies, synthetic humans, and wild schemes for freezing people for eternal life?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Berger, Thomas. Who Is Teddy Villanova?. New York. 1977. Delacorte Press. 0440095468. A Seymour Lawrence book. 247 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by John Sposato.
DESCRIPTION - In WHO IS TEDDY VILLANOVA? Mr. Berger turns for the first time to the private-eye thriller, which, as practiced by the masters Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, was for many years his voracious addiction as reader. The seedy office; the down-at-heel shamus; the procession of sinister, chicane, or merely brutal men and scheming, vicious, but lovely women; the sequence of savage beatings, apparently unmotivated except by the typically human urge to bring pain; and especially the Byzantine plot, trying to unravel which (at any time before the magical denouement) would be as if to attack the Kremlin cipher with a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring - all these, and more, are in Who WHO IS TEDDY VILLANOVA? The cast of characters would seem taken from the roster of known sex offenders maintained by the police of every major American city - the giant sadist Gus Bakewell; Donald Washburn II, perhaps the scion of a wealthy family, certainly an exhibitionist; quaint slumlord Sam Polidor; sleek, blonde Natalie Novotny, surely more than the airline stewardess she pretends to be; pneumatic Peggy Tumulty, who hails from Queens; Russel Wren, reluctant hero and garrulous narrator of the tale (in a rococo style reminiscent by turns of Thomas DeQuincey, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Sir Thomas Malory, but nothing like that of Thomas Berger's previous work); a covey of depraved schoolgirls; and a styful of undercover cops, to name only some of the principals. But over them all falls the evil shadow of the elusive Teddy Vlllanova, master criminal, underwear fetishist, archenemy of social ameliorism, and, though presumably a foreigner, a habitue of a diseased Manhattan.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist,
DESCRIPTIONs he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
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Bergreen, Laurence. James Agee: A Life. New York. 1984. Dutton. 0525242538. 467 pages. hardcover. Front & back photographs by Helen Levitt.
DESCRIPTION - When James Agee died in 1955, he had published only three works of any length: PERMIT ME VOYAGE, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, and THE MORNING WATCH. The volume of poetry was largely forgotten; the documentary had been proclaimed a failure; the novel had received mixed reviews. A version of the genius destroyed-by-the-system legend had grown up around Agee, based primarily upon his monumentally self-destructive personality and his long association with the Luce empire, but he seemed destined for the ranks of America's forgotten writers. Publication of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY in 1957 and its award of the Pulitzer Prize for literature increased interest in Agee and his work and led to the reissue of LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN in 1960. Reconsidered, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN appeared to be one of the most important books of the 1930s. This judgment, along with the success of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, seems to have won for Agee a permanent place in American literary history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laurence Bergreen (born February 4, 1950) is an American historian and biographer. His most recent book is Casanova :The World of a Seductive Genius , published by Simon & Schuster in November 2016. After graduating from Harvard University in 1972, Bergreen worked in journalism, academia and broadcasting before publishing his first biography, James Agee: A Life. Bergreen has written books on historical subjects, such as Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASA's exploration of Mars, and Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. Bergreen's biography, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, is being developed into a feature film starring Matt Damon. Bergreen has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and Esquire. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and served as Assistant to the President of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. In 1995, he served as a judge for the National Book Awards and in 1991 as a judge for the PEN/Albrand Nonfiction Award. A frequent lecturer at major universities and symposiums, and, on occasion, aboard cruise ships, he has served as a Featured Historian for the History Channel. In 2007, Bergreen was asked by NASA to name some geological features surrounding the Victoria crater on Mars, based on places Ferdinand Magellan visited. In 2008, Bergreen was a keynote speaker at NASA's 50th anniversary event in Washington, D.C. His most recent work is Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius. Bergreen is a member of PEN American Center, The Explorers Club, the Authors Guild, and the Board of Trustees of the New York Society Library. He lives in New York City. Bergreen's first book was Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting, published in 1980. His biography, James Agee: A Life, was a New York Times “Notable Book” for 1984. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, appeared in 1990. It won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award; it was also a New York Times “Notable Book” for 1990. In 1994, he published Capone: The Man and the Era. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a New York Times "Notable Book", it has been optioned by Miramax. In 1997, Bergreen published Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, a biography drawing on unpublished manuscripts and interviews with Armstrong's colleagues and friends. It appeared on the “Best Books of 1997” lists of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Publishers Weekly. Bergreen is the author of Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASA's exploration of Mars, published in November 2000. Dramatic rights were acquired by TNT. In October 2007, Bergreen published Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, a biography of the iconic traveler. Warner Brothers is developing a feature film based on this book starring Matt Damon and written by William Monahan.
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Berkove, Lawrence I. (editor). The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West. Columbia. 2006. University of Missouri Press. 9780826216519. Mark Twain and His Circle. 408 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Sagebrush School is a term applied to a group of writers who spent their creative years in Nevada from the 1860s to the early twentieth century--its most illustrious representative being Mark Twain. Yet most of their work was never republished from the periodicals in which it first appeared and today remains largely unknown to many scholars and aficionados of Western literature. Lawrence I. Berkove, acknowledged as the leading authority on this body of literature, has assembled an exceptional collection that rescues the lively works of the Sagebrush School from the dusty archives in which they have languished. The Sagebrush Anthology enlarges Mark Twain's circle to encompass the Sagebrush Bohemians through a compelling blend of humorous and serious fiction, memoir, nonfiction, letters, and poetry. These selections convey the experiences shaped by Nevada's rough-and-tumble culture, abounding in wit and humor--with a fondness for literary hoaxes--that were the last major formative influence on Twain. The anthology contains sixty-eight selections--seven by Twain--representing outstanding work by accomplished Sagebrushers Dan De Quille, Sam Davis, Joe Goodman, and Rollin Daggett, plus pieces by lesser-known writers such as Arthur McEwen, Alf Doten, and Fred Hart. Berkove's introduction recounts the history of the school and identifies and analyzes its main thematic and stylistic characteristics. He shows that Sagebrush literature records and reflects the collision of the last generation of frontiersmen with the new culture of technology, industry, and big business--men of talent, imagination, and integrity driven to work out distinctive ways of coping with an unresponsive system of justice, an economy tilted toward the rich, and a society that impinged on individual liberties. Although many critics have noted the influence that this period had on Twain when he lived in Virginia City, few have delineated the influence of specific writers on his style. The Sagebrush Anthology not only shows that some of the ideas and literary techniques credited to Twain can be seen as characteristics of the school that he assimilated and refined, but it also fosters an appreciation of these other writers in their own right, showing that their work encompassed topics and genres that Twain barely addressed. By casting new light on the movement, it invites students and general readers to appreciate a silver flowering of Western literature that remains entertaining and instructive for our own time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lawrence I. Berkove, a full professor of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-D), retired to emeritus status in 2003 after 39 years of teaching in its humanities department.
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Berlin, Lucia. Where I Live Now: Stories: 1993-1998. Jaffrey. 2017. David Godine. 9781574230918. 252 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In Where I Live Now, Berlin contemplates the human condition with a compassionate understanding. Berlin's vision is sometimes remorseful, sometimes resigned, always courageous. The elusive nature of happiness is a compelling theme here: the survivors in these stories―many of them society's marginal or excluded people, fighting alcohol or drug addiction, bearing emotional scars―recognize it all too well.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lucia Berlin was a short story writer with a small, devoted following during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame eleven years after her death, in 2015, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux's publication of a volume of selected stories, A Manual For Cleaning Women, edited by Stephen Emerson. It hit the New York Times bestseller list and, within a few weeks, had outsold all her previous books combined.
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Berlinski, Mischa. Fieldwork. New York. 2007. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374299161. 320 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell.
DESCRIPTION - A daring, spellbinding tale of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and an obsessed young reporter named Mischa Berlinski. When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand's English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead-a suicide-in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder. Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya's crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology-and into the family history of Martiya's victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa's obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world. Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and page-turningly plotted, FIELDWORK is a novel about fascination and taboo-scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mischa Berlinski was born in New York in 1973. He studied classics at the University of California at Berkeley and at Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist in Thailand. He lives in Rome.
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Bernard, Emily (editor). Remember Me To Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes & Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. New York. 2001. Knopf. 0679451137. With 62 illustrations. 357 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph of Langston Hughes by James Allen. Jacket photograph of Carl Van Vechten – Alfred A. Knopf. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.
DESCRIPTION - These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten - older, established, and white - was at first a mentor to the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendship - and for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly. They discussed literature and publishing. They exchanged favorite blues lyrics (‘So now I know what Bessie Smith really meant by ‘Thirty days in jail / With ma back turned to de wal1.' Hughes wrote Van Vechten after a stay in a Cleveland jail on trumped-up charges. They traded stories about the hottest parties and the wildest speakeasies. They argued politics. They gossiped about the people they knew in common - James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekking across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection. Today Van Vechten is a controversial figure: some consider him exploitative, at best peripheral to the Harlem Renaissance - or, indeed, as the author of the novel NIGGER HEAVEN, a blemish upon it, and upon Hughes by association. The letters tell a different, more subtle and complex story: Van Vechten did, in fact, help Hughes (and many other young black writers) to get published; Hughes in turn appreciated what Van Vechten was trying to do in NIGGER HEAVEN and defended him, fiercely. For all their differences, Hughes and Van Vechten remained staunchly loyal to each other throughout their lives. A correspondence of great cultural significance, judiciously gathered together here for the first time and annotated by the insightful young scholar Emily Bernard, REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM shows us an unlikely friendship, one that is essential to our understanding of literature and race relations in twentieth-century America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emily Bernard was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1967. She received her Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. She has been the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellowship at Harvard University. She is an assistant professor of African American studies at Smith College. This is her first book.
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Bernardi, Adria. Benefit Street: A Novel. Tuscaloosa. University of Alabama Press. 9781573661973. 160 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son's ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident. Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends - teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans - in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime. The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adria Bernardi is a writer and translator whose publications include an oral history, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories, and two novels. Her work has been awarded the Bakeless Prize for fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award. She lives in Nashville.
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Bernays, Anne. Professor Romeo. New York. 1989. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1555842186. 279 pages. hardcover. Cover: John Alcorn.
DESCRIPTION - Professor Romeo is the story of Jacob Barker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, best-selling author, leading researcher in his field, and indefatigable seducer of young women.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anne Fleischman Bernays (born September 14, 1930) is an American novelist, editor, and teacher.
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Bernays, Anne. The Address Book. Boston. 1983. Little Brown. 0316091952. 255 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Editor Alicia Baer, agonizing over an attractive job offer which would require her to live apart from her husband and teenaged daughter, discovers in her address book five new names, unknown to her but written in her handwriting.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anne Fleischman Bernays (born September 14, 1930) is an American novelist, editor, and teacher.
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Bernheimer, Kate. The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold. Tuscaloosa. 2011. University of Alabama Press/Fiction Collective 2. 9781573661591. 128 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods. Like her sisters, who appeared in Bernheimer's first two novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold), Lucy has a secret, but she is unable to fasten onto anything but brightness. Novelist Donna Tartt writes, "Lucy's particular brand of optimism, blind to its own shadow, is very American-she is innocence holding itself apart so fastidiously that it becomes its opposite." This novel is a perfect end to the Gold family series, and the perfect introduction, for new readers, to Bernheimer's enchanting body of work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Bernheimer attended Wesleyan University and received her M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. She has taught in the Harvard Summer Writing Program and has been the George Bennett Fellow in Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The editor of the book Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Doubleday), she teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is Bernheimer's first novel.
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Bernstein, Michael Andre. Conspirators. New York. 2004. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374237549. 506 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Amy C. King. Jacket photograph: Carriages and people in Am Hof Platz, Vienna. Background pattern: Detail from book jacket design by Koloman Moser, courtesy of IMAGNO/ Austrian Archives, Vienna. Author photograph by Dalya M. Sachs.
DESCRIPTION - Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the Castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the worldly, corrupt Count- Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the Empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the Count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob Tausk, a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends into every corner of the province and beyond, enlisting union organizers, financiers, aristocrats and their servants, and a young novelist and playwright newly arrived in the Vienna of Franz Josef and Freud, hungry for literary success. In the wake of new terrorist attacks, a mysterious preacher appears in the provincial capital- one of the so-called wonder rabbis from the shtetls of the East-trailing a band of fanatical disciples who proclaim him the Messiah. Word of the charismatic leader spreads quickly from the Jewish quarter to the Castle, and soon Tausk finds himself serving two masters: the Count and the richest man in the province, Moritz Rotenburg, who has a private interest in the wonder rabbi and whose only son has returned from his studies burning for revolution, ready to gather disciples of his own. Moving from underground meetings and makeshift synagogues to the bedrooms of country estates and the secret high councils of the ailing Habsburg Empire, Michael Andre Bernstein's compelling first novel evokes a densely believable world on the edge of collapse, full of the haunting suggestiveness of a fable or nightmare and the erotic, mystical, and apocalyptic passions of an age.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ANDRE BERNSTEIN was raised and educated in Europe, Canada, and the United States. He was a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Republic.
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Bernstein, Michael Andre. Prima Della Rivoluzione. Orono. 1984. National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine at Orono. 0915032414. 61 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A 61 page booklet with 29 poems, all in English.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Andre Bernstein was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of THE TALE OF THE TRIBE: EZRA POUND AND THE MODERN VERSE EPIC (Princeton) and PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE, a volume of poetry (National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine at Orono).
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Berriault, Gina. The Descent. New York. 1960. Atheneum. 181 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The story opens in 1964, with America going underground. Everywhere throughout the United States excavation is in process--hastened by the uncertainty of when the cold war may cease to be cold. Atomic munitions are being produced with frantic speed, and as a complement the nation's psychological witch doctors are preparing American people to believe that the descent into the earth will be a happy manifestation of prepared togetherness. Yet both in Washington and at the United Nations strenuous efforts are made to keep up the semblance of the attempt to maintain peace. A new Cabinet post is devised: that of Secretary of Humanity. The story opens with the arrival in Washington, together with his family, of a man chosen for this post. The rest of the book describes with terrifying quietness the experiences that Arnold Elkins undergoes as Secretary for Humanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gina Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school. Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes. She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984. The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.
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Berriault, Gina. The Lights of Earth. Berkeley. 1984. North Point Press. 086547141x. 157 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A master of the short form, Gina Berriault stands somewhere between Chekhov and Isaac Babel in style and psychological acuity—and in this beautiful new edition of one of her most beloved novellas, she traces the changing relationships between one woman and two fellow novelists. When it was first published, Andre Dubus said of The Lights of Earth, “Like her stories, it’s masterly. Its central character is a woman, Ilona Lewis, who confronts loss of earthly love. But Ilona’s experience is far more complex than losing a man because he has become a celebrity. It involves the hearts of all of us seeking the lights of earth, the soul’s blessing in its long, dark night.” Forsaken by her lover as he gains fame as a novelist, Ilona is stirred by the need to remember the brother she left behind long ago. Revealing the precious worth of life that emerges from the depths of loss, The Lights of Earth is a deeply moving exploration of the soul and a masterwork of style and psychological acuity from one of the most celebrated voices in contemporary fiction. Gina Berriault’s work as a storywriter of great psychological empathy and extraordinary elegance and subtlety was widely praised at the end of her life and, with this reissue of one of her more celebrated short novels, her work can be discovered by a new generation of readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gina Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school. Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes. She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984. The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.
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Berriault, Gina. The Son. New York. 1966. New American Library. 169 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The first published in 1962, The Son introduces readers to Vivian Carpentier, confined by her role as an upper class woman in the 1940s, gleans meaning only from erotic love. Troubled by the elusiveness of men, yet convinced that they run the world, she can barely conceal her desperation to entice. Struggling with motherhood and the failure of marriage, she takes jobs to bridge intervals between lovers. She sings in a hotel bar, sells dresses, and nurses her father’s friend through his last illness, hoping to atone for a self-centered life. The constant in Vivian’s life is her son, David. Having seen her worst and best moments, he provides her with consolation and a reason for living.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gina Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school. Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes. She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984. The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.
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Berriault, Gina. The Son / Conference of Victims. San Francisco. 1985. North Point Press. 0865471983. 249 pages. paperback. Cover: Seurat-'Poseuse de dos'.
DESCRIPTION - Vivian Carpentier, confined by her role as an upper class woman in the 1940s, gleans meaning only from erotic love. Troubled by the elusiveness of men, yet convinced that they run the world, she can barely conceal her desperation to entice. Struggling with motherhood and the failure of marriage, she takes jobs to bridge intervals between lovers. She sings in a hotel bar, sells dresses, and nurses her father's friend through his last illness, hoping to atone for a self-centered life. The constant in Vivian's life is her son, David. Having seen her worst and best moments, he provides her with consolation and a reason for living, 'In those days of her lover's absence, she grew fascinated with her son's beauty. with the hard blue of his eyes, with all the particulars of his face, the pliability of his lips.' The Son is the haunting story of a woman who desires 'something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.' Two novels that are 'penetrating character studies full of luminous observations.' Philadelphia Inquirer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gina Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school. Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes. She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984. The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.
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Berriault, Gina. Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories. Washington DC. 1996. Counterpoint. 1887178384. 416 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This remarkable collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gina Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school. Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes. She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984. The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.
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Berrssenbrugge, Mei-Mei. I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems. Berkeley. 2006. University of California Press. 0520246020. New California Poetry, 18. 154 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style–its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux. CONTENTS - From Summits Move with the Tide; From Random Possession; From The Heat Bird; From Empathy; From Sphericity; From Endocrinology; From Four Year Old Girl; From Nest; New Poems.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and lives in New Mexico. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Nest, The Four Year Old Girl, and Empathy.
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Berryman, John. Recovery. New York. 1973. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374248176. 254 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - A thinly-veiled autobiographical novel, Recovery follows Dr. Alan Severance through his emotional journey of Freudian group analysis where he confesses his humiliations, defeats, and delusions in an attempt to purge himself and achieve normality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Allyn Berryman (October 25, 1914 - January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York. 1950. Sloane. 347 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A critical and psychological study of Stephen Crane by John Berryman in the American Men Of Letters Series.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Allyn Berryman (October 25, 1914 - January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Berryman, John. The Freedom of the Poet. New York. 1976. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374158487. 389 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Less than a year before his death in 1972, John Berryman signed a contract with his publisher for a book of prose, The Freedom of the Poet, for which he had made a selection from his published and unpublished writings. In his draft of a prefatory note, he acknowledged the influence of Eliot, Blackmur, Pound, and Empson on his critical thought, pointing out that 'my interest in critical theory has been slight,' and concluding: 'But I have also borne in mind throughout: remarks by Franz Kafka ('the story came out of me like a real birth, covered with slime and blood') and Joseph Conrad: 'All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty.' There are thirty-six pieces in all, including not only such justly famous writings on Elizabethan figures as 'Shakespeare at Thirty' and 'Thomas Nashe and The Unfortunate Traveller' but also 'Shakespeare's Last Word' and 'Marlowe's Damnations,' published for the first time; essays on American writers like Dreiser, Crane, James, Lardner, Fitzgerald, and Bellow, and on poets like Hardy, Pound, Ransom, Eliot, Thomas, Lowell, and Williams; unpublished essays on Cervantes, Whitman's 'Song of Myself,' Conrad, and Anne Frank; 'Thursday Out,' an account of a trip to India, and stories, published and unpublished, including 'Wash Far Away,' 'The Lovers,' 'All Their Colours Exiled,' and 'The Imaginary Jew.'The poet's 'freedom' in Berryman's definition is not license but escape, release - even death. The title piece - the second part of his essay on The Tempest - confirms this with his statement about Prospero: 'This longing - for release, for freedom -. .is neither disillusioned nor frightening. It is radiant and desirous.'This final book which John Berryman himself prepared exhibits his erudition and scholarship, his critical insight and empathy, and a first-rate poet's powerful prose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Allyn Berryman (October 25, 1914 - January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne. Personal Science: Poems. North Adams. 2017. Tupelo Press. 9781936797912. 71 pages. paperback. Cover art: Laylah Ali. Design: Jesef Beert.
DESCRIPTION - What happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying, given our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds? Bertram’s third full-length collection pivots on an extended piece of creative nonfiction, “Forecast,” which shows how obsessive thinking can begin in actual occurrences that are then exploded in the imagination. The science is personal, as the factual is tinted and stylized, filtered through a self grappling with the difficulty of knowing what is “real.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen, 2012), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Benjamin Saltman Award. She is also author of a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen, 2016) and a chapbook, cutthroat glamours (Phantom Limb, 2013). She holds degrees in creative writing from the University of Utah, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Carnegie Mellon University, and is now assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.
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Betts, Doris. Beasts of the Southern Wild & Other Stories. New York. 1973. Harper & Row. 0060103213. 192 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The nine beautifully crafted tales in Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories display Doris Betts at the top of her compassionate, witty, and unforgettable. "The Ugliest Pilgrim" takes you into the adventures and into the heart of a disfigured young woman who has run away from her life in search of a better one. This award-winning story is the basis for the musical Violet, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In "Hitchhiker," a wary secretary hitches a ride in a boat with a man hell-bent on saving fish; instead he saves her from the river -- and herself. And in the title story, Betts brilliantly captures the inner life of a teacher and writer struggling to control her classroom, her household, and her life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Doris Betts (June 4, 1932 – April 21, 2012) was a short story writer, novelist, essayist and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the author of three short story collections and six novels.
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Betts, Doris. Heading West. New York. 1981. Knopf. 0394517989. 359 pages. hardcover. Cover: Robert DiFranco/Mary Bess Engel.
DESCRIPTION - The author of Souls Raised from the Dead offers a gripping novel that combines the suspense of a thriller with the exhilarating story of a woman's bumpy journey toward liberation. A small-town librarian with big dreams is resigned to a dull vacation with her sister and brother-in-law--until a thief accosts the group and kidnaps her. Nancy Finch, her kidnapper, and on-the-run hitchhiker Judge J. Jolley drive westward from South Carolina and--after plots, failed chances, and retreats along the way--arrive finally at the Grand Canyon and deliverance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Doris Betts (June 4, 1932 – April 21, 2012) was a short story writer, novelist, essayist and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the author of three short story collections and six novels.
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Betts, Doris. Souls Raised From the Dead. New York. 1994. Knopf. 0679426213. 339 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Members of a Southern family--a young girl, her state trooper father, two sets of grandparents, her runaway mother--and their neighbors and friends struggle to cope with the child's serious, perhaps terminal, illness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Doris Betts (June 4, 1932 – April 21, 2012) was a short story writer, novelist, essayist and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the author of three short story collections and six novels.
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Betts, Reginald Dwayne. Bastards of the Reagan Era. Tribeca. 2015. Four Way Books. 9781935536659. 74 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, confronting realities that frame an America often made invisible. Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear “the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world.” We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS’S Shahid Reads His Own Palm won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. He is a Yale Law student.
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Bezzerides, A. I. Thieves' Market. New York. 1949. Scribners. 233 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Nick Garcos shouldn't ever have started hauling for himself; he was too young and too inexperienced, and independent trucking is tough even for the old-timers. But Nick was sick of making only thirty-six dollars a week at the packing house in Fresno, and he wanted to be his own boss. With the four thousand dollars insurance his Pop had left, Nick bought an old truck, planning to get crops cheap from outlying farmers and then make a killing on them in the Frisco produce market. But trucking produce is a cut-throat business. Nick's education started with Ed Kennedy, who offered to be his partner, and who would cheerfully have cheated him out of his last penny, given the chance. It continued with Tex Wexley, a prostitute (the best in town, all the boys said), who was willing to sell him out for fifty bucks, and it really was not complete until Nick learned that everybody had just one goal - money. And they weren't squeamish about how they got it. A. I. Bezzerides will be remembered for his earlier book, THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT - also about truckmen. He knows the background of which he writes, and the people too. They aren't very respectable, either of them, but they exist in the middle of every big city and they are truly portrayed here. The pungent dialogue of truckmen and merchants and their hangers-on rings shockingly true; the fumes of gasoline, the penetrating odor of burnt brakebands and the stench of rotten fruit reproduce the authentic smell of the marketplace. Fast action, rough words, deceit and crime permeate this novel as they do the real world it reflects. You may not like that world, but you'll be fascinated by it, and you may, like Nick Garcos, lose some of your illusions before you're through.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - A. I. ‘ Buzz' Bezzerides (August 9, 1908 - January 1, 2007) was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing Noir and Action motion pictures, especially several of Warners' ‘social conscience' films of the 1940s. He was born Albert Isaac Bezzerides in Samsun, Ottoman Empire (now in Turkey), to a Greek-Armenian family who immigrated to America before he was two. He wrote the novel The Long Haul (1938), which got him into the screenwriting business. He wrote such action feature movies as They Drive by Night (1940) - which was based on his novel, The Long Haul (1938), Desert Fury (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Beneath the 12 Mile Reef(1953), Track of the Cat (1954), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He was one of the co-creators of the western television series The Big Valley. Bezzerides' most famous script was Kiss Me Deadly, which was a masterful film noir and influenced many directors in France shortly after its release. Bezzerides transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make ‘the great whatsit' the Pandora's Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented: ‘People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn't think about it when I wrote it. I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, ‘You don't taste like anybody I know.' I'm a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun.' In 1940, Warner Bros. offered Bezzerides $2,000 for movie rights to his 1938 novel The Long Haul. He learned later that the script based on his book had already been written. The film, They Drive By Night, starred Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. Bezzerides' third novel, Thieves' Market (1949), was adapted to a film known as Thieves' Highway, directed by Jules Dassin. The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. Bezzerides also worked alongside William Faulkner and befriended him. Also, Bezzerides, who at the time was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, later wrote: ‘I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract. Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world.' His first film credit was 1942's Juke Girl, which starred Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan. Bezzerides had begun writing short stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he studied Electrical Engineering. He was first published in a 1935 issue of Story Magazine, which printed his story titled Passage Into Eternity.
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Bierce, Ambrose. A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography. Knoxville. 1999. University of Tennessee Press. 9781572330184. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. 357 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A brilliant author and satirist famous for his sardonic wit, Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) remains one of the most colorful figures in American letters. He fought in the Civil War, worked as a journalist in both the United States and England, and produced such enduring works as The Devil's Dictionary and the classic short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.' In 1913, he disappeared into war-torn Mexico and is believed to have died there. This book brings together, for the first time in one volume, all of Bierce's autobiographical writings; much of this material has never been reprinted since its original appearance in newspapers. The editors have organized these writings into a comprehensive account of Bierce's long life. The core of the book is ‘Bits of Autobiography,' a series of eleven essays Bierce wrote about his Civil War experiences (in which he saw action at key battles such as Shiloh and Chickamauga), his adventures as a Treasury Department aide in the Reconstruction era South, and his three years as a Grub Street hack in London. In combing through Bierce's voluminous journalism and letters, the editors uncovered many other autobiographical passages, which they have included here. These writings describe Bierce's slow rise to celebrity as a journalist in San Francisco and as a writer of tales of the Civil War and of the supernatural, his celebrated battle with the railroad baron Collis P. Huntington in 1896, and his stormy relationship with William Randolph Hearst during his long tenure with the San Francisco Examiner. This volume helps to dispel many of the myths that have reduced Bierce to a perennially embittered, misanthropic caricature. It reveals a man whose intolerance for fools, scoundrels, and hypocrites and whose magisterial gifts of satire and repartee placed him among the most feared writers of his time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 - circa 1914) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. He wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto "Nothing matters", and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work, all earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce". Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited
DESCRIPTIONs, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace. S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor and the author of several books, including H.P. Lovecraft: A Life and The Weird Tale. He was formerly a senior managing editor for Chelsea House Publishers in New York. David E. Schultz is a technical editor for an environmental engineering firm in Milwaukee. He edited a critical edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, and, with S. T. Joshi, he coedited four volumes of Lovecraft's letters as well as An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft.
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Bierce, Ambrose. The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Satires. Knoxville. 102001. University of Tennessee Press. 9781572330962. 288 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A prolific journalist and author well known for his tales of horror and stories about the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) was also a mordant commentator on the political, social, legal, and intellectual failings of his countrymen. Throughout his career, he remained an unapologetic curmudgeon who took a dim view of everything from trade unions and the temperance movement to Americans' insatiable thirst for money. Even the very principles of democracy did not escape his skeptical pen. This volume brings together a generous sampling of Bierce's scathing fictional satires, many of which have not been reprinted since their first appearance a century ago. In writing these works, Bierce often employed fanciful devices, such as assuming the perspective of a future historian looking back on the follies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among such selections, “Ashes of the Beacon” is perhaps the finest, with its trenchant comments on socialism, anarchy, and the problems of republican government. In another fictional piece, “The Land Beyond the Blow,” Bierce recounts voyages to an imaginary world in the style of Gulliver's Travels, commenting on bizarre political and social customs that, not coincidentally, mirror America's own. The volume also includes a rich array of still-relevant nonfiction essays on such topics as capital punishment, the evils of insurance, and the unpleasant disposition of the canines that roam the nation's capital. These pieces reflect many of the same concerns Bierce addresses in his fictional satires, albeit in a more direct way. The selections are drawn from contributions to newspapers and magazines and from Bierce's Collected Works, and include many unsigned editorials that Bierce wrote for the San Francisco Examiner. Editors S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have thoroughly annotated the pieces and have written a substantial introduction outlining the aspects of Bierce's political thought. The resulting volume is essential reading for anyone who appreciates lively commentary desgined to puncture the hypocrisies and sentimentality of Bierce's contemporaries, whatever their beliefs. It fills a major gap in Bierce scholarship and allows us to see the world as the notorious cynic did.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – circa 1914) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. He wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto "Nothing matters", and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work, all earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce". Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited
DESCRIPTIONs, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace. The Editors: S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have collaborated extensively on books devoted to Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, and other literary figures. The edited Bierce’s A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography, also published by the University of Tennessee Press, and an annotated edition of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.
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Bierce, Ambrose. Stories and Tales. New York. 1977. Stemmer House. 0916144208. Selected and with an introduction by Edward Wagenknect. Illustrated by Ferebe Streett. 343 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Brilliant and corrosive, he (Bierce) held a sardonic view of mankind at a time when expansionism and chauvinsitic fervor were at their height in America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842; assumed to have died sometime after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto ‘Nothing matters' and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce'. Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited
DESCRIPTIONs, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.
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Bierce, Ambrose. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians: and Other Stories. New York. 2000. Penguin Books. 9780140437560. Introduction by Tom Quirk. 304 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Questing after Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces, Ambrose Bierce rode into Mexico in 1913 and was never seen again. He left behind him theDevil's Dictionary and a remarkable body of short fiction. This new collection gathers some of Bierce's finest stories, including the celebrated Civil War fictions 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' and 'Chickamauga', his macabre masterpieces, and his tales of supernatural horror. Reminiscent of Poe, these stories are marked by a sardonic humour and a realistic study of tense emotional states.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842; assumed to have died sometime after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto ‘Nothing matters' and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce'. Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited
DESCRIPTIONs, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.
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Bierce, Ambrose. The Ambrose Bierce Satanic Reader. Garden City. 1968. Doubleday. Edited by Ernest Jerome Hopkins. 237 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - If there were a patron saint of newspapermen, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierece would have no serious competition for the assignment. The very mention of his name to literate members of the working press sends them into envious reverie. With over 350 previously unknown examples of America's great 19th century iconoclast at work, the present compilation is a feast of social and journalistic satire to be enjoyed by anyone who likes free speech and concedes the frailty of the human race. For over 40 years, Bierce had the virtual monopoly in this department, earning him the reputation of 'The Wickedest Man in San Francisco' - a misnomer, perhaps, for Bierce was acutely responsive to the wrongs, idiocies and inconsistencies of humanity, using sharply honed wit as his weapon rather than rage. In this volume, his writings are arranged under 13 headings ranging from Crime and the Law to the Church to Economic Regimentation. Typical comments include: 'Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.' Bierce was a prolific and versatile writer whose entire life was overcast by a somber view of man and his weaknesses. Thus, his rediscovery as a spiritual predecessor of today's black humourists is what gives Bierce's work such amazing modern relevance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842; assumed to have died sometime after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto ‘Nothing matters' and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce'. Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited
DESCRIPTIONs, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.
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Bierce, Ambrose. The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary. Athens. 2017. University of Georgia Press. 9780820352787. 6 x 9. 440 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - If we could only put aside our civil pose and say what we really thought, the world would be a lot like the one alluded to in The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary. There, a bore is a person who talks when you wish him to listen, and happiness is an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce's satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book's ninety-year history. A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth. This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi's exhaustive investigation into the book's writing and publishing history. All of Bierce's known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included. Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.
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Bierce, Ambrose. Write It Right. New York. 1909. Neale. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Amusing and thought-provoking, this A-to-Z compendium outlines common oral and written gaffes. Ambrose Bierce, a celebrated literary wit, assembled his informative compilation in 1909 from many years of observations and notes. He advocates precision in language, offering alternatives to grammatical lapses and inaccurate word choices. - Moneyed for Wealthy: "The moneyed men of New York." One might as sensibly say, "The cattled men of Texas," or, "The lobstered men of the fish market." Name for Title and Name: "His name was Mr. Smith." Surely no babe was ever christened Mister. Juncture means a joining, a junction; its use to signify a time, however critical, is absurd. "At this juncture the woman screamed." In reading that account of it, we scream, too. Times and usages have changed considerably in the past century. Bierce's strict rules remain, however, a timeless source of interest for wordsmiths and lovers of language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842; assumed to have died sometime after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto ‘Nothing matters' and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce'. Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited
DESCRIPTIONs, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.
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Bierhorst, John (edited and introduction). In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations. New York. 1971. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 0374336407. 201 pages. SHAW585.
DESCRIPTION - Well-annotated edition which includes 18 Aztec, 6 Maya, and other poems of Indian cultures from Latin America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Bierhorst's books on Latin American lore include The Mythology of South America and The Mythology of Mexico and Central America. He currently serves as an editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
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Bierhorst, John (editor, translator, and foreword). Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature: Quetzalcoatl; The Ritual of Condolence; Cuceb; The Night Chant. New York. 1974. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 0374157928. 371 pages. SHAW584.
DESCRIPTION - Bibliography. Scholarly presentation, including new English translation, of each work, with separate introduction, notes, and bibliography. The masterworks are from Aztec, Iroquois, Maya, and Navajo cultures, respectively. Cuceb is a revision of the English translation by Ralph L. Roys (1949).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Bierhorst's books on Latin American lore include The Mythology of South America and The Mythology of Mexico and Central America. He currently serves as an editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
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Biguenet, John. Oyster. New York. 2002. Ecco Press. 0060198362. 288 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Set on the Louisiana coast in 1957. OYSTER recounts the engrossing tale of a deadly rivalry between two families. To avoid ruin after years of declining oyster crops, Felix and Mathilde Petitjean offer their young daughter, Therese, in marriage to 52-year-old Horse Bruneau, who holds the papers on their boat and house. Bruneau has spent his life as Felix's rival for both the Petitjean's century-old oyster beds and, as we learn, Mathilde. But as Therese explains to Horse one night as they float in a pirogue alone in the marsh. ‘I don't get bought for the price of no damn boat.' These characters inhabit a harsh environment in which people save themselves, if they are to be saved at all. The rapid sequence of events of the opening of the novel is typical of the sudden violence that is never more than an insult away in the muddy wastes of the marsh. People work there without a margin, their boats mortgaged to the next harvest of shrimp or oyster, their work one of the most dangerous of daily occupations, their emotions scraped raw by the grievances they cultivate and pass down to their children as the only lasting inheritance of a life of poverty. The spiraling violence of OYSTER and the seething passions behind it drive an unpredictable tale of murder and revenge in which two women and the men who desire them play out a drama as elemental and inexorable as a Greek tragedy. John Biguenet's fiction has appeared in such publications as Esquire, Granta, Playboy, Story, amd Zoetrope. The winner of an O. Henry Award for short fiction, he lives in New Orleans. Ecco published his debut collection of stories, THE TORTURER'S APPRENTICE. in 2001. OYSTER is his first novel. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Biguenet (born March 9, 1949, New Orleans, LA) has published seven books, including Oyster, a novel, and The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories, released in the U.S. by Ecco/HarperCollins and widely translated. His work has received an O. Henry Award for short fiction and a Harper's Magazine Writing Award among other distinctions, and his poems, stories, plays, and essays have been reprinted or cited in The Best American Mystery Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, Best Music Writing, Contemporary Poetry in America, Katrina on Stage, and various other anthologies. His work has appeared in such magazines as Granta, Esquire, North American Review, Oxford American, Playboy, Storie (Rome), Story, and Zoetrope. Named its first guest columnist by The New York Times, Biguenet chronicled in both columns and videos his return to New Orleans after its catastrophic flooding and the efforts to rebuild the city. Biguenet's radio play Wundmale, which premiered on Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Germany's largest radio network, was rebroadcast by Österreichischer Rundfunk, the Austrian national radio and television network. Two of his stories have been featured in Selected Shorts at Symphony Space on Broadway, the Long Wharf Theatre, and elsewhere. The Vulgar Soul won the 2004 Southern New Plays Festival and was a featured production in 2005 at Southern Rep Theatre; he and the play were profiled in American Theatre magazine. Rising Water was the winner of the 2006 National New Play Network Commission Award, a 2006 National Showcase of New Plays selection, and a 2007 recipient of an Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the 2007 Big Easy Theatre Award for Best Original Play; it has had numerous productions around the country. Shotgun, the second play in his Rising Water cycle, premiered in 2009 at Southern Rep Theatre, with subsequent productions at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Florida Studio Theatre, both in 2010; it won a 2009 National New Play Network Continued Life of New Plays Fund Award and was a 2009 recipient of an Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Shotgun is published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. Mold, the final play in the trilogy, will premiere in 2013 at Southern Rep Theatre. This trilogy of plays about the flooding of New Orleans has been the subject of articles in American Theatre, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. He was awarded a Marquette Fellowship for the writing of Night Train, his new play, which he developed on a Studio Attachment at the National Theatre in London and which premiered at New Jersey Rep Theatre in 2011. In 2008, Biguenet was named Theatre Person of the Year at the Big Easy Theatre Awards, the region's major professional theater awards. He received the Louisiana Writer Award in 2012. Having served twice as president of the American Literary Translators Association and as writer-in-residence at various universities, he is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
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Biguenet, John. Torturer's Apprentice: Stories. New York. 2001. Ecco Press/Harper Collins. 0060198354. 176 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Whether recounting the predicament of an atheistic stigmatic in 'The Vulgar Soul' or a medieval torturer who must employ his terrible skills upon his own apprentice in the title tale, this extraordinary debut collection of stories never settles for easy sentiments or assurances. Though fluent in a variety of narrative voices, the volume is as notable for the rigor of its intellect as for the sweep of its imagination. Imposing neither a single style nor a repeated structure, Biguenet addresses a range of subjects that reach far beyond the failed relationships and unfulfilled lives that occupy so much fiction today. If these stories engage the world in sometimes shocking ways, though, they are virtuoso engagements, eloquent in their prose, surprising in their plotline, sly in their humor.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Biguenet (born March 9, 1949, New Orleans, LA) has published seven books, including Oyster, a novel, and The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories, released in the U.S. by Ecco/HarperCollins and widely translated. His work has received an O. Henry Award for short fiction and a Harper's Magazine Writing Award among other distinctions, and his poems, stories, plays, and essays have been reprinted or cited in The Best American Mystery Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, Best Music Writing, Contemporary Poetry in America, Katrina on Stage, and various other anthologies. His work has appeared in such magazines as Granta, Esquire, North American Review, Oxford American, Playboy, Storie (Rome), Story, and Zoetrope. Named its first guest columnist by The New York Times, Biguenet chronicled in both columns and videos his return to New Orleans after its catastrophic flooding and the efforts to rebuild the city. Biguenet's radio play Wundmale, which premiered on Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Germany's largest radio network, was rebroadcast by Österreichischer Rundfunk, the Austrian national radio and television network. Two of his stories have been featured in Selected Shorts at Symphony Space on Broadway, the Long Wharf Theatre, and elsewhere. The Vulgar Soul won the 2004 Southern New Plays Festival and was a featured production in 2005 at Southern Rep Theatre; he and the play were profiled in American Theatre magazine. Rising Water was the winner of the 2006 National New Play Network Commission Award, a 2006 National Showcase of New Plays selection, and a 2007 recipient of an Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the 2007 Big Easy Theatre Award for Best Original Play; it has had numerous productions around the country. Shotgun, the second play in his Rising Water cycle, premiered in 2009 at Southern Rep Theatre, with subsequent productions at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Florida Studio Theatre, both in 2010; it won a 2009 National New Play Network Continued Life of New Plays Fund Award and was a 2009 recipient of an Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Shotgun is published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. Mold, the final play in the trilogy, will premiere in 2013 at Southern Rep Theatre. This trilogy of plays about the flooding of New Orleans has been the subject of articles in American Theatre, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. He was awarded a Marquette Fellowship for the writing of Night Train, his new play, which he developed on a Studio Attachment at the National Theatre in London and which premiered at New Jersey Rep Theatre in 2011. In 2008, Biguenet was named Theatre Person of the Year at the Big Easy Theatre Awards, the region's major professional theater awards. He received the Louisiana Writer Award in 2012. Having served twice as president of the American Literary Translators Association and as writer-in-residence at various universities, he is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
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Bingham, Robert. Lightning On the Sun. New York. 2000. Doubleday. 0385488564. 293 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Hans Deumling.
DESCRIPTION - Asher is in trouble. He's washed up in Phnom Penh, the UNESCO monument-preservation work has dried up, and he's at the end of his spiritual and financial ropes. But highest-quality heroin is wonderfully cheap in this dangerous and corrupt part of the world. So with funds borrowed from the loan-sharking massage parlor owner Mr. Hawk and the aid of journalist and ‘citizen' Reese as an unwitting mule, he plans to move some weight to New York, where supply will happily meet demand. His partner in this plan is Julie, his once and future love, a beautiful Harvard-educated dabbler in trendy nihilism and fashionable marginalization, currently working behind the bar at Stopless, a downtown strip club. It's all been carefully worked out, but when Julie decides to improvise, the plans swiftly and dangerously unravel in ways that will put the lives of these three complexly flawed young Americans in mortal danger. Robert Bingham's LIGHTNING ON THE SUN is a beautifully plotted and written novel with the fast-paced suspense of a thriller and the moral resonance and exotic setting of one of Graham Greene's classic works. The novel's sense of place, whether steamy Phnom Penh or bustling New York or a leafy New England prep school, is unerring, as is its sense of postmodern moral compromise and the disillusioning ways of the world. It offers an exhilarating read; the literary legacy of one of his generation's most gifted writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Worth Bingham IV (March 14, 1966 - November 28, 1999) was an American writer and a founding editor of the Open City Magazine. A member of a wealthy family of Louisville, Kentucky, his great-grandfather was the politician and newspaper publisher Robert Worth Bingham, and his grandfather, Barry Bingham, Sr., went into the family newspaper businesses as an editor and publisher. Bingham's father, Robert Worth Bingham III (known by his middle name), who also worked in the family business and was expected to take over, was killed aged 34 in a car accident while on vacation at Cape Cod in 1966, when his son was only three months old. Bingham graduated from Brown University in 1988. He then received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. His fiction and non-fiction appeared in The New Yorker, and he worked for two years as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily. He wrote the short story collection Pure Slaughter Value and the novel Lightning on the Sun. Bingham died of a heroin overdose at age 33 on November 28, 1999, six months after marrying Vanessa Scharven Chase, a Harvard graduate art historian, and five months before the publication of his novel. In Robert Bingham's honor, the PEN American Center has established the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement. Bingham was a close friend of musician Stephen Malkmus; Malkmus played a show at Bingham's wedding, and served as an usher at his funeral. The title of "Church on White," a song from Malkmus's debut album, Stephen Malkmus, refers to Bingham's old New York City address. Bingham was also a friend of poet/musician David Berman (leader of the band Silver Jews); the song 'Death Of An Heir of Sorrows', from Silver Jews' 2001 album Bright Flight, is an elegy for Bingham.
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Bingham, Robert. Pure Slaughter Value: Stories. New York. 1997. Doubleday. 0385488556. 195 pages. hardcover. Jacket design and photograph by Michael Ian Kaye.
DESCRIPTION - In his extraordinary debut collection, PURE SLAUGHTER VALUE, Robert Bingham tracks the conscience of a generation that grew up educated, privileged, and starved for meaning. Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake (‘The Other Family'); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon (‘Marriage Is Murder'); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie (‘The Fixers'); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walkaways from drug and alcohol rehab (‘Preexisting Condition'); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing. These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in their intellectual acuity, emotional depth, and wicked, dark humor; Fitzgerald, in their vivid chronicling of a new, restless social elite; and the work of ‘transgressive' writers, in their pervasive sense of the imminent possibility of danger and violence, even in the most civilized surroundings. Above all, the stories in Pure Slaughter Value mark the debut of a striking new literary voice-unsparing, bold, ironic, and true-that will haunt us for a long time to come. ‘Pure Slaughter Value is a fine debut for a writer who is loaded with talent.' -WARD JUST. ‘Robert Bingham's PURE SLAUGHTER VALUE is a very fine thing-eerie and precise, deadpan but full of wicked subcurrents, sexual, psychological, and otherwise-a real marvel of wild, heavy thinking disguised as stories so quiet and even-keeled that you literally don't know what hit you.' - Dennis Cooper.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Worth Bingham IV (March 14, 1966 - November 28, 1999) was an American writer and a founding editor of the Open City Magazine. A member of a wealthy family of Louisville, Kentucky, his great-grandfather was the politician and newspaper publisher Robert Worth Bingham, and his grandfather, Barry Bingham, Sr., went into the family newspaper businesses as an editor and publisher. Bingham's father, Robert Worth Bingham III (known by his middle name), who also worked in the family business and was expected to take over, was killed aged 34 in a car accident while on vacation at Cape Cod in 1966, when his son was only three months old. Bingham graduated from Brown University in 1988. He then received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. His fiction and non-fiction appeared in The New Yorker, and he worked for two years as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily. He wrote the short story collection Pure Slaughter Value and the novel Lightning on the Sun. Bingham died of a heroin overdose at age 33 on November 28, 1999, six months after marrying Vanessa Scharven Chase, a Harvard graduate art historian, and five months before the publication of his novel. In Robert Bingham's honor, the PEN American Center has established the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement.
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Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. New York. 1994. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374226407. Selected & Edited by Robert Giroux. 668 pages. hardcover. The cover shows a watercolor of flowers drawn by Elizabeth Bishop. Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat.
DESCRIPTION - Robert Lowell once remarked, ‘When Elizabeth Bishop's letters are published (as they will be), she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but one of the most prolific writers of our century.' ONE ART is the magnificent confirmation of Lowell's prediction. From several thousand letters, written by Bishop over fifty years - from 1928, when she was seventeen, to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979 - Robert Giroux, the poet's longtime friend and editor, has selected over five hundred missives for this volume. In a way, the letters comprise Bishop's autobiography, and Giroux has greatly enhanced them with his own detailed, candid, and highly informative introduction. ONE ART takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, fully displaying the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great artist.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award winner in 1970.
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Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. New York. 1984. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374126283. Edited & With An Introduction by Robert Giroux. 278 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat. The original watercolor by Elizabeth Bishop was drawn at Key West.
DESCRIPTION - The quality of Elizabeth Bishop's prose is as distinctive and natural as that of her poems. This collection compiled by Robert Giroux, is arranged in two parts - stories and memoirs of persons and places. Of her eight published stories, three appeared in The New Yorker - ‘In the Village,' the extraordinary account of a Nova Scotia childhood; ‘Gwendolyn', about the death of a little girl; and ‘The Housekeeper', published under the pseudonym of Sarah Foster. The others are ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy,' ‘The Sea & Its Shore,' ‘The Baptism' ‘The Farmer's Children' and ‘In Prison.' The non-fiction pieces, with the exception of her Introduction to THE DIARY OF HELEN MORLEY and her essay on the primitive painter ‘Gregorio Valdes', were found among her papers after her death in 1979. The long and witty memoir of Marianne Moore, ‘Efforts of Affection', is a portrait of the older poet and her mother. It recalls visits to Brooklyn, to the circus, to a poets' gathering for the Sitwells and other adventures. ‘To the Botequim & Back' and ‘A Trip to Vigia' are set in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop's home for years. Key West is the setting of ‘Mercedes Hospital', where the author encounters ambiguities surrounding a living saint. ‘The U.S.A. School of Writing' is a seriocomic account of the poet's first job, and there are two priceless memoirs of childhood - 'Primer Class,' life in a one-room school in Canada, and ‘The Country Mouse,' a six-year-old's unhappy days as an orphan in her grandparents' large house. The book reflects the author's lifelong devotion to questions of memory and travel. As a companion volume to THE COMPLETE POEMS: 1927-1979, It reinforces James Merrill's conclusion that Elizabeth Bishop is ‘our greatest national treasure.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award winner in 1970.
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Bishop, John Peale. The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop. New York. 1948. Scribners. Edited and With An Introduction by Edmund Wilson. 508 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The essays here brought together, from Bishop's published volumes and from the many journals and periodicals to which he contributed, range from general discussions of art and literature to book reviews or bits of criticism, but all gain unity from an underlying philosophy and point of view. Contains essays on Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others. Edmund Wilson contributes a seven-page introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Peale Bishop (May 21, 1892 - April 4, 1944) was an American poet and man of letters. Bishop was born in Charles Town, West Virginia, to a family from New England, and attended school in Hagerstown, Maryland and Mercersburg Academy. At 18, Bishop fell victim to a severe illness and temporarily lost his sight for some time. He entered Princeton University in 1913, at age 21, where he became friends with Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He graduated from Princeton in 1917 and served with the army for two years in Europe. He was the model for the character Thomas Parke D'Invilliers in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise. Upon returning to the United States, he wrote poetry as well as essays and reviews for Vanity Fair in New York City. In 1922 he married Margaret Hutchins, and they soon moved to France, where they lived until 1933, punctuated by one stint for Paramount Pictures in New York (1925–26). While in France they bought the Château de Tressancourt at Orgeval, Seine et Oise, near Paris, where they raised three sons. In 1933 Bishop's family returned to the United States, residing first in Connecticut, then New Orleans, and finally in a house on Cape Cod. His novel Act of Darkness, based on the true story of the rape of a prominent Charles Town social figure by a local Charles Town man, caused a scandal in the town when it was published. He became chief poetry reviewer for The Nation (1940). In 1941-2 he served as publications director in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and was then invited to be resident fellow at the Library of Congress. He died within a few months of his appointment, on April 4, 1944, in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
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Bitsui, Sherwin. Flood Song. Port Townsend. 2009. Copper Canyon Press. 9781556593086. 73 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics. "I map a shrinking map," he writes, and "bite my eyes shut between these songs." An astonishing, elemental volume. I retrace and trace over my fingerprints Here: magma, there: shore, and on the peninsula of his finger pointing west-- a bell rope woven from optic nerves is tethered to mustangs galloping from a nation lifting its first page through the man hole--burn marks in the saddle horn, static in the ear that cannot sever cries from wailing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sherwin Bitsui's acclaimed first book of poems, Shapeshift, appeared in 2003. He has earned many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and Lannan Foundation, and he is frequently invited to poetry festivals throughout the world. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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Blackburn, Venita. Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories. Lincoln. 2017. University of Nebraska Press. 9781496201867. Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. 168 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways. Venita Blackburn's characters hurl themselves toward the inevitable fates they might rather wish away. Their stories play with magic without the sparkle, glaring at the internal machinations of the human spirit. Fragile symbols for things such as race, sexuality, and love are lifted, decorated, and exposed to scrutiny and awe like so many ruins of our imagination. Through it all Blackburn's characters stumble along currents of language both thoughtful and hilarious.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Venita Blackburn is an English instructor at Arizona State University. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Faultline, the Georgia Review, and Smoke Long Quarterly. She was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship and a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2014.
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Blaeser, Kimberly. Ancient Light: Poems. Tucson. 2024. University of Arizona Press. 9780816552177. 108 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota. The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is an Anishinaabe writer, photographer, and scholar. Her poetry collections include Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance.
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Blair, Sara. Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century. Princeton. 2007. Princeton University Press. 9780691130873. 73 halftones. 376 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Harlem riot of 1935 not only signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance; it made black America's cultural capital an icon for the challenges of American modernity. Luring photographers interested in socially conscious, journalistic, and aesthetic representation, post-Renaissance Harlem helped give rise to America's full-blown image culture and its definitive genre, documentary. The images made there in turn became critical to the work of black writers seeking to reinvent literary forms. Harlem Crossroads is the first book to examine their deep, sustained engagements with photographic practices. Arguing for Harlem as a crossroads between writers and the image, Sara Blair explores its power for canonical writers, whose work was profoundly responsive to the changing meanings and uses of photographs. She examines literary engagements with photography from the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond, among them the collaboration of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, Richard Wright's uses of Farm Security Administration archives, James Baldwin's work with Richard Avedon, and Lorraine Hansberry's responses to civil rights images. Drawing on extensive archival work and featuring images never before published, Blair opens strikingly new views of the work of major literary figures, including Ralph Ellison's photography and its role in shaping his landmark novel Invisible Man, and Wright's uses of camera work to position himself as a modernist and postwar writer. Harlem Crossroads opens new possibilities for understanding the entangled histories of literature and the photograph, as it argues for the centrality of black writers to cultural experimentation throughout the twentieth century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sara Blair is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation.
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Blaise, Clark and Mukherjee, Bharati. Days and Nights in Calcutta. Garden City. 1977. Doubleday. 0385028954. 300 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year with her family in Calcutta. Clark came as a Westerner; Bharati, as an adult woman examining her life as it might have become had she followed the traditional course expected of her. They recount a modern passage to India with insight, humor and compassion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.'.
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Blaise, Clark. A North American Education. Garden City. 1973. Doubleday. 0385064330. 230 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A series of autobiographical short stories, following the son of Canadian born parents growing up in the deep south, his early adulthood traveling through Europe, and eventually his move to Montreal and marriage to the Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.'.
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Blaise, Clark. Lunar Attractions. Garden City. 1979. Doubleday. 0385133189. 305 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - David has always been special, attuned to the dark side of things, pulled toward the disturbing undercurrents beneath the slick surface of American life. As a whimsical, misunderstood boy growing up in the Florida backwoods, he maps out a reality less hostile than the snapping gators and insensitive school teachers of his rural home. As an adolescent he gets a shocking introduction to sensuality, a sexual initiation in stark contrast to the gentle first-kiss fantasies of teenaged dreams. Lunar Attractions brilliantly captures the manic nature of our times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.'.
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Blaise, Clark. Lusts. Garden City. 1983. Doubleday. 0385154747. 253 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Richard Durgin desires and marries the beautiful, sophisticated, and gifted Rachel, his opposite in many ways, yet he never comes to understand or truly love her until after her death.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.'.
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Blaise, Clark. Resident Alien. New York. 1986. Penguin Books. 0140082344. Paperback Original. 184 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - RESIDENT ALIEN is an interesting exploration of the fine line between autobiography and fiction - nonfiction essays surround stories that imaginatively rework the material already presented. Blaise once again looks at the subject of loneliness and alienation as well as the differences between Canada and the United States as he reconstructs the small events and influences on a life that could have produced 'an eventual artist (if lucky) or a functional neurotic.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.'.
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Blaise, Clark. Selected Essays. Evanston. 2008. Northwestern University Press. 9781897231500. Edited by John Metcalf and Tim Struthers. 288 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise, OC (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University’.
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Blaise, Clark. Tribal Justice. Garden City. 1974. Doubleday. 0385010389. 224 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Clark Blaise's second book, a collection of well-received short stories that involve coming to terms with a fragmented society, and issues of assimilation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.'.
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Blanchfield, Brian. Proxies. Callicoon. 2016. Nightboat Books. 9781937658458. 184 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Highly original, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics - Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br'er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus - that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life's rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina. “Brian Blanchfield's Proxies is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.” - Maggie Nelson.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Brian Blanchfield is an American poet and essayist. He was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1973, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Warren Wilson College. He is the author of two books of poetry, Not Even Then (2004) and A Several World (2014), and a book of essays/autobiography, Proxies (2016).
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Blaser, Robin. The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser. Berkeley. 2007. University of California Press. 0520245938. 544 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the ‘Berkeley Renaissance' of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing ‘Image-Nation' and ‘Truth Is Laughter' series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time–from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre. Contents - Foreword by Robert Creeley; A Note on the Text; Author's Note; THE BOSTON POEMS (1956 - 1959); CUPS 1 - 12 (1959 - 1960); THE PARK (1960); THE FAERIE QUEENE (1961); THE MOTH POEM (1962 - 1964); IMAGE-NATIONS 1 - 4 (1962 - 1964); LES CHIMÈRES (1963 - 1964); CHARMS (1964 - 1968); GREAT COMPANION: PINDAR (1971); IMAGE-NATIONS 5 - 14 AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS (1965 - 1974); REAMS I (1974 - 1976); NTAX (1979 - 1981); LL MELL (1981 - 1988); EAT COMPANION: ROBERT DUNCAN (1988); REAMS II (1986 - 1991); ODY (1990 - 1993); TES (1994 - 2000); EAT COMPANION: DANTE ALIGHIERE (1997); NDERS (2001 - 2002); (2003); ! (2004); Afterword by Charles Bernstein; Index of Titles and First Lines.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robin Blaser (May 18, 1925, Denver, CO - May 7, 2009, Vancouver, Canada) was Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Among his many books are The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (UC Press), Pell Mell, and Syntax. Miriam Nichols is College Professor at University College of the Fraser Valley and editor of Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser.
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Blessing, Lee. A Walk in the Woods. New York. 1988. Plume/New American Library. 0452261996. 63 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A Walk in the Woods is a 1988 play by Lee Blessing. The play depicts the developing relationship between two arms negotiators strolling in the woods above Geneva, Switzerland, in the late summer, away from the glare of the negotiating table. They are a Soviet diplomat, Andrey Botvinnik age 57, and John Honeyman age 45, an American negotiator. The two men eventually develop a relationship, although their personalities differ. Botvinnik is friendly and enjoys American culture, Honeyman is formal and idealistic The play is suggested by a real-life incident, which occurred in 1982. "Negotiators Paul H. Nitze and Yuli A. Kvitsinsky left the official Geneva sessions for an unofficial "walk in the woods" and achieved a breakthrough, soon rejected by their Governments."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lee Knowlton Blessing (born October 4, 1949) is an American playwright best known for his 1988 work, A Walk in the Woods. A lifelong Midwesterner, Blessing continued to work in regional theaters in and around his hometown of Minneapolis through his 40s before relocating to New York City. Blessing was born in Minneapolis Minnesota and graduated from Minnetonka High School in 1967. He began his college education at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, but later transferred to Reed College in Oregon where he earned a B.A. in English in 1971. After Blessing earned his degree, his parents offered the young graduate the choice between a used car or a trip to Russia. Blessing chose Russia where he found inspiration to write his best-known work, the award-winning A Walk in the Woods. According to interviews with Blessing, the play, which depicts the developing relationship between a Russian and an American arms limitation negotiator is based on fact. Apparently, during the 1982 talks in Geneva, Switzerland, Soviet Yuli Kvitsinsky and American Paul Nitze left the formal discussions to literally take a walk in the woods. Following its premiere in Waterford, Connecticut, A Walk in the Woods was nominated for both a Tony award and a Pulitzer Prize. Though the production won neither award, it was reprised produced in Moscow in 1989 and later adapted for television. Upon returning from his tenure abroad, Blessing went on to study playwriting at the University of Iowa where he received MFA degrees in English and Speech and Theater. He would later return to teach at the Iowa's Playwrights Workshop and the Iowa Writers' Workshop in addition to his time as an instructor at the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis. He currently serves as Head of the graduate playwriting program at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Blessing's most recent plays include A Body of Water, Whores, The Scottish Play, Black Sheep, Fortinbras, and many others. He has also written one act plays including The Roads That Lead Here and Eleemosynary. Eight of his plays have been staged at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut during the prestigious National Playwrights Conference. Several of his most recent works produced in New York City including Thief River, Cobb and Chesapeake, received Drama Desk nominations and an award, plus nominations from the Outer Critics Circle. Blessing married his first wife, Jeanne Blake, in 1986. He is currently married to fellow playwright and screenwriter, Melanie Marnich.
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Blinn, James W. The Aardvark Is Ready For War. Boston. 1997. Little Brown. 0316099872. 279 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by David High.
DESCRIPTION - Aardvark is a tactical jet crewman on board an aircraft carrier steaming to the Persian Gulf War. Nicknamed after the gas masks he and all combatants carry, Aardvark is a virtual warrior in the world's first virtual war. Sardonic and borderline, a camcorder voyeur and cathode ray tube assassin, he wears his aardvark mask constantly and tries to filter reality through digital or video screens at all times. In his incendiary narrative of the voyage from San Diego to the Gulf, Aardvark shows us the warping effects of his shipmates' slow realization that they have come not just to deliver death, but to risk death themselves. Through increasingly surreal daily training exercises and two phantasmagorical shore leaves, Aardvark sees violence, drunkenness, and sheer military lunacy embraced with heroic abandon. As the ship nears its destination, Aardvark finds his private mission going horribly awry - but there is still hope he can salvage everything with the right photo op.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James W. Blinn served in the U.S. Navy for none years and now lives in San Diego with his wife, Anne Isaaks, also a novelist.
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Bly, Nellie. Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings. New York. 2014. Penguin Books. 9780143107408. Introduction by Jean Marie Lutes. 368 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The first edited volume of work by the legendary undercover journalist Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, Nellie Bly was one of the first and best female journalists in America and quickly became a national phenomenon in the late 1800s, with a board game based on her adventures and merchandise inspired by the clothes she wore. Bly gained fame for being the first "girl stunt reporter," writing stories that no one at the time thought a woman could or should write, including an exposé of patient treatment at an insane asylum and a travelogue from her record-breaking race around the world without a chaperone. This volume, the only printed and edited collection of Bly's writings, includes her best known works-Ten Days in a Mad-House, Six Months in Mexico, and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days-as well as many lesser known pieces that capture the breadth of her career from her fierce opinion pieces to her remarkable World War I reporting. As 2014 marks the 150th anniversary of Bly's birth, this collection celebrates her work, spirit, and vital place in history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (born Elizabeth Jane Cochran; May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and for an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She ushered in the era of stunt girl reporting and helped advance a new kind of immersion journalism
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Bockris, Victor. With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker. New York. 1981. Seaver Books. 0394518098. 250 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Victor Bockris spent six years following Burroughs around the globe, tape-recording conversations between Burroughs and a variety of individuals, including Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Tennessee Williams, Terry Southern, and Andy Warhol, on topics such as Writing, Dreams, Drugs, Politics, and Psychic Sex. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs scattered throughout.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Victor Bockris (born 1949) is an English-born, U.S.-based author, primarily of biographies of artists, writers, and musicians. He has written about Lou Reed (and the Velvet Underground), Andy Warhol, Keith Richards, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Blondie, Patti Smith, and Muhammad Ali. He helped write the autobiographies of John Cale and Bebe Buell. Bockris' book Beat Punks explores the relationship between artistic bohemians of the 1950s (the Beats) and the 1970s (the Punk rockers). This is a theme he is developing in his memoir, In Search of the Magic Universe.
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Bogan, Louise. Selected Criticism. New York. 1955. Noonday Press. 404 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This collection brings together much of Ms. Bogan's critical work that she wrote for The New Yorker including her thoughts on the modern movement in literature, popular and unpopular art, articles on Goethe, Eluard, and Yeats, reviews of works by writers from Flaubert to Dinesen, and reviews of prominent contemporary poets.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 - February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945. As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century. The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, ‘Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the ‘reactionary generation.' This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan ‘one of the finest lyric poets America has produced,' and added that ‘the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending.'
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Bogosian, Eric. Mall. New York. 2000. Simon & Schuster. 0684857278. 249 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kevin Brainard.
DESCRIPTION - November 2000 All Roads Lead. to the Mall The mall. It's become a punch line for jokes about American culture and a sprawling, often-tacky clichE -- a land of big hair and mid-priced department stores, high-end cars and furtive window-shoppers. You might think there's nothing new to say about this institution, but then you aren't award-winning actor and writer Eric Bogosian. Bogosian tackles this prominent feature of the typical suburban landscape in his alternately disturbing and humorous first novel, Mall. Opening the story with Mal, a methamphetamine addict who murders his mother and then sets his sights on the mall, Bogosian presents a rogues' galleria of disaffected, hapless characters, propelled to the shopping mecca by their own despondency. Danny seems to have it all, including a loving wife and lucrative job. Why then is he nabbed by security agents while gawking at the nubile Donna undressing in a not-so-private room? Why does Donna crave -- and attain -- attention from such exhibitionism, sprinkled with a healthy dose of food binges and the dismissal of her life as a housewife? This motley group of mall-goers includes the jaded, cynical Jeff, barely out of his teens, who goes to the mall -- why else? -- for a girl. And, lastly, Michael, a widowed Haitian security guard, comforted by his dreams of his departed wife as he goes about a humdrum, all-too-normal existence. What is normal, anyhow? In this riveting book, Eric Bogosian will force consideration of that word as never before, and you'll never view a trip to the mall in the same way again.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Michael Bogosian (/bəˈɡoʊʒən/; born April 24, 1953) is an American actor, playwright, monologuist, novelist, and historian. Descended from Armenian-American immigrants, he grew up in Watertown and Woburn, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Chicago and Oberlin College. His play Talk Radio was a finalist for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Bogosian also wrote and starred in the 1988 film adaptation, winning the Silver Bear. As an actor, he has appeared in plays, films, and television series throughout his career. His television roles include Captain Danny Ross in Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2006–10), Lawrence Boyd on Billions (2017–18), Daniel Molloy on Interview with the Vampire (2022–present), and Gil Eavis on Succession (2018–23). He also starred as Arno in the Safdie brothers' film Uncut Gems (2019). Bogosian has also been involved in New York City ballet production, and has written several novels as well as the historical nonfiction Operation Nemesis (2015), based on the program to assassinate perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. He is the recipient of three Obie Awards and a Drama Desk Award, as well as two-time fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Bohjalian, Chris. Midwives. New York. 1997. Harmony Books. 060960497x. 312 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to have died in labor. But what if—as Sibyl's assistant later charges—the patient wasn't already dead, and it was Sibyl who inadvertently killed her? As recounted by Sibyl's precocious fourteen-year-old daughter, Connie, the ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt except for the fact that all its participants are acting from the highest motives—and the defendant increasingly appears to be guilty. As Sibyl Danforth faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the very best novels ever do.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chris A. Bohjalian is an American novelist and the author of over twenty novels, including Midwives (1997), The Sandcastle Girls (2012), The Guest Room (2016), and The Flight Attendant (2018). Bohjalian's work has been published in over thirty languages, and three of his novels have been adapted into films. Bohjalian's The Flight Attendant has been adapted for a television drama starring Kaley Cuoco.
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Bohjalian, Chris. Water Witches. Hanover. 1995. University Press Of New England. 0874516870. 342 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Vermont is drying up. The normally lush, green countryside is in the grip of the worst drought in years: stunted cornstalks rasp in the hot July breeze, parched vegetable gardens wither and die, the Chittenden River shrinks to a trickle, and the drilling trucks are booked solid as one by one the wells give out. Patience Avery, known nationwide as a gifted 'water witch,' is having a busy summer, too. Using the tools of the dowser's trade -- divining sticks, metal rods, bobbers, and pendulums -- she can locate, among other things, aquifers deep within the earth. In the midst of this crisis, Scottie Winston lobbies for permits to expand Powder Peak, a local ski area that's his law firm's principal client. As part of the expansion, the resort seeks to draw water for snowmaking from the beleaguered Chittenden, despite opposition from environmentalists who fear that the already weakened river will be damaged beyond repair. What ensues in Chris Bohjalian's fourth novel is a struggle between conservation and development, rugged tradition versus inevitable progress. But it is also a tale of the clash between science and mystery, a chronicle of one man's transformation from cynic to believer. Vivid with the texture of New England ways, alive with characters both quirky and real, informed by the ongoing, real-life battles between environmentalism and economic expansion in Vermont, Water Witches is a story of ineffable forces, tenuous balances, 'and perhaps something about our abilities as a people to heal and forgive and to love.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chris A. Bohjalian is an American novelist and the author of over twenty novels, including Midwives (1997), The Sandcastle Girls (2012), The Guest Room (2016), and The Flight Attendant (2018). Bohjalian's work has been published in over thirty languages, and three of his novels have been adapted into films. Bohjalian's The Flight Attendant has been adapted for a television drama starring Kaley Cuoco.
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Bohjalian, Christopher A. A Killing in the Real World. New York. 1988. St Martin's Press. 0312017812. 217 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Patti Manzone.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Is there life after college?' For Penny Noble, the beautiful daughter of a socially prominent family, the answer is no-literally. Penny is found murdered, along with a pornographer, in a Greenwich Village apartment, only a few years after graduating from one of the country's most exclusive women's colleges. Of Penny's college roommates, it is the inquisitive Lisa Stone who becomes drawn into the bewildering questions surrounding Penny's death. and Lisa's curiosity soon turns into the frightening suspicion that any one of three men closest to her could have been Penny's murderer. When a second roommate is killed before Lisa's eyes, a terrifying pattern emerges, which Lisa and young Manhattan homicide detective Richard Heckler must race to discern before the murderer strikes again. Written with verve and style, Christopher A. Bohjalian's first novel is a fast-paced, effervescent, and startling mystery that delves into the hip, up-to-the-minute world of New York City's shining, ambitious youth. CHRISTOPHER A. BOHJALIAN'S short stories have appeared in Cosmopolitan and other magazines. A graduate of Amherst College, he currently lives with his wife in a small Vermont village, where he is completing his latest novel. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chris A. Bohjalian is an American novelist and the author of over twenty novels, including Midwives (1997), The Sandcastle Girls (2012), The Guest Room (2016), and The Flight Attendant (2018). Bohjalian's work has been published in over thirty languages, and three of his novels have been adapted into films. Bohjalian's The Flight Attendant has been adapted for a television drama starring Kaley Cuoco.
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Bonner, Marita. Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Boston. 1987. Beacon Press. 0807063002. Edited and introduced by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. 286 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Aaron Douglas, Song of the Towers, 1934.
DESCRIPTION - Marita Bonner (1899-1971), prize-winning author of short stories, plays, and essays, is virtually unknown today. Born and educated in Boston and Cambridge, a writer and member of Georgia Douglas Johnson's "S" Street Salon in Washington, D.C., and a teacher, wife, and mother in Chicago, Bonner is one of America's most vital twentieth-century black writers. Here for the first time in book form are her collected works. Bonner's stories, essays, and plays, many of which were originally published in the black magazines "Crisis" and "Opportunity" between 1925 and 1941, describe black working-class life in Chicago. The setting is Frye Street, Bonner's fictional neighborhood, a melting pot where many different ethnic groups struggle to survive in the face of extreme poverty, racism, and violence. Listen to how she evokes the atmosphere of the place in the story "Nothing New": "You have been down on Frye Street. You know how it runs. from freckled-faced tow heads to yellow Orientals; from broad Italy to broad Georgia, from hooked nose to square black noses. How it lisps in French, how it babbles in Italian, how it gurgles in German, how it drawls and crawls through the Black Belt dialects. Frye Street flows nicely together. It is like muddy water. Like muddy water in a brook." "Frye Street and Environs" is a rich and rewarding collection. Opening with two essays, the most famous of which is the poignant autobiographical "One Being Young--a Woman--and Colored," the book also contains three plays and 22 short stories. "The Purple Flower," an experimental dramatic allegory about the back quest for freedom and happiness in the post-Emancipation U.S., is probably the best know of her plays. Her short stories--works like "The Prison-Bound," "Drab Rambles," "Tin Can," "The Makin's," and "Hate Is Nothing"--offer an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of working-class blacks, exploring the interlocking themes of color prejudice, alienation of the Southern black migrant, ethnic clashes, tensions in interracial romance, the psychological devastation of racism, poverty, thwarted ambition, and the problems of black female aspiration. "There is only one Frye Street," wrote Marita Bonner, but "all the world is there." Until now, Bonner's fictional universe has been known to only a select few. With the publication of "Frye Street and Environs," her audience will grow as many readers encounter for the first time the thoughts and passions of the people in this unforgettable neighborhood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899 - December 7, 1971), also known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. On December 29, 1921, along with 15 other women, she chartered the Iota chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Marita Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Anne Noel Bonner. Marita was one of four children and was brought up in a middle-class community in Massachusetts. She attended Brookline High School, where she contributed to the school magazine, The Sagamore. She excelled in German and Music, and was a very talented pianist. In 1917, she graduated from Brookline High School and in 1918 enrolled in Radcliffe College, commuting to campus because many African-American students were denied dormitory accommodation. In college, she majored in English and Comparative Literature, while continuing to study German and musical composition. At Radcliffe, African-American students were not permitted to board, and many either lived in houses off-campus set aside for black students, or commuted, as Bonner did. Bonner was an accomplished student at Radcliffe, founding the Radcliffe chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority, and participating in many musical clubs (she twice won the Radcliffe song competition). She was also accepted to a competitive writing class that was open to 16 students, where her professor, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged her not to be "bitter" when writing, a descriptor often used for authors of color. In addition to her studies, she taught at a high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After finishing her schooling in 1922, she continued to teach at Bluefield Colored Institute in West Virginia. Two years later, she took on a position at Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C., until 1930, during which time her mother and father both died suddenly. While in Washington, Bonner became closely associated with poet, playwright and composer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson's "S Street salon" was an important meeting place for many of the writers and artists involved in the New Negro Renaissance. While living in Washington D.C., Bonner met William Almy Occomy. They married and moved to Chicago, where Bonner's writing career took off. After marrying Occomy, she began to write under her married name. After 1941, Bonner gave up publishing her works and devoted her time to her family, including three children. She began teaching again in the 1940s and finally retired in 1963. Bonner died on December 7, 1971, from smoke-inhalation complications at a hospital after her apartment caught fire. She was 73.
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Bontemps, Arna and Hughes, Langston. Popo and Fifina. New York. 1993. Oxford University Press. 0195087658. Illustrations by E. Simms Campbel. Introduction and Afterword by Arnold Rampersad. 112 pages. hardcover. Cover illustration by E. Simms Campbell.
DESCRIPTION - When POPO AND FIFINA was first published in 1932, it marked the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership between Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. The book was greeted with universal approval. The New York Times praised its ‘simple home-like atmosphere' and suggested that all children's books ‘should be written by poets.' It was favorite among children, parents, and teachers for more than two decades and now this new edition introduces its magic to a new generation. Popo and his sister, Fifina, live on the island of Haiti. They grow up just like children all over the world. It's true that life on a tropical island is much different from our life, but we all recognize the excitement of moving day as the family leaves its home in the hills to move to a town by the sea. The next few months are full of experiences and adventures - adjusting to a new home, a trip back to the hills for a visit, Popo's work as a carpenter's apprentice, the children's fun with a wondrous kite made by their father, and even a trip to the lighthouse at the end of the island and an amazing tropical storm. Hughes and Bontemps bring their gifts of simplicity, realism, and poetic charm to this introduction to Haiti and the rustic life that existed there in the 1930s. When originally published, their clear and melodious voices made POPO AND FIFINA an immediate success. Now, 60 years later, its natural appeal is enhanced by our awareness of its place in history. This story is not only a glimpse of life and times long past but also stands as on early African-American classic and as a milestone in the history of literature for children.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) was born in Louisiana and grew up in California. He moved to New York City in 1923, and it was there that he met Langston Hughes and other writers who were leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps began his literary career as a poet but also wrote novels and edited anthologies of African-American poetry and folktales. Hughes and Bontemps collaborated on POPO AND FIFINA and also worked together on other novels for young adults and several anthologies, such as POETRY OF THE NEGRO, 1746-1949 and THE BOOK OF NEGRO FOLKLORE. Bontemps is known as one of our major African-American poets, but he is also credited with making black folklore and literature available to the public through his anthologies and through his work as a historian, librarian, and teacher at several American universities. Arnold Rampersad is a professor of English and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. Among his books are THE ART AND IMAGINATION OF W. E. B. DU BOIS and the two-volume THE LIFE OF LANGSTON HUGHES. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.' POPO AND FIFINA, written in collaboration with fellow poet Arna Bontemps, was his first novel written especially for children.
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Borofka, David. Hints of His Mortality. Iowa City. 1996. University of Iowa Press. 0877455570. 235 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The award-winning stories in David Borofka's Hints of His Mortality focus on the male of the species, on bewildered, guilt-ridden, hypersensitive characters adrift in a sea of changing roles and expectations. Although they yearn for the ideal-whether physical or spiritual-and for that sense of divine connection suggested by Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, they usually end up settling for what seems the next best thing: sex or religion. The amorous scrimmage between male and female in these taut, intense stories is a contest that leaves no one unmarked. The hapless ministers in Borofka's memorable collection find that their daily grind of professional piety leaves them with more questions than answers. The men and boys in Hints of His Mortality are always aware of their flaws, for Borofka's vital characters have the capacity to register the shadows of their every blemish. Like Ferguson of the title story, haunted for twenty years by his failures of conscience, each protagonist experiences the inexorable fallibility of his own nature, agonizes over his moral weakness, and longs for escape from this life in which 'our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.' Yet each is redeemed by his ongoing struggle for compassion and understanding.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Borofka is an America novelist and short story writer. He is the author of the short story collection, Hints of His Mortality, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1996, and the novel, The Island (1997). Borofka has won the Missouri Review's Editors' Prize, Carolina Quarterly's Charles B. Wood Award for Distinguished Writing. His short fiction has appeared in Image, Southern Review, Manoa, and Glimmer Train. He is a professor of composition, literature and creative writing at Reedley College.
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Boruch, Marianne. Cadaver, Speak. Port Townsend. 2014. Copper Canyon Press. 9781556594656. 101 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Honored by Library Journal as an "Amazing Poetry Title" "Extraordinary how in a single poem from 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Boruch slides 1800s London barber-surgeons and the dissection of murderers only (condemned to hell anyway) to the observation, 'Future or past, it's all we ever think about.' The first part of this sharp, surprising book captures our inescapable but slippery physicality in the world, the second the breakdown of the cadaver of a 99-year-old woman--told from her perspective, rather jauntily."--Library Journal "Boruch displays a quietly gymnastic intellect in the examinations of art, the body, and the human condition."--American Poets "Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: she sees and considers with intensity."--The Washington Post "Some books begin as a dare to the self," notes poet Marianne Boruch. Inspired by life-study drawing classes and direct work in a cadaver lab, Boruch's latest book looks at what the body holds, and examines living through bodies deceased.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marianne Boruch is the author of seven collections of poetry including The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press), two volumes of essays, and a memoir. In 2013 she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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Boruch, Marianne. Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing. Port Townsend. 2016. Copper Canyon Press. 9781556594915. 127 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A starred review in Library Journal says this about Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing "Only a poet as accomplished as Boruch could make such beautiful verse while leading us through the everyday, of life's subtle, steady shiftings ('the bird's hunger, seeking shape'). If the opening image of a pool filled with cruelly dredged up roses bespeaks quiet assent ('I stood before them the way an animal/ accepts sun'), the next poem turns immediately to progress (and hence progression) as a modern invention beyond the heaven-and-hell alternatives; finally, the poet concedes, 'I lose track of my transitions.' In fact, transition defines us. Here, a static painting gives way to 'between and among, ' a simple typeface never yields a perfect copy, and even in a medieval score, two exquisite quavers are connected by a slur. Highly recommended." "Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity."--The Washington Post "Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things--but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."--Poetry In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro. From "Before and Every After": Eventually one dreams the real thing. The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle a skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky passing into rock and underground river. A single row of strangers faced front, each of us behind another close as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up politely, pre-flight.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marianne Boruch is the author of ten collections of poetry. She is the 2013 recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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Borzutzky, Daniel. Lake Michigan. Pittsburgh. 2018. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822965220. Pitt Poetry Series. 6 x 9. 88 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In Lake Michigan, National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky writes in direct response to a history of police abuse targeted at African Americans and carried out at Homan Square, a secret interrogation facility on the west side of Chicago. “I am vehemently protective of my native city - its rollicking history and gritty glories are legion. But it is also sweltering, blade-edged and murderous, with brown people squarely in its gunsights. Borzutzky's surreal and terrifying lakeside dreamscape - sparked by the real-world specter of the city's infamous ‘blacksite' interrogation warehouse - is deftly crafted and chilling in its proximity to the real.” - Patricia Smith. “Borzutzky stages Lake Michigan in two ‘acts' at an imaginary prison on the real and symbolic border of Chicago. Each poem-scene vividly dramatizes state violence and capitalist exploitation, while the tortured speakers perform a lyricism of estrangement. Throughout, we are compelled to radically critique our political realities and to inscribe our vulnerable bodies into public song.” - Craig Santos Perez.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator, and the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, Memories of my Overdevelopment, and The Book of Interfering Bodies. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia won the 2017 National Translation Award. Other translations include Raúl Zurita's The Country of Planks; and Song for His Disappeared Love and Jaime Luis Huenun's Port Trakl. He lives in Chicago.
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Boswell, Robert. Crooked Hearts. New York. 1987. Knopf. 0394557069. 339 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Robert Boswell's wonderful first novel - both heart-piercing and freshly funny, at once strikingly contemporary in its fix on life and timeless in its power to move us - tells the story of an American family transplanted from Kentucky to the Sunbelt not long ago.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Boswell is an American short story writer and novelist. He has been faculty at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson. Boswell teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.
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Boswell, Robert. Dancing in the Movies. Iowa City. 1986. University of Iowa Press. 0877451346. 153 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Six stories tell of a Black policeman's fear of racism, a student who tries to convince his girlfriend to stop her drug habit, lovers trying to build a relationship, and soldiers at war.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Boswell is an American short story writer and novelist. He has been faculty at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson. Boswell teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.
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Bosworth, David. From My Father,Singing. New York. 1986. Pushcart Press. 0916366367. Winner Of The 4th Annual Editors' Book Award. 120 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Recounts the return of a young man, down on his luck and in despair, who returns to the Maine town of his boyhood searching for the soul and vision of his dead father.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Bosworth received his B.A from Brown University in English and American Literature in 1969, and joined the faculty at University of Washington English department faculty in 1984. Throughout his long career, Professor Bosworth has published in a wide range of forms, from short fiction, to the novel, to poetry, to the critical essay. Prior to his arrival at the UW, his book of short fiction, The Death of Descartes (1981), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was also the recipient of a Special Citation from PEN and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Professor Bosworth is also the author of the novel, From My Father, Singing(1986), which was the winner of Editor’s Book Award. More recent work includes The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession (2014), a work of cultural criticism, and Conscientious Thinking: Making Sense in an Age of Idiot Savants (2017). Over the years, Professor Bosworth has established himself as a cultural producer, cultural critic, public intellectual, and university teacher with a strong commitment to the literary arts.
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Bosworth, David. The Death of Descartes. Pittsburgh. 1981. University of Pittsburgh Press. 0822934485. 182 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Stories deal with memories of the past, the parents of a dying child, a guilty affair, an enigmatic phone call, and a retired detective's work on a new murder investigation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Bosworth received his B.A from Brown University in English and American Literature in 1969, and joined the faculty at University of Washington English department faculty in 1984. Throughout his long career, Professor Bosworth has published in a wide range of forms, from short fiction, to the novel, to poetry, to the critical essay. Prior to his arrival at the UW, his book of short fiction, The Death of Descartes (1981), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was also the recipient of a Special Citation from PEN and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Professor Bosworth is also the author of the novel, From My Father, Singing(1986), which was the winner of Editor’s Book Award. More recent work includes The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession (2014), a work of cultural criticism, and Conscientious Thinking: Making Sense in an Age of Idiot Savants (2017). Over the years, Professor Bosworth has established himself as a cultural producer, cultural critic, public intellectual, and university teacher with a strong commitment to the literary arts.
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Bowen, Kevin. Playing Basketball With the Viet Cong: Poems. Willamantic. 1994. Curbstone Press. 1880684209. 63 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - "This is a different kind of Vietnam book; this collection evolves around a natural empathy between actors on a human stage that's almost mythic in scope and concerns. This poetry is shaped out of a love for people, as well as a painful passion garnered from the experience of war. One feels that a witness is sharing heartfelt moments when reading." -- Yusef Komunyakaa.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kevin Bowen was drafted and served in the First Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. He is a 1973 graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Boston. A former Danforth Fellow and Fulbright Fellow at New College, Oxford, he earned his PhD in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He worked as an aide and speechwriter for Lt. Governor Thomas P. O'Neill III prior to becoming director of the Veterans' Upward Bound Program at University of Massachusetts–Boston in 1984. Since 1987, he has returned to Vietnam many times, initiating cultural, educational, and humanitarian exchanges. He is an adjunct associate professor in the English department, where he teaches courses in creative writing, literature and war, and the literature of the Vietnam War. Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, his first collection of poetry, was published by Curbstone Press in 1994. His poems have appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Witness, and other places. He has edited a special feature on contemporary Vietnamese poetry in the winter 1996 issue of Manoa. With Bruce Weigl he is coeditor of Writing Between the Lines: Writings on War and Its Consequences published by the University of Massachusetts Press in February 1997. He was appointed codirector of the Joiner Center in 1984 and has been director of the center since 1993. He lives with his wife and two children in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
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Bowles, Jane. Feminine Wiles. Santa Barbara. 1976. Black Sparrow Press. 0876852533. Introduction by Tennessee Williams. 89 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Paul Bowles prepared this posthumous miscellany for publication in 1976. Jane Bowles's fictional tone is never dark, although betrayal, sin, madness, and death inhabit her work. Her lucid, spare, rarely figurative style acquires both comic and disturbing reverberations. Her novel is characteristic. In it, “two serious ladies” pursue different unnerving journeys away from traditional women's lives.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
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Bowles, Jane. Out in the World: Selected Letters. Santa Barbara. 1985. Black Sparrow Press. 0876856261. Edited by Millicent Dillon. 323 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - For John Ashbery, Jane Bowles was 'one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.' Her body of work is small: a novel, a play, and six short stories. And now we have her letters - 133 of them - which, like everything she wrote, are exercises in literary precision. As her editor Millicent Dillon writes, 'they are exercises in emotional accuracy as well,' little essays in which Bowles explained her joys, doubts, and obesssions to herself and to her correspondents, including her husband, Paul Bowles. Includes 14 pages of black-&-white photographs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
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Bowles, Jane. The Collected Works of Jane Bowles. New York. 1966. Farrar Straus Giroux. Introduction by Truman Capote. 431 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ronald Clyne.
DESCRIPTION - Jane Bowles has for many years had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of the twentieth century. This collection of expertly crafted short fiction will fully acquaint all students and scholars with the author Tennessee Williams called the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
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Bowles, Jane. Two Serious Ladies. New York. 1943. Knopf. 273 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Eccentric, adventurous Christina Goering Meets the anxious but equally enterprising Mrs. Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience. Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, TWO SERIOUS LADIES is a daring, original work that defies analysis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
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Bowles, Jane. Two Serious Ladies. London. 1965. Peter Owen. 271 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Eccentric, adventurous Christina Goering Meets the anxious but equally enterprising Mrs. Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience. Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, TWO SERIOUS LADIES is a daring, original work that defies analysis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
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Bowles, Paul (editor and translator). Five Eyes. Santa Barbara. 1979. Black Sparrow Press. 0876854102. 147 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Stories by: Abdeslam Boulaich, Mohamed Choukri, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, & Ahmed Yacoubi. The stories were told aloud, recorded, and translated. The two storytellers who did not sign any copies of this edition were unable to as they were illiterate.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul (introduction). The Hakima: A Tragedy in Fez. New York. 1991. Aperture. 0893812870. Introduction by Paul Bowles. Photos by William Betsch. 144 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - True-to-Life mystery, The Hakima: A Tragedy in Fez is a wholly unprecedented form of novelistic photojournalism. Investigating the apparent suicide of a Moroccan bride whose virginity is suspect, prize-winning photographer William Betsch interviews Hakima's intimates and captures on film her sensual and terrifying world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, Morocco, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles' home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88.
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Bowles, Paul (Translator). She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her: Translations by Paul Bowles. San Francisco. 1985. Cadmus. 0932274277. 91 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A major figure in 20th-century arts and letters, Paul Bowles was also an accomplished literary translator who cultivated a special interest in European and Latin American surrealist authors. She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her gathers Bowles' short translations into a single volume, reflecting his love for language as well as his painstaking efforts to craft superior translations. Bowles's taste is as always impeccable, but also prescient. For example, in 1945, Jorge Luis Borges was unknown in the United States, having published only a few stories in South American journals. Given the editorship of an issue of View, Bowles selected 'Las Ruinas Circulares' for inclusion, introducing this seminal author to Western readers and arguably initiating the Borges craze that began in the 1960s. Other important writings in this collection include 'Hebdomeros' by Giorgio de Chirico and 'White Man's Son' by Denise Moran.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories. New York. 1988. Ecco Press. 0880012048. 368 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A noted composer and novelist, Bowles has won widest acclaim for his short stories. The selection he has made here stretches from The Delicate Prey ( LJ 11/15/50) through Unwelcome Words (Tombouctou, 1988) and adds two uncollected stories. Most utilize a Third World setting (Latin America, Sri Lanka, North Africa) to dramatize the bankruptcy of Western values. Though later works are less extreme in their violence, the title story is typical: a linguistics professor laden with "maps, sun lotions and medicines" is relieved of his tongue and his senses by the tribe he would study. Bowles has emerged as one of our most important contemporary writers. A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's short stories, as selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. San Francisco. 1962. City Lights Books. 63 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - These are four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality; Idir's victory over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif-smoker's ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kif, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others but above all with themselves. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. A Thousand Days For Mokhtar. London. 1989. Peter Owen. 0720607159. 176 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Collects 14 stories written between 1944 and 1985. CONTENTS: How many midnights (1947) -- You are not I (1948) -- Julian Vreden (1984) -- If I should open my mouth (1952) -- Unwelcome words (1985) -- The fourth day out from Santa Cruz (1949) -- Pastor Dowe at Tacaté (1946) -- The circular valley (1948) -- The scorpion (1944) -- Señor Ong and Señor Ha (1947) -- Tapiama (1957) -- By the water (1945) -- A thousand days for Mokhtar (1948) --A distant episode (1945).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories 1939-1976. Santa Barbara. 1979. Black Sparrow Press. 0876853971. Introduction by Gore Vidal. 421 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In the stories that make up this collection, Bowles creates a world in which the extreme situations the characters find themselves in move relentlessly towards their logical, yet disturbing conclusions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Days-Tangier Journal: 1987-1989. New York. 1991. Ecco Press. 0880012692. 108 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Between 1987 and 1989, Paul Bowles, at the suggestion of a friend, kept a journal to record the daily events of his life. What emerges is not only just a record of the meals, conversations, and health concerns of the author of The Sheltering Sky but also a fascinating look at an artist at work in a new medium. Characterized by a refreshing informality, clear-sightedness, and passages of exquisite prose, these pages record with equal fascination the behavior of an itinerant spider, a brutal episode of violence in a Tangier marketplace, and the pageantry and excess of Malcolm Forbes's seventieth birthday party. In Days, a master observer of the foreign and obscure turns his attentions toward his own daily existence, giving us a startlingly candid portrait of his life in late twentieth-century Tangier.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Desultory Correspondence / Sporadische Korresponenz. Zurich. 1997. Memory/Cage Edition. 3952049778. An Interview With Paul Bowles On Gertrude Stein In Both English & German. 109 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Bilingual edition, all parts in both English and German / In has three sections, 1) An Interview with Paul Bowles on Gertrude Stein 2) Paul Bowles' poem "Spire Song' and 3) Gertrude Stein's short essay "My Last About Money"
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Here To Learn. Lympne Kent. 1979. Hand & Flower Press. 36 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A novella-length story covering a number of years and events in the life of a young Moroccan who is 'adopted' by various affluent Europeans. This story was originally published in Antaeus #34 (Summer 1979) and then in the collection Midnight Mass (Black Sparrow Press, 1981). Erica Marx (May 12, 1909 - April 4, 1969), the sole proprietor of the Hand and Flower Press in Kent, England from 1945 to 1963. was an English publisher and niece of Karl Marx. From 1940 she lived with her partner Mariette Lydis, until her death in 1969. Marx learned the trade in France where her father, the collector Hermann Marx (Cobham), entrusted her to her friend Giuseppe Govone. She worked with Alberto Tallone at the Hotel de Sagonne Paris Bastille and created a collection of young poetry writers in 1951: Hand and Flower Press.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. New York. 1993. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374185107. Edited by Jeffrey Miller. 604 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In Touch is an extraordinary collection of correspondence spanning eight decades from the bestselling author of The Sheltering Sky. Selected by Bowles's bibliographer from more than 7,000 letters, In Touch provides an evolving portrait of an artist renowned for his privacy. Yet Bowles was an indefatigable correspondent, and his letters offer a rare look at the many aspects of his brilliant career - as composer, novelist, short-story master, travel writer, translator, ethnographer, and literary critic. From his earliest extant letter, written at the age of four, to his precocious effusions to Aaron Copland and to Gertrude Stein; from his meditations on mescaline as relayed to Ned Rorem, to his intensely moving letters to Jane Bowles during her illness. In Touch fills in the lacunae left by previous biographers and by Bowles's own memoir and journal. Here is Bowles on the genesis of his first novel, The Sheltering Sky; on his distaste for Western melodies and his dogged attempts to record indigenous Moroccan music; on the Beats, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams; on the nature and craft of writing; on Bernardo Bertolucci, David Byrne, and Sting; on the decline of America and the challenges of living in North Africa. Gossipy, reflective, enlightening, and always entertaining, In Touch stands as an epistolary autobiography of one of the legendary writers of our time, and a unique chronicle of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Let It Come Down. New York. 1952. Random House. 311 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by E. McKnight Kauffer.
DESCRIPTION - To Tangier, outpost of unrestrained freedom, morass of ruthless greed and opportunism, comes a young American, Nelson Dyar. Fed up with his job in a New York bank, he has accepted a position in this swarming Moroccan city where nationals of many countries mingle in a frenzy of smuggling, espionage, vice of every
DESCRIPTION. Quickly caught up in the stream of evil, Dyar discovers that the new life he seeks can be attained only by renouncing whatever loyalty he has for ethical principles. He finds, too, that casting all morality to the four winds is easy and spiritually beneficial in that it awakens him to new points of view. With the help of men and women whose varying state of depravity apparently have been achieved only after years of effort, he learns that each successive violation of a social taboo brings him nearer to self-knowledge. At the same time, because of the sanctions he fears will be taken against him, his involvement in society becomes more complete, his escape more improbable. With the skill so evident in his previous novel, THE SHELTERING SKY, Paul Bowles thrusts the reader into a setting that draws instant response from every sense. Few writers today can so readily and with such economy of expression evoke ‘place.' But places, no matter how bizarre, are backgrounds for people, and here in the revelation of the humans who share the burden of the story. LET IT COME DOWN is astonishingly rich. Whether it is Daisy, Marquesa de Valverde, who sees in Dyar a prey for her hashish-inspired impulses; or Hadija, at fifteen a thoroughly practical wench who sells to the highest bidder (or to all, if she can manage it); or Thami, pained by intimations of immorality but not by the money thus begotten; or Jack Wilcox, who dwells in frightened panic but who would never dream of forsaking his little racket - whether it is any of these, or any of the others who bump momentarily against the raft of Dyar's life as it moves downstream, each assumes a reality extraordinarily sharp and clear. For all who remember the excitement that attended their reading of THE SHELTERING SKY, this new novel - suspenseful to the last page - offers fresh proof of Paul Bowles' original and unusual talent. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Midnight Mass. Santa Barbara. 1981. Black Sparrow Press. 0876854773. 165 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - These thirteen stories were written in the five years between 1976 and 1981 and pick up where Bowles' Collected Stories left off. The collection includes the novella-length "Here to Learn", about a young Moroccan woman 'adopted' by various affluent Europeans. ‘His short stories are among the best ever written by an American.' - Gore Vidal. ‘A man returns to the house in Tangier where he was raised-a house he loves-preparing it for the arrival of his family, who are coming to spend the Christmas holiday. But it's been eight years since his last visit, and the big house has badly deteriorated. There's also a new harshness to the weather - a cold edge he hadn't remembered - which makes the ramshackle old place that much less livable. So the owner cables his family not to come, and decides to spend the holidays alone. But no one wants to be completely alone at such a time - so he fixes the place up as best he can, and then invites some guests in for Christmas Eve. Actually, he appoints Madame Dervaux, a local meddler (whom he frankly dislikes) to do the inviting for him. One of the people she brings to the party is a persistent young Moroccan painter who spends the evening dropping unsubtle hints to his host about how he has no studio space of his own, and how the big old house has so many empty rooms. Much to the host's relief, his guests decide to leave for Midnight Mass. All save the young painter, that is, who stays on. Embarrassed, the host quickly gives in, and offers the painter a room to use as a studio. There is a hiatus. The owner of the house leaves Tangier to rejoin his family. During the following year he learns that the painter, far from being deprived, in fact has a very rich and influential family. In his, the owner's absence, they have taken possession of the entire house, even establishing a legal claim to the property. The owner reacts quietly to this loss, but his calm is shattered when, a few months later, he learns that Mrs. Dervaux has rented from the painter's family the top floor of the house where he was raised. Here in the title piece, as in each of the twelve new tales by this celebrated writer of short stories, a special atmosphere hangs over things, changing and subtly distorting them. It's an atmosphere of something vaguely amiss, as if reality had shifted imperceptibly out of focus. No one had noticed, perhaps, but now things are irrevocably different from the way they were. This new state of things may seem on the surface to be exactly as before - but look again.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Next To Nothing. Santa Barbara. 1981. Black Sparrow Press. 0876855060. 77 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This slim volume collects Bowles' poetry, from his earliest youthful Surrealist lyrics to the longer narrative title poem and several other brief lyrics from the seventies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Next To Nothing. Kathmandu, Nepal. 1976. Starstreams Poetry Series. unpaginated. paperback. Cover design: Verifax by Maya. Frontpiece collage by Dana Young. Title page illustration by Sidney Hushour.
DESCRIPTION - This slim volume collects Bowles' poetry, from his earliest youthful Surrealist lyrics to the longer narrative title poem and several other brief lyrics from the seventies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Pages From Cold Point. London. 1968. Peter Owen. 156 pages. hardcover. One of only 2000 copies.
DESCRIPTION - Pages From Cold Point is a milestone volume of stories by one of the most distinguished writers in contemporary literature. Their setting is North Africa, the author's adoptive home, a sanguine, enigmatic environment where Western influences float like oil on the older, deeper waters of more primitive cultures, never truly altering or disrupting them. Against this background the author forges his diverse and powerful themes—sexual perversion, racial antagonism, drug hallucination, superstition, justice and its dark counterpart, revenge—into a series of vivid portrayals. And with each story he creates a tension that mounts irresistibly towards a violent or stunningly incisive climax.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Paul Bowles On Music: Includes the last interview with Paul Bowles. Berkeley. 2003. University of California Press. 0520236556. Edited by Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann. 310 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It's an easy enough job if one has something to say,' Paul Bowles remarked in a letter to his mother about his first foray into music criticism. And Paul Bowles, indeed, had plenty to say about music. Though known chiefly as a writer of novels and stories, Paul Bowles (1910-99) thought of himself first and foremost as a composer. Drawing together the work he did at the intersection of his two passions and professions, writing and music, this volume collects the music criticism Bowles published between 1935 and 1946 as well as an interview conducted by Irene Herrmann shortly before his death. An intimate of Aaron Copland and protEgE of Virgil Thomson, Bowles was a musical sophisticate acquainted with an enormous range of music. His criticism collected here brilliantly illuminates not only the whole range of modernist composition but also film music, jazz, Mexican and Moroccan music, and many other genres. As a reviewer he reports on established artists and young hopefuls, symphonic concerts indoors and out, and important premieres of works by Copland, Thomson, Cage, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, among others. Written with the austere grace of his better-known literary works, Bowles's criticism enhances our picture of an important era in American music history as well as our sense of his accomplishments and extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century culture. Winner of the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award for music criticism,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York. Timothy Mangan is classical music critic for the Orange County Register. Irene Herrmann is Lecturer in Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the executrix of the Paul Bowles music estate.
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Bowles, Paul. Points in Time. New York. 1984. Ecco Press. 0880010444. 92 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In this intense and brilliant book Bowles focuses on Morocco, condensing expreience, emotion, and the whole history of a people into a series of short, insightful vignettes. He distills for us the very essence of Moroccan culture. With extraordinary immediacy, he takes the reader on a journey through the Moroccan centuries, pausing at points along the way to create resonant images of the country, it's landscapes, and the beliefs and characteristics of its inhabitants.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Scenes. Santa Barbara. 1968. Black Sparrow Press. Blue printed wrappers, illustrated (with title page woodcut by Henry Shire),. 10 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Contains the first appearance in book form of nine poems, written by Paul Bowles between 1934 and 1941.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. The Delicate Prey and Other Stories. New York. 1950. Random House. 307 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by E. McKnlght Kauffer.
DESCRIPTION - Despite the fact that many of them have appeared in out-of-the-way places, the stories of Paul Bowles have already created a sensation among critics and low and fellow-writers. Of the seventeen stories in this volume, all but one are set in Arab North Africa, the Far East or Latin America. They share an almost Gothic preoccupation with violence - particularly that violence arising out of the clash of the Westerner with the alien world of the East. CONTENTS: At Paso Rojo; Pastor Dowe at Tacaté; Call at Corazon; Under The Sky; Señor Ong And Señor Ha; The Circular Valley; The Echo; The Scorpion; The Fourth Day Out From Santa Cruz; Pages From Cold Point; You Are Not I; How Many Midnights; A Thousand Days To Mokhatar; Tea On The Mountain; By The Water; Delicate Prey; A Distant Episode.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York. 1949. New Directions. 318 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Lustig.
DESCRIPTION - ‘The sky hides the night behind it, and shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.' In this mood of suspense - half fear and half anticipation - we follow a remarkable new novelist into a strange and fascinating world - a coastal city in North Africa and the great desert behind it, the Sahara, where civilization ends. When Port Moresby and his wife Kit left New York they had a problem to solve together. So perhaps it was a mistake to invite their friend Tunner along on the trip, even if he was their best friend. And perhaps they were even less wise to choose Africa for their journey. The Sahara, they were to find, does not let itself be taken lightly. Is it presumptuous to suggest that Paul Bowles, in THE SHELTERING SKY, may have done for our understanding of Arab Africa something of what E.M. Forster did for India in A PASSAGE TO INDIA? There is more here than an exciting tale; we sense the sinister power of Africa, its prodigality and its squalor, its vitality and its decadence, and we feel the impact which it makes on the outsider who attempts to penetrate its mystery. Another world from ours. And yet not altogether. For in certain ways the dread Sahara can suggest the moral landscape of our own environment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. London. 1949. John Lehmann. 304 pages. hardcover. Pictorial dust jacket by Fred Uhlman.
DESCRIPTION - The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures. A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. The Spider's House. New York. 1955. Random House. 406 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting and uncompromising in its characterizations. Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures - recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings - The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. The Stories of Paul Bowles. New York. 2001. Ecco Press. 0066212731. Introduction by Robert Stone. 672 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An American literary cult figure, Paul Bowles established his legacy with the novel The Sheltering Sky. An immediate sensation, it became a fixture in American letters. Bowles then returned his energies to the short story - the genre he preferred and soon mastered. Bowles's short fiction is orchestral in composition and exacting in theme, marked by a unique, delicately spare style and a dark, rich, exotic mood, by turns chilling, ironic, and wry. In ‘Pastor Dowe at TacatE,' a Protestant missionary is sent to the far reaches of the globe - a place, he discovers, where his God has no power. In ‘Call at Corazon,' an American husband abandons his alcoholic wife on their honeymoon in a South American jungle. In ‘Allal,' a boy's drug-induced metamorphosis into a deadly serpent leads to his violent death, but not before he feels the ‘joy' of sinking his fangs into human prey. Also gathered here are Bowles's most famous works, such as ‘The Delicate Prey,' a grimly satisfying tale of vengeance, and ‘A Distant Episode,' which Tennessee Williams proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of short fiction.' ‘Beauty and terror go wonderfully well together in [Bowles's] work,' Madison Smartt Bell once said. Though sometimes shocking, Bowles's stories have a symmetry that is haunting and ultimately moral. Like Poe (whose stories Bowles's mother read to him at bedtime), Bowles had an instinctive adeptness with the nightmare vision. Joyce Carol Oates, in her introduction to Too Far from Home, writes that his characters are ‘at the mercy of buried wishes experienced as external fate.' In these masterful stories, our deepest fears are manifest,tables are turned, and allegiances are tested. Fate is an inexorable element of Bowles's distant landscapes, and its psychological effects on his characters are rendered with penetrating accuracy. Like Hemingway, Bowles is famously unsentimental, a skilled craftsman of crystalline prose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue. New York. 1963. Random House. 208 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Bowles, one of the four or five best writers in English in the second half of the twentieth century, embraced the desert as a Christian saint embraces his martyrdom. His self-abnegation and his love of traditional culture made him one of the keenest observers of other civilizations we have ever had in America. Unlike his countrymen he did not brashly set out to improve the rest of the world. For Bowles, Americanization was the problem, not the solution. As these startling, sober travel pieces show, Bowles, because of his powers of negative capability, was able to enter into the inner truth of even the most remote places and peoples.'- Edmund White.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Thicket of Spring: Poems 1926-1969. Los Angeles. 1972. Black Sparrow Press. 0876850999. 59 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The second collection of poetry published by Black Sparrow Press by Paul Bowles (the first was Scenes in 1968).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Things Gone and Things Still Here. Santa Barbara. 1977. Black Sparrow Press. 0876853432. 93 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Stories and other writings by American expatriate writer Paul Bowles that reflect his experiences living in Morocco. CONTENTS: Allal; Mejdoub; You have left your lotus pods on the bus; The Fqih; Istikhara, Anaya, Medagan, and the Medaganat; The waters of Izli; Afternoon with Antaeus; Reminders of Bouselham; Things gone and things still here.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Three Tales. New York. 1975. Hallman. 27 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The paperbound edition limited to 1000 copies. Contains 3 stories. From the contents: "Afternoon with Antaeus", "The Fqih", and "Mejdoub".
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Time of Friendship. New York. 1967. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 215 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Bowles first short story collection after THE DELICATE PREY (1950). The preoccupations which have marked his fiction - the illuminations and deceit of friendship, the shifting line between illusion and reality, the energies of youth and the sadnesses of age, the transformations in the psyche induced by kif smoking - are all present with a force and vision which, at times, brings the reader to his own borders of perception." ; Experience the pleasure of reading and appreciating this actual printed item. It has its own physical history that imbues it with a character lacking in ephemeral electronic renderings.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Too Far From Home: Selected Writings of Paul Bowles. New York. 1993. Ecco Press. 0880012951. 697 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Taking its title from a new novella published here for the first time, this volume also brings together a dozen of Bowles's best stories; excerpts from his three other novels, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World; excerpts from Points in Time, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, Days, and Without Stopping; as well as a group of poems, a selection of previously unpublished letters, and an interview conducted by Daniel Halpern. In addition it includes The Sheltering Sky in its entirety. Also includes bibliographical references.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Unwelcome Words: Seven Stories. Bolinas. 1988. Tombouctou Books. 86 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Stories include: 'Julian Vreden', 'New York 1965', 'Hugh Harper', 'Massachusetts 1932', 'Dinner At Sir Nigel's', 'Tangier 1975', 'Unwelcome Words'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Up Above the World. New York. 1966. Simon & Schuster. 223 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - On the terrace of an elaborate hilltop apartment overlooking a Central American capital, four people sit making polite coversation. The American couple - an elderly physician and his young wife - are tourists. Their host, whom they have just met, is a young man of striking good looks and charm. The girl, who is his mistress, is very young and very beatufiul. Sitting there, with drinks in their hands, watching the sunset, the Slades seem to be experienced in the sort of fortunate chance encounter that travelers cherish. But amidst the civilities and small talk, one remark proves prophetic. The host says to the American woman: ‘It's not exactly what you think.' Masterfully - with the poetic control that has always characterized his work - Paul Bowles leads the reader beneath the surface of hospitality and luxury into a tortuous maze of human relationships and shifting moods, until what seems at first a merely casual encounter is seen to be one rooted in viciousness and horror.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping. New York. 1972. Putnam. 379 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Paul Bowles, the acclalmed author of The Shelterlng Sky, offers movlng, powerful, subtle, and fasclnatlng lnslghts lnto hls llfe, hls wrltlng, and hls world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowles, Paul. Yallah. New York. 1957. McDowell Obolensky. Photographs by Peter W. Haeberlin. 12 pages of text; 83 pages of photographs. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An essay (text by Paul Bowles, and photographs by Peter W. Haeberlin) about the tribes in western Sahara beautifully printed in gravure.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
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Bowman, David. Bunny Modern. Boston. 1998. Little Brown. 0316102814. 216 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Stuart Patterson for Art Department.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Raymond Chandler merges with Gabriel Garcia Marquez,' said the New York Times Book Review of David Bowman's first novel, LET THE DOG DRIVE. ‘Now that David Bowman has emerged, it will be interesting to see where his surrealistic, hard-boiled intelligentsia style takes him next.' Where it has taken him is BUNNT MODERN - a hard-boiled comedy about love, abduction, and child care, set in the future where electricity has disappeared and fertility is on the wane, but human passions are as messy as ever. This is the story of Clare, a nanny who packs a Glock and guards babies from childless kidnappers. Clare has undergone the standard aversion therapy to keep her from bonding with the infants she protects. But despite all her training, Clare finds herself helpless to resist the big eyes and droolly charms of her latest charge, an ineffably lovable baby named Soda. BUNNY MODERN is the strange saga of Clare and Soda, as told by Dylan, an investigator who's fallen in love with Clare while looking into a connection between Soda's parents and the disappearance of electricity years earlier. First admiring Clare from afar and then joining her in a series of adventures on Manhattan's gaslit streets, Dylan unfolds a tale in which Lit Wear (Melville trousers, Jane Eyre blouses), carrier pigeons, fertility monuments, a drug called Vengeance, and the Jersey Bounce Dance Studio all figure with mysterious coherence. Seamlessly interweaving elements of the noir thriller with hallucinogenic flourishes that are all his own,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Bowman has written a novel that is mesmerizing, hilarious, and utterly captivating. David Bowman won New York University's Elmer Holmes Babst Award for his first novel, LET THE DOG DRIVE. Shortlisted in the Granta ‘Best American Novelists Under Forty' issue, he has contributed to both analog and hyperspace publications such as the New York Times Book Review and Salon. He lives in New York City.
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Bowman, David. Let the Dog Drive. New York. 1992. New York University Press. 0814712053. 1st Novel. 295 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - It's 1975. Bud Salem, 18-years-old, is fleeing his mother's TV church and meets a woman pitching oranges in the Mojave. She's Sylvia Cushman, a 45-year-old housewife, who loves driving alone through the desert. They odyssey through western motels and Apache gas stations where Sylvia gives long lectures about Emily Dickinson and drags Bud up into the mesas to search for petroglyphs. After sharing adventures in Detroit, New York, and Amherst, the travelers part. In many ways Let the Dog Drive is an askew detective novel- when a character dies under strange circumstances in Texas, Bud goes to the panhandle to uncover what happened. His strange narration does contain pleasures of the genre: a shootout inside an aquarium; a faked death; another shootout on a chicken farm in Texas. .But Let the Dog Drive is also a freewheeling merging of many other genres and concerns - Hollywood, hardboiled novels of the 1930s, Emily Dickinson's white dress, hallucinatory cacti, The Book of Luke. .And dogs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Bowman was born in Racine, Wisconsin on December 8, 1957. His interest in writing first emerged while studying music at the Interlochen Arts Academy High School in Interlochen, Michigan. He briefly attended Putney College in Vermont, before moving to New York to write while working as a bartender and as a clerk at a bookstore. His works include Let the Dog Drive, Bunny Modern, and This Must Be the Place. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage on February 27, 2012 at the age of 54.
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Boyce-Taylor, Cheryl. We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems. Evanston. 2022. Northwestern University Press. 9780810144231. 88 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a collection of political love poems rendered through the eyes of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, an immigrant living in New York City. For many women of color, aging in America means experiencing a lack of proper medical treatment, inhumane living conditions, poor nutrition, and often isolation. Many seniors feel thrown away, useless, and vulnerable. These poems challenge the injustices of ageism, racism, and oppression with rage, forgiveness, honor, and endurance. During these rough political times, they are salve and balm. Born in Trinidad and having grown up in Queens, Boyce-Taylor creates a framework for her own experience out of the life experiences and work of beloved Black women in history. She salutes the women who have lifted her, including Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ntozake Shange, and Winnie Mandela, as well as her mother, Eugenia Boyce, and her beloved daughter-in-law, Deisha Head Taylor. The poems in this collection are unapologetic, fierce, and confrontational while remaining caring and intimate. They stand strong in the face of adversity and boldly demand what is owed while still honoring and cherishing what is loved.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CHERYL BOYCE- TAYLOR is the author of four previous collections of poetry—Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival—and a memoir and poetic tribute to her son, Mama Phife Represents. A VONA fellow and a teaching artist, Boyce-Taylor is the founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series, and she has led numerous poetry workshops for Cave Canem, the New York Public Library, Urban Word NYC, and Poets House, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Boyd, Blanche McCrary. The Redneck Way of Knowledge: Down-home Tales. New York. 1982. Knopf. 039451050x. 160 pages. hardcover. Cover: Clarence John Laughlin-'The Enigman: 1941'.
DESCRIPTION - The Redneck Way of Knowledge is about family reunions and kamikaze love affairs. It is about crashing an arts festival with two precociously decayed Charleston aristocrats and watching the Pope deliver Communion at Yankee Stadium. It is about the selves we try on and slough off on the way to becoming who we are. Throughout, Blanche McCrary Boyd travels the expressway between the realm of the senses and the state of grace, and reports on the journey in prose that combines riotous humor, diamond-hard intelligence, and savage lyricism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Blanche McCrary Boyd (born August 31, 1945) is an American author. She is currently the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College.
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Boyd, Herb and Allen, Robert L. (editors). Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America-An Anthology. New York. 1995. Ballantine/One World. 0345376706. Illustrations by Tom Feelings. 910 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kristine V. Mills.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Brotherman!' is a special greeting among Black men. With that single word a bloodline is invoked, a gender proclaimed. It is a verbal handshake, a shared mantra that expresses much more than a mere hello. This greeting was first heard in the euphoric Sixties. But it still resonates today, carrying a number of meanings for Black men no matter who they are - whether they work in offices in three-piece suits or bop down the street in shredded pants with their caps turned backward. Their coded exchange of ‘brotherman' signals immediate recognition and rapport. It conveys a message that is at once an affirmation, an affectionate embrace, and a battle cry. It proclaims: Our bloodlines and soul force are the same and we have a common fate - what happens to one happens to all. And that battle cry, that call to arms - though different for each generation - has inspired a multitude of voices during the Black man's long odyssey in America. These voices have cried out in despair, railed against injustice, defied oppression and have spoken truth with power and eloquence. For every Black man's voice muffled by defeat or hushed by draconian edicts, hundreds more have soared in triumph, singing endlessly and gloriously about victories over insurmountable odds. When the voice was not disposed to song, it reaffirmed our uncompromising manhood, and made resolute demands for freedom, decency, and respect. These voices now echo from BROTHERMAN' - From the Introduction. The purpose of this extraordinary anthology is made abundantly clear by the editors' stated intention: ‘to create a living mosaic of essays and stories in which Black men can view themselves, and be viewed without distortion. In this, they have succeeded brilliantly. BROTHERMAN contains more than one hundred and fifty selections, some never before published - from slave narratives, memoirs, social histories, novels, poems, short stories, biographies, autobiographies, position papers, and essays. BROTHERMAN books us passage to the world that Black men experience as adolescents, lovers, husbands, fathers, workers, warriors, and elders. On this journey they encounter pain, confusion, anger, and love while confronting the life-threatening issues of race, sex, and politics - often as strangers in a strange land. The first collection of its kind, BROTHERMAN gathers together a multitude of voices that add a new, unforgettable chapter to American cultural history. The voices of BROTHERMAN - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Muhammad Ali; Ernest Allen, Jr.; Robert L. Allen; Alston Anderson; Molefi K. Asante; Arthur Ashe; Jabari Asim; William Attaway; James Baldwin; William Banks; Amiri Baraka; Nouk Bassomb; Sidney Bechet; Derrick Bell; Playthell Benjamin; Lerone Bennett, Jr.; Herb Boyd; Cecil Brown; Claude Brown; Jim Brown; Lloyd Brown; Sterling Brown; Wesley Brown; Stephen Carter; Charles Chesnutt; Nick Chiles; Robert Chrisman; John Henrik Clarke; Price M. Cobbs; Eric V. Copage; Ellis Cose; Stanley Crouch; Countee Cullen; Miles Davis; William Demby; Melvin Dixon; Frederick Douglass; W. E. B. Du Bois; Henry Dumas; Paul Laurence Dunbar; Michael Eric Dyson; Gerald Early; Harry Edwards; Louis Edwards; Duke Ellington; Trey Ellis; Ralph Ellison; Louis Farrakhan; Rudolph Fisher; Robert Fleming; Arthur Flowers; James Forman; John Hope Franklin; George C. Fraser; Albert French; Ernest Gaines; Marcus Garvey; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Nelson George; Roland Gilbert; Earl Graves; Sam Greenlee; William H. Grier; Damu Hakim; Alex Haley; Ron Hall; Arthur Hamilton, Jr.; Charles V. Hamilton; Nathan Hare; E. Lynn Harris; Essex Hemphill; Calvin C. Hernton; Chester Himes; Hosea Hudson; Langston Hughes; Earl Ofari Hutchinson; Ice T; James E. Jackson; Jesse Jackson; Yosef ben-Jochannan; Charles Johnson; Earvin ‘Magic' Johnson; John H. Johnson; Edward Jones; Quincy Jones; Maulana Karenga; William Melvin Kelley; Randall Kenan; John Oliver Killens; Dennis Kimbro; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Etheridge Knight; Spike Lee; Julius Lester; David Levering Lewis; Nathaniel Mackey; Haki R. Madhubuti; Clarence Major; Richard Majors; Malcolm X; Manning Marable; Jarvis Masters; Nathan McCall; Claude McKay; Reginald McKnight; James Alan McPherson; Kenneth Meeks; Kwesi Mfume; Sylvester Monroe; W. J. Brandy Moore; Walter Mosley; Willard Motley; Jess Mowry; Satchel Paige; Gordon Parks; Alexs Pate; Richard Perry; Sidney Poitier; Kevin Powell; Dudley Randall; Ishmael Reed; Paul Robeson; Jackie Robinson; Randall Robinson; J. A. Rogers; Kalamu ya Salaam; Yusef Salaam; Albert Race Sample; Bobby Seale; Charlie Sifford; Brent Staples; Shelby Steele; Ron Stodghill II; William Strickland; George Edward Tait; Greg Tate; Clyde Taylor; Wallace Terry; Howard Thurman; Wallace Thurman; Jean Toomer; Quincy Troupe; Cheo Tychimba-Taylor; Brent Wade; Dhoruba Bin Wahad; Booker T. Washington; Mel Watkins; Cornel West; Walter White; John Edgar Wideman; Ralph Wiley; John A. Williams; Richard Wright; Samuel F. Yette.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herb Boyd is the author of AFRICAN HISTORY FOR BEGINNERS and DOWN THE GLORY ROAD. An award-winning journalist, his articles have appeared in Emerge, Class, Down Beat, Amsterdam News, Detroit Metro Times, and The Black Scholar. He lives in New York City. Robert L. Allen, Ph.D., is the author of THE PORT CHICAGO MUTINY and coeditor of COURT OF APPEAL. He is senior editor of The Black Scholar and past board president of the Oakland Men's Project.
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Boyd, Thomas. Through the Wheat. Carbondale. 1978. Southern Illinois University Press. 080930855x. Originally Published by Scribner In 1923. Afterword by James Dickey. 280 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - “There is no battle in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, no conflict in Stendhal’s account of Waterloo, to equal the drama and terror of Boyd’s account of Private Hicks’ advance through the wheat,” James Dickey writes in his Afterword to this new edition of a truly remarkable World War I novel. Earlier, in 1923 on the novel’s first publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald closed his review of it with the statement that it “is not only the best combatant story of the great war but also the best war book since The Red Badge of Courage ,” and was joined in his praise of the novel by such critics as Edmund Wilson. Boyd, who fought in the war, writes in the tradition of Stephen Crane. In Private Hicks, ordinary, young, trapped by World War I, he creates the archetype of the modern warrior for whom battle holds a horror no previous soldier had to endure—the horror of technology—because of which a man may fight, suffer wounds, die, without ever seeing the face of the enemy. It is a vision of war, Dickey adds, “that is as profound as any vision of war has ever been from the tribes of the caves to the ambushes of Vietnam.” Boyd saw war as a massive, brutal rape on even the most elemental of human rights, a rape no man deserves, no mind can tolerate.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Alexander Boyd (July 3, 1898 – January 27, 1935) was an American journalist and novelist, born in Defiance, Ohio. Boyd was raised by his mother's family due to his father's death before he was born. While still in school, he and a friend enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and saw service in France during World War I, where he was gassed in 1918. Upon discharge from the occupation forces in 1919, Boyd tried several occupations before becoming a writer for newspapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. He opened a bookstore, Kilmarnock Books, in St. Paul, which became the locus of literary figures, including Sinclair Lewis. He was urged to write and produced the 1923 novel Through the Wheat, based in part on his own war experiences and set partly during the Battle of Belleau Wood. Another war novel, The Dark Cloud, followed in 1924, and a book of short stories, Point of Honor, in 1925.[1] Boyd later remarried and became interested in Socialist causes during the Depression, eventually running as the Communist candidate for governor of Vermont. He died suddenly in 1935 of a stroke.
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Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York. 2003. Scribner. 0684842300. 528 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Victor John Villanueva. Jacket photograph by Alex M. Rivera, Rivera Pictures. Author photograph by Andrea Ferreira.
DESCRIPTION - A woman of enormous talent, remarkable drive, and rare intellectual prowess, Zora Neale Hurston published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Although she enjoyed some popularity during her lifetime, her greatest acclaim has come posthumously. All of her books were out of print when she died in poverty in 1960, but today nearly every black woman writer of significance - including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker-acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother. And her masterpiece, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, has become a crucial part of the American literary canon. Yet, despite the recent renewed interest in Hurston's work, she remains, as a friend and contemporary described her, ‘a woman half in shadow.' WRAPPED IN RAINBOWS - the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in twenty-five years - illuminates the complexities of an extraordinary life. Born in Alabama in 1891, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. In this close-knit community - the first incorporated all-black town in America - she spent a pleasant childhood, happily imbibing the rich language and folk culture of the rural black South. When Hurston was still a girl, her mother died, and her father's swift remarriage led to the family's dispersal. Hurston spent the next decade wandering in search of parental figures, working menial jobs, and charting her own course into adulthood. Reinventing herself at the age of twenty-six, she entered high school in Baltimore by claiming to he ten years younger-a fiction she would maintain throughout her life. Hurston went on to attend Howard University and Barnard College, and during this time launched her writing career in the midst of the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. In New York, she developed relationships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Fannie Hurst, and Carl Van Vechten. Hurston periodically left New York to travel the country (and the world) collecting black music, poetry, and literature-becoming one of the most important folklore collectors of her time, as well as one of the most enduring writers of her century. WRAPPED IN RAINBOWS presents a full picture of Hurston as both a writer and a woman, shedding new light on her public and private lives. Drawing on meticulous research and a wealth of crucial information that has emerged over the past twenty years, Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston's thirst for the limelight, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, her mysterious relationship with Vodou, and her occasionally controversial political views. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston's work in her time but offers implications for our own. Featuring more than thirty-five black-and-white photographs - including some that have never been published - WRAPPED IN RAINBOWS is an eloquent profile of one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century. ‘Valerie Boyd has written a superb biography of a fascinating and complex writer. She brings Zora to life, and portrays her in all of her complexity and bodaciousness.' - Robert E. Hemenway, Chancellor, University of Kansas, and author of ZORA NEALE HURSTON.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Valerie Boyd (born December 11, 1963), is a widely published journalist, author, and cultural critic, best known for the critically acclaimed biography, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She obtained her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1985 and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 1999. Currently, Boyd is an Associate Professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she teaches narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism. She has also taught creative nonfiction in the graduate writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives in Atlanta.
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Boyle, Kay. Fifty Stories. Garden City. 1980. Doubleday. 0385149964. 648 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Selected and arranged by the author, these memorable stories demonstrate the development--and high level-of Boyle's craft over a fifty-year career
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992) was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist. Boyle is best known for her fiction, which often explored the intersections of personal and political themes. Her work contributed significantly to modernist literature, and she was an active participant in the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and O. Henry Award winner.
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Boyle, Kay. Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1927-1984. San Francisco. 1985. North Point Press. 0865471878. Edited & With An Introduction by Elizabeth S. Bell. 262 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by David Bullen.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of twenty-five articles, reviews, and memoirs spanning more than fifty years, chronicles a remarkable life in letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992) was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist. Boyle is best known for her fiction, which often explored the intersections of personal and political themes. Her work contributed significantly to modernist literature, and she was an active participant in the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and O. Henry Award winner.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. A Friend of the Earth. New York. 2000. Viking Press. 0670891770. 271 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Marty Blake.
DESCRIPTION - In his eighth novel, T. C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species. It is the year 2025, and Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in Southern California, managing a pop star's private menagerie of the species ‘only a mother could love' - scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs and three down-at-the-mouth lions. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed in a grim but pointed way, and most of the major mammalian species - not to mention fish, birds and frogs - are extinct. At one time, as we see in alternating chapters, Ty was a passionate environmentalist, so committed to saving the earth that he became an eco-terrorist and, ultimately, a convicted felon. As a member of the radical environmental group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his wife, Andrea, and his daughter, Sierra (who herself became an icon of the Movement as an inveterate tree-sitter in the late nineties). Now, when he's just trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life. Both gritty and surreal, A FRIEND OF THE EARTH represents a high-water mark in Boyle's career - his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with real compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect of his work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. After the Plague and Other Stories. New York. 2001. Viking Press. 0670030058. 303 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph bt Joshua Sheldon.
DESCRIPTION - Hailed as one of the best short story writers of his generation, T.C. Boyle presents sixteen stories--nine of which appeared in The New Yorker--that highlight the evolving excellence of his inventive, modern, and wickedly witty style. In After the Plague, Boyle exhibits his maturing themes through an amazing array of subjects in a range of emotional keys. He taps today's headlines, from air rage (‘Friendly Skies') to abortion doctors (‘Killing Babies'), and delves into more naturalistic themes of quiet power and passion, from a tale of first love (‘The Love of My Life') to a story about confronting old age (‘Rust'). Combining joy and humor with the dark, intense scenarios that Boyle's audience has come to love, After the Plague reveals a writer at the top of his form.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Budding Prospects. New York. 1984. Viking Press. 0670194395. 326 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michael Doret.
DESCRIPTION - From a brilliant young novelist who has already been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Tom Robbins, here is a hilarious and pyrotechnic yarn about marijuana farming in northern California. Its hero is Felix, an oddly attractive 31-year-old wastrel who has taken a left turn from the mainstream but is still powered by its illusions. He has run out on practically everything in his life - the Boy Scouts, graduate school, his wife - and now he has hit a solitary low point. As he tells it, ‘I woke alone, I flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone.' He is, in short, ready to be talked into farming a crop of sinsemilla by his enterprising friend Vogelsang, an entrepreneur who collects antique esoterica, cases of dry red wine from little vineyards with names like Goat's Crouch, and girls like the punkette Aorta, a singer with an all-female group called the Nostrils. Felix enlists two other lost souls in this pastoral labor: an old school Friend named Phil Cherniske and Phil's 200-pound housemate, Gesh. Together the three of them set off for the lonely hills of northern California where - sustained by booze, exotic chemicals, masculine conversation, and the occasional woman - they propose, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, to carry off a major agricultural coop worth more than a million dollars. But they haven't reckoned with the not-so-benevolent neighborliness of the farmer on the next hill and his mentally unbalanced son, or the depredations of wildlife (ranging from rats to a bear) and the vicissitudes of nature, or the havoc wrought on their necessarily hermetic solitude by the lusts of the flesh. And most of all they haven't prepared for the fact that Felix will undertake - on behalf of a wayward sculptress with whom he has fallen improbably in love - a one-man vendetta against a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak. What follows is an irresistible, exuberant narrative that brings its author's full-throttle wit and dazzling gift for storytelling into balance with deeply sympathetic characterizations and an affirmative moral vision. As Salman Rushdie said of WATER MUSIC, Mr. Boyle's first novel, ‘Gulp it down; it beats getting drunk.'. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Descent of Man. Boston. 1979. Atlantic/Little Brown. 0316104698. 219 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Gerry Hoover.
DESCRIPTION - In seventeen slices of life that defy the expected and launch us into the absurd, Boyle offers his unique view of the world. A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp; a Norse poet overcomes bard-block; collectors compete to snare the ancient Aztec beer can, Quetzalcoatl Lite; and Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote. Dark humor, delirious fantasy, and surreal satire come together in this collection that brilliantly expresses just what the 'evolution' of mankind has wrought.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. East Is East. New York. 1990. Viking Press. 0670832200. 364 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Young Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka, inspired by dreams of the Cty of Brotherly Love and trained in the ways of the samurai, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into a net of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendents of slaves, and the denizens of an artists' colony. In the hands of T. Coraghessan Boyle, praised by Digby Diehl in Playboy as ‘one of the most exciting young fiction writers in America,' the result is a sexy, hilarious tragicomedy of thwarted expectations and mistaken identity, love, jealously, and betrayal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Greasy Lake & Other Stories. New York. 1985. Viking Press. 0670805424. Remainder Markings. 276 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, The Washington Post Book World says these masterful stories mark T. Coraghessan Boyle's development from 'a prodigy's audacity to something that packs even more of a wallop: mature artistry.' They cover everything, from a terrifying encounter between a bunch of suburban adolescents and a murderous, drug-dealing biker, to a touching though doomed love affair between Eisenhower and Nina Khruschev.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. If the River Was Whiskey. New York. 1989. Viking Press. 0670826901. 224 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In sixteen stories, T. Coraghessan Boyle tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific. Boyle introduces us to a death-defying stuntman who rides across the country strapped to the axle of a Peterbilt, and to a retired primatologist who can't adjust to the 'civilized' world. He chronicles the state of romance that requires full-body protection in a disease-conscious age and depicts with aching tenderness the relationship between a young boy and his alcoholic father. These magical and provocative stories mark yet another virtuoso performance from one of America's most supple and electric literary inventors. Eccentrics, charlatans, and decent, vulnerable people. You'll find them all in this acclaimed collection of stories. From 'Sorry Fugu, ' the tale of an improbable romance between a restaurateur and a food critic, to 'The Little Chill, ' a chronicle of 60's survivors in arrested development, these works are magical, surprising, haunting, and hilarious.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. T. C. Boyle Stories. New York. 1998. Viking Press. 0670879606. 624 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Few authors in America write with the sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T. C. Boyle. His talent and range are manifest in this selection of sixty-eight tales that span his every theme, mood, and nuance, clothed in his hallmark virtuoso prose. Mythical and realistic, farcical and tragic, these stories (written between 1972 and 1997) are grouped under the headings of 'Love', 'Death', and everything in between. Three of them are previously unpublished: 'The Rapture Of The Deep.' a galley chef's jaded and mutinous view of Cousteau's endless voyages; 'Mexico,' an intense tale about an American tourist and his amorous adventures with a tough female boxer; and the comedy and pathos of an old lady's frenzy to defend a houseful of stray squirrels, her 'Little Fur People.' Four previously uncollected stories include the mini-masterpiece 'I Dated Jane Austen.' Here is a definitive gift for Boyle fans and for every reader ready to discover the 'ferocious, delicious imagination' (Los Angeles Times Book Review) of a 'vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society' (The New York Times).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. The Harder They Come. New York. 2015. Ecco Press. 9780062349378. 385 pages. hardcover. Jacket art & design by Jim Tierney.
DESCRIPTION - Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent in the American character. Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people - an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover - as they careen towards an explosive confrontation. On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal - only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control. Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens' Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and non-applicable. Adam's senior by some fifteen years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic - a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history. As he explores a father's legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. The Human Fly & Other Stories. New York. 2005. Speak/Penguin Books. 0142403636. 181 pages. paperback. Cover design & illustration by Jay Cooper.
DESCRIPTION - His many, varied novels are part of the American literary landscape -- but one of the best ways to appreciate T. C. Boyle is through his richly imagined short fiction. Boyle's kaleidoscopic humor and wit, his keen, unforgiving take on American life, and his all-too-human protagonists all combine to make his a singular voice. Here is a collection of classic Boyle stories about teenagers (including the O. Henry Award-winning ‘The Love of My Life') that will speak directly to them, as well as to anyone who was once a teenager.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. The Road To Wellville. New York. 1993. Viking Press. 0670843342. 476 pages. hardcover. Cover: Tom Nikosey.
DESCRIPTION - The year is 1907, and the boom town of Battle Creek Michigan, is attracting a formidable array of visitors - the rich, the preposterously rich, and the merely famous, from California, Chicago, New York and even Europe. What draws them to this place? And what inspires them to trade in their steaks and oysters, their martinis and champagne for a diet of bran and yogurt and a regimen of five enemas per day? Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of course, inventor of the corn flake, peanut butter, and the coffee substitutes that have ruined so many a bright morning, the man whose dietary wisdom is at your disposal in this comic masterpiece by T. Coraghessan Boyle. THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE overflows with a Dickensian cast of characters - all in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives, or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. The hapless hero of this pursuit is Will Lightbody, a man with an undiagnosed stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife too much. For Eleanor Lightbody, despite her upper-crust credential, her capacity and beauty, is a health nut of the first stripe, and when she travels to Dr. Kellogg's ‘Temple of Health' to live out the vegetarian ethos with a vengeance, so too does poor Will. Boyle's amazing novel offers much more than a cure for pernicious maladies - it will make you howl with delighted recognition as you discover the root and basis for the catechism of today's food police. It will also give you a look at the boom industry that made the little burg of Battle Creek known around the world, and introduce you to the hustlers and confidence men who came to town to profit from the public's credulity. And it will give you adventure along with a good dolop of comic instruction in the mysteries of the prescriptive diet and the evils of sex (Dr. Kellogg believed in abstaining - for life). Boyle has been compared with Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Dickens, and Evelyn Waugh. Imagine a amalgam of them all, overlaid with the wicked modern comic sensibility that has made this flamboyant author the rising star of American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. The Tortilla Curtain. New York. 1995. Viking Press. 0670856045. 368 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A freak accident causes two couples-a pair of Los Angeles liberals and Mexican illegal's-and their opposing worlds to collide in a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding. Men and women with brown faces and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Water Music. Boston. 1981. Atlantic/Little Brown. 0316104671. 437 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Twenty five years ago, T.C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music - a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining novel of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle's tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London's seamy gutters and Scotland's scenic highlands - to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. World's End. New York. 1987. Viking Press. 067081489x. 456 pages. hardcover. Jacket design & illustration by Fred Marcellino.
DESCRIPTION - Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history. It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960s back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940s, to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic Van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the Van Brunts--will be revealed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Bradbury, Ray. A Graveyard For Lunatics. New York. 1990. Knopf. 0394547020. 278 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The first novel in a trio of mysteries by Ray Bradbury (19202012). A Graveyard for Lunatics followed in 1990 and Let's All Kill Constance in 2002. In Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), the unnamed narrator enlists the help of detective Elmo Crumley in solving a series of murders in Venice, California. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
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Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. Garden City. 1957. Doubleday. 281 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Vickrey,.
DESCRIPTION - Dandelion Wine is a 1957 novel by Ray Bradbury, taking place in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, based upon Bradbury's childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. The novel developed from the short story "Dandelion Wine" which appeared in the June 1953 issue of Gourmet magazine. The title refers to a wine made with dandelion petals and other ingredients, commonly citrus fruit. In the story, dandelion wine, as made by the protagonist's grandfather, serves as a metaphor for packing all of the joys of summer into a single bottle. The main character of the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after Bradbury. Most of the book is focused upon the routines of small-town America, and the simple joys of yesterday.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
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Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York. 1962. Simon & Schuster. 317 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - One of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre. For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares. Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
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Bradbury, Ray. The Illustrated Man. Garden City. 1951. Doubleday. 256 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Sydney Butchkes.
DESCRIPTION - Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin - visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness.the sight of gray dust selling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere.the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father's clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Ray Bradbury's THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster's premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
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Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. Garden City. 1950. Doubleday. 222 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Martian Chronicles is a science fiction fix-up novel, published in 1950, by American writer Ray Bradbury that chronicles the exploration and settlement of Mars, the home of indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war. The book projects American society immediately after World War II into a technologically advanced future where the amplification of humanity's potentials to create and destroy have miraculous and devastating consequences. Events in the chronicle include the apocalyptic destruction of Martian and human civilizations though there are no stories with settings at the catastrophes. The outcomes of many stories raise concerns about the values and direction of America of the time by addressing militarism, science, technology, and war-time prosperity that could result in a global nuclear war (e.g., "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Million-Year Picnic"); depopulation that might be considered genocide (e.g., "The Third Expedition", "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright", and "The Musicians"); racial oppression and exploitation (e.g., "Way in the Middle of the Air"); ahistoricism, philistinism, and hostility towards religion (e.g., "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright"); and censorship and conformity (e.g., "Usher II"). On Bradbury's award of a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2007, the book was recognized as one of his "masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime".
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
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Bradley, Adam. Ralph Ellison in Progress. New Haven. 2011. Yale University Press. 9780300147131. 244 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration – Ralph Ellison photographed by Gordon Parks.
DESCRIPTION - Ralph Ellison may be the preeminent African-American author of the twentieth century, though he published only one novel, 1952's INVISIBLE MAN. He enjoyed a highly successful career in American letters, publishing two collections of essays, teaching at several colleges and universities, and writing dozens of pieces for newspapers and magazines. Yet Ellison never published the second novel he had been composing for more than forty years. A 1967 fire that destroyed some of his work accounts for only a small part of the novel's fate; the rest is revealed in the thousands of pages he left behind after his death in 1994, many of them collected for the first time in the recently published THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING. RALPH ELLISON IN PROGRESS is the first book to survey the expansive geography of Ellison's unfinished novel while re-imaging the more familiar, but often misunderstood, territory of INVISIBLE MAN. It works from the premise that understanding Ellison's process of composition imparts important truths not only about the author but also about race, writing, and American identity. Drawing on thousands of pages of Ellison's journals, typescripts, computer drafts, and handwritten notes, many never before studied, Adam Bradley argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis that moves a greater share of the weight of Ellison's literary legacy to the last forty years of his life and to the novel he left forever in progress.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adam Bradley is Associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the coeditor of Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING. , and he author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of HIP HOP.
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Bradley, David. South Street. New York. 1975. Grossman/Viking. 0670659355. 340 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - From the first startling encounter at Lightnin' Ed's Bar and Grill to the last glimpse of the ghetto from the other side of the river, this novel vibrates with a sense of life so strong, a sense of character so rich, that to read SOUTH STREET is to be there: there among the lives and half-lives in the black city. David Bradley's excursion into street life resonates with jive talk and jazz rhythms, tastes of the visceral reality of this corner of America. A young, middle-class black, a would-be ‘proletarian poet,' decides to seek the world of the ‘people'; and it is among the hookers and hustlers, the winos and the pimps, the con men and the missionaries that he finds a life threatened by impotence and empty rage, yet charged and invigorated by laughter, brassiness, and pride. An extraordinary achievement, this rendering of life into words - words charged by the rhythms of the city, fired by the substance of lives lived on a precipitous edge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Henry Bradley, Jr. (born September 7, 1950, in Bedford, Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon and author of South Street and the The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. The Chaneysville Incident, inspired in part by the real-life discovery of the graves of a group of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born, also earned Bradley a 1982 Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Bradley has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in periodicals and newspapers such as Esquire, Redbook, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. He also appeared on the June 12, 2011 episode of 60 Minutes in a segment regarding the censored version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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Bradley, David. The Chaneysville Incident. New York. 1981. Harper & Row. 0060104910. 432 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Camarello/Eyetooth Design.
DESCRIPTION - The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. THE CHANEYSVILLE INCIDENT is the powerful story of a man's obsession with discovering what that something was, what it had to do with the deaths of his slave great-grandfather and his moonshiner father, and what it has to do with him. John Washington has a doctorate in history and is a professor at a major university, an escapee from his small-town black origins. He is awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call telling him that Old Jack Crawley is dying. To the people of John's home town Jack Crawley is the strange, unkempt old man who shines shoes and lives in a shack in the woods. To John he is the man who was his father's best friend and the person who became his spiritual mentor when his father died a mysterious death. He taught John to hunt and fish, to become an expert woodsman, and most of all he told John stories. He told John of his father, who began as a moonshiner and ended as the wealthy and most influential black member of the community. And he told the tales that had been passed on about his forebears and the troubled history of his small, rural Pennsylvania town. Before Jack dies he tells John one more story. And we realize that John really has not escaped his home town, nor his own past, nor can he escape the strange bequest left him on Old Jack's passing. Slowly John comes to know that he can never come to terms with his feelings for his father, his relationship with a warm, loving white woman; indeed, he cannot go on with his life until he can solve the dual mysteries of how his father died and what dark secret of his family's past his father was trying to uncover when he died. Once John sets out to untangle the twisted skein of his family history, an obsessive, almost demonic force is set into motion. And there is no release until the final page.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Henry Bradley, Jr. (born 1950, in Bedford, Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon and author of South Street and the The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. The Chaneysville Incident, inspired in part by the real-life discovery of the graves of a group of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born, also earned Bradley a 1982 Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Bradley has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in periodicals and newspapers such as Esquire, Redbook, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. He also appeared on the June 12, 2011 episode of 60 Minutes in a segment regarding the censored version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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Bragg, Linda Brown. Rainbow Roun Mah Shoulder. Chapel Hill. 1984. Carolina Wren Press. 093211220x. Winner Of Best Book by A North Carolina Minority Writer Award From The North Carolina Cultural Arts Coalition. 135 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Linda Brown Bragg's first novel is a valuable contribution to contemporary Afro-American fiction. RAINBOW ROUN MAH SHOULDER links the ineluctable power of lyric prose with sustained exploration of woman's consciousness in the 20th century, yielding rich, sometimes surprising insights about drylongso folk in the Black South. This novel illustrates how people, in the words of Richard Wright, ‘might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.' - Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Chairman, English Department, Tougaloo College, Mississippi. ‘There is very little under the sun which is in fact novel. Linda Bragg brings a new experience to us. We applaud her debut.' - Nikki Giovanni. ‘This is a remarkable first novel. It touches so many levels of experience, is gripping beautiful, wise.' -Elizabeth Sewell. AWARD WINNING BOOK - The North Carolina Cultural Arts Coalition, a statewide arts service organization for minority artists, and the Carolina Wren Press, which has a special commitment to minority and women writers, sponsored a contest in 1983 for the best book, whether fiction, poetry or drama, by a North Carolina minority writer. The entries were anonymous, and the judges were Dr. Sondra O'Neale, of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., Dr. Jerry W. Ward, Jr., of Tougaloo College in Miss., and Judy Hogan, the editor and publisher of the Carolina Wren Press of Durham, NX They enthusiastically and unanimously proclaimed the winning book as Linda Brown Bragg's RAINBOW ROUN MAH SHOULDER. Linda received a $500 cash prize and book publication as her award.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Linda Brown Bragg vas born in Akron, Ohio, in 1939. She graduated from Bennett College in 1961, holds an M.A. from Case Western Reserve University and a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School. Linda works as a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, teaching Afro-American literature and Creative Writing. She has been writing since the age of 14, and had her first poems published in BEYOND THE BLUES, an anthology of black poetry edited by Rosey Poole and published in 1960. In 1974, she brought out her first book of poems with Broadside Press, A LOVE SONG TO BLACK MEN, and she has subsequently been published in various periodicals, including Black Scholar, Encore, Guilford Review, Cricket Magazine, and Writer's Choice. She also does extensive lecturing in and out of the state of North Carolina, and is a writing consultant with the National Episcopal Church. Linda is a founding member of Message, Inc., a small corporation which includes three other women who give frequent workshops on subjects such as the uses of the imagination and the connection between the sacred and the artistic. Her plans for the future include a second novel, which she has recently begun, publishing another volume of poetry, and continuing to build up her free-lancing. Her major emphasis is always to give life to the concrete world through imaginative work so that it will speak of the great mysteries. Her belief is that writing is an exercise of faith and a way of participating in creation. She lives with her two children, Christopher and Lali, in Greensboro.
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Braly, Malcolm. Felony Tank. Greenwich. 1961. Fawcett Gold Medal. 189 pages. paperback. s1075.
DESCRIPTION - Author's first novel. A brutal account of life in prison. written while the author was a prisoner at San Quentin. "This is what it's like to get thrown in jail for the first time, to grow up hard and cool almost overnight, in the gray metal guts of the--Felony Tank!"
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Braly (1925–1980) was born in Portland, Oregon. Abandoned by his parents, Braly lived between foster homes and institutions for delinquent children, and by the time he was forty had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin, and Folsom State Prison. He wrote three novels behind bars, FELONY TANK (1961), SHAKE HIM TILL HE RATTLES (1963), and IT'S COLD OUT THERE (1966), and upon his release in 1965 began to work on ON THE YARD. When prison authorities learned of the book they threatened to revoke his parole, and he was forced to complete it in secret. Published in 1967, after Braly's parole had expired, On the Yard received wide acclaim. It was followed by his autobiography, FALSE STARTS: A MEMOIR OF SAN QUENTIN AND OTHER PRISONS (1976), and a final work of fiction, THE PROTECTOR (1979). Malcolm Braly enjoyed fifteen years of freedom before his death in a car accident at age fifty-four.
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Braly, Malcolm. On the Yard. Boston. 1967. Little Brown. 344 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism in which Malcolm Braly paints an unforgettable picture of the complex and frightening world of the penitentiary. At its center are the violently intertwined stories of Chilly Willy, in trouble with the law from his earliest years and now the head of the prison's flourishing black market in drugs and sex, and of Paul, wracked with guilt for the murder of his wife and desperate for some kind of redemption. At once brutal and tender, clear-eyed and rueful, On the Yard presents the penitentiary not as an exotic location, an exception to everyday reality, but as an ordinary place, one every reader will recognize, American to the core.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Braly (1925–1980) was born in Portland, Oregon. Abandoned by his parents, Braly lived between foster homes and institutions for delinquent children, and by the time he was forty had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin, and Folsom State Prison. He wrote three novels behind bars, FELONY TANK (1961), SHAKE HIM TILL HE RATTLES (1963), and IT'S COLD OUT THERE (1966), and upon his release in 1965 began to work on ON THE YARD. When prison authorities learned of the book they threatened to revoke his parole, and he was forced to complete it in secret. Published in 1967, after Braly's parole had expired, On the Yard received wide acclaim. It was followed by his autobiography, FALSE STARTS: A MEMOIR OF SAN QUENTIN AND OTHER PRISONS (1976), and a final work of fiction, THE PROTECTOR (1979). Malcolm Braly enjoyed fifteen years of freedom before his death in a car accident at age fifty-four.
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Braly, Malcolm. The Protector. New York. 1979. Jove. 0515051780. 189 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - It was an Upper West Side apartment building - an island besieged, in a sea of junkies and street predators. Then private guard John Mack was hired - with his bullets and his creed of law and order until it hurt. The crime ebbed. The neighborhood relaxed. Only one final secret, one terrible danger remained. The Protector.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Braly (1925–1980) was born in Portland, Oregon. Abandoned by his parents, Braly lived between foster homes and institutions for delinquent children, and by the time he was forty had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin, and Folsom State Prison. He wrote three novels behind bars, FELONY TANK (1961), SHAKE HIM TILL HE RATTLES (1963), and IT'S COLD OUT THERE (1966), and upon his release in 1965 began to work on ON THE YARD. When prison authorities learned of the book they threatened to revoke his parole, and he was forced to complete it in secret. Published in 1967, after Braly's parole had expired, On the Yard received wide acclaim. It was followed by his autobiography, FALSE STARTS: A MEMOIR OF SAN QUENTIN AND OTHER PRISONS (1976), and a final work of fiction, THE PROTECTOR (1979). Malcolm Braly enjoyed fifteen years of freedom before his death in a car accident at age fifty-four.
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Branch, William B. (editor). Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama. New York. 1992. Mentor/New American Library. 0451628446. Introduction by William B. Branch. 520 pages. paperback. ME2844.
DESCRIPTION - THE VOICES OF TODAY'S BEST BLACK PLAYWRIGHTS - FROM AMIRI BARAKA TO AUGUST WILSON. African American playwrights have played a major role in the vitality and popularity of American theater, especially during the last two decades. All the plays collected in this anthology were written between 1975 and 1990 - works produced in the post-civil-rights era, but which actively confront the racial realities of American culture. Whether it's the award-winning interracial love story THE TAKING OF MISS JANIE by Ed Bullins, or the eleven dazzling, high-energy ‘exhibits' in THE COLORED MUSEUM by George C. Wolfe, or Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson's impressive first play, MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, these plays easily rank among the best work being done in the contemporary theater. The nine playwrights celebrate the African American experience, express the truth about racial issues in American life, and create exciting dramatic experiences rich with meaning, originality, and superb entertainment. This volume includes playwright William Branch's comprehensive introduction, a history of the African American theater from its roots in the early nineteenth century up to the 1990s - an especially valuable resource for theater lovers and scholars.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Blackwell Branch is an African-American playwright who has also been involved in many aspects of entertainment, including journalism, media production, editing, a short-lived career acting for television as well as talking on the radio.
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Brandon, William (editor and compiler). The Magic World: American Indian Songs and Poems. New York. 1971. William Morrow. 145 pages. SHAW588.
DESCRIPTION - Contains 9 Nahuatl selections, 3 Maya poems, and others.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY -
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Braudy, Susan. Who Killed Sal Mineo?. New York. 1982. Wyndham Books. 0671610090. 318 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Sara Martin, a beautiful New York journalist investigating the lifestyle and murder of actor Sal Mineo, is drawn into the glittering, highly charged homosexual millieu of Hollywood,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Braudy (born Susan Orr July 8, 1941) is an American author and journalist. Braudy grew up in Philadelphia and later relocated to Manhattan, New York City. She received her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and attended University of Pennsylvania and Yale University graduate schools, where she studied ethics and aesthetics. Braudy's father Bernard Orr worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and actively supported local artists such as Dox Thrash. He was Vice President of the American Jewish Committee and his Master's thesis at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania became the book Technological Unemployment, an early look at how advances in technology were replacing human labor. He was the principal of a vocational night school whose students were largely African-American. Braudy's mother Blanche Orr taught history at Germantown High School, whose students were also largely African-American, and went back to school to become a reading supervisor because her students needed better reading skills. Braudy now lives with film editor Joe Weintraub. Braudy has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, The Huffington Post, Harper's Magazine, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Ms., New York Magazine, The New Journal, Jezebel and The Week. She was the first woman writer hired by Newsweek. Braudy had been commissioned by Playboy magazine in 1969 to write an "objective" piece on the feminism movement. Her final article was viewed as controversial by male Playboy editors. The debate continued up to Hugh Hefner; who wrote in a memo (covertly distributed by female Playboy employees) that he felt the article needed to focus more on the "highly irrational, emotional, kookie trend" of feminism because "these chicks [are] the natural enemy of Playboy." He argued that radical feminists were rejecting the Playboy way of life. Braudy later wrote an article published in Defiance and Glamour magazine in which she analyzed the contents of Hefner's memo and criticized his approach to women. Braudy was an editor and writer at Ms. magazine. She edited the October 1975 men's issue of Ms. whose cover featured Robert Redford's back. In 1977, Braudy became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. In 1981, Braudy was appointed Vice President of East Coast Production at Warner Brothers. She worked as Vice President of Michael Douglas's Stonebridge Production Company from 1986 to 1989. She was hired by Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Bruckheimer, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone to write screenplays. Her article on paperback auctions, published in The New York Times Magazine, was used by the Federal Trade Commission for an anti-trust suit against the high-bidder in a multimillion-dollar paperback rights auction. In 2006, Braudy judged the Lukas Prize, the award from the Columbia University Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, given annually to recognize excellence in book-length investigative journalism.
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Brautigan, Richard. A Confederate General from Big Sur. New York. 1965. Grove Press. 159 pages. hardcover. Cover by Larry Rivers.
DESCRIPTION - A Confederate General from Big Sur is Richard Brautigan's first published novel, published in 1965. The story takes place in 1957. A man named Lee Mellon believes he is a descendant of a Confederate general who was originally from Big Sur, California. This general is not in any books or records and there is no proof of his existence, although Mellon meets a drifter from the Pacific Northwest who has also heard of this general. Mellon seeks the truth of his own modern-day war against the status quo of the modern United States in light of the Confederacy's past struggle with the Union. The novel's overall theme is the struggle of the human mind's perceptions and beliefs versus reality. Brautigan completed the novel in 1961 but it was not published until January 22, 1965. The novel sold poorly and soon went out of print but was later republished when Brautigan developed something of a cult following, largely based on his reputation developed in response to his next major work, the novella Trout Fishing in America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. In Watermelon Sugar. San Francisco. 1968. Four Seasons Foundation. 160 pages. paperback. Cover by Edmund Shea. Photo shows Brautigan with his muse Hilda Hoffmann.
DESCRIPTION - In Watermelon Sugar is an American postmodern post-apocalyptic novel by Richard Brautigan written in 1964 and published in 1968. Set in the aftermath of a fallen civilization, it focuses on a commune organized around a central gathering house which is named "iDEATH". In this environment, many things are made of watermelon sugar (though the inhabitants also use pine wood and stone for building material and fuel made from trout oil). The landscape of the novel is constantly in flux; each day of the week has a different colored sun which creates different colored watermelons, and the central building also changes frequently. The novel's narrator, who is left unnamed, claims to be writing an investigative book on his experiences at iDEATH. Its first-person narrative is sparse and minimalist, granting the novel a detached and alien quality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. Revenge of the Lawn. New York. 1971. Simon & Schuster. 0671209604. 174 pages. paperback. Cover by Edmund Shea.
DESCRIPTION - Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 is a collection of 62 short stories written by the American author Richard Brautigan from 1962 to 1970. Like most of Brautigan's works, the stories are whimsical, simply themed, and often surreal. Many of the stories were originally published elsewhere. The book also contains two missing chapters from his work Trout Fishing in America, "Rembrandt Creek" and "Carthage Sink". CONTENTS: Revenge of the Lawn; 1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel; 1/3, 1/3, 1/3; The Gathering of a Californian; A Short Story About Contemporary Life in California; Pacific Radio Fire; Elmira; Coffee; The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America: Rembrandt Creek and Carthage Sink; The Weather in San Francisco; Complicated Banking Problems; A High Building in Singapore; An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimetre Film; The Scarlatti Tilt; The Wild Birds of Heaven; Winter Rug; Ernest Hemingway's Typist; Homage to the San Francisco YMCA; The Pretty Office; A Need for Gardens; The Old Bus; The Ghost Children of Tacoma; Talk Show; I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone; Trick or Treating Down to the Sea in Ships; Blackberry Motorist; Thoreau Rubber Band; 44:00; Perfect California Day; The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon; Pale Marble Movie; Partners; Getting to Know Each Other; A Short History of Oregon; A Long Time Ago People Decided to Live in America; A Short History of Religion in California; April in God-damn; One Afternoon in 1939; Corporal; Lint; A Complete History of Germany and Japan; The Auction; The Armoured Car; The Literary Life in California/1964; Banners of My Own Choosing; Fame in California/1964; Memory of a Girl; September California; A Study of California Flowers; The Betrayed Kingdom; Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning; Hallowe'en in Denver; Atlantisburg; A View from the Dog Tower; Greyhound Tragedy; Crazy Old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today; The Correct Time; Holiday in Germany; Sand Castles; Forgiven; American Flag Decal; World War I Los Angeles Aeroplane.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt. New York. 1970. Delacorte Press. 0440074959. 85 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt by Richard Brautigan. a collection of eighty-five poems, was Brautigan's sixth collection of poetry; his eighth poetry book publication. Brautigan visited Roxy and Judy Gordon in Austin, Texas, in August 1970. While there he was issued a Texas fishing license (August 14, 1970). It notes his height (6'4") and weight (165 pounds). The poem "Autobiography (Polish It like a Piece of Silver)," collected in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, contains a reference to Judy Gordon and Byrds, a town in central Texas, near Brownwood. Two poems, "A Study in Roads" and "Stone (real," both collected in June 30th, June 30th contain references to Bee Caves, Texas, a small town twelve miles west of Austin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. New York. 1971. Simon & Schuster. 0671208721. 226 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A reclusive young man works in a San Francisco library for unpublishable books. Life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their manuscripts to the library, where they will be welcomed, registered and shelved. They will not be read, but they will be cherished. In comes Vida, with her manuscript. Her book is about her gorgeous body in which she feels uncomfortable. The librarian makes her feel comfortable, and together they live in the back of the library until a trip to Tijuana changes them in ways neither of them had ever expected.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western. New York. 1974. Simon & Schuster. 0671218093. 216 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The time is 1902, the setting eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a fifteen-year-old Indian girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men to kill the monster that lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house. What follows is a series of wild, witty, and bizarre encounters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America. San Francisco. 1967. Four Seasons Foundation. Writing 14. 112 pages. paperback. The cover of the book is a photograph of Brautigan and a friend identified as Michaela Le Grand, whom he referred to as his "Muse." The photo was taken by Erik Weber, in San Francisco's Washington Square Park in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue. The first chapter of the book is an extended and fanciful
DESCRIPTION of this photo.
DESCRIPTION - Trout Fishing in America (1967) is a novella written by Richard Brautigan. It consists of short pieces linked by recurring characters. Technically it is Brautigan's first novel, as he completed it in 1961, but his book A Confederate General from Big Sur was published first. Trout Fishing In America is an abstract book without a clear central storyline. Instead, the book contains a series of anecdotes broken into chapters, with the same characters often reappearing from story to story. The settings of most of the chapters occur in three locales: Brautigan's childhood in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.; his day-to-day adult life in San Francisco; and a camping trip in Idaho with his wife and infant daughter during the summer of 1961. Most of the chapters were written during this trip. An excerpt appeared as the lead piece in the Evergreen Review, Volume 7, No. 31 (Oct.–Nov. 1963). The phrase "Trout Fishing in America" is used in various ways: it is the title of the book, a character, a hotel, the act of fishing itself, a modifier (one character is named "Trout Fishing in America Shorty") and other things. Brautigan uses the theme of trout fishing as a point of departure for thinly veiled and often comical critiques of mainstream American society and culture. Several symbolic objects, such as a mayonnaise jar, a Ben Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square and trout, reappear throughout the book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Brautigan, Richard. Willard and His Bowling Trophies. New York. 1975. Simon & Schuster. 0671220659. 167 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The story takes place in San Francisco in the early 1970s. The title character is a papier mache bird that shares the front room of an apartment with a collection of bowling trophies that some time earlier were stolen from the home of the Logan brothers. The human tenants of this apartment are John and Pat, who have just returned from seeing a Greta Garbo movie in a local movie theater. Their neighbors are Bob and Constance, a married couple going through some rough times in their relationship. Because of their failing relationship, Bob becomes depressed. Meanwhile the Logan brothers are looking for their stolen trophies. The brothers have turned their happy life of bowling into a life of vengeance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone.
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Braverman, Kate. Palm Latitudes. New York. 1988. Linden/Simon & Schuster. 0671645420. 384 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Written nearly a decade after Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, Kate Braverman's second novel and arguably her chef d’oeuvre, explores the intertwined lives of three women who await absolution and revelation in the bougainvillea- and violence-filled "barrio" of Los Angeles. Frances Ramos is a voluptuous prostitute who flaunts her wealth and is held in high esteem by the local street gangs. Gloria Hernandez is a dutiful young wife and mother—until her husband’s act of betrayal sparks her growing estrangement and fury. Marta Ortega, a prophetic old woman connected viscerally with the forces/elements of nature, nods as past and present mingle and quietly charts the cross-pollenization of her turbulent neighborhood, and of human destiny.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Braverman (February 01, 1950 - October 12, 2019) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
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Braverman, Kate. Squandering the Blue: Stories. New York. 1990. Fawcett. 0449905519. 241 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Single mothers, insolent daughters, blood sisters, and desperate friends people the tales in this twelve-story cycle, as they live out urban fairy tales and nightmares in the atmospheric landscape of Los Angeles.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Braverman (February 01, 1950 - October 12, 2019) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
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Braverman. Kate. Lithium For Medea. New York. 1979. Harper & Row. 0060104414. 251 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Lithium for Medea is a tale of addiction: to drugs, physical love, and dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent his waking hours in the garden cut off from his wife's harangues. Now an adult, Rose works her way through a string of unhealthy love(less) affairs. After a brief, unhappy marriage, she slips more deeply and dangerously into the lair of a parasitic, cocaine-fed artist whose sensual and manipulative ways she grows addicted to in the bohemian squalor of Venice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Braverman (February 01, 1950 - October 12, 2019) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
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Brawley, Ernest. Selena. New York. 1979. Atheneum. 0689109512. 376 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Spanning a quarter of a century, from the early 1950's to the late 70's, and set against the social and political turmoil of that watershed era, Selena traces the interlocking destinies of a haunting young woman, driven by a mystical belief in her uniqueness, and two desperate men who have been lifelong rivals.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernest Brawley's life story reads like one of his action and adventure filled novels. After college, and a stint in the US Army, he stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, where he got a job as a reporter on an English language newspaper. Eventually, he worked his way around the entire world as a deckhand, dishwasher, money changer, movie extra and English tutor. He ended up in Paris, living the proverbial life of the “penniless artist.” When he published his first novel, he went literally from “rags to riches,” which he spent by living the European high life for a few years. Ernest wrote more novels and since then he has spent his life writing, teaching, and traveling. An adventurer at heart, he has lived and worked in several remote locales, including Bolivia, India, Thailand, and Japan. He now lives on the island of Mauritius.
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Brawley, Ernest. The Alamo Tree. New York. 1984. Simon & Schuster. 0671450883. 432 pages. hardcover. Cover: Wendell Minor.
DESCRIPTION - Traces the stories of the Carrizos, a Mexican family who rise from servants to financial giants, and the O'Hares, an American family who develop a small hotel into an internationally famous resort.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernest Brawley's life story reads like one of his action and adventure filled novels. After college, and a stint in the US Army, he stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, where he got a job as a reporter on an English language newspaper. Eventually, he worked his way around the entire world as a deckhand, dishwasher, money changer, movie extra and English tutor. He ended up in Paris, living the proverbial life of the “penniless artist.” When he published his first novel, he went literally from “rags to riches,” which he spent by living the European high life for a few years. Ernest wrote more novels and since then he has spent his life writing, teaching, and traveling. An adventurer at heart, he has lived and worked in several remote locales, including Bolivia, India, Thailand, and Japan. He now lives on the island of Mauritius.
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Brawley, Ernest. The Rap. New York. 1974. Atheneum. 0689105630. 473 pages. hardcover. Cover: Lawrence Ratzkin.
DESCRIPTION - The roiling action of Ernest Brawley’s novel The Rap takes place in and around a penitentiary much like San Quentin. The time is the early 70s, when George Jackson, Angela Davis and others were agitating for prison reform, and the authorities were doing everything they could do to thwart them. A young, sympathetic guard, Arvin Weed, attends night classes at a local college in pursuit of a dream to break away from his worst working at the prison forever, like his father. But his reputation as a Vietnam vet rifle marksman draws him unwittingly into a conspiracy to murder revolutionary, black militant leader, William Galliot, who’s just been sent to prison. Arvin’s evil cousin, Wasco Weed, also a recent arrival to the prison, fancies himself a criminal genius, and has, in fact, been directly tapped by conservative political eminences to assassinate Galliot, the revolutionary. Wasco shrewdly manipulates everyone in his orbit, including his voluptuous wife, Moke, an almost supernatural creature given to midnight swims in the ocean and driven by a ferocious craving for money and power; Fast-Walking Miniver, a young guard and the warden’s scapegrace son; Big Arv, Arvin’s loutish father; Lobo Miniver, the urbane and opportunistic warden; and even Wasco’s own mother, Evie, the bawdy proprietress of a whorehouse. Moving from the tragic to the comic, the obscene to the exalted, the real to the surreal, The Rap is the ultimate American saga.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernest Brawley's life story reads like one of his action and adventure filled novels. After college, and a stint in the US Army, he stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, where he got a job as a reporter on an English language newspaper. Eventually, he worked his way around the entire world as a deckhand, dishwasher, money changer, movie extra and English tutor. He ended up in Paris, living the proverbial life of the “penniless artist.” When he published his first novel, he went literally from “rags to riches,” which he spent by living the European high life for a few years. Ernest wrote more novels and since then he has spent his life writing, teaching, and traveling. An adventurer at heart, he has lived and worked in several remote locales, including Bolivia, India, Thailand, and Japan. He now lives on the island of Mauritius.
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Bredehoft, Tom. Foote: A Mystery Novel. Morgantown. West Virginia University Press. 9781952271601. 248 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In the space of one weekend in Morgantown, West Virginia, private investigator Big Jim Foote finds himself at the center of two murder investigations. Suspected of one killing at a local festival, he locates the body of a missing person immediately after. The cops are watching him, and Big Jim has a secret he dares not reveal: he is a bigfoot living in plain sight, charged with keeping his people in the surrounding hills from being discovered. To protect the bigfoot secret, he must solve both murders--and convince himself it wasn't a bigfoot who pulled the trigger. Through the course of his investigations, Big Jim is helped by unique and well-rendered characters and friends in both his bigfoot and human communities. Readers are introduced to Appalachian mountain folk and traditional culture in new ways, even while Big Jim experiences the impact of the opioid epidemic on his own bigfoot kin. By centering a mythical creature as the unlikely protagonist in this enchanting literary murder mystery, Foote offers a winsome redefinition of a cryptid "monster" and breathes new life into the PI genre.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Bredehoft lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. In an earlier life, he was an English professor specializing in medieval literature.
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Brinig, Myron. The Flutter of An Eyelid. New York. 1933. Farrar & Rinehart. Illustrated by Lynd Ward. 310 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Very scarce novel set in Southern California in the 1920s, and a lost classic. One modern-day commentator has observed that the book was "killed by neglect" (receiving only a single review -- a pan -- in the Saturday Review of Literature), but as Kevin Starr relates in "Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s," its fate may have been a bit more complicated than that. The book was, in fact, a scabrously satirical portrait of Southern California's bohemian community, and in particular of prominent L.A. bookman Jake Zeitlin and his circle of friends and associates (who included Merle Armitage, Edward Weston and others). Since it was Zeitlin himself who had originally introduced the author to this group, he understandably viewed the book as an "insulting betrayal" (Starr's words). Zeitlin in fact took legal action against it. Starr observes that Brinig's caricature of Zeitlin ("Sol Mosier" in the book) was anti-Semitic "even by the most forgiving of standards," and Zeitlin, having seen a set of galleys prior to publication, threatened a lawsuit and thereby succeeded in having the most offensive passages removed from the book prior to publication. In spite of (or maybe because of) being out of print for over eighty years, the book has achieved a kind of quasi-mythic reputation, and has been cited as both a landmark in Southern California fiction and an early gay novel. David Fine, who discusses it at some length in his book Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, describes it as possibly "the strangest novel to come out of the territory -- a novel not set in Hollywood or dealing with the making of movies, but saturated with every fantasy and dream associated with the region." It has also been admired for its apocalyptic finale, in which the state of California is struck by a massive earthquake and falls into the ocean -- "not the first or the last time," writes Starr, "this fate would be dealt by fictionists to the Pacific Coast."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Myron Brinig (December 22, 1896 - May 13, 1991) was a Jewish-American author who wrote twenty-one novels from 1929 to 1958. Brinig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Romanian parents, but grew up in Butte, Montana. Brinig began studying at New York University in 1914, where poet Joyce Kilmer gave him lectures on writing. He then studied at Columbia University and started his career by writing short stories for magazines. Brinig's first novel, Madonna Without Child, was released in 1929. Published by Doubleday, the novel tells the story of a woman who is obsessed with another woman's baby. Many of Brinig's early novels depicted the settlement and development of Montana, the state he grew up in. These novels include Singermann (1929), Wide Open Town (1931), This Man Is My Brother (1932), and The Sun Sets in the West (1935). Brinig based the main character of these novels, Singermann, on his father, Maurice Brinig, who was a Romanian immigrant and shopkeeper. Brinig's novels often depicted miners, labor organizers, farmers, and businessmen living in Montana. These usually became bestsellers in the United States and were praised by critics of The New York Times. One of the best-selling novels, The Sisters, was adapted to a feature-length film in 1938, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Brinig's novels often dealt with homosexuality, likely because he was a homosexual himself (although he was publicly closeted all his life). According to the Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, Brinig was the "first American Jewish novelist to write in any significant way about the gay experience." In 1951, The New York Times Book Review said Brinig's "sentimental streak and his sympathetic touch with characters usually lend his books a warm glow of humanity, if not of art." At the beginning of his career, Brinig was praised by critics for his "artistry and inventiveness in narrative, character and incident." In the early 1930s, he was described as one of the leading young writers in America. Brinig's last novels, however, were met with mixed reviews from critics, who criticized them for their "verbosity and banality." Brinig died on May 13, 1991. The cause of his death was gastrointestinal hemorrhage.
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Briscoe, Connie. Big Girls Don't Cry. New York. 1996. Harper Collins. 0060172770. 377 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Jody Hewgill.
DESCRIPTION - Naomi Jefferson was born into a comfortable world only occasionally marred by racism - even when she is called a nigger after wandering into the wrong neighborhood, she learns not to let it touch her too deeply. As a teenager in the 1960s, her biggest concerns are when she'll give up her virginity and if you really can't get pregnant the first time, like her friends tell her. But when her adored older brother, Joshua, seemingly the family's chosen one who is destined for greatness, is killed in a tragic car accident on his way to a civil rights demonstration, the rift between black and white America suddenly becomes personal. In an attempt to live up to Joshua's example, Naomi immerses herself in 1970s campus politics. But instead of finding herself, she loses her sense of who she is. She's unsure how to negotiate her way through a world where brothers die for no good reason and the one man she depends on most betrays her with another woman. Slapped in the face with such harsh realities, Naomi makes a decision: Politics are useless, romance is hopeless, and what she really needs is a career. But work and success in the 1980s aren't all they're cracked up to be, particularly since the promotions keep going to the white guys. Just when Naomi starts to think that the only person she can depend on is herself, two people walk into her life who make her believe once again that anything worth having is worth fighting for. From the bestselling author of SISTERS & LOVERS, BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY is about one woman's search for love and purpose in a world where it's all too difficult to have both. With a heroine readers will embrace as their own and a dramatic climax readers won't soon forget, it announces Connie Briscoe's arrival among the ranks of our most beloved novelists.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Connie Briscoe has been a full-time published author for more than ten years. Born with a hearing impairment, Connie never allowed that to stop her from pursuing her dream - writing. Since she left the world of editing to become a writer, Connie has hit the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Connie lives with her family in Maryland.
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Briscoe, Connie. Sisters & Lovers. New York. 1994. Harper Collins. 0060171162. 339 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Beverly, Charmaine, and Evelyn are three sisters living in the same Maryland town outside Washington, D.C., each wishing her life were just a little different. Beverly is twenty-nine and single. She's a successful magazine editor who would love to be in love. The problem is, no man can meet her high standards. Charmaine longs to finish her degree, but meanwhile, she has to juggle a thankless job, a beautiful child, and an irresponsible husband she doesn't quite have the nerve to leave. Evelyn seems to have it made. She has a successful psychology practice and her husband is a partner in a prestigious law firm. But there's trouble in paradise, and Evelyn refuses to face the facts. Warm and bittersweet, believable and real, SISTERS & LOVERS is a novel of family and love, heartache and hope, and above all, the triumph of sisterhood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Connie Briscoe has been a full-time published author for more than ten years. Born with a hearing impairment, Connie never allowed that to stop her from pursuing her dream - writing. Since she left the world of editing to become a writer, Connie has hit the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Connie lives with her family in Maryland.
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Brodeur, Brian. Local Fauna. Kent. 2015. Kent State University Press. 9781606352373. Wick Poetry Chapbook Series Five, #5. 5½ x 8½. 46 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Local Fauna opens with a meta-poem about Jack Spicer, and I couldn't help but think of his ‘dictated' poetry, poetry as vessel, poetry getting down what needs to be said. Brian Brodeur's poems have this urgency - life, death, cruelty, politics, war, capitalism, and love. Hard truths come through the past, radio interviews, zoo animals, neighbors, personas, and pop songs. Brian Brodeur's poetry has insistence and morality, nclusivity and beauty. Local Fauna is terrific.' - Denise Duhamel. ‘Brian Brodeur's formal skill, his feel for the whole history beneath a sentence, a line, a syllable, is matched here only by his unsentimental compassion for the people he renders in his poems. I can think of few other poets who capture what contemporary American life actually feels, looks, and sounds like as movingly as Brodeur does. Poems such as ‘Cousins,' ‘Local Fauna,' and ‘The Register' will be with us for a long time indeed. Brian Brodeur is a marvel.' - Peter Campion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Brian Brodeur (born July 25, 1978) is the author of the poetry collections Natural Causes (2012) and Other Latitudes (2008), as well as the chapbook So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007). New poems and interviews have been published or are forthcoming in AWP Writer's Chronicle, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. Brodeur curates the blog ‘How a Poem Happens,' an online anthology of over 150 interviews with poets. A 2013 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, he is currently a George Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature Program at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as an assistant editor for The Cincinnati Review.
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Brodkey, Harold. First Love and Other Sorrows. New York. 1957. Dial Press. 223 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ismar David.
DESCRIPTION - When originally published in 1958, FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS won Harold Brodkey widespread acclaim and announced a brilliant new arrival on the literary scene. Brodkey was hailed as an ‘unusually gifted writer' (The Atlantic) and a ‘rich talent' (San Francisco Chronicle), whose stories read like ‘murmured confidences, highly personal yet carefully contrived' (Chicago Tribune). In FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS, the young Brodkey chronicles the world of the educated and affluent middle class of the 1950s, at leisure and in love. He establishes the themes that would appear throughout his career(the painful uncertainties of childhood, the halting intimacies of social life(with rare tenderness, humor, and haunting insight.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub (October 25, 1930 born in Staunton, Illinois - January 26, 1996 Manhattan) was an American writer, and novelist.
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Bromell, Henry. I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo: Stories. New York. 1979. Knopf. 0394501160. 132 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino.
DESCRIPTION - Four inter-connected short stories from the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award-winning author of THE SLIGHTEST DISTANCE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Henry Bromell (September 19, 1947 - March 18, 2013) was an American author, screenwriter, and director. Bromell joined the crew of NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994. He served as a writer and co-executive producer for the show's third season. He contributed to writing seven episodes for the season. He was promoted to executive producer for the fourth season and wrote a further 17 episodes. He scaled back his involvement with the fifth season and became a consulting producer. He wrote a further two episodes before leaving the crew at the end of the season in 1997. He contributed to a total of 26 episodes as a writer over three seasons with the series. He returned as a co-writer and co-executive producer for the feature-length follow-up Homicide: The Movie in 2000. He wrote and produced for many television series, including Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, Brotherhood, Carnivàle, and Rubicon. He was a consulting producer, and later Executive Producer on the Showtime series Homeland at the time of his death and wrote four episodes: ‘The Good Soldier‘, ‘Representative Brody‘, ‘Q&A‘, and ‘Broken Hearts‘. He was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for ‘The Good Soldier', and he was posthumously awarded a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for ‘Q&A'. He shared the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series - Drama with the other producers of Homeland in 2012. He was nominated in the same category at the Emmys for his work on the 1993 TV series I'll Fly Away, for which he was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for the episode titled ‘Amazing Grace'. Bromell wrote and directed the feature film Panic (2000), which was nominated for the top prize at the Deauville Film Festival, and tele-movie Last Call (aka Fitzgerald), with Jeremy Irons playing writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bromell attended Eaglebrook School (1963) and the United World College of the Atlantic (1964–1966). He graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, The Slightest Distance. His collection of short stories, I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, was published by Knopf. Bromell's work has appeared in two O. Henry Award collections. Bromell's first wife was the screenwriter and director Caroline Thompson. He then married writer Trish Soodik, who died of cancer in January 2009; they had a son, William. Bromell died March 18, 2013, at UCLA Santa Monica hospital at age 65. He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and sons, William and Jake.
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Bromell, Henry. Little America. New York. 2001. Knopf. 0375406840. 403 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph: Park Avenue Garage, Hotel Margurey, New York City, c. 1950 by Louis Faurer. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.
DESCRIPTION - A suspense novel, a political thriller, a novel of discovery - LITTLE AMERICA opens in Boston today and tells the story of a man in search of the truth about his father's past, a past locked away in the C.I.A.'s code of silence. Terry Hooper's father - Quaker-raised, Yale-educated, a sometime poet, now a retired (is he?) State Department veteran - was, in the 1950s, the C.I.A. station chief in Kurash, a small, newly constituted Middle Eastern country, a country caught in the grip of cold war politics, a country of beautiful and frightening Otherness (Arab women hidden behind their veils, scar-faced men on horseback with curved sabers, and streets that melted in the heat), 90 percent Muslim, lodged like a walnut between Syria and Iraq. Mack Hooper's assignment: to win the confidence of the King of Kurash, an enigmatic, British-educated desert aristocrat to whom no one, not even the U.S. Ambassador, had been able to get close. In a narrative that moves backward and forward in time, Terry puts together the pieces of the puzzle that has haunted him. Is his father a good man? Was he a friend to the young King, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him? What Terry unearths about the American intrigues in Kurash, about promises made, about monies delivered, about betrayal, about courage, about ‘us' and ‘them,' is brilliantly told in a novel that royally entertains while it evokes the conflict between private morality and public policy as it recaptures a time gone by, a time when Americans set out armed with ‘good intentions,' youthful desire for adventure, and the belief that they could save the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Henry Bromell (September 19, 1947 - March 18, 2013) was an American author, screenwriter, and director. Bromell joined the crew of NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994. He served as a writer and co-executive producer for the show's third season. He contributed to writing seven episodes for the season. He was promoted to executive producer for the fourth season and wrote a further 17 episodes. He scaled back his involvement with the fifth season and became a consulting producer. He wrote a further two episodes before leaving the crew at the end of the season in 1997. He contributed to a total of 26 episodes as a writer over three seasons with the series. He returned as a co-writer and co-executive producer for the feature-length follow-up Homicide: The Movie in 2000. He wrote and produced for many television series, including Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, Brotherhood, Carnivàle, and Rubicon. He was a consulting producer, and later Executive Producer on the Showtime series Homeland at the time of his death and wrote four episodes: ‘The Good Soldier‘, ‘Representative Brody‘, ‘Q&A‘, and ‘Broken Hearts‘. He was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for ‘The Good Soldier', and he was posthumously awarded a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for ‘Q&A'. He shared the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series - Drama with the other producers of Homeland in 2012. He was nominated in the same category at the Emmys for his work on the 1993 TV series I'll Fly Away, for which he was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for the episode titled ‘Amazing Grace'. Bromell wrote and directed the feature film Panic (2000), which was nominated for the top prize at the Deauville Film Festival, and tele-movie Last Call (aka Fitzgerald), with Jeremy Irons playing writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bromell attended Eaglebrook School (1963) and the United World College of the Atlantic (1964–1966). He graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, The Slightest Distance. His collection of short stories, I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, was published by Knopf. Bromell's work has appeared in two O. Henry Award collections. Bromell's first wife was the screenwriter and director Caroline Thompson. He then married writer Trish Soodik, who died of cancer in January 2009; they had a son, William. Bromell died March 18, 2013, at UCLA Santa Monica hospital at age 65. He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and sons, William and Jake.
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Bromell, Henry. The Follower. New York. 1983. Putnam. 0399128638. 223 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Henry Bromell's debut novel follows a young loner in New York, aspiring to become an actor, who becomes entangled in a case of mistaken identity, leading to a suspenseful narrative.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Henry Bromell (September 19, 1947 - March 18, 2013) was an American author, screenwriter, and director. Bromell joined the crew of NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994. He served as a writer and co-executive producer for the show's third season. He contributed to writing seven episodes for the season. He was promoted to executive producer for the fourth season and wrote a further 17 episodes. He scaled back his involvement with the fifth season and became a consulting producer. He wrote a further two episodes before leaving the crew at the end of the season in 1997. He contributed to a total of 26 episodes as a writer over three seasons with the series. He returned as a co-writer and co-executive producer for the feature-length follow-up Homicide: The Movie in 2000. He wrote and produced for many television series, including Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, Brotherhood, Carnivàle, and Rubicon. He was a consulting producer, and later Executive Producer on the Showtime series Homeland at the time of his death and wrote four episodes: ‘The Good Soldier‘, ‘Representative Brody‘, ‘Q&A‘, and ‘Broken Hearts‘. He was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for ‘The Good Soldier', and he was posthumously awarded a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for ‘Q&A'. He shared the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series - Drama with the other producers of Homeland in 2012. He was nominated in the same category at the Emmys for his work on the 1993 TV series I'll Fly Away, for which he was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for the episode titled ‘Amazing Grace'. Bromell wrote and directed the feature film Panic (2000), which was nominated for the top prize at the Deauville Film Festival, and tele-movie Last Call (aka Fitzgerald), with Jeremy Irons playing writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bromell attended Eaglebrook School (1963) and the United World College of the Atlantic (1964–1966). He graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, The Slightest Distance. His collection of short stories, I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, was published by Knopf. Bromell's work has appeared in two O. Henry Award collections. Bromell's first wife was the screenwriter and director Caroline Thompson. He then married writer Trish Soodik, who died of cancer in January 2009; they had a son, William. Bromell died March 18, 2013, at UCLA Santa Monica hospital at age 65. He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and sons, William and Jake.
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Bromell, Henry. The Slightest Distance. Boston. 1974. Houghton Mifflin. 0395194083. Winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. 192 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A mother and her three boys are on a small Greek island, where they prepare to reunite with her husband. Before they leave, they attend a party, and spend time reflecting on the possibility that they may never see their missing loved one again.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Henry Bromell (September 19, 1947 - March 18, 2013) was an American author, screenwriter, and director. Bromell joined the crew of NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994. He served as a writer and co-executive producer for the show's third season. He contributed to writing seven episodes for the season. He was promoted to executive producer for the fourth season and wrote a further 17 episodes. He scaled back his involvement with the fifth season and became a consulting producer. He wrote a further two episodes before leaving the crew at the end of the season in 1997. He contributed to a total of 26 episodes as a writer over three seasons with the series. He returned as a co-writer and co-executive producer for the feature-length follow-up Homicide: The Movie in 2000. He wrote and produced for many television series, including Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, Brotherhood, Carnivàle, and Rubicon. He was a consulting producer, and later Executive Producer on the Showtime series Homeland at the time of his death and wrote four episodes: ‘The Good Soldier‘, ‘Representative Brody‘, ‘Q&A‘, and ‘Broken Hearts‘. He was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for ‘The Good Soldier', and he was posthumously awarded a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for ‘Q&A'. He shared the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series - Drama with the other producers of Homeland in 2012. He was nominated in the same category at the Emmys for his work on the 1993 TV series I'll Fly Away, for which he was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for the episode titled ‘Amazing Grace'. Bromell wrote and directed the feature film Panic (2000), which was nominated for the top prize at the Deauville Film Festival, and tele-movie Last Call (aka Fitzgerald), with Jeremy Irons playing writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bromell attended Eaglebrook School (1963) and the United World College of the Atlantic (1964–1966). He graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, The Slightest Distance. His collection of short stories, I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, was published by Knopf. Bromell's work has appeared in two O. Henry Award collections. Bromell's first wife was the screenwriter and director Caroline Thompson. He then married writer Trish Soodik, who died of cancer in January 2009; they had a son, William. Bromell died March 18, 2013, at UCLA Santa Monica hospital at age 65. He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and sons, William and Jake.
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Bromige, David. Threads. Santa Barbara. 1971. Black Sparrow Press. 0876850204. 105 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - David Bromige is often associated with Language poetry. He was hailed by Carolyn Jones in the San Francisco Chronicle as a “mentor to hundreds of young poets … known for his generous spirit and impeccable syntax.” The poet D.A. Powell has described Bromige's poetry as “filled with paradoxes and quiet inquiries into the cognitive domain of language.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Mansfield Bromige (October 22, 1933 - June 3, 2009) is a Canadian poet who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author. He departs from language poetry in the thematic unity of many of his poems, in the uses to which he puts found materials, with the romantic aspect of his lyricism, and with the sheer variety of his approaches to the poem.
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Bromige, David. Tight Corners and What's Around Them. Los Angeles. 1974. Black Sparrow Press. 0876851944. 101 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - David Bromige has stated that Tight Corners and What's Around Them was the most interesting to him of this clutch of books. “I was using a fairly familiar sort of sentence, in prose, with a last line that either boosted sales or fell flat as a flapjack. I didn't care. Banal or brilliant, it made no difference in the world I was living in. Besides, sometimes the banal turned brilliant as I listened.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Mansfield Bromige (October 22, 1933 - June 3, 2009) is a Canadian poet who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author. He departs from language poetry in the thematic unity of many of his poems, in the uses to which he puts found materials, with the romantic aspect of his lyricism, and with the sheer variety of his approaches to the poem.
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Brooks, Gwendolyn. A Street in Bronzeville. New York. 1945. Harper & Brothers. 57 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In these poems of contemporary Negro life a new and talented young writer relates with sincerity, perception and stunning power her feelings about her people. A Street in Bronzeville is the collected impression of the small, everyday matters which make up the substance of experience in a large city - the poignant illumination of a Negro Sunday with its small possible pleasures, its isolation, the turning to one another; the people of the city - Satin-Legs Smith, the genial man about town, the queen of the blues, the modest madonna of the inviolate breasts whose man no longer comes to call. There are the sharply etched impressions of a Bronzeville street - the preacher behind his sermon, the hunchback girl who thinks of heaven, the memories of a vacant lot, the huddled life of a kitchenette. Here are poems in ballad form, displaying the author's versatility in mood and metre. Here are vivid comments on Army life in which the author shows her ability to handle thoughtfully and clearly a further aspect of American Negro experience. In this, her first book, Gwendolyn Brooks proves herself an accomplished artist. She is never sentimental, never obvious, but maintains a standard of sincerity and perception of skillful integration of mood and expression not often found among contemporary poets. Her poetry has the true flavor of Negro life and at the same time its meaning is associated with the whole content of experience in this country. Richard Wright has written of her work: ‘She is a real poet. There is no self-pity here, nor a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor and the problem of color prejudice.' William Rose BenEt wrote: ‘A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks is the work of a remarkable young poet. Her book, throughout has dramatic vigor and unusually expressive phrase. Miss Brooks is as originals as dynamic as Langston Hughes. She is saliently individual.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and was educated at the Englewood High School and Wilson Junior College in Chicago. Living in Chicago since early childhood she has watched the life of her people there and has reflected it in her poems which have appeared an magazines like The Negro Quarterly, Poetry, Common Ground, Harper's and the New York Herald Tribune.
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Brooks, Gwendolyn. In the Mecca. New York. 1968. Harper & Row. 56 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser.
DESCRIPTION - This is the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry in nearly ten years. ‘I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter' Gwendolyn Brooks has said. ‘I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced.' What she has known and experienced in these past years - the passionate commitment and involvement of being Negro - has resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's Negro ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Miss Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. ‘the Blackstone Rangers gangs' the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall last summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who ‘induces almost unbearable excitement' - as Phyllis McGinley has described her - is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GWENDOLYN BROOKS is a native of Chicago and is a graduate of Englewood High School and Wilson Junior College. She was cited for creative writing by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1946 and received two Guggenheim Fellowships for creative writing in 1946 and 1947. She has published five volumes of poetry and a novel, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for ANNIE ALLEN, a ballad of Chicago Negro life. In 1968 Miss Brooks was named Poet Laureate for the State of Illinois, succeeding the late Carl Sandburg. She has taught poetry classes at Northeastern Illinois State College, Columbia College in Chicago, and Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois. She was married to Henry Blakely and is the mother of two children, Henry and Nora.
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Brooks, Joanna and Saillant, John (editors). ‘Face Zion Forward’: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798. Boston. 2002. Northeastern University Press. 1555535399. Introduction by Joanna Brooks and John Saillant. The Northeastern Library of Black Literature. 242 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Leslie Evans.
DESCRIPTION - At the close of the Revolutionary War, in 1783, more than three thousand black Loyalists, many liberated from slavery by enlisting in the British army, left New York for Nova Scotia in search of land and freedom. Almost half of the emigrants settled an independent black community at Birchtown, Nova Scotia, where, in spite of extraordinarily harsh conditions, they established their own churches and schools and cultivated a shared sense of themselves as a chosen people. A majority of the population emigrated once again in 1791, this time setting sail for Sierra Leone to fulfill what they perceived to be their prophetic destiny. This circuit of gathering, exodus, and diaspora was grounded in a unique black Atlantic theology focused on redemption and Zion that was conceptualized and shaped by the charismatic black evangelists of diverse Protestant faiths who converged in the Nova Scotia settlements. ‘‘Face Zion Forward' now brings together the remarkable writings of these early authors of the black Atlantic. This collection of memoirs, sermons, and speeches, many of which are based on the Birchtown experience, documents how John Marrant, David George, Boston King, and Prince Hall envisioned the role of Africa and African American communities in black liberation. ‘Face Zion Forward' provides an informed reconstruction of the major ideological and theological conversations that occurred among North American blacks after the American Revolution and illustrates the disparate and complex underpinnings of the modern black Atlantic. In addition, the work presents invaluable insights into African American literary traditions and the development of Ethiopianist and black nationalist discourses.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOANNA BROOKS is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. JOHN SAILLANT is Associate Professor of English and History at Western Michigan University. RICHARD YARBOROUGH, editor of the Northeastern Library of Black Literature, is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Brooks, Peter. Henry James Goes To Paris. Princeton. 2007. Princeton University Press. 9780691129549. 18 halftones. 288 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Henry James's reputation as The Master is so familiar that it's hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year--1875 to 1876--when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James's writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist's Paris year - and its momentous artistic and personal consequences. James's Paris story is one of enchantment and disenchantment. He initially loved Paris, he succeeded in meeting all the writers he admired (Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Daudet), and he witnessed the latest development in French painting, Impressionism. But James largely found the writers disappointing, and he completely misunderstood the paintings he saw. He also seems to have fallen in and out of love in a more ordinary sense - with a young Russian aesthete, Paul Zhukovsky. Disillusioned, James soon retreated to England - for good. But James would eventually be changed forever by his memories of Paris.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of many works of literary criticism, including Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, and Realist Vision. He has also published a novel, World Elsewhere (Simon & Schuster).
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Brown, Cecil. Days Without Weather. New York. 1983. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374135304. 249 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bob Cato. Jacket photo by Jerry Bauer.
DESCRIPTION - Cecil Brown's new novel, DAYS WITHOUT WEATHER, portrays the experiences of black comedians, writers, actors, and singers in the cutthroat world of Hollywood - an irresistible phantasmagoria whose characters argue, fight, lie, love, and struggle to get ahead, sometimes at all costs. DAYS WITHOUT WEATHER is a wonderful mixture of bitterness, anger, and genuine good humor. Its hero, Jonah, is a stand-up comic who moves to Hollywood from North Carolina in search of his true identity. In riveting, funny, fast-paced language, Cecil Brown depicts Gadge, Jonah's rich, overweight uncle, who has sold out to the white world of movie producers, writing and editing scripts to their specifications; Jonah's scriptwriter friend Randell, in love with superstar singer Ritual Bondage; and Jonah's white girlfriend Clea Menchan, who betrays both Jonah and Randell. These events and more bring Jonah to the painful realization that at least he must expose the black celebrities who say one thing and do another, and the white producers who do the same. Of course, Jonah is taking a big chance in the choice of his mission, as mutiny scenes on movie sets turn into real-life confrontations between black and white actors. When Jonah's anger finally gets the better of him onstage at a nightclub, he lashes out at all of Hollywood. ‘Cecil Brown has written a moving and terrifying allegory concerning the various prices of art, love, and life: and, most specifically, the black American's struggle not to be an accomplice to his own destruction.' - JAMES BALDWIN. ‘There is nothing corrupt about his pride. I have never met a writer who loved his work as much as Cecil Brown. The humor, the warmth, and even the smell are beautiful. The gentleness with which he handles the memories of his characters is great. I have had many Days Without Weather too.' - RICHARD PRYOR.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CECIL BROWN was born in North Carolina in 1943. He attended Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Mr. Brown has taught film and writing, most recently at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written numerous plays, short stories, and films scripts - including Which Way Is Up?, which he co-authored. His first novel, THE LIFE AND LOVES OF MR. JIVEASS NIGGER, was published in 1969. Mr. Brown Lives in Berkeley, California.
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Brown, Cecil. I, Stagolee. Berkeley. 2006. North Atlantic Books. 1556435746. 259 pages. paperback. Cover art by Nola Hatterman, ‘On the Terrace.’ Cover design by Suzanne Albertson.
DESCRIPTION - It's the birth year of Ragtime music, 1895, and Lee ‘Stagolee' Shelton, a St. Louis pimp, murders Billy Lyons, a political gang member. Afterwards, Stagolee makes a deal with Judge Murphy to bring order to the underworld. As a member of a group of pimps called the ‘Stags,' Stagolee makes alliances with the Democratic Party and votes for a Democratic Mayor. Later, the Stag Party, along with the Democratic Party, elects St. Louis's first black policeman. It is this policeman who is sent to arrest Stagolee for the murder of Billy Lyons. Now, nearly 50 years after singer Lloyd Price introduced mainstream audiences to the ‘Stagger Lee' story, Cecil Brown portrays the events that gave rise to this mainstay of African-American popular culture. This follows the successful Stagolee Shot Billy, Brown's nonfiction account of the same story.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cecil Brown, novelist, screenwriter, and scholar, was educated at Columbia University (B.A.), University of Chicago (M.A.), and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D.). His other published work includes THE LIFE AND LOVES OF MR. JIVEASS NIGGER, DAYS WITHOUT WEATHER, COMING UP DOWN HOME, and STAGOLEE SHOT BILLY. Cecil Brown has been awarded a W.E. Dubois Fellowship from Harvard University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, specializing in African-American folklore, oral narrative, and literature. In the spring of 2006, he initiated a new class, ‘Richard Pryor, Humor, and American Society.'.
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Brown, Cecil. The Life & Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. New York. 1969. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374186243. 213 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - African-American author's first novel. The irreverent story of young man finding himself and his place in society abroad.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CECIL BROWN was born in North Carolina in 1943. He attended Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Mr. Brown has taught film and writing, most recently at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written numerous plays, short stories, and films scripts - including Which Way Is Up?, which he co-authored. His first novel, THE LIFE AND LOVES OF MR. JIVEASS NIGGER, was published in 1969. Mr. Brown Lives in Berkeley, California.
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Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. New York. 1988. Penguin Books. 0140390626. Edited & With An Introduction by Norman S. Grabo. 285 pages. paperback. Cover painting, Approaching Storm, by Albert Bierstadt Courtesy of Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York.
DESCRIPTION - A fascinating psychological novel that explores man's uncontrollable nature, by the author of WIELAND. EDGAR HUNTLY is the story of a young man who sleepwalks each night, a threat to himself and others, unable to control his baser passions. Set outside Philadelphia in 1787, the book becomes a metaphor for the founding of a new nation. Its characters face the problems confronted by the framers of the Constitution: how to harness the irrational, passionate aspects of man's nature without sacrificing individual liberty. One of America's first Gothic novels, EDGAR HUNTLY is a tale of mystery, murder, vengeance, and psychological terror. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 - February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the 'early American novel,' or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was not the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.
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Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. New York. 1991. Penguin Books. 9780140390797. Introduction by Jay Fliegelman. 416 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A terrifying account of the fallibility of the human mind and, by extension, of democracy itself, Wieland brilliantly reflects the psychological, social, and political concerns of the early American republic. In the fragmentary sequel,Memoirs, Brown explores Carwin's bizarre history as a manipulated disciple of the charismatic utopian Ludloe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 - February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the 'early American novel,' or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was not the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.
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Brown, Claude. Manchild in a Promised Land. New York. 1965. Macmillan. 415 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Manchild in the Promised Land is indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem -- the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humor. The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because the book is affirmative and inspiring. Here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and became a man.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Claude Brown (February 23, 1937 - February 2, 2002) is the author of MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND, published to critical acclaim in 1965, which tells the story of his coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Harlem. He also published CHILDREN OF HAM (1976). Autobiographical in nature, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND describes the cultural, economic, and religious conditions that suffused Harlem during Brown's early childhood and adolescence while constructing a narrative of Brown's tumultuous early life. Starting at age six, his life involved stealing, alcohol consumption, truancy, and gang wars. These were the harsh realities of life in 1950s Harlem that shaped his childhood. At the age of 11, he was placed in a reform school, which he cycled in and out of more than three times. By that time he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and the director of the Wiltwyck School for Boys for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys, which was in Esopus, Ulster County, New York. Dr. Papanek, whom Mr. Brown described in his book as ‘probably the smartest and the deepest cat I had ever met,' encouraged him to seek an education. Acknowledging the damaging effects of drugs like heroin and gang violence on his community and his friends, he decided to change. He knew he had to get out of Harlem. He moved away from Harlem, his heart broken seeing all his friends ‘strung-out‘ by drug addiction. He felt Harlem wasn't for him anymore. After being one of the ‘hippest cats' (as he says in the book), he decided to turn away from it and move down to Greenwich Village, where he could start over. For the first time in his life, he decided to get an education and eventually began attending night classes at a high school downtown, supporting himself by working as a busboy and deliveryman and at other odd jobs. Eventually, he went on to graduate in 1965 from Howard University (where his professors included sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Hare), and later went on to attend Stanford and Rutgers[disambiguation needed ] law schools, but left when the lecture circuit proved more lucrative than law. Brown would go on to publish a second book, CHILDREN OF HAM, which explores the lives of several black teenagers from Harlem who escape the clutches of heroin. By comparison to his first work, it was a failure. Brown spent most of his professional life as a full-time lecturer, but also became increasingly involved in critical urban issues, especially with respect to at-risk black adolescents. This lifetime concern led him to become deeply involved in criminal justice and rehabilitation issues, as he visited juvenile detention centers and prisons in search of answers to the question of what was motivating the much more violent, feral behavior of youth gangs and underage criminals prowling America's inner-cities, a plague that seemingly became progressively worse with the passage of time. Essentially, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND was written to demonstrate how someone could overcome great odds to become in his case, a lawyer. His ultimate conclusion was that American society had abandoned these young individuals, causing a profound sense of alienation and ostracism, which in turn led to futile outbursts of excessive, wanton violence and criminality. He remained critical of what he perceived as the societal failures of addressing these existential crises afflicting African-American youth-especially those residing in urban areas-and more broadly, underserved, alienated American youth in general. Claude Brown died of respiratory failure in 2002.
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Brown, Claude. The Children of Ham. New York. 1976. Stein & Day. 0812818377. 224 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - CHILDREN OF HAM explores the lives of several black teenagers from Harlem who escape the clutches of heroin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Claude Brown (February 23, 1937 - February 2, 2002) is the author of MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND, published to critical acclaim in 1965, which tells the story of his coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Harlem. He also published CHILDREN OF HAM (1976). Autobiographical in nature, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND describes the cultural, economic, and religious conditions that suffused Harlem during Brown's early childhood and adolescence while constructing a narrative of Brown's tumultuous early life. Starting at age six, his life involved stealing, alcohol consumption, truancy, and gang wars. These were the harsh realities of life in 1950s Harlem that shaped his childhood. At the age of 11, he was placed in a reform school, which he cycled in and out of more than three times. By that time he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and the director of the Wiltwyck School for Boys for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys, which was in Esopus, Ulster County, New York. Dr. Papanek, whom Mr. Brown described in his book as ‘probably the smartest and the deepest cat I had ever met,' encouraged him to seek an education. Acknowledging the damaging effects of drugs like heroin and gang violence on his community and his friends, he decided to change. He knew he had to get out of Harlem. He moved away from Harlem, his heart broken seeing all his friends ‘strung-out‘ by drug addiction. He felt Harlem wasn't for him anymore. After being one of the ‘hippest cats' (as he says in the book), he decided to turn away from it and move down to Greenwich Village, where he could start over. For the first time in his life, he decided to get an education and eventually began attending night classes at a high school downtown, supporting himself by working as a busboy and deliveryman and at other odd jobs. Eventually, he went on to graduate in 1965 from Howard University (where his professors included sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Hare), and later went on to attend Stanford and Rutgers[disambiguation needed ] law schools, but left when the lecture circuit proved more lucrative than law. Brown would go on to publish a second book, CHILDREN OF HAM, which explores the lives of several black teenagers from Harlem who escape the clutches of heroin. By comparison to his first work, it was a failure. Brown spent most of his professional life as a full-time lecturer, but also became increasingly involved in critical urban issues, especially with respect to at-risk black adolescents. This lifetime concern led him to become deeply involved in criminal justice and rehabilitation issues, as he visited juvenile detention centers and prisons in search of answers to the question of what was motivating the much more violent, feral behavior of youth gangs and underage criminals prowling America's inner-cities, a plague that seemingly became progressively worse with the passage of time. Essentially, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND was written to demonstrate how someone could overcome great odds to become in his case, a lawyer. His ultimate conclusion was that American society had abandoned these young individuals, causing a profound sense of alienation and ostracism, which in turn led to futile outbursts of excessive, wanton violence and criminality. He remained critical of what he perceived as the societal failures of addressing these existential crises afflicting African-American youth-especially those residing in urban areas-and more broadly, underserved, alienated American youth in general. Claude Brown died of respiratory failure in 2002.
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Brown, Frank London. The Myth Maker. Chicago. 1969. Path Press. 179 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Frank London Brown's posthumously published novel The Myth Maker (1969) demonstrates an interest in Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the existentialist novel. An unjustly neglected classic from the author of the 1959 novel Trumbull Park, an account of the struggles facing African American families attempting to integrate a Chicago housing development. Published posthumously by Path Press, one of the earliest Black-owned publishing houses in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - FRANK LONDON BROWN (October 7, 1927, Kansas City, MO - March 12, 1962) was born in Kansas City, but moved to Chicago at age twelve. Educated at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, Brown worked numerous jobs to support his literary ambitions. Most significant of these was his work as an organizer and program officer for the United Packing-house Workers of America and other labor unions. Brown was profoundly impacted by the musical culture of African American Chicago, most significantly jazz, but also gospel and blues. A devotee of bebop, Brown published a seminal interview with Thelonious Monk in Downbeat and pioneered in the reading of fiction to jazz accompaniment. Many critics have also noted the importance of a trip Brown made as a journalist to cover the Emmett Till murder case. At the time of his death, he was an accomplished writer on the Chicago scene and a regular contributor to Negro Digest and various literary magazines. He was also a candidate for a PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and was director of the Union Research Center. His reputation is largely based upon his 1959 novel, Trumbull Park, an account of the struggles facing African American families attempting to integrate a Chicago housing development. However, his short fiction and especially his 1969 posthumous novel, The Myth Maker, deserve greater attention. Trumbull Park was typical of social realist fiction in the style of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, while The Myth Maker demonstrates an interest in Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the existentialist novel. Both texts are clearly influenced by the work of Richard Wright. Their great accomplishment is the detailed
DESCRIPTION of the “everyday” of urban African American experience, excellent attention to vernacular speech and dialect, and a philosophically sophisticated account of the rise of despair in the ghetto and the continuing deprecatory impact of institutionalized racism. Both novels are occasionally limited by deficient character and plot development. Trumbull Park has received a moderate amount of critical attention and The Myth Maker none. Brown's occasional short stories also reveal attention to language and a strong commitment to realism as a mode of expression and investigation. His most popular story, “McDougal” (Abraham Chapman, Black Voices, 1968) is noteworthy for its sympathetic treatment of a white trumpet player attempting to succeed as a jazz musician within the very environment of Chicago's 58th Street that Brown had long chronicled. In addition to the accomplishment of his two novels, Brown's reputation should also be enhanced by his exploration of the possibility of an artistic life irreducibly connected to a life of social action. His participation in leftist political activity and counter-cultural artistic movements at the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War is suggestive of a courageous intellect. His succumbing to leukemia in March of 1962 just prior to the dawning of the Black Arts movement in Chicago is one of the major tragedies of contemporary African American literature.
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Brown, Frank London. Trumbull Park. Boston. 2005. Northeastern University Press. 155553628x. Foreword by Mary Helen Washington. Northeastern Library of Black Literature. Series editor: Richard Yarborough. 432 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Leslie Evans.
DESCRIPTION - Frank London Brown's powerful debut novel, originally published in 1959. fictionalizes the real-life ordeals of the first black families to integrate Chicago's Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. Protagonist Buggy Martin tells the first-person story of moving with his wife and two children from a rotting tenement on the South Side to the new development, where the family is besieged by angry whites. They endure the strain of living with racial violence - until the day Buggy and a friend refuse police protection and walk home together through the white mob. ‘Brown has probed the psychology of people under fire. The real drama in this novel is not found in what white people tried to do to their Negro neighbors: it comes from tile self-restraining heroism in the Negroes.' - R. L. Duffus, New York Times Book Review. ‘How in the end, determination and decency seem about to triumph, is the theme of this story, unfolded in terms of characters terribly alive and real.' - Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune Book Review. ‘[This story] will shame white Americans. but it is not grimly accusatory. That is one of Brown's great achievements, that hatred did not guide his pen.' - Alan Paton, Chicago Sunday Tribune.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - FRANK LONDON BROWN (October 7, 1927 - March 12, 1962) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and his family moved to Chicago when he was twelve. An associate editor of Ebony, he also wrote THE MYTH MAKER, a novel, as well as numerous articles and short stories published in Down Beat, Negro Digest, Chicago Review, Ebony, and Southwest Review. Brown also worked as a machinist, bartender, loan interviewer, postal clerk, union organizer, and jazz singer, and he was the first writer to read his short stories to jazz accompaniment. MARY HELEN WASHINGTON is Professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the editor of INVENTED LIVES: NARRATIVES OF BLACK WOMEN, 1860-1960 and MEMORY OF KIN: STORIES ABOUT FAMILY BY BLACK WRITERS. RICHARD YARBOROUGH, editor of the Northeastern library of Black Literature, is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Brown, Fredric. Nightmares and Geezenstacks. New York. 1961. Bantam Books. 137 pages. paperback. J2296.
DESCRIPTION - Do you know a Geezenstack? If you don't, you probably think it's a joke. If you do you're shuddering compulsively. Geezenstacks are the kind of “things” Fred Brown writes about. They can take you out of yourself, you might say. BUT - BEWARE GETTING SO FAR OUT YOU CAN'T GET BACK. Nightmares and Geezenstacks is a collection of stories revolving about some of the gaudiest ghouls and craziest nightmares ever unleashed in our space, our time and our galaxy. (Forget any others.) It proves once again Fred Brown's unchallengeable position as the first master of fantasy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 - March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati. He is perhaps best known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form - stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a somewhat postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena," is officially credited for an adaptation as an episode of the landmark television series, Star Trek.
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Brown, Gita. Be I Whole. Aspen. 1995. Macmurray & Beck. 1878448668. 267 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Love stories tell of strange things', she says. ‘A woman passes. A man speaks to her in a friendly way. They chat together. They lay together. They live together. They enjoy many pleasures. But with all that, they are yet strangers. In their minds they think, if I could only enter the spirit of this one and remove all this strangeness. But there is nothing left to do but to live with the strangeness. To Papa Job, this woman was quite strange. You know their eyes, they didn't see in the same way. Two people. Two different spirits. Yah. Two different worlds'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Author Gita Brown grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan and Brown University, where she earned an M.F.A. in fiction writing. Her first novel, Be I Whole, begins in 1950s Detroit, where Papa Job, a West Indian who grew up in the city, finds Sizway, an island immigrant and herbalist, stealing vegetables from his cellar. The novel then chronicles the two characters' relationship as they marry, move to rural Ohio, raise children, and struggle with relationship and cultural issues. The story is narrated by an elderly West Indian woman.
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Brown, Hallie Q. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. New York. 1992. Oxford University Press. 0195075757. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Introduction by Randall K. Burkett. 252 pages. paperback. Cover design by Honi Werner.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Extraordinary. .The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers allows us for the first time to see clearly the full dimensions of the literary achievements of black women. This magnificent project will dramatically change the landscape of [African-American] cultural history.' - Eric J. Sundquist, The New York Times Book Review. This series, under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , has rescued the voice of an entire segment of the African-American literary tradition by offering volumes of compelling and rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism, written by nineteenth-century black women. Hallie Q. Brown recreates, along with twenty-eight contributors, the lives of sixty remarkable Afro-American women, all born in North America between the mid 1740s and the end of the nineteenth century. Homespun Heroines tells the tales of slaves and social workers, artists and activists, cake makers and homemakers. It offers unusual insight into female networks, patterns of voluntary association, work, religion, family life, and black women's culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hallie Quinn Brown (March 10, 1849 - September 16, 1949) was an African-American educator, writer and activist. Originally of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while quite young, her parents moved to a farm near Chatham, Canada. In 1868, she began a course of study in Wilberforce University, Ohio, from which she graduated in 1873 with the degree of Bachelor of Science. She started her career by teaching at a country school in South Carolina and at the same time, a class of older people. After this, she went to Mississippi, where she again had charge of a school. She became employed as a teacher at Yazoo City, Mississippi before securing a position as teacher in Dayton, Ohio. Resigning due to ill health, she then traveled in the interest of Wiberforce University on a lecture tour, and was particularly welcomed at Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University) in Virginia. Though elected as instructor in elocution and literature at Wilberforce University, she declined the offer in order to accept a position at Tuskegee Institute. In 1886, she graduated from Chautauqua, and in 1887 received the degree of Master of Science from her alma mater, Wilberforce, being the first woman to do so. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Randall K. Burkett is Associate Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro- American Research at Harvard University.
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Brown, Linda Beatrice. Crossing Over Jordan. New York. 1995. Ballantine/One World. 0345378571. 320 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Georgia McCloud lives to see emancipation. Her daughter Sadie discovers that, though she might be free, she is powerless to break with a man who abuses her. At the center of their communal pain is Sadie's intelligent, beautiful, ambitious daughter Story, who wants more from life than she's been led to expect. Her uncompromising desire for 'safety' corrupts Story to her very soul, dooming her to wander an emotional desert, repressed, rigid, enslaved to propriety. Her daughter Hermine must then challenge the lie that life is hardship. But can Hermine finally break the cycle of oppression that has chained the women of her family? Can she alone cross over Jordan? Reminiscent of the early work of Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor, Crossing Over Jordan deftly explores the themes of the mother-daughter relationship, the emotional scars left by history, the struggle to be authentic in the throes of great personal pain, and the transforming power of love. Linda Beatrice Brown has a wise, moving new voice that, once heard, must be embraced.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Linda Beatrice Brown (born March 14, 1939, Akron, OH) is an African American author and educator. She was born in Akron, Ohio and went to college in North Carolina at Bennett College. While in North Carolina, she won several awards for her writing in both fiction and nonfiction. Brown has published many books including Belles of Liberty, Black Angels, Crossing Over Jordan and The Long Walk. The genres and styles of writing in which she wrote include fiction, nonfiction, playwriting and poetry. Many of her works are centered on the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles that can be rooted back to slavery during the time of the American Civil War.
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Brown, Lloyd L. Iron City. Boston. 1994. Northeastern University Press. 9781555532062. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2. Northeastern Library of Black Literature. 288 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Northeastern Library of Black Literature Foreword by Alan Wald. ‘Brown's 1951 novel is another of his portraits of African Americans involved in the Socialist movement. Protagonist Lonnie James is an innocent black man incarcerated for the death of a white-businessman. ’ - Library Journal. A groundbreaking work of African American proletarian literature, first published in 1951 and now back in print. Iron City is based on an actual court case and inspired by the author's experiences as a labor organizer and political prisoner. This well-crafted novel tells the story of Lonnie James, a black youth falsely convicted of-and sentenced to death for-the murder of a white businessman. From inside the ‘iron city’ of a state penitentiary in a northern steel town, three black Communist prisoners spearhead a fight to save Lonnie James's life. In advancing the author's controversial socialist vision of black and white proletarian solidarity, Iron City unflinchingly confronts race relations in mid-twentieth-century America inside and outside prison walls. Endorsements: ‘Here are people, richly characterized, warm, honest, tender, angry human beings, struggling, fighting, suffering, and triumphantly living the problems and answers. ’—Paul Robeson. ‘Iron City is a book of pace and of passion, and of emotion. It takes a piece of your life and your time, and holds it up to you like a mirror. Read it. ’—Howard Fast, Freedom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LLOYD L. BROWN was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He became a labor organizer in the early 1930s, participating in the organization of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He was Managing Editor of the Weekly New Masses and an associate editor of the cultural monthly Masses and Mainstream. He died in 2003. ALAN WALD is Professor in the English Department and Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and author of Exiles from a Future Time (2002). RICHARD YARBOROUGH, editor of the Northeastern Library of Black Literature, is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Brown, Rosellen. Half a Heart. New York. 2000. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374299870. 402 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo by James Darell.
DESCRIPTION - Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable white middle-class life she leads with her fmaily in Houston during the 1980s. The life suddenly shatters with the appearnace, after almost eighteen years of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter boen in Mississippi in the sixties when Miriam was a civil rights activist. Hot tempered, sensitive, manipulative and deeply hurt at her mother's disappearance from her life, Ronnee has been raised by her father, a formerly brilliant college professor who forbade her to see her white mother. Half a Heart charts the emotionally fraught terrain of the mother and daughter's reunion and Ronnee's divided sense of self and loyalty. With which family, and which race, does she identify? How does all this affect her relationships with her newly discored half-sister, her white boyfriend, and the father she is rebelling against? Half a Heart is a searingly honest novel of public and private ideals betrayed and hopes reignited by one of our foremost novelists.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rosellen Brown (born May 12, 1939) is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work. The 1996 film Before and After was adapted from her novel of the same name. Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College in 1960 and Brandeis University.
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Brown, Rosellen. The Autobiography of My Mother. Garden City. 1976. Doubleday. 0385098960. 272 pages. hardcover. Jacket by Alex Gotfryd/Douglas Bergstreser.
DESCRIPTION - Gerda Stein is a brilliant, successful civil liberties lawyer in New York, a champion of the oppressed, an exacting, rational woman who never repeats her mistakes. But she can't erase her prodigal daughter, Renata, who has returned after an eight year abscence, unwed, with a child in tow , hoping to make peace. Renata is aimless, sensual, irrational, yet she too has principles, as fleshy and real as her mother's are physical and abstract. As a mother and daughter warily circle each other, looking for what neither can give, the child stands between them, a second chance-and for each, the ultimate revenge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rosellen Brown (born May 12, 1939) is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work. The 1996 film Before and After was adapted from her novel of the same name. Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College in 1960 and Brandeis University.
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Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Evanston. 2020. Northwestern University Press. 9780810142381. Edited by Michael S. Harper. Foreword by Cornelius Eady and introductory texts by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. 288 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Sterling A. Brown was renowned for his prolific poetry and scholarship on African American folklife. A contemporary of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer and the first poet laureate of the District of Columbia, Brown gained acclaim for blues, jazz, and southern folklore. His celebrated works, including Southern Road, are collages of narrative and dialect expressing an unflinching poetic voice. Edited by the late distinguished poet Michael S. Harper, this new edition includes a foreword by award-winning poet Cornelius Eady and introductory texts by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. The result is a tour de force by one of the most distinctive poets in American letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - STERLING A. BROWN (1901–1989) was one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African American literature and criticism in the twentieth century. Born in Washington, D.C., he became not only a poet but a folklorist, anthologist, critic, and reviewer. Brown was a professor at Howard University for forty years. MICHAEL S. HARPER (1938–2016) was a celebrated poet and professor. The first poet laureate of Rhode Island, he taught at Brown University from 1970 to 2013. CORNELIUS EADY is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather and The Gathering of My Name. He is the cofounder of Cave Canem.
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Brown, Wesley. Darktown Strutters. New York. 1994. Cane Hill. 0943433118. 224 pages. paperback. Cover art: detail from 19th century poster.
DESCRIPTION - DARKTOWN STRUTTERS is the story of Jim Crow, a remarkable black dancer, born in slavery, who performs in minstrel shows, South and North, during the furious dines of pre- and post-Civil War America. His experiences, onstage and off, are a mix of applause with mob violence, of love and loss, played against the grim laughter of a black nation within a nation finding its way to an ever-elusive promised freedom. Touching, harrowing, inspiring, this is a unique novel of courage and pride. ‘Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters, the story of 19th Century minstrel performers, is a free-handed performance in the surrealism of its subject and deals with history the way Coleman Hawkins might energize the standard version of a show tune. An original and visionary book.' - Ted Solotaroff. ‘Armed with the brilliantly revealing image of 19th century blackface minstrelsy, Darktown Strutters cuts to the cruel center of American racialism. Wesley Brown's traveling minstrel show is where the symbolism of skin color establishes public meaning and private identity the way a funhouse mirror measures height and weight. Like Melville's THE CONFIDENCE MAN, this is a scary book, and mordantly funny, too. We all look ridiculous in it and, sad to say, instantly recognizable.' - Russell Banks.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wesley Brown is the author of an earlier novel, TRAGIC MAGIC, two plays, BOOGIE WOOGIE AND BOOKER T. and LIFE DURING WARTIME, and co-editor of the multicultural anthologies, VISIONS OF AMERICA (autobiography and essay) and IMAGINING AMERICA (short fiction). He teaches literature and creative writing at Rutgers University and lives in New Jersey with his son, Anthony.
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Brown, Wesley. Tragic Magic. New York. 1978. Random House. 0394502248. 170 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Mark Huie.
DESCRIPTION - The doors of the prison closed behind him barely hours ago. He walks toward the subway station on his way home. He is no hardened ex-con looking for the next score, or a high school dropout who turned to crime as to adventure. He is Melvin Ellington: university-educated, black, a draft-dodging conscientious objector who chose prison rather than Vietnam or Canada. Melvin, who has based his manhood on principles of reason, aloofness, and self-control. His immediate future includes a family that is ashamed of him, friends who don't understand him, and a community that has changed radically since the feverish days of campus takeovers, sit-ins, fierce loyal- ties and fiercer betrayals. His past includes three years of the special testing that only a prison can provide (where manhood is reduced to its lowest common denominator and where a C.O. is laughable). Out of that world Wesley Brown, an astonishingly gifted writer, weaves a powerful story about some extraordinary people: Otis, a wounded veteran obsessed with John Wayne; Alice, a lovely clear-headed girl with emotional scars. Melvin's relationship with these two old friends underscores his own conflicts, which finally erupt in an uptown restaurant where he watches, helplessly, as his friend engineers his own death at the hand of a stranger - a quiet man with the death of other people written on his face. In language that soars sometimes, explodes sometimes, and sometimes is gently moving, Wesley Brown explores the thin line between nonviolence and cowardice, recklessness and risk - in short, what it is to be a man. The geography of place and emotion in TRAGIC MAGIC is as vivid as any ever encountered in a first novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wesley Brown is the author of an earlier novel, TRAGIC MAGIC, two plays, BOOGIE WOOGIE AND BOOKER T. and LIFE DURING WARTIME, and co-editor of the multicultural anthologies, VISIONS OF AMERICA (autobiography and essay) and IMAGINING AMERICA (short fiction). He teaches literature and creative writing at Rutgers University and lives in New Jersey with his son, Anthony.
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Brown, William Wells. Clotel Or the President's Daughter. New York. 1969. Citadel Press. Introduction & Notes by William Edward Farrison. 254 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Todd Ash.
DESCRIPTION - One of the unique books in American literature is this novel written by an escaped Negro slave. Until he was twenty-one years old William Wells Brown could neither read nor write; all the more remarkable, then, is this dramatic and frequently moving story. Brown based his novel on the oft-repeated claim that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote magnificently about human freedom while continuing to buy, work, and sell slaves, had fathered many slave children. According to the legend, one of these children, a beautiful young girl, was later sold at auction. Brown utilized this material for a bitter attack on the system of slavery, and, whether the Jefferson story is true or not, it is certainly true that many slave-owners did sell their own children on the block. Included in this volume is Brown's own narrative of his life as a slave and his escape to Canada and from thence to England. Professor Farrison's Introduction presents the historical background of CLOTEL. The present edition is textually the same as the first edition, which was published in London in 1853.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Wells Brown (circa 1814 - November 6, 1884) was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian in the United States. Born into slavery in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near the town of Mount Sterling, Brown escaped to Ohio in 1834 at the age of 20. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer. While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement. His novel Clotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, England, where he resided at the time; it was later published in the United States. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. In 1858 he became the first published African-American playwright, and often read from this work on the lecture circuit. Following the Civil War, in 1867 he published what is considered the first history of African Americans in the Revolutionary War. He was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, established in 2013. A public school was named for him in Lexington, Kentucky. Brown was lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US; as its provisions increased the risk of capture and re-enslavement, he stayed overseas for several years. He traveled throughout Europe. After his freedom was purchased in 1854 by a British couple, he and his two daughters returned to the US, where he rejoined the abolitionist lecture circuit in the North. A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, Brown was overshadowed by the charismatic orator and the two feuded publicly. William Edward Farrison is Professor of English at North Carolina College at Durham.
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Brown, William Wells. Clotel or, the President's Daughter. New York. 2004. Penguin Books. 0142437727. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by M. Giulia Fabi. 285 pages. paperback. Cover art by Joanna Boyce Wells (1831-61), 'Head of a Mulatto Woman'.
DESCRIPTION - At a slave auction, a beautiful teenage girl, her sister, and her mother are sold as William Wells Brown's 1853 novel CLOTEL begins. In making his title character the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, Brown takes advantage of a scandalous and - until recently - unconfirmed rumor. Clotel's new owner falls in love with her, gets her pregnant, seems to promise marriage - then sells her. A fast-paced and harrowing tale of slavery and freedom, and of the hypocrisies of a nation founded on democratic principles, CLOTEL is more than a sensationalist novel. It is a founding text of the African American novelistic tradition, a brilliantly composed and richly detailed exploration of human relations in a new world. This edition includes the various endings Brown created for the different versions of CLOTEL; his narrative of his own ‘Life and Escape'; an introduction that discusses the author's pioneering portrayal of slave culture and the complexity of racial and gender boundaries; and explanatory notes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Wells Brown (circa 1814 - November 6, 1884) was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near the town of Mount Sterling, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. Brown was lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US; he stayed overseas for several years to avoid the risk of capture and re-enslavement. After his freedom was purchased in 1854 by a British couple, he and his two daughters returned to the US. He rejoined the abolitionist lecture circuit. A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, Wells Brown was overshadowed by the charismatic orator and the two feuded publicly
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Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated By My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death. New York. 1992. Potter. 0517582163. 137 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Chip Kidd.
DESCRIPTION - ‘This is Anatole in the flesh. Even facing death he is sassy, funny, as impudent as you can get. This is a book for all us mortal critters.' - ALFRED KAZIN. ‘Anatole Broyard tells the story of his closing months of 4fe with intensity, irony, and with high courage. Drawing on the almost ecstatic sense of proportion imposed by diminishing days, he celebrates intelligent, articulate existence. I never knew Anatole Broyard in life, but I feel that I have met him now, in this book.' - SHIRLEY HAZZARD. ‘A jewel of a book with the capacity to reach to the depths. Intoxicated by My Illness has all the makings of an enduring classic.' - MAX LERNER. ‘A profoundly moving book - brave, witty, and radiant.' - JUSTIN KAPLAN. ‘When the doctor told me I was ill it was like an immense electric shock. I felt galvanized. I was a new person. All of my old trivial selves fell away and I was reduced to essence.' In the fall of 1989, Anatole Broyard, literary critic and essayist for The New York Times, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Rather than slide into despondence, Broyard felt exhilarated, ‘intoxicated' by this news, as if with the encroachment of death, life's mysteries were suddenly revealed. In intensely personal essays and journal notes, he chronicles his experiences and his thoughts with rare wit, insight, and elegance. In ‘The Patient Examines the Doctor,' Broyard eloquently defines a new kind of care for the critically ill. In ‘The Literature of Illness,' he explores the ‘narrative' of his own illness and his strategies for opposing it. Broyard's earlier essays on illness and death - long subjects of fascination - as well as a short story inspired by the death of his father are also included.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anatole Paul Broyard (July 16, 1920 - October 11, 1990) was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death. After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy and discussions related to how he had chosen to live as an adult in New York. A Louisiana Creole of mixed race, he was criticized by some blacks for 'passing' as white as an adult and failing to acknowledge his African-American ancestry. Multiracial advocates though have cited Broyard as an example of someone forging their own racial identity long before it was acceptable in mainstream America.
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Broyard, Bliss. My Father, Dancing: Stories. New York. 2000. Knopf. 0375400605. 208 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Eight stories about relationships between men and women - but especially between fathers and daughters - in a debut from Bliss Broyard. ‘The fathers in Broyard's collection are charismatic, seductive, often brilliant men who are large in the world and even larger in the home, irresistible but also harmful, beautiful but not benign. ‘In spare, unsentimental prose, Broyard captures the passages of daughters, both as young girls and as grown women: the early lessons girls absorb through their fathers - their first male audience - and the secrets girls keep as they test their own desires; the dislocation of discovering, and identifying with, a parent's infidelity; the struggle to escape from familial roles and the unyielding impulse to re-create them. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bliss Broyard is the author of My Father, Dancing (1999), a New York Times notable book of the year, and One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race & Family Secrets (2007). Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Art of the Essay, and she is a frequent contributor to Elle Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Broyard lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.
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Bruccoli, Matthew J. (editor). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. New York. 1994. Scribners. 0684195704. 503 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Glorai Adelson/Lulu Graphics.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print.' F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-six when he wrote this lament to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1923 - two years before Scribners published THE GREAT GATSBY. Soon after Gatsby appeared, Fitzgerald wrote to H. L. Mencken, ‘I think the book is so far a commercial failure - at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn't reached 20,000 yet.' Gatsby turned out all right in the end. But while Fitzgerald's roller-coaster reputation fell precipitously in the years approaching his death in 1940, his stature in American literature has risen steadily in the five decades that followed - the strongest restoration in American literary history. Yet his life and work have remained obscured by myth and misconceptions. In this new collection of his letters, edited by leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, we see through his own words the artistic and emotional maturation of one of America's most enduring and elegant authors. A LIFE IN LETTERS is the most comprehensive volume of Fitzgerald's letters - many of them appearing in print for the first time. The fullness of the selection and the chronological arrangement make this collection the closest thing to an autobiography Fitzgerald ever wrote. While many readers are familiar with Fitzgerald's legendary ‘jazz age' social life and his friendships with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, and other famous authors, few are aware of his writings about his life and his views on writing. Letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins illustrate the development of Fitzgerald's literary sensibility; those to his friend and competitor Ernest Hemingway reveal their difficult friendship. The most poignant letters here were written to his wife, Zelda, from the time of their courtship in Montgomery, Alabama, during World War I to her extended convalescence in a sanatorium near Asheville, North Carolina. Fitzgerald is by turns affectionate and proud in his letters to his daughter, Scottie, at college in the East While he was struggling in Hollywood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (August 21, 1931 - June 4, 2008) was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Bruccoli's interest in Fitzgerald began in 1947 when he heard a radio broadcast of Fitzgerald's short story 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'. That week he tracked down a copy of The Great Gatsby, 'and I have been reading it ever since,' he told interviewers. Bruccoli graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1949, and studied at Cornell University where one of his professors was Vladimir Nabokov and at Yale University where he was a founder member of the fledgling Manuscript Society, graduating in 1953. He was awarded a master's degree and doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1960. Bruccoli, who also taught at the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University, spent nearly four decades teaching at the University of South Carolina. He lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where, according to his New York Times obituary, he 'cut a dash on campus, instantly recognizable by his vintage red Mercedes convertible, Brooks Brothers suits, Groucho mustache and bristling crew cut that dated to his Yale days. His untamed Bronx accent also set him apart' (Grimes). Over the course of his career, he authored over 50 books on F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary figures. His 1981 biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is considered the standard Fitzgerald biography. He has edited many of Fitzgerald's works, from This Side of Paradise to Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Bruccoli has also edited Scott's wife Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel Save Me the Waltz. While studying Fitzgerald, Bruccoli and his wife Arlyn began to collect all manner of Fitzgerald memorabilia. Bruccoli owned the artist's copy of Celestial Eyes, the cover art by Francis Cugat which appeared on the first edition, and most modern editions, of The Great Gatsby. In 1969, Bruccoli befriended F. Scott and Zelda's daughter Frances 'Scottie' Fitzgerald. In 1976, Bruccoli and the Fitzgeralds' daughter Scottie (as Scottie Fitzgerald Smith) published The Romantic Egoists, from the scrapbooks that F. Scott and Zelda had maintained throughout their lives of photographs and book reviews. Later in life Bruccoli and his wife donated their collection to the Thomas Cooper Library at USC. The collection is valued at nearly $2 million. Bruccoli was general editor of the 'Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography,' published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. As part of this series, he produced F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography and, with Richard Layman, Ring W. Lardner: A Descriptive Bibliography (1976). A working draft of the Lardner book was prepared in the summer of 1973 by Bruccoli, who 'put his then-graduate-research-assistant Layman to work on checking it. Layman displayed so much aptitude for the assignment that a collaboration seemed obligatory.' Along with Richard Layman, a Dashiell Hammett scholar and former graduate assistant, and businessman C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., Bruccoli launched the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The 400-volume reference work contains biographies of more than 12,000 literary figures from antiquity to modern times. Bruccoli continued working at the University of South Carolina until being diagnosed with a brain tumor, and died June 4, 2008.
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Bruce, H. C. The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man - Recollections of H. C. Bruce. Lincoln. 1996. University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books. 0803261322. Introduction by Willard B. Gatewood. 177 pages. paperback. Cover: Jacob Lawrence, Frederick Douglass Series no. 29, Part III, ‘The Free Man’, 1938-1939.
DESCRIPTION - Born to black slaves in 1836, H. C. Bruce took the name of his master, a farmer in Prince Edward County, Virginia. After years of slaving on the plantation in Missouri and working in tobacco factories, Bruce escaped to freedom in Kansas with his future wife. In the 1880s, he moved to the District of Columbia to take a federal job arranged by his brother, Blanche K. Bruce, a senator from Mississippi. THE NEW MAN is unusual in its double perspective: for Bruce's life as split by servitude and freedom, and his experience gave heightened meaning to both. Bruce provides insights into the slave's attitudes toward his masters and toward poor white people. He believes that ‘good blood' (a sense of honor and duty and domestic virtues) will tell, no matter the race, but he appeals to fairness in assessing the situation of emancipated slaves at the end of the Civil War: ‘They were set free without a dollar, without a foot of land, and without the wherewithal to get the next meal even, and this too by a great Christian Nation.' This rich and complex story of one man's life during turbulent times is introduced by Willard B. Gatewood, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and the author of ARISTOCRATS OF COLOR: THE BLACK ELITE, 1880-1920.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Clay Bruce (1836-1902), brother of the first black U.S. Senator Blanche K. Bruce, was born into slavery in Virginia to parents owned by Lemuel Bruce. He spent the first years of his life in Virginia before he and his family were sold to Jack Perkinson in 1844, and were taken to Chariton County, Missouri. There Mr. Bruce was rented out as a laborer and also learned to read. Before and after his new master moved him back to Virginia in 1847, he worked at a variety of positions as a rented slave laborer, including tobacconist, rail splitter, and eventually farm hand supervisor. In 1864, Henry Bruce encountered some trouble due to his literacy. The master of Henry's fiancEe opposed the couple's marriage because he was concerned that Henry's ability to read and write might spoil his slaves. Henry and his wife risked a great deal when they successfully escaped their masters and fled to Kansas that year. Once in Kansas, Bruce found work as a bricklayer, and several years later the couple bought a house. Mr. Bruce would remain in Kansas for many years, owning several businesses, running unsuccessfully for public office, and serving a term as an elected doorkeeper for the state senate. In 1881, Henry's brother Blanche secured him a job at the post office and he and his family moved to Washington, D.C., where he would spend the remainder of his life. Henry Clay Bruce's life is best remembered today through his autobiography, Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man, which was published in 1895. Willard B. Gatewood, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and the author of Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920.
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Bruce, John Edward. The Black Sleuth. Boston. 2002. Northeastern University Press. 1555535119. Edited & With An Introduction by John Cullen Gruesser. The Northeastern Library of Black Literature. 126 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Leslie Evans.
DESCRIPTION - Originally serialized in McGirt's Magazine between 1907 and 1909, THE BLACK SLEUTH is one of the earliest African American fictional works to depict a black detective. Now published for the first time in book form, this fascinating yet idiosyncratic mystery centers on its West African protagonist, Sadipe Okukenu. The tale follows his student years, his successful career as a brilliant sleuth in England and on the continent, and his investigation of the theft of a large, flawless diamond. But THE BLACK SLEUTH is much more than a detective story. John Edward Bruce employs conventions from popular fiction and an extended ‘African-abroad' plot to boldly attack and ridicule white prejudice and racial injustice in the United States and elsewhere. His narrative not only counters the dominant Eurocentric view of the world with a Black Atlantic perspective, but also educates his black readers about Africa, Western Imperialism, and, perhaps most important, themselves. Bruce's novel ultimately suggests that even the most talented black sleuth. cannot break up the greatest conspiracy of all-that of prejudice against people of color in the United States and abroad. Instead, its defeat can apparently be attained only through black solidarity and coordinated resistance.' - from the Introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOHN EDWARD BRUCE (February 22, 1856, Piscataway, MD - August 7, 1924, New York City, NY) was born a slave in Maryland and given a hero's funeral in Harlem. He briefly studied at Howard University before beginning a career as a journalist, editor, historian, and public speaker. He was the cofounder with Arthur A. Schomburg of the Negro Society for Historical Research.'.
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Bruchac, Joseph. Chenoo: A Novel. Norman. 2016. University of Oklahoma Press. 9780806152073. 6 x 9. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series - 68. 224 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Jacob Neptune, a wise-cracking, two-fisted Penacook private investigator with a checkered past, lives in upstate New York - four hundred miles from his tribal community on Abenaki Island. Then one night the phone rings. ‘We. got. trouble,' Neptune's cousin Dennis says from the other end. And trouble is where it all starts in this brilliant, often hilarious novel by acclaimed Abenaki storyteller Joseph Bruchac. Attacked by bikers before he can even board his plane, Neptune - 'Podjo' to his friends - quickly begins to realize just how much trouble surrounds his people's ancestral home. Guided by his sense of duty to his homeland, he agrees to help protect Dennis and other Penacooks as they stage a takeover of a state campground on land that should have reverted to their tribe. But encroaching developers, government operators, and even fellow Penacooks eager to build a casino each pose a threat to the Abenaki lands - and all have reasons to want Neptune out of the picture. Podjo greets each challenge with self-deprecating humor - but it's difficult to shake his increasingly disturbing dreams, and an unsettled feeling when his return leads to a reunion with a long-ago love interest. As he and Dennis contend with hired guns, police, and security, a far greater threat appears: someone, or something, is brutally killing people in the woods. It will take all of Neptune's skills as a martial arts fighter and the wisdom gained from tribal elders to battle the forces that threaten the sacred land - and his and his people's lives. Bruchac ratchets the tension from the first page to the last in this detective novel that pairs comedy and action with serious consideration of corporate greed, environmental destruction, cultural erosion, and other modern-day issues pressing Native peoples.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Bruchac, an Abenaki writer, poet, and storyteller, has written more than 130 A Novel By Dawn Karima Pettigrew books during his distinguished career. His best-selling Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children is used in classrooms across the country.
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Buell, Lawrence. Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently . New York. 2023. Oxford University Press. 9780197684269. 10 b/w illustrations. 144 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - "When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond. ." Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a leading figure in the American Transcendentalist movement and the era of U. S. literary emergence, an intellectual with worldwide influence as essayist, social thinker, naturalist-environmentalist, and sage. Thoreau's Walden, an autobiographical narrative of his two-year sojourn in a self-built lakeside cabin, is one of the most widely studied works of American literature. It has generated scores of literary imitations and thousands of neo-Walden experiments in back-to-basics living, both rural and urban. Thoreau's great essay, "Civil Disobedience," is a classic of American political activism and a model for nonviolent reform movements around the world. Thoreau also stands as an icon of modern American environmentalism, the father of American nature writing, a forerunner of modern ecology, and a harbinger of freelance spirituality combining the wisdom of west and east. Thoreau is also a controversial figure. From his day to ours, he has provoked sharply opposite reactions ranging from reverence to dismissal. Scholars have regularly offered conflicting assessments of the significance of his work, the evolution of his thought, even the facts of his life. Some disagreements are in the eye of the beholder, but many follow from challenges posed by his own cross-grained idiosyncrasies. He was an advocate for individual self-sufficiency who never broke away from home, a self-professed mystic now also acclaimed as a pioneer natural and applied scientist, and a seminal theorist of nonviolent protest who defended the most notorious guerrilla fighter of his day. All told, he remains a rather enigmatic figure both despite and because we know so much about him, beginning with the two-million-word journal he kept throughout his adult life. The esteemed Thoreau scholar Lawrence Buell gives due consideration to all these aspects of Thoreau's art and thought, framing key issues and complexities in historical and literary context.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. Considered one of the founders of the ecocriticism movement, he has written and lectured worldwide on Transcendentalism, American studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of many books, including Literary Transcendentalism, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Invention of American Culture, Writing for an Endangered World, and Emerson.
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Bukowski, Charles. A Love Poem. Santa Barbara. 1979. Black Sparrow Press. unpaginated. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Printed for "friends" of the press; this issue contains the Charles Bukowski poem A Love Poem.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Between the Earthquake, the Volcano and the Leopard. Santa Rosa. 1994. Black Sparrow Press. 11 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Collects 'Fante,' 'the observer,' 'August, 1993,' 'this night,' and 'betting on now.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Bring Me Your Love. Santa Barbara. 1983. Black Sparrow Press. 0876856067. Illustrated by R. Crump. 16 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - “The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author “He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter Charles Bukowski's acerbic wit shines through in this dark short story about a cheating lover—accompanied by the illustrations of R. Crumb. Bring Me Your Love is must-have for every Bukowski collection.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Confessions of a Man Insane Enough To Live With Beasts. Bensenville. 1965. Mimeo Press. [24 pages]. paperback. Cover painting by Anne Purcell of Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - This fragmentary story concerns two of Bukowski's favorite themes: bad luck and bad times. Impossible, surrealistic characters populate this story where no one is is really normal just hysterical types created by a writer who cannot accept the banality of the ordinary.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. San Francisco. 1972. City Lights Books. 0872860612. 478 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is a paperback collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, first published by City Lights Publishers in 1972. It was the first collection of Bukowski's stories to be published, and it was republished in two volumes in 1983, as Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Flying Through Space. Dusseldorf. 0. S Press Tonband Verlag. 18 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Three poems by Charles Bukowski. CONTENTS: A Poem for the DMV, Flying Through Space, The Last Person
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Ham On Rye. Santa Barbara. 1982. Black Sparrow Press. 0876855591. 287 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The autobiographical Ham on Rye is widely considered his finest novel. A classic of American literature, it offers powerful insight into his youth through the prism of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, who grew up to be the legendary Hank Chinaski of Post Office and Factotum.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Joe. Dusseldorf. 0. S Press Tonband Verlag. 5 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - German pirated edition of Bukowski's poem JOE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Kaputt in Hollywood. Postfach. 1976. Maro Verlag. 3875120310. 143 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness was a paperback collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, first published by City Lights Publishers in 1972. It was the first collection of Bukowski's stories to be published, and it was republished in two volumes in 1983, as Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights Publishers, was one of the first to recognize Bukowski as a short-story writer. He published the collection, which was dedicated to Bukowski's girlfriend, the poet and sculptor Linda King. The stories originally appeared in the underground newspapers Berkeley Barb and Open City, men's magazines including Adam, and in literary reviews, including Nova Express.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Life and Death in the Charity Ward. Dusseldorf. 1974. S Press Tonband Verlag. 11 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A pirated edition of a story from Bukowski's Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Notes of a Dirty Old Man. San Francisco. 1970. City Lights Books. 204 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Collection of Bukowski's columns from the underground newspapers Open City and the Los Angeles Free Press. "People come to my door—too many of them really—and knock to tell me Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk. drink half the night. A long distance operator from Newburgh, N.Y. sends me money. She wants me to give up drinking beer and to eat well. I hear from a madman who calls himself 'King Arthur' and lives on Vine Street in Hollywood and wants to help me write my column. A doctor comes to my door: 'I read your column and think I can help you. I used to be a psychiatrist.' I send him away. ."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. One For the Old Boy. Santa Barbara. 1984. Black Sparrow Press. unpaginated. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Printed for "friends" of the press; this issue contains the Charles Bukowski poem One For The Old Boy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Poems Written Before Jumping Out of An 8 Story Window. Glendale. 1968. Poetry X/Change. Includes a centerspread illustration by Bukowski, reproduced in brown. [32] pages. paperback. Cover - ‘Self-portrait by P. David Horton.
DESCRIPTION - Includes the poems - One Night stand; Sleep; Hangover and Sick Leave; The Blackbirds Are Rough Today; Big Bastard with a Sword; Kite String; The Millionaire; 86'd; Cows in Art Class; Weary Curls the Worm; The Beast; Mercy, Wherever You Are, Come Running in to Grab Me in Your Good Arms; Poem for the Future; Singing is Fire; Thermometer; Red Violets Boiling; Freedom: the Unmolested Eagle of Myself; The Hairy Hairy Fist, and Love Will Die. At the central opening the text is printed lengthwise, from tail to head, on the verso of leaf 8 and recto of leaf 9, accompanied by an illustration of cows by the author reproduced in orange.Verso of title-page.a Litmus Edition. Includes the poem "Cows in Art Class".
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader. New York. 1993. Harper Collins. 0060169117. Edited by John Martin. 497 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Louise Fili. Jacket photograph by John Montfort.
DESCRIPTION - For five decades, Charles Bukowski's writing has depicted life on the edge with an unflinchingly mordant clarity that has earned him millions of devotees all over the world. Here is the first comprehensive collection of the best of Bukowski's autobiographical stories, novels, and poems, and it brings into razor-sharp focus the counterculture idol's astonishing life and work. Bukowski's crisp, gritty, highly personal writing chronicles his spectacularly extreme life, with its mingling strings of odd jobs, unusual women, inspired debauches, matter-of-fact desperation, and literary triumphs. RUN WITH THE HUNTED weaves these strings together in a manner that is as appropriate for Bukowski's work as it is unusual for an anthology. It is arranged chronologically, not by its contents' original publication dates but by the period in Bukowski's life that each entry covers. As such, it transcends the realm of anthology and becomes something very like Bukowski's memoir. Beginning with his first recollection of consciousness (as a toddler under a table in 1922) and culminating with wry septuagenarian reflections, RUN WITH THE HUNTED is packed with dispassionately eloquent accounts of his hard life - from brutal childhood to reluctant stardom - and crystalline observations of life at large. Compiled by John Martin, Bukowski's longtime friend and editor, this landmark volume distills the essence of a prodigious life's work and offers a sometimes harrowing, invariably exhilarating reading experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CHARLES BUKOWSKI was born In Andernach, Germany, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived for many years in San Pedro, Callfornia. He published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He has now written over forty-five books of poetry and prose, as well as the screenplay of the film Barfly. JOHN MARTIN started Black Sparrow Press in 1966 specifically to publish Charles Bukowski's work. Since then, Black Sparrow has published approximately five hundred books of poetry and prose by a wide variety of authors.
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Bukowski, Charles. Shakespeare Never Did This. San Francisco. 1979. City Lights Books. 087286118x. Photographs by Michael Montfort. 93 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - An account of Bukowski's epic trip to Germany, documented by Montfort.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life. Los Angeles. 1973. Black Sparrow Press. 0876851898. 192 pages. paperback. Design by Barbara Martin.
DESCRIPTION - South of No North is a collection of short stories written by Charles Bukowski that explore loneliness and struggles on the fringes of society. Among the short stories collected in the book are "Love for $17.50", about a man named Robert whose infatuation with a mannequin in a junk shop leads him first to buy it, then make love to it, and then eventually fall in love with "her," much to the consternation of his real-life girlfriend; "Maja Thurup", about a South American tribesman with an enormous penis who is brought to Los Angeles by the woman anthropologist who has "discovered" him and become his lover; and "The Devil is Hot", about an encounter with Old Nick at an amusement pier in Santa Monica, where Scratch himself is caged and on display, fed only peanut butter and dogfood, exploited by a cynical carnie. The collection also features two of Bukowski's most famous short stories: "All the Assholes in the World Plus Mine", an autobiographical rumination on the treatment of his hemorrhoids, and "Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts". (The latter story originally was published as a chapbook of 500 copies by Bensenville Mimeo Press in 1965.) The short stories collected in the volume are evocative of Bukowski at his most successful, when he was one of the premier short story writers still at the top of his talent. The oddness of the subject matter can be explained by the fact that Bukowski's early lack of popularity in the U.S. meant that he wasn't being published in mainstream magazines. Instead, he was part of the "mimeograph revolution" in letters of the 1960s, appearing in mimeographed poetry magazines or chapbooks during the decade, including a magazine he himself published with Neeli Cherry, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns from 1969 to 1971. To support himself, he contributed to men's magazines that were in the market for "dirty stories". The latter situation explains the presence of the soft-core pornographic story "Stop Staring at My Tits, Mister", an outrageous burlesque of cowboy fiction featuring a sex-mad wagon master named "Big Bart" obsessed with "Honeydew", the amply endowed wife of "The Kid". Big Bart's obsession with Honeydew leads to the inevitable show down with The Kid, with highly unpredictable results reflecting both Bukowski's misanthropic, cynical appreciation of the absurdities of real life. Like fellow 1970s cult artist-favorite Robert Altman in the media of film, Bukowski in fiction was able to subvert genre fiction with his acerbic world view.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. The Captain Is Out To Lunch & the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. Santa Rosa. 1998. Black Sparrow Press. 157423059x. Illustrated by Robert Crumb. 144 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A book length collaboration between two underground legends, Charles Bukowski and Robert Crumb. Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and to give new meaning to what was once only familiar. Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Those Marvelous Lunches. Santa Rosa. 1993. Black Sparrow Press. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Printed for "friends" of the press; this issue contains the Charles Bukowski poem Those Marvelous Lunches.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. To Lean Back Into It. Santa Rosa. 1998. Black Sparrow Press. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Printed for "friends" of the press; this issue contains the Charles Bukowski poem To Lean Back Into It.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. We Ain’t Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain. Santa Rosa. 1990. Black Sparrow Press. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Printed for "friends" of the press; this issue contains the Charles Bukowski poem We Ain't Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bukowski, Charles. Women. Santa Barbara. 1978. Black Sparrow Press. 0876853920. 290 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
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Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. New York. 2019. Penguin Books. 9780143134039. Edited by Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao. Introduction by E. San Juan Jr. Foreword by Elaine Castillo. 384 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A 1946 Filipino American social classic about the United States in the 1930s from the perspective of a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dream, with a foreword by novelist Elaine Castillo Poet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the U.S. pre-World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel America is in the Heart begins with the narrator's rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish American War of the late 1890s. Carlos's experiences with other Filipino migrant laborers, who endured intense racial abuse in the fields, orchards, towns, cities and canneries of California and the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, reexamine the ideals of the American dream. Bulosan was one of the most important 20th century social critics with his deeply moving account of what it was like to be criminalized in the U.S. as a Filipino migrant drawn to the ideals of what America symbolized and committed to social justice for all marginalized groups. Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month with these three Penguin Classics: America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan (9780143134039) East Goes West by Younghill Kang (9780143134305) The Hanging on Union Square by H. T. Tsiang (9780143134022)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (November 24, 1913 – September 11, 1956) was a Filipino-American novelist and poet who immigrated to the United States on July 1, 1930. He never returned to the Philippines and he spent most of his life in the United States. His best-known work today is the semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943 essay on The Freedom from Want.
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Bunker, Edward. Dog Eat Dog. New York. 1996. St Martin's Press. 0312143141. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods and Marc Montalto. Photo illustration by Ferenc Suto.
DESCRIPTION - Carved from a lifetime of experience that runs the gamut from incarceration to liberation, DOG EAT DOG is the story of three men who are all out of prison and now have the task of adapting themselves to civilian life. The California three strikes law looms over them, but what the hell, they're going to do it, and they're going to do it their way. Troy, an aloof mastermind, seeks an uncomplicated, clean life but cannot get away from his hatred for the system. Diesel is on the mob's payroll and his interest in his suburban home and his nagging wife is waning. The loose cannon of the trio, Mad Dog, is possessed by true demons within that simply lead him from one situation to the next. One more hit, one more jackpot, and they'll all be satisfied. Troy constructs the perfect crime and they pull it off, but in the aftermath, they keep finding the law surrounding them wherever they go.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - EDWARD BUNKER is the author of three previous books, NO BEAST SO FIERCE, ANIMAL FACTORY, and LITTLE BOY BLUE, and coauthor of the screenplay of the movie RUNAWAY TRAIN. More recently he played Mr. Blue in the film Reservoir Dogs. He is one of a very few writers who have been able to create true literature out of their experiences as criminals or prisoners.
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Bunker, Edward. Little Boy Blue. New York. 1981. Viking Press. 0312195044. 324 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Raised within the confines of a system that has done nothing but provide him with pain, Alex Hamilton's frustration and anger are completely natural--and inherently dangerous. Since his parents split up, Alex has been constantly running from foster homes and institutions, yearning to be with his father, a broken man who cannot give his son the home he desperately needs. The only constant in Alex's life is no-good, criminally-minded peers, who are all too ready to plant illegal ideas in an intelligent mind. Bunker writes, ‘His unique potential would develop into unique destructiveness.'. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Heward Bunker (December 31, 1933 - July 19, 2005) was an American author of crime fiction, a screenwriter, and an actor. He wrote numerous books, some of which have been adapted into films. He was a screenwriter on Straight Time (1978), Runaway Train (1985) and Animal Factory (2000). Bunker was a bright but troublesome child, who spent much of his childhood in different foster homes and institutions. He started on a criminal career at a very early age, and continued on this path throughout the years, returning to prison again and again. He was convicted of bank robbery, drug dealing, extortion, armed robbery, and forgery. A repeating pattern of convictions, paroles, releases and escapes, further crimes and new convictions continued until he was released yet again from prison in 1975, at which point he finally left his criminal days permanently behind and became a writer. Bunker stayed out of jail thereafter, and instead focused on his career as a writer and actor.
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Bunker, Edward. The Animal Factory. New York. 1977. Viking Press. 0670127094. 202 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Abner Graboff.
DESCRIPTION - THE ANIMAL FACTORY goes deep into San Quentin, a world of violence and paranoia, where territory and status are ever-changing and possibly fatal commodities. Ron Decker is a newbie, a drug dealer whose shot at a short two-year stint in the can is threatened from inside and outside. He's got to keep a spotless record or it's ten to life. But at San Quentin, no man can steer clear of the Brotherhoods, the race wars, the relentlessness. It soon becomes clear that some inmates are more equal than others; Earl Copen is one of them, an old-timer who has learned not just to survive but to thrive behind bars. Not much can surprise him-but the bond he forms with Ron startles them both; it's a true education of a felon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Heward Bunker (December 31, 1933 - July 19, 2005) was an American author of crime fiction, a screenwriter, and an actor. He wrote numerous books, some of which have been adapted into films. He was a screenwriter on Straight Time (1978), Runaway Train (1985) and Animal Factory (2000). Bunker was a bright but troublesome child, who spent much of his childhood in different foster homes and institutions. He started on a criminal career at a very early age, and continued on this path throughout the years, returning to prison again and again. He was convicted of bank robbery, drug dealing, extortion, armed robbery, and forgery. A repeating pattern of convictions, paroles, releases and escapes, further crimes and new convictions continued until he was released yet again from prison in 1975, at which point he finally left his criminal days permanently behind and became a writer. Bunker stayed out of jail thereafter, and instead focused on his career as a writer and actor.
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Bunting, Josiah. The Lionheads. New York. 1972. George Braziller. 0807606324. 213 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Three American soldiers, divided by their values and ambitions, come face to face with the horrors of war in Vietnam during the spring of '68.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josiah Bunting III (born November 8, 1939) is an American educator. He has been a military officer, college president, and an author and speaker on education and Western culture. Bunting is married and has four adult children. His half-brother is Dick Ebersol, the creator and former executive producer of Saturday Night Live; Ebersol and Bunting have the same mother.
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Burke, James Lee. Texas City, 1947. Northridge. 1992. Lord John Press. 0935716610. 32 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A story of the childhood of boys raised by their father's uncaring mistress originally published in the Summer 1991 issue of The Southern Review and in 1983 by Pocket Books as a paperback original. Designed by Gary Abrahamian and printed by Patrick Reagh. Binding by Mariana Blau.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Lee Burke (born December 5, 1936) is an American author of mysteries, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won an Edgar Award for Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Cimarron Rose (1998). The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin (Heaven's Prisoners) and then Tommy Lee Jones (In the Electric Mist). Burke has also written seven miscellaneous crime novels, two short story anthologies, four books starring protagonist Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, and three books starring Billy Bob's cousin Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland.
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Burke, James Lee. The Convict. Baton Rouge. 1985. Louisiana State University Press. 0807112739. 145 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Convict and Other Stories is a collection of nine award-winning and beautifully composed stories, set in locales along the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas and battlefields around the world. These masterful stories are at once poignant portrayals of the rugged, conflicted Southern man as well as explorations of themes long familiar to Burke's readership: loss and hard-won courage, betrayal and friendship, violence and heroism, and the inveitability of death. A collection of nine award-winning stories, set in locales along the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas and battlefields around the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Lee Burke (born December 5, 1936) is an American author of mysteries, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won an Edgar Award for Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Cimarron Rose (1998). The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin (Heaven's Prisoners) and then Tommy Lee Jones (In the Electric Mist). Burke has also written seven miscellaneous crime novels, two short story anthologies, four books starring protagonist Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, and three books starring Billy Bob's cousin Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland.
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Burke, James Lee. The Lost Get-Back Boogie. Baton Rogue. 1986. Louisiana State University Press. 0807113344. 241 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - During his twenties Iry Paret took life easy and cool, playing guitar in honky-tonk bars in south Louisiana, boozing it up whenever possible, and trying to stay away from trouble. But trouble found him one night when he killed a man in a barroom fight and was later convicted of manslaughter. As James Lee Burke's remarkable new novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, begins, Iry has just been paroled after serving two years in the state prison at Angola. Hoping to reorder his life, he decides to sever all ties to his past and strike out for new parts. 'I think I'm just going to roll, Ace, ' he says to his straitlaced brother, and piling into his father's old pickup, he heads west.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Lee Burke (born December 5, 1936) is an American author of mysteries, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won an Edgar Award for Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Cimarron Rose (1998). The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin (Heaven's Prisoners) and then Tommy Lee Jones (In the Electric Mist). Burke has also written seven miscellaneous crime novels, two short story anthologies, four books starring protagonist Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, and three books starring Billy Bob's cousin Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland.
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Burnett, W. R. Iron Man. New York. 1930. Dial Press. 312 pages. hardcover. Jacket in colors by Edna M. Reindel.
DESCRIPTION - Mr. Burnett's first novel LITTLE CAESAR was not only widely heralded by the critics as ‘the most exciting book of the year' and ‘a work of art', but achieved immediate and extraordinary success. Its sales placed it at once among the best sellers. Now comes IRON MAN to prove that Mr. Burnett is all that the critics said, and more. IRON MAN tells the story of a mechanic's helper who becomes a prize fighter and finally middle-weight champion. It strikes a deeper and more intimately human note than did LITTLE CAESAR. Coke Mason is as unforgettable a character as Cesare Bandello. But though he is a ‘rough-neck' and rather ‘dumb', he is strangely attractive and even lovable. His feeling for his pretty but decidedly flighty wife is beautifully portrayed, and set against the thoughts and actions of the rough ‘pugs' and gamblers by whom he is surrounded, it stands out with an exquisite and poignant pathos. IRON MAN is a veritable epic of the prize-ring, uncompromising in its realism, powerful, brutal. But love and loyalty are as real in Mr. Burnett's world as the brutality and sordidness which are all that a ‘realist' is generally supposed to see. Burnett senses and portrays an essential decency in men that makes his world just that much more true. He has the realism of great art, which does not exclude the ideal as an element of reality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Riley Burnett (November 25, 1899 - April 25, 1982), often credited as W. R. Burnett, was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, whose film adaptation is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies. Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio, U.S. He left his civil service job there to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over a hundred short stories and five novels, all unpublished.
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Burnett, W. R. Romelle. New York. 1946. Knopf. 254 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Romelle, a fill-in singer at a third-rate dive called The Blue Evening, tired, disillusioned, feeling herself to be passe at thirty, is definitely getting to the end of her tether when a handsome young stranger begins to pay her flattering attentions. At first she mistrusts him, but his excellent manners and his kindness reassure her and they are married. She knows practically nothing about him, never guessing that he is a member of a powerful and historic old Southern family, his relation to which is decidedly peculiar; never suspecting how strange and wayward his life has been. But in the months that follow the marriage she finds out about her husband, through a series of violent events culminating in a murder. This powerful and absorbing story, played against a lush Southern California background, is unfolded with unusual psychological insight. It is the kind of hard-hitting, suspenseful novel of which W.R. Burnett is an acknowledged master.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Riley Burnett (November 25, 1899 - April 25, 1982), often credited as W. R. Burnett, was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, whose film adaptation is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies. Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio, U.S. He left his civil service job there to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over a hundred short stories and five novels, all unpublished.
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Burnett, W. R. The Asphalt Jungle. New York. 1949. Knopf. 271 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A classic noir novel - the story of a jewelry heist in a midwestern city that goes wrong - from its planning to execution to the aftermath ending in death or capture. Basis for 1950 classic film noir directed by John Huston and starring Sterling Hayden, and notable for an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Riley Burnett (November 25, 1899 - April 25, 1982), often credited as W. R. Burnett, was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, whose film adaptation is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies. Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio, U.S. He left his civil service job there to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over a hundred short stories and five novels, all unpublished.
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Burns, John Horne. A Cry of Children. New York. 1952. Harper & Brothers. 275 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In his first two novels John Horne Burns showed a power to capture and shock the imagination which has brought him to the forefront of American writers. THE GALLERY, a cutting indictment of the brutality of war, is by common consent one of the best novels of the past decade. LUCIFER WITH A BOOK was a highly controversial story of a private school; whatever their view, most readers found in it a renewal of the author's fiercely honest craftsmanship and a razor-edged gift for satire. In this his third novel John Horne Burns tells of a man's redemption from the private hell into which his mistress had drawn him. In spite of his brilliant career as a concert pianist, David Murray had discovered neither self-fulfillment nor happiness. Then he met the clever and completely abandoned Isobel. He could hardly suspect, however, that she was to plunge him into the frenzied half-world that lived on the other side of the city, from party to party, from hangover to hangover and from bed to bed. It was a world of emotionally threadbare, would-be bohemians, tolerant of every vice and depravity, with unflagging appetites for the shabby sex and liquor that kept them on the fringes of existence. David came to realize that he could not save Isobel from this world, that his own hopes for being saved were in the love of another woman who represented all that he had wished to leave behind. A CRY OF CHILDREN has not been written with false sentimentality. It is intimate, merciless and shockingly dramatic. More important still, it is a novel of faith and of love, written for those who do not deny the human spirit its own base agonies and high triumphs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Horne Burns (7 October 1916 - 11 August 1953) was a United States author. He is best known as the author of the 1947 story-cycle THE GALLERY, which depicts life in Allied-occupied Naples, Italy, in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. In this work he explores the themes of material and class inequality, alcoholism, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop.
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Burns, John Horne. The Gallery. New York. 1947. Harper & Brothers. 342 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - John Horne Burns brought THE GALLERY back from World War II, and on publication in 1947 it became a critically-acclaimed bestseller. However, Burns's early death at the age of 36 led to the subsequent neglect of this searching book, which captures the shock the war dealt to the preconceptions and ideals of the victorious Americans. Set in occupied Naples in 1944, THE GALLERY takes its name from the Galleria Umberto, a bombed-out arcade where everybody in town comes together in pursuit of food, drink, sex, money, and oblivion. A daring and enduring novel and one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military. ‘The first book of real magnitude to come out of the last war.' - John Dos Passos.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Horne Burns (7 October 1916 - 11 August 1953) was a United States author. He is best known as the author of the 1947 story-cycle THE GALLERY, which depicts life in Allied-occupied Naples, Italy, in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. In this work he explores the themes of material and class inequality, alcoholism, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop.
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Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. New York. 2010. Oxford University Press. 9780199542888. Oxford World's Classics. Edited by Jason Haslam. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A central figure in American popular culture, Tarzan first came swinging through the jungle in the pages of a pulp-fiction magazine in 1912, and subsequently appeared in the novel that went on to spawn numerous film, full-length cartoon, and theatrical adaptations. The infant Tarzan, lost on the coast of West Africa, is adopted by an ape-mother and grows up to become a model of physical strength and natural prowess, and eventually leader of his tribe. When he encounters a group of white Europeans, and rescues Jane Porter from a marauding ape, he finds love, and must choose between the values of civilization and the jungle. Jason Haslam's engaging introduction situates the novel not only in the pulp fiction industry, but also against the backdrop of adventure stories, European exploration in Africa, and the debates over nature versus civilization. This edition also features an up-to-date bibliography, chronology, and helpful notes as well as appendices that include selections of letters from readers to the editor of The All-Story magazine where the novel first appeared, histories of feral children, African explorers, and American advocates of self-reliance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950) was an American writer best known for his creations of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.
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Burroughs, William S. Nova Express. New York. 1964. Grove Press. 187 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The diabolical Nova Criminals—Sammy The Butcher, Green Tony, Iron Claws, The Brown Artist, Jacky Blue Note, Izzy The Push, to name only a few—have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It’s up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word and imagery machine of these “control addicts” before it’s too late. This surrealist novel is part sci-fi, part Swiftian parody, and always pure Burroughs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York. 1985. Viking Press. 0670808334. 134 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A love story which takes place in Mexico City during the 1940s, featuring William Lee, the protagonist of Burroughs's debut novel "Junky." The book was originally written in 1952, but not published until 1985.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays . New York. 1986. Seaver Books. 0805000003. 205 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Acclaimed by Norman Mailer more than twenty years ago as "possibly the only American writer of genius," William S. Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous “cut-up” method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As a satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Burroughs, William S. The Western Lands. New York. 1987. Viking Press. 0670813524. 258 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Deborah Pinkney.
DESCRIPTION - The trilogy that began with CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT (1981) and continued with THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS (1983) is completed here, and the result is a divine comedy. Although this final volume is a significant work on its own merits, one must wade through the chaotic and at times unintelligible Cities and the more coherent though by no means easy Place to fully understand why THE WESTERN LANDS is a remarkable achievement. While the plot resists encapsulation, in general terms it concerns the search for eternal rest that is symbolized by the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology. Among those involved in the quest are many characters from the earlier books in the trilogy, as well as a few from NAKED LUNCH; not the least of them is Burroughs himself. While Burroughs's ability to create and describe vast, hellish landscapes has never been denied, often there has been no character with whom the reader can empathize. Here, however, an empathetic bond is established in passages describing the fear of death, where Burroughs speaks more directly than usual, sometimes in the guise of old, forgotten novelist William Seward Hall, sometimes forthrightly and freely in his authorial voice. As a result, Burroughs fans will find this narrative vivid, horrifying, beautiful and sad. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Burroughs, William. Cities of the Red Night. New York. 1981. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 0030539765. 332 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and, the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the trilogy continued in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, William Burroughs sharply satirizes modern society in a poetic and shocking story of sex, drugs, disease and adventure.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. New York. 1959. Grove Press. 255 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Burroughs, William. The Place of Dead Roads. New York. 1984. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 0030632560. 306 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - William Seward Hall, who writes westerns under the name of Kim Carsons--a man with a mission to reorganize Earth into a more meaningful world--takes part in a shoot-out in the Boulder, Colorado, cemetery.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century'. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion' of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War', while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius'. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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Busch, Frederick. Absent Friends. New York. 1989. Knopf. 0394574265. 278 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tended to set his fiction in a physical territory--the Northeast, upstate New York especially--which he has given literary shape. With the capaciousness of a Dickens and the control of a Hemingway, Busch's novels have come in steady counterpoint, raising and answering by turns insistent questions that worry even the plainest of domestic lives. In this his fifth book of stories, the Absent Friends of the title are the lost characters the author has so compassionately detailed, who long to recover their absent selves. But they are also, as Richard Bausch comments in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "friends we have failed, or who have failed us; it is the emotional cost of that estrangement that interests Frederick Busch." CONTENTS: From The New World; Ralph the Duck; Comrades; Orbits; Greetings From; Naked; In Foreign Tongues; Gravity; Dog Song; One More Wave of Fear; North; Reruns; Name the Name; To the Hoop.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Breathing Trouble and Other Stories. London. 1973. Calder & Boyars. 0714508993. 190 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of 12 short stories
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Domestic Particulars: A Family Chronicle. New York. 1976. New Directions. 081120605x. 200 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch's 4th work of fiction, a "family chronicle" told in thirteen interrelated episodes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Girls. New York. 1997. Harmony Books. 0517704552. 279 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Whitney Cookman. Jacket photograph by Gary Isaacs.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch has built a reputation as a master storyteller, a magician with words, and a writer who deserves to be a household name. In his new novel, Girls, he once again treats readers to the 'ice-clear, dagger-sharp' (Seattle Times) writing he's become known for and a story that's deeply affecting, terrifying, and tragic. Jack is a security officer at an upstate New York college. When 14-year-old Janice Tanner vanishes from a neighboring town, he reluctantly becomes involved in the search as a favor to a friend of the girl's parents. A suicidal young woman, a teenage runaway, and two more missing girls make it impossible for Jack to drive resurfacing memories of his own daughter's death from his mind. In the course of the investigation, as he comes to confront Janice's murderer, Jack comes to realize just how dangerous it is to be a girl: 'I wondered if girls had been kidnapped, murdered, preyed upon for years. Maybe it was the times, and therefore everything human and otherwise from when we began might not be at fault.' Girls is a novel that is both a thriller and a stylistic wonder, and, like its protagonist, is tender and tough at the same time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Hardwater Country. New York. 1979. Knopf. 0394505603. 209 pages. hardcover. Dust jacket design by S. Neil Fujita.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch’s third collection of short stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Harry and Catherine. New York. 1990. Knopf. 0394574257. 290 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Here is that rarest and most satisfying of books: a grown-up love story. Harry and Catherine have been falling in and out of love for many years. She is divorced, determinedly raising two sons, and running a small gallery in upstate New York. He is an ex-newspaperman, a wistful drifter, now assistant to a New York senator. After a long separation, Harry is assigned to find out whether a new shopping mall in Catherine's neighborhood will desecrate an historic black cemetery. Catherine is living with another man, a contractor for the mall who finds both his financial interests and his relationship with Catherine threatened by Harry. With penetrating acuity and generosity of spirit, one of our finest writers brings us what David Bradley calls "a book people will love and be proud of loving." "Unsuppressed emotion, painful honesty. all of it in the most lively and supple language anyone is writing today."― Rosellen Brown.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. I Wanted a Year Without Fall. London. 1971. Calder & Boyars. 0714507288. 156 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch's 1st first novel, first published in the UK. The story centres on two men who are running from their problems.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Invisible Mending. Boston. 1984. David Godine. 0879234938. Winner National Jewish Book Award. 277 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Zimmer's wife, Lil, says their love is dead. He says it's just tired. Divorcing, he feels as if his whole love life is passing before him - and then part of it really is, in the still-sexy person of old flame Rhona Glinsky. In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian. And now, twenty years later, the middle-aged Zimmer is proving that opposites still attract, by falling in love - again - with both of them. Invisible Mending is Frederick Busch's half-comic, half-serious mediation on Jewish identity and consciousness - an ambitious grapple with the New York/Jewish ethos.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Long Way From Home. New York. 1993. Ticknor & Fields. 0395634156. 292 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Suddenly seized with an "emergency feeling," Sarah abandons her husband, Barrett, and their six-year-old son, Stephen, to search for her biological mother in rural Pennsylvania. "Absorbing, fast-paced and a joy to read." --The Boston Globe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Manual Labor. New York. 1974. New Directions. 0811205363. Simultaneous Hardcover Edition. 181 pages. paperback. NDP376. Cover: Judy Nelson.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch's second novel, set in rural New England, explores the collapse and renewal of a contemporary marriage.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Rounds. New York. 1979. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374252580. 243 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The lives of Eli Silver, a pediatrician who accidentally lets his only child die, the childless Sorensons, and pregnant, unmarried Elizabeth Bean interlock through circumstances that involve the vagaries of bodily functions and emotional extremes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Sometimes I Live in the Country. Boston. 1986. David Godine. 0879236221. 218 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - After his parents separate, Petey leaves Brooklyn and moves with his father, an ex-cop, to a rural village in upstate New York, where his adolescent depression prompts him to play suicidal games with his father's pistol.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Take This Man. New York. 1981. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374272468. 24 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The life of one American family, from a chance wartime meeting in 1944 through contemporary life, provides a comprehensive view of our society over the past forty years.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. The Mutual Friend. New York. 1978. Harper & Row. 0855276649. 222 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The subject of this extraordinary work of fiction is Charles Dickens--taken from biographies, from personal scholarship, from Dickens' own work--and brought to life, as he was at the end of his a desperate man in physical and emotional agony, obsessed with his emotional power over his readers. The end result is a profound and provocative vision of the man and his age.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. Too Late American Boyhood Blues. Boston. 1984. David Godine. 087923511x. 275 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch's Too Late American Boyhood Blues is a lyrical and introspective exploration of the author's experiences growing up in the Midwest in the 1970s. Busch's autobiographical novel explores the relationships he forms with his family, friends, and the wider community, as well as his struggles with identity and self-realization.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America's most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
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Busch, Frederick. War Babies. New York. 1989. New Directions. 0811211037. 114 pages. hardcover. Cover: Hermann Strohbach.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Busch's novel War Babies is a short, powerful moral tale that sheds light upon the insidious nature of evil and the grip history holds on the lives of the seemingly protected innocent. Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp--the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox--himself a survivor of the camp--can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown 'war babies.' As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Busch is the recipient of the 1991 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, an Award in Literature from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Woodrow Wilson, NEA, James Merrill and Guggenheim Awards. His novel The Night Inspector was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University, and has been the acting Director of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.
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Busia, Akosua. The Seasons of Beento Blackbird. Boston. 1996. Little Brown. 0316114952. 367 pages. paperback. Jacket design and illustration by Honi Werner based on photograph by Butch Martin.
DESCRIPTION - THE SEASONS OF BEENTO BLACKBIRD marks the debut of Akosua Busia, an exciting and passionate new novelist. It is the story of Solomon Wilberforce, a magnetic and brilliant man who writes bestselling children's books under the name Beento Blackbird and who has dedicated himself to educating the far-flung children of African descent about their glorious heritage. And it is also the story of the three women who love him: Miriam, the Caribbean midwife who delivered him into the world when she was nine years old; Samantha, his beautiful talented, and utterly modern New York book agent; and Ashia, an innocent woman-child who awaits him in her native village in Ghana. Solomon spends one season a year with each of these very different women. But when a family tragedy brings him to New York out of season, he finds that the neat compartments that once separated Miriam, Sam, and Ashia begin to fold in on one another. In a life that was once ordered by the cadence of nature itself, suddenly nothing is certain - and Solomon and the women he loves will never be the same again. From the cool ocean breezes of the Caribbean to the unruly energy of New York to the vibrant earth of Africa, THE SEASON OF BEENTO BLACKBIRD is a captivating novel about the complexities of life - the struggle to determine where we belong, and with whom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Ghana, educated in Europe, and now living in Los Angeles, Akosua Busia is a novelist and an actress who appeared alongside Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple. She is currently at work on her second novel.
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Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York. 1995. Four Walls Eight Windows. 156858055x. 145 pages. hardcover. Jacket Design by Stark Design.
DESCRIPTION - Octavia E. Bitter once gleefully described her eerie novella ‘Bloodchild', the title piece of BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES as her ‘pregnant man story.' ‘Bloodchild' explores the paradoxes of power and inequality and starkly portrays the experience of a class who, like women throughout most of history, are valued chiefly for their reproductive capacities. After it appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, SF's highest honors. ‘Speech Sounds', which also won the Hugo Award, and ‘Crossover', Butler's first published story, both describe women continuing to endure after their lives have become unbearable. ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night' wrestles with the double - edged sword of illness and talent. ‘Near of Kin', Butler's only non - SF story, describes a young woman coming to terms with the death of the mother who abandoned her. Also included here are two autobiographical pieces by Butler on what she calls ‘the art, the craft, and the business of writing.' BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES brings together for the first time Butler's entire output of shorter work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavia E. Butler is the author of ten published novels. They are PATTERNMASTER, MIND OF MY MIND, SURVIVOR, KINDRED, WILD SEED, CLAY'S ARK, DAWN, ADULTHOOD, RITES, IMAGO, and PARABLE OF THE SOWER. She has won both of science fiction's highest awards, the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. As one of the only African American women writing science fiction, she has received widespread praise for her exploration of feminist and racial themes. She describes herself as ‘a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist always, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and an oil-and - water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive. About her writing, she says, ‘I write about people who do extraordinary things. It just turned out that it was called science fiction.'.
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Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Garden City. 1979. Doubleday. 0385150598. 264 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavia E. Butler is the author of ten published novels. They are PATTERNMASTER, MIND OF MY MIND, SURVIVOR, KINDRED, WILD SEED, CLAY'S ARK, DAWN, ADULTHOOD, RITES, IMAGO, and PARABLE OF THE SOWER. She has won both of science fiction's highest awards, the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. As one of the only African American women writing science fiction, she has received widespread praise for her exploration of feminist and racial themes. She describes herself as ‘a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist always, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and an oil-and - water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive. About her writing, she says, ‘I write about people who do extraordinary things. It just turned out that it was called science fiction.'.
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Butler, Octavia. Dawn. New York. 1987. Warner. 0446513636. 264 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The first volume in the XENOGENESIS trilogy by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. In this stunning novel Butler approaches the concept of xenogenesis, or genetic hybridization between species.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 - February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known African-American women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship nicknamed the Genius Grant. Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler), who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was ‘an introspective, only child in a strict Baptist household' and ‘was drawn early to [science fiction] magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics.' Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 ‘to escape loneliness and boredom'; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. ‘I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars,' she told the journal Black Scholar, ‘and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since.'
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Butler, Robert Olen. A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. New York. 1992. Henry Holt. 0805019863. 253 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Neil Flewellen.
DESCRIPTION - In a collection of bittersweet stories about Vietnamese expatriates living in the American South, Butler blends Vietnamese folklore and American realities, lyric, dreamlike passages and comic turns, to create a panoramic tapestry of a people struggling to find a balance between their hearts and their hopes. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Butler, Robert Olen. Countrymen of Bones. New York. 1983. Horizon Press. 0818006390. 217 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The third novel by this Pulitzer prize winning writer. Set in the New Mexico desert, it is the story of two one an archeologist unearthing the past, the other working on the development of the first atom bomb.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Butler, Robert Olen. Sun Dogs. New York. 1982. Horizon Press. 0818006366. 218 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - SUN DOGS, the haunting second novel by Pulitizer-winner Robert Olen Butler, probes a man's search for viable meaning in his life, for personal salvation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Butler, Robert Olen. Tabloid Dreams: Stories. New York. 1996. Henry Holt. 0805031316. Pulitzer Prize Winning Author. 205 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Raquel Jaramillo.
DESCRIPTION - In his first collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winning A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN, Robert Olen Butler dazzles anew with his mastery of the short-story form and his true empathy for the denizens of the less-well-explored corners of the human condition. Though his mirthful and appropriately absurd story titles - ‘Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis,' ‘Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,' ‘Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband,' and ‘JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction,' among others - reflect Butler's genuine fondness for the outsized fancies of tabloid readers' and writers' imaginations, his ambitions are not so lighthearted or ephemeral. Once again he explores the enduring issues of cultural exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for the self. Employing a seamless mixture of high and low culture, of the surreal, the sordid, and the sad, Butler has created a frequently hilarious, always deeply moving, and profoundly American book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Butler, Robert Olen. The Alleys of Eden. New York. 1981. Horizon Press. 0818006315. 256 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The 'Eden' in Pulitzer Prize-winning Robert Olen Butler's astonishing first novel is a room. A man and woman have lived in this room for almost five years, in love, and in a secrecy forced upon them by a dangerous past: Clifford Wilkes is a deserter, in fact the last American Army deserter left in Saigon; Lanh is an extradordinary woman whose love is enabling her slowly to heal from the bitter life of prostitution to which she had been subjected by foreign troops. The scars of the past born by both, the sensitivity of their understanding, their need for each other in an unremitting atmosphere of crisis, have sealed them in a pssion of love now under daily threat. The life they make together is so truly described that the reader lives with them daily in its strangeness and intimacy, and in intensifying anxity as the last moment for escape in America approaches. They desperate race through the alleys of the city, with the engines of the choppers - their final hope - hammering away in the distance, their arrival at the gates in front of freedom, and finally the rise of flight into the sky - this suspensful sequence of action comprise one of the most powerful passages of writing in any novel of war in our time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Butler, Robert Olen. The Deep Green Sea. New York. 1998. Henry Holt. 0805031308. 229 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Raquel Jaramillo.
DESCRIPTION - In THE DEEP GREEN SEA, Robert Olen Butler has created a memorable and incandescent love story between a contemporary Vietnamese woman orphaned in 1975, when Saigon finally fell to the Communists, and a Vietnam veteran who returns from America to a once war-torn land, seeking closure and a measure of peace. Bit by bit they learn more of each other's pasts. Secrets are revealed: Ben's love affair with a Vietnamese prostitute in 1966; Tien's mixed racial heritage and her abandonment by her bar-girl mother, who feared retribution from the North Vietnamese for having given birth to one of the hated ‘children of dust.' In Butler's hands, what follows conjures the stuff of classical tragedy and also achieves a classic reconciliation of once-warring cultures.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Butler, Robert Olen. The Deuce. New York. 1989. Simon & Schuster. 067167093x. 304 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by David Montiel and Martha Savitzky. Jacket illustration by David Montiel.
DESCRIPTION - Robert Olen Butler's first novel, THE ALLEYS OF EDEN, was one of the finest books ever written about the American experience in Vietnam. With the publication of his subsequent works, SUN DOGS, COUNTRYMEN OF BONES, ON DISTANT GROUND, and most recently, WABASH, Butler has earned a reputation as one of the most gifted authors of his generation. In his new novel, THE DEUCE, Butler turns once more to the intertwined legacies of Vietnam and America, but in the startlingly fresh voice of a young Amerasian boy, Tony Hatcher. At age six, Tony is snatched away from Saigon and his bar-girl mother and brought to the United States by his American father, a former Army officer, now a district attorney. For ten years, Tony grows up as ill-at-ease amid the affluence of the Jersey Shore as he had been as one of the despised mixed-blood Children of Dust in Saigon. And in America he has not escaped the stress and the stigma of embodying two seemingly irreconcilable cultures; that conflict rages within him, particularly as he becomes a teenager. So at sixteen Tony runs away, thinking he's heading for Montreal, where he might blend into the Vietnamese community. But when his money is stolen in New York City's Port Authority bus terminal, Tony begins an odyssey at once hellish and profound, for this former Saigon street kid must fend for himself in a new set of city streets among the pimps, prostitutes, dealers, and con artists. There are grave dangers among the predators of this street, but there are also new friends, deeply hurt and themselves in danger - Joey, a Vietnam vet finding his own life in the streets; Norma, one of New York's desperate and vulnerable runaway young women. And at the heart of the book is Forty-second Street, known on the street as “the Deuce,” the black hole at the center of the world that gives Tony his nickname and threatens always to claim him. It is there, in adventures that call to mind THE CATCHER IN THE RYE and MIDNIGHT COWBOY that Tony must attempt to come to terms with his dual heritage and try to make his peace both with his past and with America. The Deuce is a remarkable tour de force, a coming-of-age story of enormous suspense and heartbreaking humor that conveys more powerfully than any book of combat the legacy of our intervention in Vietnam.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1971 as a Vietnamese linguist and counterintelligence agent. He lives with his wife, Maureen, and his fifteen-year-old son, Joshua, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches creative writing at McNeese State University. THE DEUCE is his sixth novel.
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Butler, Robert Olen. Wabash. New York. 1987. Knopf. 039455597x. 211 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Douglas Fraser.
DESCRIPTION - Wabash is a town on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, across from St. Louis. Wabash is also the name of the steel mill, which is the main industry here in the summer of 1932. This is the setting for Butler's novel about the Coles, Deborah and Jeremy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
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Buzbee, Lewis. Fliegelman's Desire. New York. 1990. Available Press. 0345367383. Paperback Original. 172 pages. paperback. Cover design by William Geller.
DESCRIPTION - Fliegelman's Desire is a modern San Francisco version of the European urban wanderer. When Fliegelman's desire abandons him, he searches the city for her, only to discover that desire is everywhere, and as treacherous and lovely as ever. Calvino meets Kafka, translated by Elkin. 'A playful imagination and a charming way of animating the ordinary.' (Publishers Weekly)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lewis Buzbee's writing has appeared in Harper's, GQ, Paris Review, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.
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Buzbee, Lewis. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. Saint Paul. 2006. Graywolf Press. 1555974503. 218 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - This is my ideal time to be in a bookstore. The shortened light of the afternoon and the idleness and hush of the hour gather everything close, the shelves and the books and the few other customers who graze head-bent in the narrow aisles. I've come to find a book. In The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Buzbee, a former bookseller and sales representative, celebrates the unique experience of the bookstore - the smell and touch of books, getting lost in the deep canyons of shelves, and the silent community of readers. He shares his passion for books, which began with ordering through The Weekly Reader in grade school. Interwoven throughout is a fascinating historical account of the bookseller's trade - from the great Alexandria library with an estimated one million papyrus scrolls to Sylvia Beach's famous Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which led to the extraordinary effort to publish and sell James Joyce's Ulysses during the 1920s. Rich with anecdotes, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is the perfect choice for those who relish the enduring pleasures of spending an afternoon finding just the right book. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lewis Buzbee's writing has appeared in Harper's, GQ, Paris Review, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.
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Byrd, Rudolph P. Jean Toomer's Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936. Athens. 2010. University of Georgia Press. 9780820337777. 6 x 9. 232 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Jean Toomer (1894-1967) earned his place in American literary history with Cane (1923), a brilliant modernist collage of fiction, poetry, and drama about black life in rural Georgia and the urban North. Although Toomer continued to write prodigiously, his work went largely unpublished as he turned away from an exploration of his African American roots he had employed so powerfully in Cane. Rudolph P. Byrd examines the central reason behind Toomer's literary decline: his enthusiasm for the theories of George Gurdjieff, a contemporary Russian psychologist, philosopher, and mystic. As Toomer's work degenerated into propaganda for Gurdjieff's theories on human development and spiritual reforms, publishers turned away. Yet, Byrd makes clear that the works Toomer wrote after 1923 do not represent the total break from his earlier concerns that critics have generally assumed. Examining both Cane and the body of writings Toomer produced after it, Byrd finds a distinct thematic unity in the Toomer canon-a consistent, optimistic faith in human possibility and wholeness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - RUDOLPH P. BYRD (1953-2011) was a professor of African American Literature and director of African American Studies, Emory University. CARL VAN VECHTEN (1880-1964) was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.
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Cable, George Washington. Creoles and Cajuns: Stories of Old Louisiana. Garden City. 1959. Anchor/Doubleday. Edited by Arlin Turner. 432 pages. paperback. A179. Cover ary by Harry Ford. Typogrraphy by Edward Gorey.
DESCRIPTION - This volume brings together for the first time the best short stories of the first major Southern writer to appear after the Civil War. An important literary collection in themselves, they also point the direction Southern fiction was to take. In his realistic handling of romantic material, his awareness of the underlying ironies and tragedies of the South's race relations, and his use of violence, Cable marks a break with earlier Southern writing and foreshadows such modern authors as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. His special province was that most European of cities, New Orleans, to whose rich and varied civilization he brought an insider's knowledge of local history, legend, and social patterns, plus a reformer's concern for the paramount issues. His stories dramatize conflicts between races, national groups, classes, and ways of life, and his characters include all the elements in the city and its surrounding rural districts-Creoles, Acadians, Americains, mixed bloods, and Negroes. Cable was also, throughout his life, a crusader for Negro rights, and many of his stories reflect this. But he was too much of an artist ever to oversimplify the problem or present it in terms of clear-cut heroes and villains. It is always the system, making victims of all, that he attacks.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 - January 31, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called ‘the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century, as well as the first modern southern writer.' In his treatment of racism, mixed-race families and miscegenation, his fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner. He also wrote articles critical of contemporary society. Due to hostility against him after two 1885 essays encouraging racial equality and opposing Jim Crow, Cable moved with his family to Northampton, Massachusetts. He lived there for the next thirty years, then moved to Florida.
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Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes. New York. 1988. Penguin Books. 0140433228. Introduction by Michael Kreyling. 344 pages. paperback. Cover painting, Portrait of Henry Clement de Brueys, by Richard Claque, 1862, courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
DESCRIPTION - With THE GRANDISSIMES, George Washington Cable broke literary traditions and opened the way for novelists such as Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. At the center of this novel is a stirring story of two lovers from feuding Creole families in early nineteenth-century New Orleans. The romance of The GRANDISSIMES - the masked ball at the beginning of the story, the charming conversations in patois, the scenes between reluctant but eventually blessed lovers, the colors of the Creole spring and the French Quarter - helped make George Washington Cable famous in America during the 1880s. But in contrast to the idealized romance is Cable's accurate, unflattering portrait of Creole gentility and his arguments for racial equality. This tension gives the novel a compelling power. Through the years, critics and readers have seen Cable as a romanticist, a realist, social dissenter, inspiration for the Civil Rights movement, and even dismissed him as an unimportant local New Orleans writer. But THE GRANDISSIMES has stood the test of time and its many interpretations make it one of the richest novels in American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 - January 31, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called ‘the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century, as well as the first modern southern writer.' In his treatment of racism, mixed-race families and miscegenation, his fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner. He also wrote articles critical of contemporary society. Due to hostility against him after two 1885 essays encouraging racial equality and opposing Jim Crow, Cable moved with his family to Northampton, Massachusetts. He lived there for the next thirty years, then moved to Florida.
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Cade, Toni (editor). The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York. 1970. Signet/New American Library. 256 pages. paperback. Q4317.
DESCRIPTION - TWO KINDS OF REVOLUTION. Today America is witnessing two great human revolutions. One is that of burgeoning Black pride and militancy. The other is the rising demand by women for liberation from their chattel-like roles in a male-dominated society. This volume presents the eloquent writings of those vitally involved in both - Black women, speaking of themselves and for themselves. Included are stories, poems, and essays by Abbey Lincoln, Paule Marshall, Joanne Grant, Nikki Giovanni, Kay Lindsey, and many other notable names. They discuss such topics as politics, racism in education, the Black man, the myth of the ‘castrating' Black woman, sex, the Pill, child-raising in the ghetto, woman's share in Black power, the personal experiences that have shaped their lives, and much more. Their voices are sharply individual, their views varied. But all are proudly Black. And female. And beautiful.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995) was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Toni Cade Bambara was born in New York City to parents Walter and Helen (Henderson) Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens and New Jersey, NJ. In 1970 she changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group Bambara. Bambara graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English Literature in 1959, then studied mime at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, France. She also became interested in dance before completing her master's degree in American studies at City College, New York (from 1962), while serving as program director of Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn. She has also worked for New York social services and as a recreation director in the psychiatric ward of Metropolitan hospital. From 1965 to 1969 she was with City College's Search for Education, Elevation, Knowledge-program. She taught English, published material and worked with SEEK's black theatre group. She was made assistant professor of English at Rutgers University's new Livingston College in 1969, was visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at Emory University and at Atlanta University (1977), where she also taught at the School of Social Work (until 1979). She was writer-in-residence at Neighborhood Arts Center (1975–79), at Stephens College at Columbia, Missouri (1976) and at Atlanta's Spelman College (1978–79). From 1986 she taught film-script writing at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. Bambara participated in several community and activist organizations, and her work was influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s. She went on propaganda trips to Cuba in 1973 and to Vietnam in 1975. She moved to Atlanta, GA with her daughter, Karma Bene, and became a founding member of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers. Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died of it in 1995, at age 56. Her first book was, Gorilla, My Love (1972), collected fifteen short stories, written between 1950 and 1960. Most of the stories in Gorilla, My Love are told through a first-person point of view. The narrator is often a sassy young girl who is tough, brave, and caring. Bambara called her writing upbeat fiction. Included were ‘Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird‘ as well as ‘Raymond's Run.' Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts movement and the emergence of black feminism. Her anthology The Black Woman (1970) with poetry, short stories, and essays by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and herself, as well as work by Bambara's students from the SEEK program, was the first feminist collection to focus on African-American women. Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971) contained work by Langston Hughes, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Crayton, Alice Walker and students. She wrote the introduction for another groundbreaking feminist anthology by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. While Bambara is often ascribed as a ‘feminist,' in her chapter titled ‘On the Issue of Roles', she writes, ‘Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood.' Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) is centered around a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. The novel Those Bones Are Not My Child or If Blessings Come (title of the manuscript), was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of forty black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations. (Vintage, 1996). Her work was explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular, esp. The Salt Eaters. Her script for two awards-winning Louis Massiah film The Bombing of Osage Avenue dealt with the massive police assault in Philadelphia on the headquarters of MOVE, at 6221 Osage Ave., on May 13, 1985. Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writings, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. She was always influenced by the people of Harlem and by her strong-willed mother, Helen Bent Henderson Cade Brehon, who urged her and her brother Walter (an established painter) to be proud of African American culture and history. Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with ‘Midnight Ramble': Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. She also was one of four filmmakers who made the collaborative 1995 documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.
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Cahan, Abraham. The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories. New York. 1996. Signet/New American Library. 0451526244. Introduction by Gordon Hutner. 254 pages. paperback. CE2624. Cover: Jozef Israels-'A Jewish Wedding, 1903'. Signet Classic original.
DESCRIPTION - Abraham Cahan, one of the first and foremost of Jewish-American writers, found the inspiration for his passionate, timeless short fiction in the tenements and sweatshops of New York City's Lower east Side at the turn of the twentieth century. Like the characters in these affectionate, bittersweet tales, Cahan came to America with nothing, seeking a Promised Land of opportunity and equality. Instead, the immigrants found a bitter life of grinding poverty, sixteen-hour workdays, and challenges to their Jewish faith and traditional way of life. In these moving stories, garment workers and potato peddlers, Talmudic scholars and trade unionists, landladies and young lovers all struggle to make their way in this bewildering, exhilarating New World. Cahan was the founder and lifelong editor of the influential Yiddish-language JEWISH DAILY FORWARD. With an Introduction by Gordon Hutner. This volume includes: THE IMPORTED BRIDEGROOM AND OTHER STORIES OF THE NEW YORK GHETTO (1898), and YEKL (1896), the novella on which the award-winning film HESTER STREET was based.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Abraham 'Abe' Cahan (July 7, 1860 - August 31, 1951) was a Belarusian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.
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Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York. 1993. Penguin Books. 0140186875. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes by Jules Chametzky. 538 pages. paperback. Cover photograph of New York's Lower East Side, c. 1900: The Bettmann Archive.
DESCRIPTION - An early classic of Jewish-American literature ponders the price of assimilation In this powerful, prophetic story of Jewish-American life in turn-of- the-century New York, a young immigrant works his way from desperate poverty to material success in the garment industry, only to find himself a failure at love and unsure of his identity. Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a political radical, union organizer, and founder of the influential Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward. Warmly sympathetic (though not sentimental) toward the newly emerging multicultural nature of American life, in his writings he addressed the spiritual and emotional losses that came with it. THE RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY, originally published in 1917, vividly portrays both the culture and commerce of a vanished era and the spiritual cost of becoming an American.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Abraham 'Abe' Cahan (July 7, 1860 - August 31, 1951) was a Belarusian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.
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Caldwell, Erskine. Close To Home. New York. 1962. Farrar Straus Cudahy. 216 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A novel about an interracial love affair in a small Northern town that culminates in a jealous wife's savage act of brutality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erskine Caldwell (born December 17, 1903, Coweta county, Ga., U.S. - died April 11, 1987, Paradise Valley, Ariz.) U.S. author. Caldwell became familiar with poor sharecroppers through his father's missionary work. Fame arrived with TOBACCO ROAD (1932), a controversial novel whose title became a byword for rural squalor; adapted as a play, it ran more than seven years on Broadway. GOD'S LITTLE ACRE (1933), also a best-seller, featured a cast of hopelessly poor degenerates. Like his other novels and stories about the rural Southern poor, they mix violence and sex in grotesque tragicomedy. He also wrote the text for documentary books with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, whom he married.
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Caldwell, Erskine. The Pocket Book of Erskine Caldwell Stories. New York. 1947. Pocket Books. 312 pages. paperback. 392.
DESCRIPTION - SALT HUMOR AND EARTHY PASSION. These stories by Erskine Caldwell, author of TOBACCO ROAD and GOD'S LITTEL ACRE, are a series of short, hard, well-timed punches. Sometimes his blows land on the funnybone; often they land on the point of the chin - always with irresistible force. Here is ‘Maud Island,' here raw physical passion is the only enjoyment left in the degenerate life of a backwoods Southern community. Here is the driving power of ‘Saturday Afternoon' and ‘Kneel to the Rising Sun,' classics of terror and brutality. And here are stories like ‘Grassfire' and ‘Midwinter Guest,' about stubborn eccentrics of Maine whose laughter is taken in strong doses. Rich in humor and violent in emotion. Caldwell's tales are moving pictures of individuals in racy decay, and of human society seen in its most dramatic moments.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erskine Caldwell (born Dec. 17, 1903, Coweta county, Ga., U.S. - died April 11, 1987, Paradise Valley, Ariz.) U.S. author. Caldwell became familiar with poor sharecroppers through his father's missionary work. Fame arrived with TOBACCO ROAD (1932), a controversial novel whose title became a byword for rural squalor; adapted as a play, it ran more than seven years on Broadway. GOD'S LITTLE ACRE (1933), also a best-seller, featured a cast of hopelessly poor degenerates. Like his other novels and stories about the rural Southern poor, they mix violence and sex in grotesque tragicomedy. He also wrote the text for documentary books with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, whom he married.
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Caldwell, Erskine. When You Think of Me. Boston. 1959. Little Brown. 194 pages. hardcover. Cover: Miriam Woods.
DESCRIPTION - Collection of short storie: five in the first section labelled "Stories"; six in a section titled "American Sketches"; Three in "Czechoslovakian Sketches" and the title piece "When You Think of Me".
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erskine Caldwell (born Dec. 17, 1903, Coweta county, Ga., U.S. - died April 11, 1987, Paradise Valley, Ariz.) U.S. author. Caldwell became familiar with poor sharecroppers through his father's missionary work. Fame arrived with TOBACCO ROAD (1932), a controversial novel whose title became a byword for rural squalor; adapted as a play, it ran more than seven years on Broadway. GOD'S LITTLE ACRE (1933), also a best-seller, featured a cast of hopelessly poor degenerates. Like his other novels and stories about the rural Southern poor, they mix violence and sex in grotesque tragicomedy. He also wrote the text for documentary books with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, whom he married.
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Callahan, John E. In the African-American Grain. Urbana. 1988. University of Illinois Press. 0252014596. 281 pages. hardcover. Cover painting - ‘Untitled’ by Oliver Jackson, 1979.
DESCRIPTION - In the African-American Grain is a powerful exploration of the impact of African-American oral storytelling techniques on modern and contemporary fiction. Reading literature in the call-and-response tradition, John F. Callahan shows how African-American writers including Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, and Alice Walker have used the forms and forces of this uniquely participatory discourse to establish not only a potential relationship between storyteller and audience but also a potential for change. In a new preface Callahan comments on how the tradition of call-and-response has continued to develop among African-American writers as well as writers of other backgrounds.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Callahan was a graduate student researching the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald when a literary tangent led him along a different path. In the end, it was the work of writer Ralph Ellison, not Fitzgerald, that would leave a lifelong impression on Callahan. Ellison died in 1994, leaving behind 2,000 pages of unpublished writing, an expectation that there was a second novel coming and his widow, Fanny, who eventually asked Callahan to be the literary executor of Ellison's work. From this archive of work that Ellison left - some of it on scraps of paper and napkins - came Ellison's posthumous second novel, Juneteenth, and Three Days After the Shooting, both edited by Callahan, the latter novel with his former Lewis and Clark student, Adam Bradley. John Callahan is the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College. Callahan's own writing include In the African-American Grain, A Man You Could Love, and the upcoming The Learning Room.
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Caloyeras, Jennifer. Unruly Creatures. Morgantown. 2017. West Virginia University Press. 9781943665785. 5.5x8.5in. 180 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In this collection rife with humor and pathos, alienated characters struggle to subvert, contain, control, and even escape their bodies. A teenage girl grapples with pubic hair grown wild, a biologist finds herself in love with a gorilla, a transvestite prisoner yearns to escape her biological destiny. In some stories, the bodies have surrogates: a high- school girl babysits an elderly woman's plastic doll while negotiating her own sexual awakening, and a young man finds that he can only receive affection from his father when he is in costume. Dark humor and magical realism put in sharp relief the everyday trials of Americans in a story collection that asks, in what way are we more than the sum of our parts? ‘Jennifer Caloyeras is an enormously talented writer with a rare combination of great imagination and heart.' - Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. ‘Jennifer Caloyeras's stories snap, crackle, and pop with animal energy. Every one of these stories is an unruly creature, wild at heart, fierce and funny, and heartbreaking.' - Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living through Plastic Explosives and All the Anxious Girls on Earth. ‘When you read Unruly Creatures, the stories stare back at you like a caged gorilla. Haunting, revelatory, and utterly breathtaking, Caloyeras is an astonishing talent.' - Matthew J. Trafford, author of The Divinity Gene. ‘Riotous, off-kilter, tender, magical - this collection is utterly accomplished and madly engaging. Jennifer Caloyeras's writing is as wild and beautiful as the unruly creatures in her stories.' - Laura Trunkey, author of Double Dutch, a 2017 ABA Indies Introduce title.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jennifer Caloyeras is the author of Strays. Her short stories have appeared in Booth, Storm Cellar, and other literary magazines. She recently served as the artist-in-residence at the Annenberg in Santa Monica and teaches writing at the the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
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Campbell, Bebe Moore. Brothers and Sisters. New York. 1994. Putnam. 039913929x. 476 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Struggling with her own personal issues after the Los Angeles riots, Esther Jackson, a black employee at a downtown bank, is heartened when a black man is hired as senior vice-president, until he sexually harasses her white friend and coworker.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bebe Moore Campbell has been a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and stepson.
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Campbell, Bebe Moore. What You Owe Me. New York. 2001. Putnam. 0399147845. 552 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Los Angeles, 1945: When Hosanna Clark, newly arrived from the farm fields of Texas, befriends Holocaust survivor Gilda Rosenstein, she opens the door to a new life for them both. Using Gilda's knowledge of cosmetics and Hosanna's energy and determination, they begin producing a line of lipsticks and lotions for black women. The two are more than partners: They are dear friends. Then Gilda suddenly disappears, taking all the assets. Hosanna is doubly betrayed: financially ruined and emotionally bereft. When, years later, she passes away, her small cosmetics company dies with her. But Hosanna leaves behind a daughter steeped in her mother's pain: Matriece is as smart and driven as her mother and savvy enough to recognize that white firms are competing not only for black consumer dollars but for black professional talent as well. When Gilda's huge cosmetics conglomerate hires her to launch a line of black beauty products, Matriece takes on a mission to collect her mother's debt. What You Owe Me is a stunning account of the changes we have seen in white attitudes toward blacks, but it is also a sensitive look at what betrayal-of friendship, of love-does to us all. Ultimately, it is a moving book about healing. As Emerge magazine acknowledged, "Campbell's writings are a beacon of light, helping assuage the anger by tending our deepest wounds."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bebe Moore Campbell has been a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and stepson.
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Campbell, Bebe Moore. Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. New York. 1992. Putnam. 0399137467. 332 pages. hardcover. Jacket design and illustration by Honi Werner.
DESCRIPTION - Repercussions are felt for decades in a dozen lives after a racist beating turns to cold-blooded murder in a small Mississippi town in the 1950s. Bebe Moore Campbell's affecting memoir. SWEET SUMMER: GROWING UP WITH AND WITHOUT MY DAD, was hailed by The Philadelphia Inquirer as ‘a remarkable achievement.' ‘Ripe with family stories, lush with images, suffused with emotions,' said the Kansas City Star. ‘It is probably one of the more overdue books about and for the black community,' wrote Nikki Giovanni in The Washington Post. Now Campbell turns her abundant talents to fiction in an evocative first novel, YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE. Chicago-born Armstrong Todd is fifteen, black, and unused to the segregated ways of the Deep South when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in her native rural Mississippi. For speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, Armstrong pays the ultimate price when her husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law decide to teach him a lesson. The lives of everyone involved in the incident - black and white - are changed forever, and the reverberations extend well into the next generation. Resonant with the sorrows of poverty and racial prejudice as well as the triumphs of love and social justice, , YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE marks the debut of a powerful, clear voice in contemporary fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bebe Moore Campbell has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant and a National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Literature Award, and has been a winner of the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Campbell, Bonnie Jo. American Salvage. Detroit. 10. Wayne State University Press. 9780814334867. Made in Michigan Writers Series. 5 x 8. 192 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - New from award-winning Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind. The harsh Michigan winter is the backdrop for many of the tales, which are at turns sad, brutal, and oddly funny. One man prepares for the end of the world-scheduled for midnight December 31, 1999-in a pole barn with chickens and survival manuals. An excruciating burn causes a man to transcend his racist and sexist worldview. Another must decide what to do about his meth-addicted wife, who is shooting up on the other side of the bathroom door. A teenaged sharpshooter must devise a revenge that will make her feel whole again. Though her characters are vulnerable, confused, and sometimes angry, they are also resolute. Campbell follows them as they rebuild their lives, continue to hope and dream, and love in the face of loneliness. Fellow Michiganders, fans of short fiction, and general readers will enjoy this poignant and affecting collection of tales.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Once Upon a River (July 2011, W.W. Norton). She was a 2009 National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for her collection of stories American Salvage, which won the Foreword Book of the Year award for short fiction. Campbell is also author of the novel Q Road and the story collection Women & Other Animals. She's received the AWP Award for Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, and the Eudora Welty Prize, and she has been awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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Campbell, James. Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark. Berkeley. 2008. University of California Press. 9780520252370. 226 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - This compulsively readable collection of profiles and essays by James Campbell, tied together by a beguiling autobiographical thread, proffers unique observations on writers and writing in the post-1950s period. Campbell considers writers associated with The New Yorker magazine, including John Updike, William Maxwell, Truman Capote, and Jonathan Franzen. Continuing his longterm engagement with African American authors, he offers an account of his legal battle with the FBI over James Baldwin's file and a new profile of Amiri Baraka. He also focuses on the Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, as well as writers such as Edmund White and Thom Gunn. Campbell's concluding essay on his childhood in Scotland gracefully connects the book's autobiographical dots. The New York Times - Sam Munson The art of the literary profile is, if not dying, at least in some corporeal danger. Too often, it is a platform for inanities praiseful or damning, instead of what it ought to be: an examination of the mysterious third component of the relationship between book and reader, the person and personality of the author. James Campbell's new book, Syncopations-a collection of profiles, literary essays and reminiscences drawn primarily from the pages of The Guardian Review, The Times Literary Supplement and other British publications-suggests there's some life left in the form. Whether this impression stems more from Campbell's fluency and intimate tone of voice, or from his angled, trans-Atlantic vision of mostly American writers, is hard to say. Whatever the cause, Syncopations should interest any observer of postwar American letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Campbell (born 5 June 1951), is a Scottish writer. He was born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Edinburgh (1974–78), he is a former editor of the New Edinburgh Review and works for The Times Literary Supplement, where he writes the weekly "NB" column under the pen-name J.C.
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Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Toronto. 1973. McClelland & Stewart. 0771083300. Story Of A Mixed-Race Woman Who Rediscoveres Her Cree Roots. 157 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The story of a mixed-race woman who rediscoveres her Cree roots. For Maria Campbell, a Mtis (Halfbreed) in Canada, the brutal realities of poverty, pain, and degradation intruded early and followed her every step. Her story is a harsh one, but it is told without bitterness or self-pity. It is a story that begins in 1940 in northern Saskatchewan and moves across Canadas West, where Maria roamed in the rootless existence of day-to-day jobs, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Her path strayed ever near hospital doors and prison walls. It was Cheechum, her Cree great-grandmother, whose indomitable spirit sustained Maria Campbell through her most desperate times. Cheechums stubborn dignity eventually led the author to take pride in her Mtis heritage, and Cheechums image inspired her in her drive for her own life, dignity; and purpose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in 1940, Maria Campbell (nee June Stifle) was raised in a close-knit Metis community that existed marginally in shanties on Crown land north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Halfbreed - the most acclaimed Aboriginal autobiography of the 1970s - recalls Campbell's trying, poverty-stricken childhood and early adulthood, which included a stint as a high-end prostitute in Vancouver, battles with drug and alcohol addiction, and involvement in the drug trade. Speaking to the racism and violence that she, her family, and community faced from the surrounding White and Indian populations, Campbell's story is not merely a personal one, but also gives voice to the Metis as a whole, particularly to Metis women.
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Canaday, John. Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project. Albuquerque. 2017. University of New Mexico Press. 9780826358837. Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. 6 x 9. 224 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Human frailty and genius, human work of horror and salvation, human foibles and superhuman forces: in Critical Assembly John Canaday deploys lyric poetry, with terrific formal intelligence, to tell anew the enduring, fate-ridden story of the Manhattan Project.' - Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate. With technical mastery and remarkable empathy, John Canaday introduces readers to the people involved in the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb, from initial theoretical conversations to the secretive work at Los Alamos. Critical Assembly also includes brief biographies, notes, and a bibliography for further exploration about this critical event in world history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Canaday is the author of The Invisible World: Poems and The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. His poetry has been widely published.
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Cancio-Bello, Marci Calabretta. Hour of the Ox. Pittsburgh. 2016. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822964216. Pitt Poetry Series. 64 pages. paperback. Cover art: 'Pan' by South African artist Jono Dry.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of The 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Hour of the Ox received the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it “a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender.” Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Last Train to the Midnight Market. She received a Kundiman Poetry Fellowship and the inaugural John S. and James L. Knight Fellowship at Florida International University, and currently serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair, cofounding editor of Print-Oriented Bastards, and producer for The Working Poet Radio Show. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Narrative Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals.
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Cantor, Jay. Krazy Kat: A Novel in 5 Panels. New York. 1988. Knopf. 0394550250. 255 pages. hardcover. Jacket design & illustration by Steven Guarnaccia.
DESCRIPTION - Krazy Kat adores Ignatz Mouse. She sees the bricks he hurls at her head as tokens of love, and each day Ignatz arranges a cunningly different method of delivery for his missile. But when Ignatz and Krazy witness the mega-brick explosion in the desert, Krazy becomes depressed, and refuses to perform. To coax her back to work so they can regain their lost limelight, Ignatz invents his own brand of psychotherapy, orchestrates her kidnapping, and tries to seduce Krazy with promises of stardom from a Hollywood producer. As the mouse confronts the Kat with bewildering new concepts like sex, death, and politics, Ignatz and Krazy begin yearning to become round, for a fullness of body and spirit beyond their two-dimensional realm. Forming an altogether witty and winning counterpoint to George Herriman's classic comic strip, Jay Cantor's kinetic novel has become a classic in its own right, one of those masterpieces that creates its own unforgettable universe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jay Cantor (born 1948 New York City) is an American novelist, and essayist. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace. His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson. He was on the 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.
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Cantor, Jay. On Giving Birth To One's Own Mother: Essays On Art and Society. New York. 1991. Knopf. 0394587529. 179 pages. hardcover. Jacket art is a portrait - 'The Artist and His Mother', 1934, by Arshile Gorky. Jacket design by Archie Ferguson.
DESCRIPTION - With wit and passion, Jay Cantor in this sequence of essays tackles some of the philosophical underpinnings of modern life and art. In ‘The Patriarchs,' American leftist thought of the Sixties, nourished on Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, meets the post-modern culture of the Eighties, raising questions that will have to be answered in the Nineties. (How can we defeat post-modern irony, post-modern despair? Will we participate in reshaping ourselves or be designed by others?) The title essay, ‘On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother,' looks at Arshile Gorky painting and repainting a portrait of his mother and himself and explores the ways in which the artist transforms the loss of those he loves into art - to remake himself and to overcome his sadness. The collection includes, as well, essays on contemporary film (can we again make movies that we will want to splice into our personalities?); on making history into fiction (can we tell the story in a way that will change the shape of the future?); on Afro-American jazz, and how its inspired conversation between voices can serve as a model for a new, democratic post-modernism; on great popular art (Krazy Kat) and the endless joy it promises; and on three profound documentary films of the Holocaust, works that offer us a palpable, terrifying knowledge of loss and death, and so a deeper relationship to life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jay Cantor (born 1948 New York City) is an American novelist, and essayist. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace. His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson. He was on the 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.
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Cantor, Jay. The Death of Che Guevara. New York. 1983. Knopf. 0394517679. 577 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In his critically acclaimed epic first novel, Jay Cantor, author of Krazy Kat and Great Neck, draws on history, myth, and his own prodigious imagination to take on the life and death of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. In his now famous progress through modern times, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, the scion of a liberal Argentine family, abandoned a medical career to become a revolutionary. A fiery comrade of Fidel Castro's who joined him in overthrowing the Cuban government of Baptista, Che later broke with Castro to lead a guerrilla movement in Bolivia. As the novel charts Che's bold evolution, it also offers an incisive look at Latin America's revolutionary struggles, an exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, and a brilliant exegesis of the psychology of radical activisim.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jay Cantor (born 1948 New York City) is an American novelist, and essayist. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace. His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson. He was on the 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.
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Capote, Truman. A Tree of Night and Other Stories. New York. 1949. Random House. 209 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In this collection of short stories the author of In Cold Blood explores worlds of fear and doubt: the menacing Deep South, the impenetrable private realms of childhood -- beautiful yet frightening. The stories in A Tree of Night and Other Stories involve recurring themes of isolation and emotional anxiety. The protagonists are not quite ready to grow up, whether they are adults or children. The adult characters are emotionally isolated and bear unresolved emotional conflicts from childhood. Overall the stories are noted for involving "sexual anxiety and dysfunction without solidly grounded detail." The title story, "A Tree of Night", was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in October 1945. The book contains eight short stories: "Master Misery", "Children on Their Birthdays", "Shut a Final Door", "Jug of Silver", "Miriam". "The Headless Hawk". "My Side of the Matter". "A Tree of Night".
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 - August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.' At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's. New York. 1958. Random House. 179 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Breakfast at Tiffany's is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958. In it, a contemporary writer recalls his early days in New York City, when he makes the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbor, Holly Golightly. In 1961 it was adapted into a major motion picture of the same name. The novella is set in 1940s New York, specifically the Upper East Side, in a brownstone apartment. An area that experienced many changes following the Civil War, it went through its most major shift at the turn of the century. Broadly speaking, brownstones (the type of building that Holly lives in) were rebranded as more "stylish" places to live, rather than being thought of as decrepit and outdated buildings.[2] By the 1940s, it had become a fairly affluent area. The novella's setting plays a great role in the plot; various wealthy characters from the Upper East Side come in and out of Holly Golightly's life. Though the novella does not take place in the American South, there are mentions of it later in the novella: The reader follows Golightly's life in Manhattan for the entirety of the novella, but she was actually born in Texas, a place that she was desperate to escape.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 - August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.' At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple and Its Consequences. New York. 1965. Random House. 343 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 - August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.' At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Capote, Truman. Music For Chameleons. New York. 1980. Random House. 0394508262. 262 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An anthology of short stories both fiction and non-fiction and conversations. Capote is a master at creating settings and conjuring up personalities. The central story, a novella entitled Handcarved Coffins, follows the same guidelines as In Cold Blood yet is even more terrifying and haunting.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 - August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.' At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Capote, Truman. The Dogs Bark. New York. 1973. Random House. 0394487516. 419 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places is an anthology of works by Truman Capote. It includes essays from Local Color and Observations, as well as the The Muses Are Heard. The work is a largely retrospective look at Truman Capote's life spanning the time frame from 1942 to 1972. The title, inspired by the author André Gide is taken from an Arab proverb: "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 - August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.' At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Capote, Truman. The Muses Are Heard. New York. 1956. Random House. 182 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Muses Are Heard is an early journalistic work of Truman Capote. Originally published in The New Yorker, it is a narrative account of the cultural mission by The Everyman's Opera to the U.S.S.R. in the mid-1950s. Capote was sent to accompany the Opera as it staged a production of Porgy and Bess. First published in two parts, it was later released as a short non-fiction book. The book's title comes from a speech given by one of the Soviet cultural ministry staff, who declared, “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent. When the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 - August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.' At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York. 1977. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 003017631x. 346 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A personal memoir of the war in Vietnam, in which the author first served as a Marine and which he later covered as a reporter.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Caputo (born June 10, 1941) is an American author and journalist. He is best known for A Rumor of War, a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War. Caputo has written 15 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His latest, the nonfiction travel/adventure book The Longest Road: Overland In Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean, was published in July 2013 by Henry Holt.
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Caputo, Philip. Delcorso's Gallery. New York. 1983. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 0030582776. 352 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The respected journalist, Nicholas DelCorso, becomes obsessed with his crusade to expose the terrible realities of war in his photographs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Caputo (born June 10, 1941) is an American author and journalist. He is best known for A Rumor of War, a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War. Caputo has written 15 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His latest, the nonfiction travel/adventure book The Longest Road: Overland In Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean, was published in July 2013 by Henry Holt.
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Caputo, Philip. Horn of Africa. New York. 1980. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 0030421365. 487 pages. hardcover. Cover: Manny Haller.
DESCRIPTION - When Vietnam veteran and foreign correspondent Charlie Gage is recruited by the shadowy Thomas Colfax to assist with something called Operation Atropos, he has no idea he is about to be enlisted for guerilla warfare in northeast Africa. Once he realizes he's a mercenary, however, he is not at all concerned. Ever since his young secretary was killed by a grenade at their bureau office in Beirut a couple of years before, he has lost all volition. Which is why he so readily capitulates not only to Colfax, but also, and more dangerously so, to every command of Jeremy Nordstrand, the mystical megalomaniac determined to achieve greatness on their seemingly suicidal mission. Set in the forsaken yet exotic deserts of Ethiopia, Horn of Africa is a vividly detailed and masterfully plotted novel chronicling a broken man's struggle for salvation and inner freedom in the midst of a broken nation's fight for stability and peace.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Caputo (born June 10, 1941) is an American author and journalist. He is best known for A Rumor of War, a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War. Caputo has written 15 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His latest, the nonfiction travel/adventure book The Longest Road: Overland In Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean, was published in July 2013 by Henry Holt.
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Caputo, Philip. Indian Country. New York. 1987. Bantam Books. 0553051873. 419 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Indian Country is a sweeping, brave and compassionate story from one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the Vietnam experience. Christian Starkmann follows his boyhood friend, an Ojibwa Indian called Bonny George, from the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where they roamed, hunted and fished in their youths, to the wilderness of Vietnam, where they serve as soldiers in the same platoon. After returning home from the war, his friend buried on the battlefield he left behind, Christian begins to make a life for himself. Yet years later, although he is happily married to June, a good-hearted social worker, and has two daughters, Christian is still fighting--with the searing memories of combat, with the paranoid visions that are clouding his marriage and threatening his career, and most of all with the ghost of Bonny George, who haunts his dreams and presses him to come to terms with a secret so powerful it could destroy everything he has built.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Caputo (born June 10, 1941) is an American author and journalist. He is best known for A Rumor of War, a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War. Caputo has written 15 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His latest, the nonfiction travel/adventure book The Longest Road: Overland In Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean, was published in July 2013 by Henry Holt.
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Carelli, Anthony. Carnations: Poems. Princeton. 2011. Princeton University Press. 9780691149448. 59 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Frances Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet's materials - words, objects, phenomena - are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed. Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Carnations reminds us that unremarkable places and events - a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a cafe - can, in a blink, be new. A short walk home is briefly transformed into a cathedral, and the work-worn body becomes a dancer, a prophet, a muse.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anthony Carelli was raised in Poynette, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before completing an MFA in poetry at New York University. His poems have appeared in various magazines, including the New Yorker.
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Carkeet, David. Double Negative. New York. 1980. Dial Press. 0803717776. 246 pages. hardcover. Jacket Design by Judith K. Leeds.
DESCRIPTION - One almost hesitates to call this fascinating and richly comic novel a mystery, yet it is. There is murder, and a mystery is solved, but within these conventional boundaries the terrain is filled with wildness - bizarre killings in an ivory tower think-tank on the Wabash, where colleagues who can barely stand the sight of one another study the linguistic patterns of children. The first victim is a man who makes a fetish of cultivating enemies. The prime suspect is an iconoclastic linguist named Jeremy Cook, whose efforts to clear himself bring him into conflict with shrewd Lieutenant Leaf. To catch the murderer, Jeremy Cook must decipher a constantly changing language, a tongue known to everyone but remembered by no one, a riddle language in which it is impossible tO lie - baby talk. DOUBLE NEGATIVE is a novel of inflection as well as detection, and one of the most entertaining of the year.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Carkeet (born November 15, 1946, Sonora, California) is an American novelist and essayist. Three of his novels have been named New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year. Carkeet grew up in the small northern California town where he was born and attended the University of California at Davis and Berkeley, graduating from the Davis campus with a B.A. degree in German in 1968. He received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970 and a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Indiana University in 1973. From 1973 to 2002 he taught writing and linguistics at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He married Barbara Lubin of Elmira, New York, in 1975, and they raised three daughters, Anne, Laurie, and Molly. He has lived in Middlesex, Vermont, since 2003. Carkeet has written six novels for adults, two novels for young adults, and one memoir. A comic writer in the vein of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Peter De Vries, he is best known for his three novels featuring a linguist named Jeremy Cook as the protagonist:
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Carkeet, David. I Been There Before. New York. 1985. Harper & Row. 0060154268. 314 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - As the years of Mark Twain's birth and death coincided with the two successive appearances of Halley's Comet, this book records Twain's fictive reincarnation, provoked by the comet's approach toward Earth in November, 1985.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Carkeet (born November 15, 1946, Sonora, California) is an American novelist and essayist. Three of his novels have been named New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year. Carkeet grew up in the small northern California town where he was born and attended the University of California at Davis and Berkeley, graduating from the Davis campus with a B.A. degree in German in 1968. He received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970 and a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Indiana University in 1973. From 1973 to 2002 he taught writing and linguistics at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He married Barbara Lubin of Elmira, New York, in 1975, and they raised three daughters, Anne, Laurie, and Molly. He has lived in Middlesex, Vermont, since 2003. Carkeet has written six novels for adults, two novels for young adults, and one memoir. A comic writer in the vein of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Peter De Vries, he is best known for his three novels featuring a linguist named Jeremy Cook as the protagonist:
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Carlson, Tina. A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery: Poems. Albuquerque. 2023. University of New Mexico Press. 9780826365248. Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. 6 × 9. 128 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery gives voice to abused children, murdered women, research animals, war veterans, and even metronomes and lampshades. In poems inspired by Ovid, Tina Carlson explores the roots of voicelessness and journeys into metamorphosis, granting speech to those ignored or victimized and thereby allowing them to provide witness to their own lives. “Tina Carlson’s images are always palpable, surprising, their resonance almost too powerful for the page. What she does with those images, how she shapes and where she takes them, is an experience her readers won’t forget. I am still catching my breath.” —Margaret Randall, author of Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tina Carlson is also the author of Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems (UNM Press).
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Carmichael, Jacqueline Miller. Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker's Jubilee. Athens. 2003. University of Georgia Press. 9780820325750. 184 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - When twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Walker's first collection of poems, For My People, won the Yale Poets Award in 1942, she was just beginning her long and distinguished career as a poet, novelist, biographer, and teacher. When her novel Jubilee was published to great acclaim in 1966, the New York Review of Books said, "[It] chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages." Jubilee is noteworthy for being one of the first novels to present African American history from both a black and female perspective. It is a historical and fictional account of Walker's great-grandmother's life, from slavery through Reconstruction, as told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. In Trumpeting a Fiery Sound, Jacqueline Miller Carmichael examines the novel's genesis and composition, the process of revision and publication, the work's structure and narrative strategies, its use of history and folklore, and its critical reception in the three decades since its first publication.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JACQUELINE MILLER CARMICHAEL, who formerly taught English at Georgia State University, lives in Atlanta.
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Carpenter, Don. A Couple of Comedians. New York. 1979. Simon & Schuster. 0671228390. 220 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A Couple of Comedians is a novel by Don Carpenter, published in 1979, that explores the lives of two comedians navigating the Hollywood scene. The book is part of Carpenter's "Hollywood Trilogy," which delves into the raw and often unglamorous aspects of the entertainment industry.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 - July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. When Carpenter was 16, he and his family moved to Portland, Oregon where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met a struggling cartoonist named Shel Silverstein who would gain fame as a beloved author of children's books. When Carpenter was discharged from service in 1955 he returned to Portland where he eloped with Martha Ryherd. They had two daughters - Bonnie and Leha, and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s. In 1957, Carpenter enrolled in San Francisco State College and received an M.A. when he graduated in 1961. Four years later (1965), the Carpenters settled in Mill Valley, California. Carpenter taught English for two years before publishing his first novel Hard Rain Falling (1966). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Carpenter lived in and out of Hollywood writing screenplays for movies. Carpenter wrote a screenplay for the film Pay Day which was filmed in 1972 and starred Rip Torn as a country singer. He also wrote a teleplay for an episode of the 1960s television series The High Chaparral called ‘Once on a Day in Spring'. He also wrote three Hollywood novels between 1975 and 1981. One of the most troubling chapters to occur in Carpenter's life was in 1984, when his best friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide. In the late 1980s, Carpenter suffered from several medical maladies including tuberculosis, diabetes, and glaucoma. As the years went on, Carpenter's illnesses got progressively worse. After many years of suffering, Carpenter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the summer of 1995 at his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 64. At the time of his death, Carpenter was working on a novel called Fridays at Enrico's, which was never published, and was possibly never completed. Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was recently reissued by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series, with an introduction by George Pelecanos.
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Carpenter, Don. Blade of Light. London. 1967. Arthur Barker. 143 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Brian Keogh.
DESCRIPTION - Ugly, stammering, mentally disturbed, Semple is nevertheless not unintelligent, and has a deep need to love and be loved. Receiving no affection from his squalid relatives, he worships instead a schoolfellow, handsome Harold Hunt. But Hunt sadistically spurns him: and, as a crowning humiliation, taunts his girlfriend Carole into sleeping with Semple, 'the school idiot'. This leads to tragedy: for Carole, nauseated by Semple, whispers 'Don't you touch me' - and, overcome by his lust, stunned and angered by her rebuff, he strangles her. After years in an institution, he emerges to find a steady job in the anonymity of a big American city. Yet he is still lonely - haunted by his past - with his devotion to Harold Hunt turned to hatred. So Semple begins to play peeping-torn on Harold and his wife. In BLADE OF LIGHT, Don Carpenter - whose first novel HARD RAIN FALLING was hailed by The Spectator as 'an important contribution to modern fiction' - etches an unsentimental but compassionate portrait of physical and psychological affliction. Semple reminds us at times of John Steinbeck's Lennie in OF MICE AND MEN.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 - July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. When Carpenter was 16, he and his family moved to Portland, Oregon where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met a struggling cartoonist named Shel Silverstein who would gain fame as a beloved author of children's books. When Carpenter was discharged from service in 1955 he returned to Portland where he eloped with Martha Ryherd. They had two daughters - Bonnie and Leha, and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s. In 1957, Carpenter enrolled in San Francisco State College and received an M.A. when he graduated in 1961. Four years later (1965), the Carpenters settled in Mill Valley, California. Carpenter taught English for two years before publishing his first novel Hard Rain Falling (1966). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Carpenter lived in and out of Hollywood writing screenplays for movies. Carpenter wrote a screenplay for the film Pay Day which was filmed in 1972 and starred Rip Torn as a country singer. He also wrote a teleplay for an episode of the 1960s television series The High Chaparral called ‘Once on a Day in Spring'. He also wrote three Hollywood novels between 1975 and 1981. One of the most troubling chapters to occur in Carpenter's life was in 1984, when his best friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide. In the late 1980s, Carpenter suffered from several medical maladies including tuberculosis, diabetes, and glaucoma. As the years went on, Carpenter's illnesses got progressively worse. After many years of suffering, Carpenter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the summer of 1995 at his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 64. At the time of his death, Carpenter was working on a novel called Fridays at Enrico's, which was never published, and was possibly never completed. Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was recently reissued by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series, with an introduction by George Pelecanos.
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Carpenter, Don. Hard Rain Falling. New York. 1966. Harcourt Brace & World. 308 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkiin.
DESCRIPTION - Hardheaded, hard-hitting, written with gusto, sardonic humor, and the utmost seriousness, HARD RAIN FALLING is a picaresque novel, absorbing as narrative, devastating as a study of freedom - and imprisonment - in contemporary society. Jack Levitt, a white foundling, and Billy Lancing, a Negro drifter, are seventeen when they first briefly encounter each other in Portland, Oregon - one a formidable, tough-looking fugitive from an orphan asylum, the other already a brilliantly accomplished pool-hall hustler. Years later they meet again, in San Quentin, where Jack had landed on a charge of statutory rape, Billy for forgery. In the interim, Billy has married, begotten a son, taken a mistress, gone to college: Jack has boxed, bucked logs, worked in a cannery, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and spend time in reform school and county jails. What happens in san Quentin is crucial to both men, and helps to shape the ironic conclusion of the story in San Francisco. Let the gentle reader be warned that there is rough talk in this book, as well as rough action. Let the tough-minded reader rejoice in its vigorous style, acute characterization, originality, honesty, and high intelligence. Don Carpenter is an exciting discovery, and he has written a strong and memorable first novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Don Carpenter (1931-1995) was born in Berkeley, California, and grew up on the West Coast. He served in the air force during the Korean War, attended the University of Portland, and received a B.S. from Portland State College and an M.A. from San Francisco State College. Carpenter, his wife, Martha, and their two daughters settled in Mill Valley, near San Francisco, and he became good friends with the local writers Evan Connell and, especially, Richard Brautigan. His first book, HARD RAIN FALLING, was published in 1966 and was followed by nine other novels as well as several collections of short stories. Carpenter also wrote for the movies and television and spent a good deal of time in Hollywood, the subject of several of his novels. Plagued by poor health in his later years, he committed suicide at the age of sixty-four.
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Carpenter, Don. The Class of '49. San Francisco. 1985. North Point Press. 0865472130. 183 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Susan Ross. Jacket design by David Bullen.
DESCRIPTION - The novel and two stories in THE CLASS OF '49 take us from a Portland, Oregon, high school in 1949, through such memorable way stations as the Brookley Air Base Service Club in Mobile, Alabama, and Palace Billiards in San Francisco, to Sunset Strip and a Hollywood movie lot in the late sixties. In a sequence of short narratives the title novel portrays the triumphs and embarrassments of several students over the course of a single year. They are as different as Clyde Merriman, who ‘had no particular ambitions' but whose future is quickly decided when his girlfriend gets pregnant; the Maloney brothers, one the student body president, the other an outcast; Janet Saterlee, who trained for fifteen years to be Queen of the Rose Festival; Blaze Cooney, who attempts to write a novel; Anne Tressman, whose only interest is ballet; and Tommy German, the hanger-on, who tries desperately to meet girls on the seaside boardwalk - yet behind their fantasies and foibles lies a common rite of passage. ‘One Pocket' traces the fascination of a writer, stuck in the air force, with the game of pool. He discovers that on occasion he can shoot ‘in a ‘zone' way over his head,' a discovery at once exhilarating and alarming. Finally, in ‘Glitter: A Memory,' the writer, at work on a screenplay for a fading star, learns the lesson of Hollywood that things are not as they seem in a world of fantasy, deception, and calculated illusion. Comical, lively, and tender, THE CLASS OF '49 shows Don Carpenter's voice to be one of the most vital in contemporary American writing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 - July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. When Carpenter was 16, he and his family moved to Portland, Oregon where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met a struggling cartoonist named Shel Silverstein who would gain fame as a beloved author of children's books. When Carpenter was discharged from service in 1955 he returned to Portland where he eloped with Martha Ryherd. They had two daughters - Bonnie and Leha, and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s. In 1957, Carpenter enrolled in San Francisco State College and received an M.A. when he graduated in 1961. Four years later (1965), the Carpenters settled in Mill Valley, California. Carpenter taught English for two years before publishing his first novel Hard Rain Falling (1966). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Carpenter lived in and out of Hollywood writing screenplays for movies. Carpenter wrote a screenplay for the film Pay Day which was filmed in 1972 and starred Rip Torn as a country singer. He also wrote a teleplay for an episode of the 1960s television series The High Chaparral called ‘Once on a Day in Spring'. He also wrote three Hollywood novels between 1975 and 1981. One of the most troubling chapters to occur in Carpenter's life was in 1984, when his best friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide. In the late 1980s, Carpenter suffered from several medical maladies including tuberculosis, diabetes, and glaucoma. As the years went on, Carpenter's illnesses got progressively worse. After many years of suffering, Carpenter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the summer of 1995 at his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 64. At the time of his death, Carpenter was working on a novel called Fridays at Enrico's, which was never published, and was possibly never completed. Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was recently reissued by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series, with an introduction by George Pelecanos.
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Carpenter, Don. The Dispossessed. San Francisco. 1986. North Point Press. 0865472211. 178 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Don Carpenter's new novel is set in a lovely small town. The village residents live in an uneasy truce with the longhairs, street philosophers, drifters, runaways, and others of simple heart who make the streets of the town their home and haven: the crazies provide color and amusement, but they also lend an air of unpredictability, uncertainty, and instability--they present a visible challenge to the decidedly middle-class values of the townspeople. The center of this quiet village is The Depot, a coffee shop and gathering spot for locals and travellers alike. The commuters assemble in the morning for coffee and in the evening for wine while they unravel the mysteries of the late twentieth century. The street people emerge from the woods each day to sun themselves in town, watching the action and hanging out. The police play their regular chess game, keeping the clean and the unclean in their appropriate places. Everything is very, very normal. Until a murder is committed. And then a second. Rumors of rape and mutilation spread. Daily affairs and affairs of the heart are disrupted. A quiet frenzy envelops the whole community--commuter or bum, no one is safe. The town fathers and their police focus on their most visible "enemies," the people of the street, as suspects: without the disarray their presence provides this never would have happened. Order is suddenly much more attractive than justice. Don Carpenter weaves a riveting tale of darkness and evil unfortunately as current as this morning's paper. His ear for dialogue captures a cast of characters as real as the evening news. A story of our time by one of America's finest writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 - July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. When Carpenter was 16, he and his family moved to Portland, Oregon where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met a struggling cartoonist named Shel Silverstein who would gain fame as a beloved author of children's books. When Carpenter was discharged from service in 1955 he returned to Portland where he eloped with Martha Ryherd. They had two daughters - Bonnie and Leha, and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s. In 1957, Carpenter enrolled in San Francisco State College and received an M.A. when he graduated in 1961. Four years later (1965), the Carpenters settled in Mill Valley, California. Carpenter taught English for two years before publishing his first novel Hard Rain Falling (1966). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Carpenter lived in and out of Hollywood writing screenplays for movies. Carpenter wrote a screenplay for the film Pay Day which was filmed in 1972 and starred Rip Torn as a country singer. He also wrote a teleplay for an episode of the 1960s television series The High Chaparral called ‘Once on a Day in Spring'. He also wrote three Hollywood novels between 1975 and 1981. One of the most troubling chapters to occur in Carpenter's life was in 1984, when his best friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide. In the late 1980s, Carpenter suffered from several medical maladies including tuberculosis, diabetes, and glaucoma. As the years went on, Carpenter's illnesses got progressively worse. After many years of suffering, Carpenter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the summer of 1995 at his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 64. At the time of his death, Carpenter was working on a novel called Fridays at Enrico's, which was never published, and was possibly never completed. Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was recently reissued by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series, with an introduction by George Pelecanos.
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Carpenter, Don. Turnaround. New York. 1981. Simon & Schuster. 0671253530. 253 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Norman Mailer hailed Don Carpenter's last novel, A Couple of Comedians, as "the best novel I've ever read about contemporary show biz." Lyn Tornabene called it "marvelous, exotic, and unforgettable." The same qualities that have won this author such high praise in the past are again present in his new novel, which Kirkus Reviews calls a "a standout." In it, Carpenter takes us inside the motion-picture industry--and into the ambitious, obsessive lives of its producers, writers, actors, and deal makers. At its center are Jerry Rexford, a talented but naive, shy young man struggling to break into The Business as a writer; Rick Heidelberg, a "young Turk" with one big success behind him, desperate to prove that he's more than a "one-picture wonder boy"; and, topping this group, Alexander Hellstrom, a middle-aged mogul who, in the midst of the most passionate affair of his life, begins to wonder if it all really matters. What happens to them--and the people who surround them--unfolds in a novel about Hollywood written with wit, pace, and, above all, the authenticity that have become Don Carpenter's trademarks.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 - July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. When Carpenter was 16, he and his family moved to Portland, Oregon where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met a struggling cartoonist named Shel Silverstein who would gain fame as a beloved author of children's books. When Carpenter was discharged from service in 1955 he returned to Portland where he eloped with Martha Ryherd. They had two daughters - Bonnie and Leha, and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s. In 1957, Carpenter enrolled in San Francisco State College and received an M.A. when he graduated in 1961. Four years later (1965), the Carpenters settled in Mill Valley, California. Carpenter taught English for two years before publishing his first novel Hard Rain Falling (1966). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Carpenter lived in and out of Hollywood writing screenplays for movies. Carpenter wrote a screenplay for the film Pay Day which was filmed in 1972 and starred Rip Torn as a country singer. He also wrote a teleplay for an episode of the 1960s television series The High Chaparral called ‘Once on a Day in Spring'. He also wrote three Hollywood novels between 1975 and 1981. One of the most troubling chapters to occur in Carpenter's life was in 1984, when his best friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide. In the late 1980s, Carpenter suffered from several medical maladies including tuberculosis, diabetes, and glaucoma. As the years went on, Carpenter's illnesses got progressively worse. After many years of suffering, Carpenter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the summer of 1995 at his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 64. At the time of his death, Carpenter was working on a novel called Fridays at Enrico's, which was never published, and was possibly never completed. Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was recently reissued by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series, with an introduction by George Pelecanos.
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Carr, A. A. Eye Killers. Norman. 1995. University of Oklahoma Press. 0806127074. 352 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Lurking in the caves of eastern New Mexico, Falke, a thousand-year-old vampire, chooses his next bride: Melissa Roanhorse, an Albuquerque teenager. To regain his granddaughter's life, Michael Roanhorse, an old Navajo sheepherder wise to the power of myth, must outwit the vampire and his loyal coven. So begins A. A. Carr's Eye Killers, a novel that combines the Eastern European legend of the vampire with the Navajo tale of the monster slayer. The songs of Michael Roanhorse's childhood include potent chants passed down through his grandmother, who sang to him of Changing Woman and her Warrior Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. But Michael's spiritual strength and his memory have waned with the years. Who is left to help reunite him with his family and his family with their heritage? Michael enlists Diana Logan, Melissa's young English teacher, to wrestle Melissa from the vampire. But to conquer Falke they must also overpower his coven: Elizabeth, captured by Falke in the 1850s during her family's journey along the Santa Fe Trail, and Hanna, once a prostitute in Old Albuquerque, who aspires to supplant Falke's vampire reign. Michael must invoke ancient traditions to bring Melissa home. The elders undertake to teach Diana, but her Irish-American heritage has not prepared her for a fight against shape-shifting vampires who have lived - and murdered - for centuries. In Eye Killers, Carr delivers an imaginative clash of cultures - both a suspenseful thriller and a valid rendering of navajo and Pueblo tribal life in contemporary New Mexico. His inventiveness, expressed through melodic prose and layers of fine storytelling, weaves new legends of the American Southwest.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - A. A. Carr, producer and director of Prairie Dog Films, is Navajo and Laguna Pueblo. Eye Killers is his first novel.
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Carretta, Vincent (editor). Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century. Lexington. 1996. University Press of Kentucky. 0813119766. 387 pages. hardcover. Front cover illustration of Francis Williams courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Jacket design by Rebecca Lloyd Lemna.
DESCRIPTION - In UNCHAINED VOICES, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard dearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic - America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also dearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ignatius Sancho Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano told their stories as Afro-Britons who recognized the sovereignty of George III; Johnson Green, Belinda, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture Smith spoke and wrote as African Americans in the United States; Phillis Wheatley, initially an Afro-British poet, later chose an African-American identity; Francis Williams and George Liele wrote in Jamaica; David George and Boston King, who served with the British forces in the American Revolution and later lived in Canada, composed their narratives as British subjects in the newly established settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, UNCHAINED VOICES gives a dear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta, professor of English literature at the University of Maryland, is the author of several books on eighteenth-century literature and, most recently, the editor of Olaudah Equiano's THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE AND OTHER WRITINGS.
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Carretta, Vincent and Gould, Philip (editors). Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Louisville. 2001. University Press of Kentucky. 0813122031. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings. The contributors address the shifting meanings of race and gender during this period, explore how black identity was cultivated within a capitalist economy, discuss the impact of Christian religion and the Enlightenment on definitions of freedom and liberty, and identify ways in which black literature both engaged with and rebelled against Anglo-American culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta, professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the editor of Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Philip Gould, associate professor of English at Brown University, is the co-editor of Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism.
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Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. Athens. 2011. University of Georgia Press. 9780820333380. 279 pages. hardcover. Jacket image: Mindy Basinger Hill. Jacket illustration: Engraving of Phillis Wheatley, Scipio Moorhead.
DESCRIPTION - With POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman - of any race or background - to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. In PHILLIS WHEATLEY, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status. A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography. Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His most recent books are EQUIANO, THE AFRICAN: BIOGRAPHY OF A SELF-MADE MAN, winner of the Annibel Jenkins Prize, and THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILIP QUAQUE, THE FIRST AFRICAN ANGLICAN MISSIONARY, coedited with Ty M. Reese.
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Carroll, E. Jean. Hunter: The Strange & Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson. New York. 1993. Dutton. 0525935681. 341 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A biography of the journalist who was the inspiration for Doonesbury's Uncle Duke features material culled from interviews with family, friends, ex-lovers, and such figures as Tom McGuane, George McGovern, Gay Talese, and others.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Jean Carroll (born December 12, 1943) is an American journalist, author, and advice columnist. Her "Ask E. Jean" column appeared in Elle magazine from 1993 through 2019, becoming one of the longest-running advice columns in American publishing. In her 2019 book, What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, Carroll accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s. Her book Not My Type, subtitled One Woman Against a President, debuted at #2 on the New York Times best-seller list on June 28, 2025.
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Carroll, Jonathan. A Child Across the Sky. New York. 1990. Doubleday. 0385265352. 215 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When a film-maker commits suicide, his legacy to his old friend is to solve the riddle of his death and to complete his final, flawed horror movie. This thriller transcends reality into the world of fantasy where the living and the dead intermingle.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. After Silence. New York. 1993. Doubleday. 0385419740. 227 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Scarred by recent love affairs, L.A. cartoonist Max Fischer meets and moves in with Lily Aaron and her nine-year-old son, Lincoln, but soon discovers that Lily is running from a heinous crime she has committed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. Black Cocktail. London. 1990. Century/A Legend Novella. 0712636803. Illustrated by Dave Mckean. 76 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A radio host from San Francisco, his new lover, and a high school kid who does not age are brought together in an illustrated tale of strength and strange foes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. Bones of the Moon. New York. 1988. Arbor House/Morrow. 0877959374. 217 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration & design by Thomas Canty.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Cullen James is a young woman whose life dictates her dreams - and whose dreams control her life.' In her first dream, she found the perfect man - and the same thing promptly happened in life. Now, though, she has begun to dream dreams set in Rondua, a fantasy world of high adventure, full of tests of her courage and strength. And slowly, quietly, her dream world is spilling over into her New York City reality and beginning to threaten everything she loves in life. Her friends are gathered to help her - but even her newfound courage may not be enough.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. From the Teeth of Angels. New York. 1994. Doubleday. 0385468415. 212 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Honi Werner.
DESCRIPTION - Jonathan Carroll is no longer just a cult author. His previous novel, AFTER SILENCE, placed this gifted and award-winning writer squarely in the mainstream. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, ‘AFTER SILENCE is filled with people who feel as real as one's closest friends, observed with a penetrating, and sometimes brutally chilling, clarity. a taut, original work whose excellence fulfills the promises made by this remarkable author over the last dozen years.' In FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS, Jonathan Carroll returns to that unique literary landscape that he paves with magic and wonder. While vacationing in Sardinia, Ian McGann meets Death in a dream. Death promises to answer any of McGann's questions, but if he fails to understand the answers, he will have to pay with his life. In Los Angeles, successful film actress Arlen Ford is no longer happy living in the Hollywood fast lane. She gives up everything - her career, her house, her glamorous lifestyle - and moves to Austria, where she meets a passionate war correspondent. From the start, their relationship is all-consuming. Arlen realizes she has been waiting for this man all her life. And in Vienna, the terminally ill Wyatt Leonard suddenly discovers that he has the ability to raise the dead. How all three of these extraordinary fates converge is at the heart of Jonathan Carroll's most daring and provocative novel, in which he dares to ask - and answer - the ultimate question: What is Death?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. Kissing the Beehive. New York. 1998. Doubleday. 0385480113. 240 pages. hardocover.
DESCRIPTION - Bestselling author Sam Bayer is stuck. Burned out from his third divorce, bored with the formulaic rut his writing has fallen into, and unable to deliver the manuscript for which he has been paid a stratospheric advance, he is desperate for inspiration. But a chance visit to his hometown of Crane's View, New York, sparks his imagination. Soon he immerses himself in an unsolved case of murder that took place when he was a teenager - Sam himself had discovered the body of the victim, a beautiful and wild teenage girl named Pauline. At the same time he is drawn into an explosive affair with a gorgeous but seriously loopy fan with the improbable name of Veronica Lake. As Sam learns the disturbing facts about his lover's past, Pauline's murderer reappears - not only endangering Sam but putting his beloved fifteen-year-old daughter in jeopardy as well. Not knowing whom to trust, Sam has to brace himself for the truly unexpected resolution to this decades-old mystery.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. Outside the Dog Museum. New York. 1992. Doubleday. 0385419732. 243 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Harry Radcliffe is a brilliant prize-winning architect---witty and remarkable. He's also a self-serving opportunist, ready to take advantage of whatever situations, and women, come his way. But now, newly divorced and having had an inexplicable nervous breakdown, Harry is being wooed by the extremely wealthy Sultan of Saru to design a billion-dollar dog museum. In Saru, he finds himself in a world even madder and more unreal than the one he left behind, and as his obsession grows, the powers of magic weave around him, and the implications of his strange undertaking grow more ominous and astounding.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. Sleeping in Flame. New York. 1989. Doubleday. 0385249578. 274 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Mel Odom.
DESCRIPTION - Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre - he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past - so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. The Land of Laughs. New York. 1980. Viking Press. 0670417556. 241 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Mel Brofman.
DESCRIPTION - Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to The Land of Laughs. A novel about how terrifying that would be. Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants-in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four. Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page.leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carroll, Jonathan. Voice of Our Shadow. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 067049240x. 189 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - For Joe Lennox, successful young writer, Vienna provides a refuge from the tragedy of his brother's death, until he starts up a friendship with the eccentric India Tate and her magician husband Paul. Gradually Joe falls in love with India, but Paul finds out - before he suddenly drops dead. And now Joe has two deaths on his conscience and another voice calling from beyond the grave.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
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Carter, Steven R. Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana. 1991. University of Illinois Press. 0252017498. 201 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer at age 34, she left behind an impressive literary legacy that included a number of important dramatic works, such as the classic A RAISIN IN THE SUN. Here is the first comprehensive in-depth literary study of her complex multicultural plays and screenplays. Steven R. Carter, granted private access to all her manuscripts and papers, examines not only Hansberry's published drama, but also significant unpublished works. While Hansberry was totally immersed in the political and social movements of her time, she shared with Bertolt Brecht and Sean O'Casey the largeness of vision to create works of genuine artistry and enduring value. Hansberry's plays and works in progress include dramas set in the antebellum American South, Africa, Haiti, Greenwich Village, a post-atomic holocaust wasteland, and a fantasized deserted plain. She had projected or begun research on works set among the Navajo Indians, the eighteenth-century British, and the ancient Egyptians. Carter had access to all these works in progress. This insightful study opens with an overview of Hansberry's cultural, social, political, and philosophical views and their relation to her artistic goals. Following with detailed
DESCRIPTIONs and analyses of Hansberry's dramatic output, Carter concludes with an assessment of her dramatic achievements. ‘This book will be very useful to students and instructors who are looking for ways of bringing the life and work of Lorraine Hansberry together. The Caribbean works are very interesting, and Carter brings a whole new body of Hansberry's work to the public. Students of theater and drama as well as of American literature and women's literature will be sure to find this a very useful text.' - Nellie McKay, author of JEAN TOOMER, ARTIST: A STUDY OF HIS LITERARY LIFE AND WORK, 1894-1936.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - STEVEN R. CARTER is associate professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico and the author of numerous articles on Lorraine Hansberry, including the entry on Hansberry in THE CONCISE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.
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Carter, Vincent O. Such Sweet Thunder. South Royalton. 2003. Steerforth Press. 1586420585. 540 pages. hardcover. Cover: Aaron Douglas-'The Creation'.
DESCRIPTION - This unique and compelling novel deserves a place of prominence in American literature. Completed in 1963, read and widely admired in manuscript by a network of expatriate American artists strung across Europe, it was never published during Vincent Carter's lifetime. In 2003, Steerforth Press published the text in its entirety, knowing the book needed editing but committed to publishing this definitive hardcover edition of the work as Carter had left it. The first paperback edition has undergone substantial cutting. The writing in the paperback edition remains Carter's, and judicious pruning has given the story more immediacy, made it more likely to connect with the wide readership that should be the due of so singular and beautiful a novel. Set in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Jazz Age of the 1920s and '30s, SUCH SWEET THUNDER is a majestic evocation of childhood and parental love told through the eyes of a remarkable boy, Amerigo Jones. This vivid portrait of an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices is nonetheless rendered with love and longing for a time and place that was enriched by a vibrant, burgeoning, and widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill, earning a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spending a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in self-imposed exile. He died there in 1983.
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Carter, Vincent O. The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind. New York. 1973. John Day. 0381982378. 297 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Palevitz.
DESCRIPTION - THE BERN BOOK is Vincent Carter's meandering reflection on being the only black man in the town of Bern, Switzerland, where he lived for over 30 years. He had gone there from Kansas City, via Paris (he first thought of actually settling in Paris, but found the noise level too great). Carter had a desperate need to write-but not about black power, which was then the only subject one expected of a black writer. He rather needed to explore himself, as so many other expatriates had done before him. The book is more akin to Robert Burton's 17th-century AN ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY than to Jimmy Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME. After a number of attempts to help get Carter's manuscript published, the literary biographer, Herbert Lottman, wrote an essay on this author that appeared in a cultural quarterly. Then, a New York publisher decided to bring out THE BERN BOOK after all-using Lottman's essay as an introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VINCENT O. CARTER was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he earned a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spent a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. His only work published during his lifetime was THE BERN BOOK: A RECORD OF THE VOYAGE OF THE MIND (1973), a memoir of his life in the Swiss capital during the 1950s. He completed a draft manuscript for SUCH SWEET THUNDER in 1963. Despite receiving enthusiastic support from some in the literary world, the manuscript did not deliver what publishers expected from ‘Negro literature' at the time, and after enduring a round of rejections Carter shelved the project. He died in Bern in 1983.
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Cartier, Xam Wilson. Be-Bop, Re-Bop. New York. 1987. Available Press. 0345348338. 147 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - BE-BOP, RE-BOP is told in language that swings off the page. It's the story of the ‘30s - Krazy Kat cartoons, the Louis-Schmelling fight, the young Nat King Cole. The story of the ‘40s - the Flying Black Aces, Billie Holliday, and the least-known titans of jazz. It's the story of the ‘5Os, with its bawling baby named desegregation, and the story of now, with its brie, chablis, and self-centered me. Riding a riff of sheer joy, BE-BOP conjures up the time and life of an on-the-spot sage known as Double, along with the dues and the cues of the headbump reality he chooses to use to his gain. Up front of that backdrop we meet Double's daughter and grow to know her, not just as Double's young chip - ‘Atta baby!' Double'd say to rusty-kneed me, jiving to the beat right beside him - but as an upgrown observer in Double's own image. Then there's level-edged Vole, Double's wife, and too there's PQ. Muh-Dear, and the rest of the regulars. Ool ya koo, ah ruby do flew. BE-BOP's the pulse of American Blacklife, the real-deal depiction of folks and their values as partners in time. Not a book but a beat, it's the tune of our roots on their trail to today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - XAM WILSON CARTIER is winner of the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a California Arts Council grant, Millay Colony Residency, and finalist placement in a spectrum of literary competitions. Three of her scripts for television were nominated for the California Emmy, and one of her dramas for stage was selected for exhibit at the 1984 SF Fair and Exposition. Born in St. Louis, Xam Cartier lives in San Francisco with her daughter, Kristin. Ms. Cartier is writer-in-residence at the Western Addition Cultural Center.
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Cartier, Xam. Muse-Echo Blues. New York. 1991. Harmony Books. 0517577933. 211 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Fontana. Jacket illustration by Javier Romero.
DESCRIPTION - Amid the new breed of BMW-driving, black urban professionals of 1990s San Francisco, suffocated by the sweet wine cooler sound of black fusion muzak, Kat, a young pianist with an acute case of com- poser's block, is sorely in need of inspiration. She finds it in the jazz past of the 1940s and in a soul sister named Kitty, a young woman whose problems parallel her own at a time of "dandies duded up in bigknotted ties/chest protectors flanked by flat-map labels of double breasted suits. the sharpest togged cats in. lisle handclocked socks, tucked into Stacy Adams and Florsheims - fine fancy kicks for cats on the move to a groove of their own. ." Kat is dealing with used-up men and recalcitrant landlords, Kitty is breathing the same air as the jazz greats and making love to Chicago, a sax player from the legendary Billy Eckstine's band. Bit by bit, Kitty infuses Kat's life with the spontaneity and easy grace of a Coltrane improvisation. "For nearly half a century, critics have been uniting for the arrival of a writer who would do for fiction what jazz poets Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, John Gould Fletcher, and Langston Hughes have done for poetry. She's here! Xam CartiEr is as exciting, riveting, and original as a Max Roach solo. She is to writing what Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan are to music." - ISHMAEL REED.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - XAM WILSON CARTIER is winner of the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a California Arts Council grant, Millay Colony Residency, and finalist placement in a spectrum of literary competitions. Three of her scripts for television were nominated for the California Emmy, and one of her dramas for stage was selected for exhibit at the 1984 SF Fair and Exposition. Born in St. Louis, Xam Cartier lives in San Francisco with her daughter, Kristin. Ms. Cartier is writer-in-residence at the Western Addition Cultural Center.
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Carver, Raymond. A New Path To the Waterfall. New York. 1989. Atlantic Monthly Press. 087113280x. 126 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Poetry was as important to Raymond Carver as his short stories and this collection sounds a key-note of enjoyment in the present rather than regret for the past. In the introduction, his widow gives a moving account of his last days, his love of Chekhov and the poems of Czeslaw Milosz.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. New York. 1998. Knopf. 0375403981. 416 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - 'I began as a poet, my first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short-story writer - and occasional essayist' in that order.' Now, in what would have been his sixtieth year, and ten years after his death, Raymond Carver's poems - more than three hundred in all - are collected in this volume, allowing readers to experience their full range and overwhelming cumulative power. This complete edition brings together, in their order of publication, the early poems of Fires, the mature work of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water and Ultramarine, and the last, intensely moving collection, A New Path to the Waterfall. Poems uncollected during his lifetime, but published posthumously in No Heroics, Please, are included in an appendix. The text has been edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, whose notes address details of first publication and significant variant readings. The introduction by Tess Gallagher, Mr. Carver's widow, provides valuable insights into his methods of composition. Hailed as our own Chekhov, and certainly the preeminent storyteller of his time, Raymond Carver is revealed in All of Us as the 'heir to that most appealing American poetic voice, the lyricism of Theodore Rothke and James Wright' (New York Times). And whether in fiction or verse, his heart, craft, and vision ensure his essential position in modern literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. New York. 1990. Scribners. 0684191660. Photographs by Bob Adelman. Introduction by Tess Gallagher. 159 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Carver Country is a new updated edition of a 1990 classic. Adelman's evocative duotone photographs of the landscape and people of Carver's life in Washington, Oregon, California, and New York state are paired with selections from Carver's poems, stories, and letters. This 'visual biography' reveals that the great depth and melancholy Carver manifested in his character's lives was often directly born out of the surrounding world and his inner demons. What results becomes a profound meditation on the intersection of the fictionalized world and the physical world. Raymond Carver's gritty texts, combined with Adelman's photographs of Carver's people and haunts, re-create the world of this major writer, bringing to life the bleak, blue-collar towns, people, and places that became the inspiration for much of his work. 113 duotone photos.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York. 1983. Knopf. 0394528840. 228 pages. hardcover. Jacket art & design by Sara Eisenman.
DESCRIPTION - It was with a collection of short stories called WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE? that a young, unknown writer from Clatskanie, Oregon, took the critics by surprise and first established his claim to national notice. Thereafter, on the evidence of a second collection, WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, Cambridge University's Frank Kermode declared Raymond Carver a master of the short form. A new vision, a new method, a new tonality - these are the components of the program that has elevated Carver to international prominence. What is promptly recognizable in his work is the queer effect that issues from its surface simplicity. It is a plainness that gives off yeasty intimations of menace, as if weirdly unhygienic tales were being told, warnings of malignancies that might overtake you if you picked up the wrong utensil, uttered the wrong word. And yet Carver's world is really the world of the homely and the unexceptional, colorless people going about the business of their colorless lives. How Carver makes of their uninflected histories a primer on moral terror speaks to the magic of his force as a literary artist. But nowhere in his earlier fiction is the alchemy by which he transmutes the banal into the numinous so strange and so potent as it is in Cathedral. Indeed, the twelve stories in this book constitute a kind of grammar of that feathery language only the heart ever hears, and only at four o'clock in the morning. There is something morbidly forbidden in the places these stories go, in the sensations mere objects are made to deliver - packages of frozen food thawing on a kitchen table, a plaster cast of teeth set atop a television cabinet, the figuration of a spaceship on a birthday cake decorated for a child who must die. But none of the images will grip you as ferociously as will the one at the close of the title story - the hand of a blind man seen riding the hand of a sighted man. It is as if Carver has passed a wand over words on paper, and thus made of this story, and of those that precede it, a version of the thing itself, the charmed interior of that edifice, the cathedral - a spaciousness that is hushed, severe, transporting. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara. 1983. Capra Press. 0884961958. 189 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - More than 60 stories, poems and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection which clearly illustrates the astounding process of Carver's literary development. Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of Carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir of his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and the title essay about the influences on his writing life; fifty poems, many of them not collected elsewhere; and, seven stories, including three from the early collection "Furious Seasons".
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Furious Seasons. Santa Barbara. 1977. Capra Press. 0884961133. 110 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Raymond Carver's second collection of short stories. In Furious Seasons, a married man impregnates and then murders his sister by slashing her throat with a razor. The narrative switches back and forth between the protagonist's present and past; oddly, the past is rendered in present tense and the present in past tense.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. New York. 1992. Vintage Books. 0679740074. Paperback Original. 239 pages. paperback. Cover: Marion Ettinger.
DESCRIPTION - This volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver's early stories (including the first one he ever published), a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver's last essay, 'Friendship' about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Arranged chronologically, this book affords an intimate and comprehensive thirty-year vision of a great writer in the process of becoming himself. This volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Carver's early stories, a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Put Yourself in My Shoes. Santa Barbara. 1974. Capra Press. 0884960056. 36 pages. paperback. Cover art by Marcia/Maris.
DESCRIPTION - Number 21 in Yes! Capra Chapbook Series. Illustrated from block prints by Marcia/Maris. A single story, printed in the Yes! Capra Chapbook Series, that was later included in 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?' A comparison of the text of the two versions shows that this first edition differs throughout, with Carver's editor Gordon Lish cutting dialogue and descriptive text for republicaton in 'Will You Please.' Carver's first book of fiction after 2 poetry titles.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Ultramarine. New York. 1986. Random House. 0394553799. 128 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Mr. Carver is heir to that most appealing American poetic voice, the lyricism of Theodore Roethke and James Wright. this book is a treasure, one to return to. No one's brevity is as rich, as complete, as Raymond Carver's.' - New York Times Book Review. ‘Carver's gifts as a storyteller shine through his poetry. Sometimes a Carver poem also works as a short story, with all its elements--character, diction, place, event--compressed intact into the brevity of verse. And sometimes Carver delivers the goods in pure lyrical form, in words as full of yearning and sensibility as those of a very young man, but poems possessing the hard-won qualities of focus, stillness and irony only rewarded by experience.' - Los Angeles Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York. 1981. Knopf. 0394516842. 159 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Where I'm Calling From: New & Selected Stories. New York. 1988. Atlantic Monthly Press. 0871132354. 430 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A major collection of Carver's short stories, including seven new stories written shortly before the author's death in 1988. By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers.Where I'm Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral,What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form. Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver's life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled. About the Author: Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in August of that year, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. New York. 1985. Random House. 0394544706. 130 pages. hardcover. Jacket art and design: Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - As a short-story writer, Raymond Carver has been acclaimed as "one of the true contemporary masters" (Robert Towers, The New York Review of Books ) whose stories "can already be counted among the masterpieces of American fiction" (Irving Howe, front page, The New York Times Book Review). Now, with his first major collection of poems, Carver displays for his considerable audience, and for all readers of poetry, his gifts in this form. In some respects he was first and foremost a poet, having published three small-press collections—Near Klamath, Winter Insomnia and At Night the Salmon Move—before establishing himself as a fiction writer. Recently Carver has returned to poetry, collecting in this book all his new work. Readers unfamiliar with Raymond Carver's poetry will not fail to notice a certain resemblance to his fiction. As The Bloomsbury Review has commented, "Carver draws poetic effects, not unlike he does in his stories, from the commonplace. Even the diction of his poems is prose-like. In fact, Carver's poems bring us back to the 'real world' more forcibly than his stories, because we generally expect poetry to transport us to realms beyond the ordinary." Yet Where Water Comes Together with Other Water has a range and variety that will surprise many readers, and in fact it is Carver's sure command of his various poems that most clearly demonstrates his strength and confidence. While some poems—"stories" about drinking, divorce, emotional ruin and hopelessness— are marked by a painful intensity, others are remarkable for language as graceful and exuberant as suits the themes of friendship, love and the happy coincidences of everyday life. In sum, then, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water amplifies and enlarges the achievement of Raymond Carver, "a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty [whose] eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart" Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Carver, Raymond. Will You Please Be Quiet Please?. New York. 1976. McGraw Hill. 0070101930. 249 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paulette Nenner.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the short fiction of a literary artist of the first rank, a maker of stories that deliver the dark of the American heart. With twenty-two harsh illuminations of our dazed exertions to endure, Raymond Carver announces his uniquely resolute vision. It is a vision that is shrewd, unflinching, exact, grave. In the sunless, post-speech world Raymond Carver sees, apprehending the grossness of our fixed destinies amounts to a kind of triumph, a small but gorgeous prevailing against circumstance. Here is the work of the increasingly influential Raymond Carver, an artificer of eerie simplicities that yield the hard truths of the human enterprise - and in whose precise rendering on the page readers in pursuit of excellence in the national literature may all exult.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
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Cary, Lorene. Pride. New York. 1998. Doubleday. 0385481314. 321 pages. paperback. Jacket illustration by Elizabeth Rosen. Jacket design by Jean Traina.
DESCRIPTION - PRIDE, Lorene Cary's vibrant new novel, is a joy. The author of the acclaimed memoir BLACK ICE and the historical novel THE PRICE OF A CHILD introduces us to four accomplished, passionate, and thoroughly down-to-earth African-American women whose lifelong friendship is about to take some unexpected turns. There's Roz, the sharp-tongued politician's wife. who's trying to keep her family together as she recovers from breast cancer and her husband runs for the biggest election of his career. But she's hardly prepared for the bombshell that explodes when she discovers one of her three best friends has been sleeping with him. There's the fiery and fiercely independent Tam, avoiding commitment both in her career and in her sexually combustive affairs with men. She's ready to make some radical changes, though, including allowing herself to feel vulnerable with a sexy hunk who may have more than just looks. There's Arneatha, an Episcopal priest, to whom the friends look for moral guidance, but who has felt hollow since the early death of her husband. When fate throws her a couple of curves, in the forms of an abandoned child and an intriguing stranger, her life is completely overturned - and she needs all her faith, and all her friends, to get through. And there's Audrey, talented, caring, but nearly ruined by drinking, who has to be the bravest of them all to battle back from the clutches of addiction. Her struggle almost costs her her life but brings renewal to the friends' devotion to each other. Lorene Cary takes us into the lives of these remarkable women with verve and humor, capturing their outspoken voices, their most heartfelt emotions, and their unfailing humanity. Funny, juicy, pulsing with life and love, PRIDE is an unforgettable novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LORENE CARY was raised in Philadelphia and Yeardon, Pennsylvania. She was graduated from St. Paul's School in and received a BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. While studying at Sussex University on a Thouron Fellowship for British - U.S. student exchange, she earned an M.A. in Victorian literature. In 1992, Colby College conferred on her an honorary Doctor of Letters. In the early 1980s Ms. Cary worked as a writer for Time and as Associate Editor at TV Guide. Since then, she has taught at St. Paul's School, Antioch University (Philadelphia campus), and the University of the Arts, and has written articles for such publications as Essence and The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. In 1992 she was a contributing editor at Newsweek. Her previous book, BLACK ICE, was published in 1991 and chosen by the American Library Association as one of its Notable Books for 1992. Ms. Cary lives in Philadelphia with her husband, R. C. Smith, and their daughters, Laura and Zoe.
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Cary, Lorene. The Price of a Child. New York. 1995. Knopf. 0679421068. 1st Novel by The Author Of Black Ice. 324 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting: ‘The Booroom Slave’ detail), 1827 by Henry Thomson. Present whereabouts unknown. Jacket design by Chip Kidd.
DESCRIPTION - An intimate, gripping novel of the antebellum Underground Railroad, based on the true story of a valiant Philadelphia freedwoman - the first novel we have had from the author of BLACK ICE, the ‘stunning memoir' (New York Times) of a black student's experience at a New England prep school in the 1970s. THE PRICE OF A CHILD opens in the fall of 1855. A Virginia planter is on his way to assume a diplomatic pose in Nicaragua, accompanied by his cook, Ginnie, and two of her children (one of whom is his). Temporarily stranded in Philadelphia when they miss their steamboat, Ginnie makes a thrilling leap of the imagination, it is the moment she has been desperately waiting for, the moment she decides to be free. In broad daylight, under the furious gaze of her master, she walks straight out of slavery into a new life - and into a whole new set of compromising positions. We follow Ginnie as she settles with a respectable and rambunctious black family, as she reinvents herself, christens herself Mercer Gray, dodges slave catchers, lectures far and wide in the cause of abolition, and falls in love with a man whose own ties are a formidable barrier to their happiness. And we see her agonizing all the while about the baby boy she had to leave behind on the plantation, whom she is determined to rescue. In a remarkable feat of historical empathy, Lorene Cary has created an authentic American heroine - a woman who finds voice for the appalling loss and bitterness of her past, and who creates within herself a new humanity and an uncompromising freedom. ‘A first novel of impressive depth and texture in a literate and provocative voice.' - Publishers Weekly.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LORENE CARY was raised in Philadelphia and Yeardon, Pennsylvania. She was graduated from St. Paul's School in and received a BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. While studying at Sussex University on a Thouron Fellowship for British - U.S. student exchange, she earned an M.A. in Victorian literature. In 1992, Colby College conferred on her an honorary Doctor of Letters. In the early 1980s Ms. Cary worked as a writer for Time and as Associate Editor at TV Guide. Since then, she has taught at St. Paul's School, Antioch University (Philadelphia campus), and the University of the Arts, and has written articles for such publications as Essence and The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. In 1992 she was a contributing editor at Newsweek. Her previous book, BLACK ICE, was published in 1991 and chosen by the American Library Association as one of its Notable Books for 1992. Ms. Cary lives in Philadelphia with her husband, R. C. Smith, and their daughters, Laura and Zoe.
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Casey, Michael. Obscenities. Pittsburgh. 2002. Carnegie Mellon University Press. 9780887483752. Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series: Poetry. 5 1/2 x 9 1/4". 64 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - "These is accomplished art concealed in Mr. Casey's seemingly off-hand sketches." - Daniel Hoffman, The New York Times. A reissuing of Obscenities, the debut collection of poems by Michael Casey. Reviews: The man has that rare sense of language alive, each word as important to test against each other before letting it stay as every other word you keep. - Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice. "Readers in search of authentic gut poetry need search no further." - Publishers Weekly.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL CASEY was born in 1947 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Lowell Technological Institute in 1968. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he served as a military policeman in Missouri and in Quang Ngai Provence, the setting of Obscenities, which was chosen by Stanley Kunitz as Volume 67 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 1996 Adastra Press published Casey's second collection of poems, Millrat, and Orchises Press published his third, The Million Dollar Hole, in 2001.
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Cassells, Cyrus. Beautiful Signor: Poems. Port Townsend. 1997. Copper Canyon Press. 1556591241. Paperback Original. 123 pages. paperback. COVER ART: Le Ultime Case di Periferia (Last Houses on the Outskirts), 1991, by Giuliano Geleng. COVER DESIGN: John D. Berry Design.
DESCRIPTION - Through an interlocking suite of intensely lyrical poems, Cyrus Cassells follows his ‘beautiful Signor,' a figure who is at once a real person and an exemplar of the spirit of romantic love. These poems echo Dante's celebration of Beatrice and also the ecstasies expressed by the Sufi poets about ‘The Beloved,' embracing ‘wild-hearted risk' as they embark on the soul's journey. In a world deeply wounded by the AIDS pandemic, Cassells deftly reiterates the need to experience romantic, erotic love as a gateway to spiritual realization. ‘Unabashedly passionate, feverishly baroque, these lyrics reach back to the Song of Songs and St. John of the Cross, claiming a place in that tradition in which the body of the beloved leads to the Divine Bodv. Divine seems precisely the adjective for these gorgeous, operatic poems, in which Cyrus Cassells reinvents himself as troubadour and dervish, visionary and diva, a Wilde and a Callas. He drapes Eros - our beautiful Signor - in a costume of Venetian splendor, and allows those velvet draperies to fall away just enough to reveal how much is at stake in the bodes raptures.' - MARK DOTY. 'With Beautiful Signor, Cyrus Cassells confirms his reputation as a poet of exquisite skill. These love poems are resonant, even haunting, born of an acute sensual awareness, the images like 'mosaics / clarified by rain.' Cassells evokes ancient ruins and turquoise seas in a song of extraordinary tenderness. Beautiful, indeed?' - MARTIN ESPADA.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyrus Cassells (born 1957) is an American poet and professor. Cassells was born in Dover, Delaware, grew up in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, and began writing poetry in high school. He graduated in 1979 from Stanford University with a degree in film and broadcasting, and landed a job creating poetry filmstrips in the film division of a publishing house, where he worked when Al Young called to tell him his manuscript had been selected for publication from the 1981 National Poetry Series competition. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. Since 1998, he has taught poetry at Texas State University–San Marcos for the MFA in writing program, and lives in Austin. Cassells' collection More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press), and his fifth book, The Crossed-Out Swastika, (2010) were published by Copper Canyon Press. He has won many awards including a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. He was nominated for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Soul Make A Path Through Shouting. He has had poems published in literary journals and magazines including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, AGNI, Boston Review and Callaloo.
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Cassells, Cyrus. The Mud Actor. New York. 1982. Holt Rinehart Winston. 003061371x. Part Of The National Poetry Series. Selected by Al Young. 104 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lidia Ferrfara.
DESCRIPTION - The Mud Actor is a single work in three parts, where identity and disguise move us to a deeper confrontation with history, with the living and the dead. Cyrus Cassells has drawn these scenes from meditations, including work in hypnotic regression, yet the images and language are fresh, delicate, strongly evocative, and wholly in the service of the poetry. The book begins in childhood, where the wisdom and lore of family past twines itself into the present. A second section of poems speaks in voices from fin de siEcle France, in exquisitely felt and treasured, playful moments. The last sequence of poems is set in Japan, where the author traveled in 1978 and found himself strongly drawn to the culture of the country. His travels led him finally to a dream that he calls a memory, a memory of his death at Hiroshima. This is the subject of the book's magnificent and passionate final poem. Perhaps his meditations have brought him to a discovery of his own reincarnation - or perhaps they have allowed him to discover a vital metaphor for brotherhood through the multiple identities that lie within any one person - and so have led him to an understanding of history, responsibility, and the continuity of life that is the greatest act of the imagination.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyrus Cassells (born 1957) is an American poet and professor. Cassells was born in Dover, Delaware, grew up in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, and began writing poetry in high school. He graduated in 1979 from Stanford University with a degree in film and broadcasting, and landed a job creating poetry filmstrips in the film division of a publishing house, where he worked when Al Young called to tell him his manuscript had been selected for publication from the 1981 National Poetry Series competition. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. Since 1998, he has taught poetry at Texas State University–San Marcos for the MFA in writing program, and lives in Austin. Cassells' collection More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press), and his fifth book, The Crossed-Out Swastika, (2010) were published by Copper Canyon Press. He has won many awards including a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. He was nominated for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Soul Make A Path Through Shouting. He has had poems published in literary journals and magazines including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, AGNI, Boston Review and Callaloo.
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Castillo, Ana. Loverboys: Stories. New York. 1996. Norton. 0393039595. 224 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ann Petter. Jacket art by Esperanza Gama.
DESCRIPTION - LOVERBOYS is the eagerly awaited new book by Ana Castillo, the acclaimed author of SO FAR FROM GOD: a collection of stories that display her unique perspective on the joys and sorrows of love. Here is the experience of love captured in its wildly varying modes, from rapturous beginnings to melancholy middles to bittersweet ends, and in its equally varying configurations - man and woman, man and man, woman and woman. From the infectious moodiness of ‘Loverboys' to the high comic spirits of ‘La Miss Rose' to the murderously funny gender-war payback of ‘Vatolandia', Castillo covers the waterfront of contemporary romance. As Julia Alvarez says, ‘Ana Castillo is una storyteller de primera'. She knows what secrets lie in the hearts of women and men, and in this collection she tells all - sometimes hilariously, sometimes heartbreakingly, always irresistibly.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays On Xicanisma. Albuquerque. 1994. University of New Mexico Press. 0826315542. 238 pages. hardcover. Jacket design and illustration by Linda Mae Tratechaud. Jacket illustration based on photograph by Barbara Seyda. Jacket painting sections by Ana Castillo.
DESCRIPTION - Jacket painting sections by Ana Castillo. Keywords: Latina Culture Politics Latin America. ISBN: 0826315542. The ‘I' in these critical essays by novelist, poet, scholar, and activist/curandera Ana Castillo is that of the Mexic-Amerindian woman living in the United States. The essays are addressed to everyone interested in the roots of the colonized woman's reality. Castillo introduces the term Xicanisma in a passionate call for a politically active, socially committed Chicana feminism. In ‘A Countryless Woman,' Castillo outlines the experience of the brown woman in a racist society that recognizes race relations mostly as a black and white dilemma. Essays on the Watsonvi lie strike, the early Chicano movement, and the roots of machismo illustrate the extent to which women still struggle against male dominance. Other essays suggest strategies for opposing the suppression of women's spirituality and sexuality by institutionalized religion and the state. These challenging essays will be a provocative guide for those who envision a new future for women as we face a new century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. My Father Was a Toltec & Selected Poems. New York. 1995. Norton. 0393037185. 158 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Francine Kass.
DESCRIPTION - Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of passion and uncompromising commitment. This collection brings back into print the best of her early work, including selected poems from The Invitation and Women Are Not Roses and the entire text of her landmark 1988 collection, MY FATHER WAS A TOLTEC. Whether invoking her origins as the daughter of a street warrior, a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, or defining her own lyrical positions on a variety of social, political, sexual, and esthetic issues, Ana Castillo's poetic voice is unmistakably her own-and will be immediately recognizable to the lovers of her fiction. CONTENTS: THE TOLTEC - The Toltec; Electra Currents; Red Wagons; Saturdays; The Suede Coat; Dirty Mexican; For Ray; Daddy with Chesterfields in a Rolled Up Sleeve; LA HEREDERA - Alternatives; For No One, Or Perhaps You; Woman of Marrakech; Recordando un disparate; An Ugly Black Dog Named Goya; Encuentros; Mi Comadre me aconseja; La Heredera; Lamento de Coatlicue; Todo me recuerda tu ausencia; Poem; For Jean Rhys; IXTACIHUATL DIED IN VAIN - Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain; La Carta; Traficante, Too; Wyoming Crossing Thoughts; A Marriage of Mutes; Martes en Toledo; Tejido de pelo y dientes; Guadalupe; Cherry Stained Lips and Thick Thighs; Lunes; Donde Empezar?; I Am the Daughter/Mother Who Has Learned; IN MY COUNTRY - A Christmas Gift for the President of the United States, Chicano Poets, and a Marxist or Two I've Known in My Time; Everywhere I Go; El sueno; Entre primavera y otoño; Zoila Lopez; Me & Baby; Paco and Rosa; Cold; Tomas de Utrera's First Poem of Spring; We Would Like You to Know; No solo el ser chilena; Someone Told Me; Esta mano; In My Country; WOMEN ARE NOT ROSES - Women Are Not Roses; An Idyll; La Tristesse; Dices; A November Verse; From ‘A Letter to Alicia'; Not Just Because My Husband Said; Seduction of the Poetess; Si acaso; Cartas; Whole; THE INVITATION - The Invitation; Dance of the Nebulae; DespuEs de probar (la manzana); Tierra del Fuego; Tango (de la luna); Coffee Break; What Only Lovers; OTRO CANTO - 1975; Milagros; El ser mujer; A Christmas Carol: c. 1976; Napa, California; A Counter-Revolutionary Proposition; Strategy; FIVE RANDOM ARROWS (1974-1982) - Juego; La una y cuarto; Last Sunday; Invierno salvaje; Our Tongue Was Nahuatl.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. My Father Was a Toltec: Poems. Novato. 1988. West End Press. 093112249x. 75 pages. paperback. Design by Patt Gateley. Back cover photograph by B. Bohner.
DESCRIPTION - In this, her fullest collection of poetry in both English and Spanish, Castillo invokes her origin as the daughter of a street warrior, a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, and carries her own fight from memories of schoolyard battles into adulthood, where, as a Chicana feminist, she defines her turf with a difference. At its publication, MY FATHER WAS A TOLTEC, received wide recognition. Ana Castillo was named a winner of the Women of Words Awards in San Francisco for 1988. CONTENTS: THE TOLTEC - The Toltec; Electra Currents; Red Wagons; Saturdays; The Suede Coat; Dirty Mexican; For Ray; Daddy with Chesterfields in a Rolled Up Sleeve; LA HEREDERA - Alternatives; For No One, or Perhaps You; Woman of Marrakech; Recordando un Disparate; An Ugly Black Dog Named Goya; Encuentros; Mi Comadre Me Aconseja; La Heredera; Lamento de Coatlicue; Todo Me Recuerda Tu Ausencia; Poem 13; For Jean Rhys; IXTACIHUATL DIED IN VAIN - Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain; La Carta; Traficante, Too; Wyoming Crossing Thoughts; A Marriage of Mutes; Martes en Toledo; Tejido de Pelo y Dientes; Guadalupe; Cherry Stained Lips and Thick Thighs; Lunes; Donde Empezar; I Am the Daughter/Mother Who Has Learned; IN MY COUNTRY - A Christmas Gift for the President of the United States, Chicano Poets, and a Marxist or Two I've Known in My Time; Everywhere I Go; El Sueño; Entre Primavera y Otoño; Zoila Lopez; Me & Baby; Paco and Rosa; Cold; Tomás de Utrera's First Poem of Spring; We Would Like You To Know; No Solo El Ser Chilena; Someone Told Me; Esta Mano; In My Country.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. Peel My Love Like An Onion. New York. 1999. Doubleday. 0385496761. 215 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Honi Werner.
DESCRIPTION - Peel My Love Like an Onion is the breakthrough novel from Ana Castillo, author of the wildly praised So Far from God--a lyrical, steamy, and moving story of a love triangle set in the colorful world of flamenco dancing. Carmen 'La Coja' ('the cripple') Santos is a flamenco dancer of local renown in Chicago, despite the obstacle of a handicapped leg, the legacy of a childhood attack of polio. From the beginning of her professional career, she has carried on an affair with Agustín, the married director of her troupe--a romance that is going stale from overfamiliar lust and an absence of honesty. But when she begins a passionate liaison with the younger Manolo, Agustín's godson and a dancer of natural genius, an angry rivalry is sparked. Add to that the looming reassertion of her crippling disease and Carmen's vexed relations with her mother, one of the most exasperating parents in recent literature, and you have all the ingredients for a love story à la Ana Castillo--equal parts soap opera, tragicomedy, and rhapsody.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. Sapogonia. Tempe. 1989. Bilingual Press. 0916950956. 312 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Robin Ravary.
DESCRIPTION - Ana Castillo brings to life in SAPOGONIA a distinct place in the Americas where all mestizos reside regardless of nationality, individual racial background, or legal residential status - or, perhaps, because of all of these. Her theme is developed in the persona of the narrator, an antihero who relishes his inheritance as Conquistador while he agonizes over his legacy as the Conquered. He acts out this dilemma in a peculiar obsessive relationship with an unconquerable woman; this ultimately leads him to destruction in a desperate attempt to reestablish his dominance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. So Far From God. New York. 1993. Norton. 0393034909. 252 pages. hardcover. jacket design by Julie Metz. jacket painting by Bernadette Vigil.
DESCRIPTION - Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo's hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Hispano with the Anglo, the women with the men. With the talkative, intimate voice and the stylistic and narrative freedom of a Southwestern Cervantes, the author relates the story of two crowded decades in the life of a Chicana family. The mother, Sofia, holds things together in the years following the disappearance of her husband Domingo (he of the Clark Gable mustache and the uncontrollable gambling habit). Then there are the daughters: Esperanza, Chicana campus radical turned career woman and television news reporter; Caridad, a nurse who dulls the pain of being jilted with nightly bouts of alcohol and anonymous sex; Fe, the prim and proper bank employee in constant quest for the good life; and La Loca, whose ‘death' and subsequent resurrection at age three have left her strange and saintly and attuned to higher spiritual frequencies. Ana Castillo's triumph in SO FAR FROM GOD is to weave the mundane and the miraculous, the modern and the archaic, and the tragic and the humorous into one rich novelistic fabric. Hers is a homegrown magical realism, leavened with sly commentary, controlled anger, and a distinct feminist point of view of the world and the cosmos. Of all the marvels in this book, and there are many, the greatest is the achievement of its creator.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castillo, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters. Binghamton. 1986. Bilingual Press. 0916950689. 132 pages. paperback. Cover design: Christopher J. Bidlack.
DESCRIPTION - THE MIXQUIAHUALA LETTERS, an epistolary novel focusing on the correspondence between two Hispanic women, is a probing
DESCRIPTION of the relationship between the sexes. The novel is a far-ranging social and cultural document that encompasses both Mexican and United States Hispanic forms of love and gender conflict. Readers will find the conclusion of this novel to be a most powerful and emotionally gripping evocation of sexual warfare.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
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Castronovo, Daniel and Groth, Janet (editors). Edmund Wilson, the Man in Letters. Athens. 2001. University of Ohio Press. 0821414208. 354 pages. hardcover. Cover: Kari Rosenberg.
DESCRIPTION - Among the major writers of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald generation, Edmund Wilson defied categorization. He wrote essays, stories and novels, cultural criticism, and contemporary chronicles, as well as journals and thousands of letters about the literary life and his own private world. Here for the first time in print is Wilson's personal correspondence to his parents, lovers and wives, children, literary comrades, and friends from the different corners of his life. Various writers and thinkers -- including Lionel Trilling, Cyril Connolly, and Isaiah Berlin -- take their places alongside upstate New York neighbors in this gallery of letters that extends from the teens to the early 1970s. These letters complete the picture of Wilson the man, offering unguarded moments and flinty opinions that enrich our understanding of a complex and troubled personality. Four times married and many times in love; traveling through Depression America, the USSR, postwar Europe, the Middle East, and Haiti; and writing on a Balzacian scale, Wilson as a correspondent reveals the exhilaration and chaos of being himself. Arranged by correspondent and moving through the phases of his career, Edmund Wilson, the Man in Letters constitutes an exemplary autobiography cum cultural history. The writing itself is vintage Wilson -- a blending of classical and conversational styles that stands as part of the modern American canon and is filled with the emotions and tastes of a master.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David A. Castronovo (October 30, 1945 - November 19, 2010) was the C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City where he taught English literature and composition for more than 30 years. He was the author of a dozen books on literary subjects, including Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature (2009). His first book, Edmund Wilson, was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1985. Castronovo was born in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College, receiving his Masters and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. A specialist in Victorian studies, he wrote his dissertation on the English gentleman, a subject that he expanded upon and turned into a book in 1987. Janet Groth, Emeritus Professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, has also taught at Vassar, Brooklyn College, the University of Cincinnati, and Columbia. She was a Fulbright lecturer in Norway and a visiting fellow at Yale and is the author of "Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time" (for which she won the NEMLA Book Award) and coauthor of "Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson". She lives in New York City.
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Castronovo, David. Edmund Wilson. New York. 1984. Ungar. 0804421161. 205 pages. hardcover. Cover: David Levine/Mimi Florance.
DESCRIPTION - From the jazz age to the Nixon years, Edmund Wilson was an intrepid critic, historian, journalist, and creative writer who communicated in the voice of the public intellectual with a general audience and with international peers including Isaiah Berlin and Vladimir Nabokov. This new, revised edition of a 1985 New York Times Notable Book is about Wilson's passions: his commitment to the writer's craft, his contempt for power politics in his time and in history, his appetite for ancient and modern languages and literatures, and his many loves and eccentricities. Moving from his 1920s days as a cultural journalist to his 1930s period as a reporter on Depression America to his later years of relentless research and writings on the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the panorama of his long life in literature, Edmund Wilson Revisited analyzes the books and opinions that have made Wilson a landmark figure. Chapters devoted to literary ideas, reporting, revolutionary politics, and personal philosophy reveal grand patterns of a writer's career as they follow his life across the century. Readers will discover Wilson's renaissance outreach as he explored Iroquois Indian customs, Hebrew texts, Marx and Engels, and the work of famous friends such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other writers whom he brought into focus and championed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David A. Castronovo (October 30, 1945 - November 19, 2010) was the C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City where he taught English literature and composition for more than 30 years. He was the author of a dozen books on literary subjects, including Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature (2009). His first book, Edmund Wilson, was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1985. Castronovo was born in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College, receiving his Masters and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. A specialist in Victorian studies, he wrote his dissertation on the English gentleman, a subject that he expanded upon and turned into a book in 1987.
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Cather, Willa. Coming, Aphrodite! and Other Stories. New York. 1999. Penguin Books. 9780141181561. 336 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Best known for the distinctive portraits of the people and land of the American West in her prairie novels, Willa Cather is one of the greatest American writers of this century. The fourteen short stories in this richly diverse collection, along with an exemplary introduction by author Cynthia Griffin Wolff, allow for a more complex view of Cather. As a writer she was intrigued by nature's ruthlessness and mankind's limitless potential for brutality and had a passion for the beauty of art. Ranging from the simplicity of Cather's first published story, "Peter" (1892), to the extraordinary eroticism of "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920), this Twentieth-Century Classics collection is an engaging and triumphant testament to the genius of an American literary icon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. My Antonia. Boston. 1918. Houghton Mifflin. 419 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In Willa Cather's own estimation, My Antonia, first published in 1918, was ‘the best thing I've ever done.' Infused with a gracious passion for the land, My Antonia embraces its uncommon subject - the hardscrabble life of the pioneer woman on the prairie - with poetic certitude, rendering a deeply moving portrait of an entire community. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia Shimerda. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. My Mortal Enemy. New York. 1926. Knopf. 122 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - "Sometimes, when I have watched the bright beginning of a love story, when I have seen a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of youth, I have heard again that strange complaint breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: 'Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy.'" Willa Cather's protagonist in My Mortal Enemy is Myra Henshawe, who as a young woman gave up a fortune to marry for love—a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherworldly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. O Pioneers!. Boston and New York. 1913. Houghton Mifflin. 309 pages. hardcover. Color Frontispiece by Clarence F. Underwood.
DESCRIPTION - The first of Cather's renowned prairie novels, O Pioneers! established a new voice in American literature-turning the stories of ordinary Midwesterners and immigrants into authentic literary characters. O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier-and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself. At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. The Old Beauty and Others. New York. 1948. Knopf. 166 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A ruined beauty whose dignity has suffered a lifetime of loss and disenchantment. A Czech immigrant who finds a paradoxical contentment on the harsh expanse of the Nebraska prairie. A solitary young painter spying raptly and guiltily on his exquisite neighbor. These are some of the lives that Willa Cather renders, with a fine balance of compassion and detachment, in these nineteen stories. Here are the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; the ways in which the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. The Professor's House. New York. 1925. Knopf. 283 pages. hardcover. Dust jacket design by C. B. Falls.
DESCRIPTION - On the eve of his move to a new, more desirable residence, Professor Godfrey St. Peter finds himself in the shabby study of his former home. Surrounded by the comforting, familiar sights of his past, he surveys his life and the people he has loved — his wife Lillian, his daughters, and Tom Outland, his most outstanding student and once, his son-in-law to be. Enigmatic and courageous—and a tragic victim of the Great War — Tom has remained a source of inspiration to the professor. But he has also left behind him a troubling legacy which has brought betrayal and fracture to the women he loves most.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. Boston. 1915. Houghton Mifflin. 490 pages. hardcover. The painting that inspired cover is The Song of the Lark (1884) by Jules Breton,.
DESCRIPTION - The Song of the Lark is a novel by American author Willa Cather, written in 1915. It is her third novel to be published. Beautiful and lyrical, this third novel by Willa Cather follows the life of Thea Kronberg from her childhood in 19th-century Nebraska to her career as a renowned opera singer. Since the time of its publication, this novel had captivated readers with its sharp observations, shimmering
DESCRIPTIONs, sly humor, and its provocative heroine-a feisty young woman who strives to create her own destiny, regardless of social restrictions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cather, Willa. Willa Cather in Europe. New York. 1956. Knopf. 178 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Willa Cather was twenty-eight years old in the summer of 1902 when she saw England and France for the first time. Behind her stretched the Nebraska fields of her childhood and still ahead of her the world as it belongs only to great writers. The 1902 journey, coming ten years before she made her literary mark with O Pioneers! , was unrepeatable, special in its effects on her artistic development. After disembarking at Liverpool, she toured the Shropshire country, got swallowed up by London, and then crossed the Channel to other skies—to Rouen, Paris, and the Riviera. These fourteen travel articles, written for a newspaper in Lincoln, Nebraska, and eventually collected and published in book form in 1956, are striking for first impressions colored by a future novelist's feeling for history and for beauty in unexpected forms.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
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Cerf, Bennett. At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf. New York. 1977. Random House. 0394478770. 306 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by R. Adelson. Jacket photograph by Gordon Parks.
DESCRIPTION - I've got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let's call it Random House.' So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House's first decades. Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revolutionized the book business in the 1920s and '30s, Cerf helped usher in publishing's golden age. Cerf was a true personality, whose other pursuits (columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio host, collector of jokes and anecdotes, perennial judge of the Miss America pageant, and panelist on What's My Line?) helped shape his reputation as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm and brought unprecedented attention to his company and to his authors. At once a rare behind-the-scenes account of book publishing and a fascinating portrait of four decades' worth of legendary authors, from James Joyce and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty, At Random is a feast for bibliophiles and anyone who's ever wondered what goes on inside a publishing house.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 - August 27, 1971) was an American publisher, one of the founders of American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game show What's My Line?
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Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kalavier and Clay. New York. 2000. Random House. 0679450041. Novel by the author of THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH and WONDER BOYS. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature 2001. 656 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Leaping onto center stage from the wings of comics history comes that dazzling Master of Elusion, foe of tyranny, and champion of liberation-the Escapist. Operating from a secret headquarters under the boards of the Empire Theater, the Escapist and his crack team of associates roam the globe performing amazing feats of magic and coming to the aid of all those who languish in the chains of oppression. The history of the Escapist's creators, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay was recently chronicled in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Now the best of the Escapist's adventures are collected into a giant 80-page anthology for all to enjoy. Don't miss out on this thrilling first issue of the quarterly anthology Michael Chabon Presents. The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist, featuring an original story penned by Michael Chabon as well as the first new story in seven years written and drawn by comics creator Howard Chaykin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author and 'one of the most celebrated writers of his generation,' according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as 'a twenty-first century Middlemarch', concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
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Chabon, Michael. The Final Solution. New York. 2004. Fourth Estate/Harper Collins. 006076340x. 131 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Jay Ryan & Jason Harvey.
DESCRIPTION - In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured up the golden age of comic books-intertwining history, legend, and storytelling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to craft a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story. In deep retirement in the English country-side, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out-a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case-the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot-beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth? Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching resolution. This brilliant homage, which won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for fiction, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author and 'one of the most celebrated writers of his generation,' according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as 'a twenty-first century Middlemarch', concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
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Chabon, Michael. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York. 1988. Morrow. 0688076327. 297 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Just graduated from college, Art Bechstein sets out on a journey to adulthood as he comes to terms with his gangster father and encounters a variety of unusual people along the way.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author and 'one of the most celebrated writers of his generation,' according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as 'a twenty-first century Middlemarch', concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
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Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen's Union. New York. 2007. Harper Collins. 9780007149827. 414 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Will Staehle.
DESCRIPTION - For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a ‘temporary' safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life - and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder - right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage - and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author and 'one of the most celebrated writers of his generation,' according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as 'a twenty-first century Middlemarch', concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
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Chace, Rebecca. Capture the Flag. New York. 1999. Simon & Schuster. 0684857588. 283 pages. hardcover. Cover: Mary Rozzi/Julie Metz.
DESCRIPTION - It is the summer of 1972 when eleven-year-old Annie blackens her eyelids and cheeks with grease-paint camouflage for her first mission. The flag is under heavy guard, but Annie would do anything for the game, and her scouting partner, Justin-more self-assured at fourteen than Annie believes she will ever be-has to admit that Annie is tough, even for a city kid. That night, as they rush through the darkness on their dangerous reconnaissance, something happens between them that changes everything. 'Now we've both done something we can't tell,' Justin warns her, and even in the thrill of the chase Annie knows they will never speak of it again. Back in New York City that fall, the difficult lessons of divorce and depression send Annie reeling. But just as she seems to be losing the only family she's ever known, Annie joins forces with her longtime opponents in Capture the Flag. The fact that Tessa, Liz, and Sam-the sophisticated Shanlick sisters-live downtown is emblematic of their penchant for living beyond their years, and in their company Annie finds herself growing up fast. When the teenagers believe they have secrets no adult would ever understand, Annie's newfound maturity is sorely tested. They plan a retreat into the world of their childhood, back to the playing fields of Capture the Flag.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rebecca Chace is the author of Chautauqua Summer, a New York Times Notable Book, and the novel Capture the Flag, which was recently adapted into a short film. Chace cowrote the screenplay (with director Lisanne Skyler) and acts in the film. Chace is also the author of several plays, has contributed to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and teaches at Bard College and the MFA Creative Writing Program at City College. She lives in New York City.
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Chambers, Veronica. When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel. New York. 2004. Doubleday. 0385509006. 198 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A dazzling literary debut about a young girl and her father, a magician whose tricks and illusions both ease and hinder the painful realities of their lives. WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME is the warm and tender story of Angela, a young girl growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. One day Angela goes to school and returns home to find her mother gone. Her magician father, Teddo, left to raise Angela alone, insists on keeping Melanie's disappearance shrouded in mystery, but later Angela wryly observes, “My father was a magician, but my mother was the real Houdini.” Veronica Chambers has written a compelling story about a young girl's struggle to navigate her way through her family's web of love, loss, and magic. As Angela tries to piece her world back together and figure out why her mother has abandoned her, she's left to ponder the soul-shattering question: When did you stop loving me? A universal story that is both finely-tuned and elegant, WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME captures the intricacies, pleasures, contradictions, and complexities at the heart of every family. Spare and finely told, this novel will seep beneath your skin and stay with you long after the last page has been turned.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VERONICA CHAMBERS is the author of Having It All? and Mama's Girl. She was formerly a culture writer for Newsweek, a staff writer at Premiere magazine, and an executive editor of Savoy magazine, as well as a frequent contributor to Glamour; O, The Oprah Magazine; the New York Times, and other publications. The daughter of a magician, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband.
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Charters, Samuel. Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn. New York. 1984. Marion Boyars. 0714528056. 153 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Samuel Charters, the eminent historian of jazz and the blues, evokes the character and spirit of the self-professed inventor of jazz.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Barclay Charters IV (August 1, 1929 – March 18, 2015) was an American music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet. He was a widely published author on the subjects of blues and jazz. He also wrote fiction.
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Charters, Samuel. Mr. Jabi and Mr. Smythe. New York. 1983. Marion Boyars. 0714527793. 175 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Tony Smythe returns to an African country for the first time after its independence and struggles to understand the changes in his friendship with the native schoolteacher, Mr. Jabi. The first novel by the legendary author of seminal books on Blues and Jazz.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Barclay Charters IV (August 1, 1929 – March 18, 2015) was an American music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet. He was a widely published author on the subjects of blues and jazz. He also wrote fiction.[1][2]
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Charyn, Jerome. American Scrapbook. New York. 1969. Viking Press. 0670120154. 177 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Abner Graboff.
DESCRIPTION - The scandalous detention of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II has been overlooked as a subject of fiction. In his fourth novel Jerome Charyn continues to show daring and imagination - as well as the vigor and inventiveness, abandon, and alert feeling for the comic praised by critics of his earlier work - by setting his story in two of these "relocation camps." Through the eyes of six members of the Tanaka family, he re-creates fictionally the fears and tensions, the comedy and tragedy of those caught up in a cruel and unjust imprisonment. In the camps the jailers are white Americans. The prisoners, too, are Americans - most of them. Their responses are as varied as one would expect them to be, ranging from the paranoiac fears of Mitsuo to the innocent confusion of young Napoleon. Conflicts among family members, among factions of prisoners, and, of course, between prisoners and jailers generate the tensions of this extraordinarily original book. Although it is a novel pertinent to the current re-evaluation of our past, and as such a parable with obvious lessons for our time, American Scrapbook is first and foremost an achievement of sympathetic imagination, a triumph of a novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Back To Bataan. New York. 1993. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374304769. 101 pages. hardcover. Cover: Elaine Norman.
DESCRIPTION - Eleven-year-old Jack Dalton, a sensitive student at a private school in New York City in 1943, wants to go to Battan as a soldier just like his dead father, but instead he proves his bravery in an encounter with a mysterious hobo.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Blue Eyes. New York. 1974. Simon & Schuster. 0671218565. 234 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Manfred ‘Shotgun' Coen, detective first grade, New York City Police Department, master of flick shots, phony spins and the penholder, is a ping-pong freak, as fast with his serve as he is in a shoot-out. He is a special kind of cop, a loner, who wears magenta socks, eats at Cuban restaurants and refuses to live on Long Island with his fellow policemen. Coen is also the boyhood friend of Cesar Guzmann, a gambler and whorehouse entrepreneur, whose family migrated to the Bronx via Peru many years, ago, and who prays to Moses, John the Baptist and Saint Jerome (to keep his options open). Because of his special knowledge of the Peruvian underworld, Coen is assigned to investigate the disappearance of Caroline Child, niece of a prominent theatrical producer, who may (or may not) have run away from school with her friend Odile. Odile is New York's porno queen, mistress of The Dwarf, a notorious Village lesbian bar, and an employee of the Guzmann family. Coen's search takes him to Mexico and back to New York for a final ping-pong match with a ‘downtown' shark hired at $100 an hour to defeat Coen at his own game.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Captain Kidd. New York. 1999. St Martin's Press. 0312205066. 208 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Captain Roland P. Kahn's ancestors built the first department store in America and behaved like pirates, swallowing up other companies and other stores. The black MPs and partners in crime he commanded under General Patton didn't know that, but they called him Captain Kidd; he was a pirate himself. He'd graduated magna cum laude from Cornell, had a Phi Beta Kappa key, was engaged to marry a girl who was at least as rich as his mom--but he elected to steal. In the closing days of World War II in Germany, foraging ahead of the general's tanks, he did a lucrative business selling what the fleeing Germans had left behind--warehouses full of cognac, Cuban cigars, you name it. "Anything but gold. Gold goes right into the Third Army's vault."But wars end and army officers say a tearful good-bye to their doughnut girls and hang up their uniforms. Captain Kidd is no longer the general's court jester and dog walker now. But he's still Captain Kidd. Karp & Co., his mother's store, has become a sinking ship--it's time for piracy. Macy's? Gimbel's? The captain has ways of getting them to build up Karp and Co., even though they aren't aware of their beneficence. And things at Karp's will never be the same. Gangsters come calling, and Roland's old MPs come down from Harlem to visit. Not the kind of thing that happened much in 1947. In a kaleidoscope of satire, bitter comedy, and some heartbreak, Captain Kidd chronicles a war and how it shapes our lives well after. Charyn, a writer of strong individuality and an incisive observer of the lives we live, is also a highly satisfying entertainer in the best sense. Captain Kidd will move you, take you aback, make you laugh, cry a little, and maybe even think. But it will never fail to engage and delight you.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Darlin' Bill. New York. 1980. Arbor House. 0877952833. 300 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - An imaginative account of the real-life love affair between Bill Hickok and Sally Ovenshine, in the adventurous days of the American West, follows the two lovers from their strange initial meeting through Hickok's violent death.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Death of a Tango King. New York. 1998. New York University Press. 0814715753. 256 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Yolanda's a convict, caught by the cops while her boyfriend was robbing a bank. Now all the Hell Sisters at Harrington Hills prison farm are in love with her. Their leader wants to 'marry' her. Yolanda has to find a way out. She's been taking a philosophy course in jail from Melvin P. Sparks, a Cornell professor who talks to the female convicts once a week about ecology, in galoshes and a torn shirt. But it's only a disguise. He's actually a member of the Christian Commandos, a ragtag group of environmental rangers who aren't quite soldiers or spies. Yolanda happens to be the cousin of Ruben Falcone, king of the Medellín cartel. The rangers want to meet with Ruben, who's hiding in the jungles of Colombia, while a dozen agencies destroy the rain forest tracking him. Sparks helps Yolanda get out of jail, whisking her off to Mandellín to find her long lost cousin. And so begins a journey that takes Yolanda into a crazy, comic heart of darkness, where nothing is ever as it seems, where a druglord can be a minister of environment, where Yolanda dances in a hundred rumbeaderos with different tango kings - all of them marked for death - and where she's sucked into the current of a world she only half understands. Death of a Tango King is a sad, funny, and disturbing novel about the coming of a new century, where the distance between right and wrong is not only irregular, but also hard to find.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Eisenhower, My Eisenhower. New York. 1971. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 003085055x. 178 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by David Holzman.
DESCRIPTION - This original, violent, comic, and outrageous novel blends yesterday, today, and tomorrow into an explosive account of the terror of our urban scene, and, as the title suggests, evokes the innocence and experience, the sense of nostalgia and loss, and the search for a god-like figure at the heart of contemporary American life. The central characters are ‘gypsies, ‘the children of Azaz,' worshipers of the god Karooku, a minority who consider everyone else - WASPS, Jews, and blacks alike - 'Anglos.' They have their own language and ritual, their own Uncle Toms, their own Panther-like organization. Out of a welter of materials from our culture - including a bizarre, funny array of nostalgic junk from the movies, sports, school, the military - Jerome Charyn constructs a world that reflects our own as through a distorting mirror. Toby Malothioon, a former war hero (in a Vietnam-like intervention), moves from failed attempts at a conventional life toward and into participation in urban guerrilla warfare. And in a parody of Middle America's fears and fantasies, he and his fellow gypsies engage in every possible kind of political and sexual connection. A generation of novelists has been plagued by the difficulty of writing about a society that seems to outdo their wildest satiric inventions. In EISENHOWER, MY EISENHOWER, Jerome Charyn has found a remarkably effective solution to this problem by combining the experimental techniques of writers like Borges and Nabokov with the first-hand knowledge of Americana available to him as one of the most talented of our novelists.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Elsinore: A Crime Novel. New York. 1991. Mysterious Press. 0892963611. 249 pages. hardcover. Jacket design and illustration by Bascove.
DESCRIPTION - Returning to the underworld after a brief hiatus, hit man Sidney Holden investigates the financial floundering of Howard Phipps, a millionaire and the victim of a duplicitous ex-lover.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Going To Jerusalem. New York. 1967. Viking Press. 180 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The South Brooklyn Military Academy (called the Castle) is owned and operated by the Admiral. His son, Ivan Farkas - thirty-one, epileptic, ‘part Russian, part Hungarian, and part Portuguese' - instructs the young cadets. One of them, six-year-old Walter Van Buren, Jr., is a chess prodigy. The plan is for Ivan and Van to dog the steps of old Baldur Kortzfleisch, former world chess champion, perhaps also former Nazi, and for Van to become rich and famous by defeating the mysterious old master on this last cross-country exhibition tour of his career. And so they set out, accompanied by a turtle named Marat. Like the motel-hopping scenes in Lolita (though entirely different in style and outlook), the voyage of this novel is a search - as well as a bizarre yet remarkably accurate portrait of America. Without forcing symbols on the reader, Mr. Charyn's tragicomic inventions resonate with meaning beyond the brilliant surface. As a story GOING TO JERUSALEM is alarmingly funny, entertaining, swift, and moving throughout, the comedy darkening into terror and out again. It all culminates in a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch, Crazy Day in Yell County, Arkansas. Jerome Charyn was thirty when he published this book and had already published two novels and a collection of short stories. A reviewer of one of these earlier books spoke of Charyn's ‘Dickensian vigor and inventiveness. alert feeling for the comic. very evident promise.' GOING TO JERUSALEM provides heightened evidence for the accuracy of such praise. But it also makes further speculation about his growth as a writer unnecessary, for it displays the talent and original vision of a novelist who has reached full maturity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Hurricane Lady. New York. 2001. Mysterious Press. 0446677337. Paperback Original. 208 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Jocko Robinson is the 97th richest man in America and the creator of The Lamplighter, the world-popular TV crime series. But that doesn't stop Jocko from getting shot in the head while looking for a tofu burger in Los Angeles. And that won't stop Jocko from falling helplessly in love with a Hurricane Lady, a former model who calls herself Inertia and serves a crime lord from Cologne. A man obsessed among other obsessed men, a man in love among a tangle of lovers, Jocko is desperately trying to pry away Inertia from her life of mayhem and promiscuity. To succeed, Jocko has to enter the realm of his own fantasy - and somehow find a way out again.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Jerzy: A Novel. New York. 2017. Bellevue Literary Press. 9781942658146. 239 pages. paperback. Cover design by Alban Fischer.
DESCRIPTION - Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works. Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators―a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter―who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel.
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Charyn, Jerome. Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution. New York. 2008. Norton. 9780393064971. 480 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustrations - (Front) James Gillray/Getty Images, (Back) Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images. Jacket design by Evan Gaffney Design.
DESCRIPTION - This comic masterpiece reimagines the American Revolution with a one-eyed spy, a heroic whorehouse madam, and a cunning George Washington. Praised for one of the most ‘singular and remarkable [careers] in American literature' (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World), Jerome Charyn now delights with this picaresque tour de force. He reanimates a war-torn Manhattan overrun by Redcoats and deserted by all but the Loyalists - and Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, the tempestuous, redheaded queen of Manhattan's most spectacular bordello. When the novel opens, young double agent John Stocking is being interrogated by Washington, a rebel commander far removed from the dour, silent man of most history books. As Johnny seeks to unlock the mystery of his birth and grapples with his allegiances, he falls in love with Clara, a gorgeous, green-eyed octoroon, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude's house. The wild parade of characters he encounters includes Benedict Arnold, the Howe brothers, ‘Sir Billy' and ‘Black Dick,' and a manipulative Alexander Hamilton. Not since John Barth's THE SOTWEED FACTOR and Gore Vidal's BURR has a novel so dramatically re-created America's historical beginnings. Jerome Charyn has been a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and has received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Paris and New York.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Little Angel Street: An Isaac Sidel Novel. New York. 1994. Mysterious Press. 0892964626. 274 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The fourth volume in the New Isaac Quartet features Mayor-elect Isaac Sidel, formerly NYPD Commissioner, at his eccentric best as he copes with the rascist Knickerbocker Boys, who are murdering the city's homeless, and struggles to control the Police Department.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Maria's Girls: An Isaac Sidel Novel. New York. 1992. Mysterious Press. 089296460x. 281 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Longing for his old assignment in the Central Park precinct and for the arms of his estranged wife, detective Caroll Brent teams up with a mafia boss to plot the vengeful murder of his boss.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Marilyn the Wild. New York. 1976. Arbor House. 0877951292. 246 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - The new novel about a kind of Jewish Popeye Doyle and his rampant daughter, by a ‘marvelous' (New York Times Book Review) author who ‘forces one deep into his inimitable world of tough-talking fuzz' (New York Times) that ‘makes the friends of Eddie Coyle look like choirboys' (Publishers Weekly). Isaac Sidel (known to his detractors as Isaac the Pure) was a cop - the toughest, hardest and most incorruptible in the business; and he ruled the meanest kingdom of the city - the Lower East Side. The only one he couldn't handle was Marilyn the Wild, his daughter and the only person he truly loved. Also, Rupert, the brilliant vindictive son of Isaac's oldest friend, who in an alliance with a kung-fu expert and a fiery teen-age ‘mama' formed the Lollipop Gang, dedicated to the violent end of Isaac's sway. When his gang was finally broken, Rupert then stalked Isaac's softest spot, Marilyn, in one of the best page-turning finales ever written. This high voltage novel pulls the reader into America's urban underbelly - wild, terrifying and wondrously tender in its fashion. Its people and their remarkable histories will not let you go. not even long after the very last page.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. On the Darkening Green. New York. 1965. McGraw Hill. 244 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The story of Nick Lapucci, who upon the death of his school-teacher and his friend Crazy Bemelman, leaves the Bronx for the Catskills, changes his name to Lipshitz, and takes a job as a teacher-counselor-warden in a home for deliquent and retarded Jewish boys. Author's second novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Once Upon a Droshky. New York. 1964. McGraw Hill. 222 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Published in 1964 when Charyn was twenty-six years old, ONCE UPON A DROSHKY is a fairy tale-like story set in the Yiddish-American community of the Lower East Side. The narrator, Yankel Rabinowitz, tells the story in English that is heavily broken by Yiddish, creating a great comic effect. The novel centers on the relationship of a father and son: the father represents the old and embattled Yiddish community while the son's legalistic tendencies make him the prototypical American. Charyn draws heavily on experiences from his childhood in the Bronx for details of the Yiddish community.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Panna Maria. New York. 1982. Arbor House. 0877954089. 320 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Panna Maria, which in English means ‘Virgin Mary', who surely has no connection whatsoever with the characters who herein make up an historic collection-a unique and broad-canvased recreation of America's emigrant roots. At the turn of the century in New York's Hell's Kitchen stands the Panna Maria, a brick tenement castle that is home for Jerome Charyn's creation, a richly textured novel of astounding emotional force. Out of the cellar of this Polish-American enclave, next door to a renegade prince, Stefan Wilde - warder of the Panna Maria - ascends to love with the "Amerykanka," the daughter of a Republican party boss, only to be run out of town by her father's friends until he assumes the dreaded image of the Tsarevitch, monstrously isolated from all men, with only his memories and the Panna Maria to sustain him. By turns tragic and hilarious, PANNA MARIA is a major work by one of America's most acclaimed writers, a tour de force of twentieth century life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Paradise Man. New York. 1987. Donald I. Fine. 0917657934. 240 pages. hardcover. Cover by J. Sposate.
DESCRIPTION - The sophisticated vice-president of a fur company - who dresses in English suits and dines in New York's poshest restaurants - is really a hired killer. The Paradise Man is a hit man, and content with his life, until he meets up with the daughter of the district attorney and falls hopelessly in love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Pinocchio's Nose. New York. 1983. Arbor House. 0877954380. 384 pages. hardcover. Cover: Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - Novel of a man who unlocks the true erotic nature of Pinocchio and with it his own life in the east Bronx in New York City.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. Secret Isaac. New York. 1978. Arbor House. 0877951969. 315 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Beginning with BLUE EYES, and continuing with MARILYN THE WILD and THE EDUCATION OF PATRICK SILVER, Jerome Charyn developed a true American original, Isaac Sidel, First Deputy Police Commissioner of New York City - of Big City Anywhere, America, really - a wounded romantic whose heart is ravaged by too much love for his fellow lesser-man, whose guts are on fire with too much rage at the well-placed killers of his City's dreams. Now in SECRET ISAAC Mr. Charyn (about whose most recent novel John Leonard in The New York Times said, ‘It's as if The Sound and the fury had been written by Candide') allows the reader to discover the essential Isaac, the secret Isaac, trailing him from New York City's political halls and lower depths to Dublin's Joycean underworld as he pursues villainy, true love and terrible revenge, and along the way creates a masterwork.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Catfish Man. New York. 1980. Arbor House. 0877952493. 313 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In THE CATFISH MAN: A CONJURED LIFe Jerome Charyn has created a mock-autobiography where the author is the narrator. ‘Those catfish in the Bronx River ‘can swallow a tin can and slap a child off a mudbank' - as ‘Jerome', the authentic source of this earthy, delightful conjured life learns growing up in the Polish-Jewish enclave of Crotona Park, New York, in the 1940s.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Education of Patrick Silver. New York. 1976. Arbor House. 087795142x. 184 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Loretta Trezzo.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the capstone to Jerome Charyn's contemporary ‘brilliantly conceived crime-and-punishment trilogy' (Time) begun with BLUE EYES and continued with MARILYN THE WILD - together building a cosmos of big city folks placed high and low, in hot pursuit of life in extremis. wonderful, terrible, true. At the center is Patrick Silver, defrocked cop, ex-colleague and now antagonist of Isaac Sidel, the First Deputy Police Commissioner of New York, also known as ‘the Blue Godfather' Patrick Silver's present beat is an Irish synogogue, his enemies are fearsome, his constituents are suspicious, his love and just reward, finally, is Odile Leonhardy, a teen-age sorceress whose office is the Plaza, whose favors are a blessing. Crime-punishment-reward form the education of Patrick Silver, and the trilogy of Jerome Charyn's extraordinary achievement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Franklin Scare. New York. 1977. Arbor House. 0877951675. 326 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bob Antler.
DESCRIPTION - It is May 1944. An ordinary sailor named Oliver Beebe, a handsome man with a head full of eyebrows, arrives at the White House to cut the President's hair, and quickly, mysteriously, becomes a live-in, full-time companion and confidant to the Chief Executive. An odd nimbus surrounds the young man. The president has installed him in the attic of the White House, he comes and goes from FDR's bedroom without knocking, he is the only man who seems to be able to bridge the warring camps surrounding Eleanor and FDR. Reporters and newsmen of the nation interview and probe, but they can find no clue to the secret of Oliver Beebe. The Secret Service digs into his past, but they can only come up with questions: What is Beebe's strange relationship with his sister? Why does he go to meetings of the Fascist organization called The Liberty Club? What is the basis of his remarkable friendship with J. Edgar Hoover? As the security forces watch in frustration, the President, increasingly dependent on young Oliver, and caught up first in his election battle against Tom Dewey and then with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, remains oblivious to his own and the nation's jeopardy. What happens then, and how, is more than historic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia. New York. 2004. Thunder's Mouth Press. 1568583125. 357 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Stewart A. Williams.
DESCRIPTION - A Soviet theater troupe dares to put on Shakespeare's King Lear, but shortly before the performance, the actor playing the title role falls ill. The prop manager, a lumbering, largely silent bear of a man - completely inappropriate for the part, according to common perception - finds himself literally thrust into the spotlight. His performance becomes the talk of Moscow, and he falls under the direct scrutiny of Joseph Stalin, who controls whether the show will proceed and the actors will live to give another performance. An audacious winter's tale, The Green Lantern is an exploration of Shakespeare, the Soviet Union, and what it is to perform, by one of the great American writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Man Who Grew Younger and Other Stories. New York. 1967. Harper & Row. 195 pages. hardcover. Jacket by Fred Wellington.
DESCRIPTION - THE MAN WHO GREW YOUNGER and Other Stories by JEROME CHARYN Like its title, the world of Jerome Charyn's stories is larger than life, almost mythical; in it, people are capable of the most extraordinary things. In the novella ‘1944,' Lippy Lipkowitz, nine, of the second toughest family in the East Bronx, single-handedly defeats the police, his Uncle Max, the F.B.I., Sing Sing, and Joe Crapanzano's bookie cousin Marco. In ‘Sing, Shaindele, Sing,' Fannie Finocchiaro (alias Shaindele Berkowitz, the Molly Picon of East Broadway) causes the balcony of the Henry Street Theatre to come tumbling down. In ‘Imberman,' a weightlifter writes a 2,000-page literary masterpiece. This supernatural quality is wildly funny, until, colliding with reality, it takes on a terrible sadness. In ‘Faigele the Idiotke,' Faigele is not the little bird of her name, and when she follows a pigeon off the roof, she cannot fly. In ‘'Farewell!. Farewell!. ' Leo Simonson, of the 27th Infantry in the Pacific, cannot possibly be the hero that his sixteen-year-old brother Albie, back home in the Bronx, would like him to be. When Leo's best friend is killed in New Caledonia, Leo is sent home. Albie refuses to sleep in the same room with him and cries, ‘Why'd he have to crack up for? He should have died better than clime home like this!' In ‘Race Day at Hiawatha,' the protagonists win by cheating, and the ‘enemy,' one-eyed Torpedo Tepelwitz, turns out to be the real hero, paddling furiously in his sabotaged canoe. Charyn knows his characters thoroughly - their speech, their values, their times and places - and he captures these qualities with great humor and perception. As The New York Review of Books said of his last book, On the Darkening Green, Charyn has ‘a Dickensian vigor and inventiveness. an alert feeling for the comic. and a very evident promise.' This collection confirms and extends that judgment. Jerome Charyn was born in New York City in 1937. He attended the High School of Music and Art and was graduated from Columbia College in 1959. After teaching English at the City College of New York, he moved to the West Coast, where he is currently a visiting writer and Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. New York. 2010. Norton. 9780393068566. 349 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson. Jacket illustration by Silja Goetz.
DESCRIPTION - An astonishing novel that removes Emily Dickinson's own mysterious mask and reveals the passions and heartbreak of America's greatest poet. What if the old maid of Amherst wasn't an old maid at all? Her older brother, Austin, spoke of Emily as his wild sister. Jerome Charyn, continuing his exploration of American history through fiction, has written a startling novel about Emily Dickinson in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations that he learned from her letters and poems. The poet dons a hundred veils, alternately playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil. We meet the significant characters of her life, including her tempestuous sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert; her brooding father, Edward; and the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who may have inspired some of her greatest letters and poems. Charyn has also invented characters, including an impoverished fellow student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, who will betray her; and a handyman named Tom, who will obsess Emily throughout her life. Charyn has written an extraordinary adventure that will disturb and delight.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. The Tar Baby. New York. 1973. Holt Rinehart & Winston. 0030914854. 243 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lynn Braswell.
DESCRIPTION - Audaciously cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly - including such magazine paraphernalia as ads and letters to the editor - The Tar Baby coalesces into a brilliant, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. Above all, it is an entertainment that will disturb and delight a college-bred generation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Charyn, Jerome. War Cries Over Avenue C. New York. 1985. Donald I. Fine. 0917657306. 359 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Loretta Trezzo.
DESCRIPTION - Here, from perhaps America's most unique and original voice, is a tale of the Wild Wild East, Manhattan's Indian country designated by the alphabet avenues A to D, and especially where there are no gods, where the cops wear Batman capes as a message to snipers in the windows that they're not on patrol. Presiding over Alphabetville is Saigon Sarah, the tiger lady of Avenue C, who with her Bayonne 'New Jersey' boyfriend operates out of a talmud torah converted into a fortress. War Cries Over Avenue C is an American story from the bottom up, from the inside, out, a harrowing, and comic, saga that grabs with its narrative force, impales with its wit and imagination, and never lets go as it squeezes the juices, however dark and poisonous, from the best - and worst - of us all.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
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Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Echo of Lions. New York. 1989. Morrow. 0688064078. 381 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. Jacket painting - ‘Ships in a Storm’ by Hans Savery.
DESCRIPTION - ‘ECHO OF LIONS gives us Barbara Chase-Riboud's characteristic awesome research and brilliant dramatization of, I think, the most gripping, significant and epic saga that a century of slaveships ever produced.' - Alex Haley. From the author who brought Sally Hemings to vibrant life for millions of readers comes another controversial and fascinating historical figure - Joseph Cinque. Here is the story of a black man desperate to return to his country, and a white man trying to save his own from the approaching disaster of civil war. The young African who would become famous as Joseph Cinque, and the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, across whose path Cinque exploded like a comet, are the protagonists of this powerful and haunting epic of the only successful slave rebellion in the history of America and American jurisprudence. On August 22, 1839, a low-lying, mysterious schooner lay off Montauk, New York. Her topsail gone, her remaining sails tattered and carrying no flag of nationality, she drifted like a derelict. This was the Amistad, a Baltimore-built Spanish slaver whose cargo of fifty-three slaves had mutinied, killed the captain and crew, and tried to sail home to west Africa. For fifty-nine days they had zigzagged up the coast of the United States until they were captured and imprisoned in New Haven. Their leader, Joseph Cinque, was branded a murderer and a slave pirate by some, and a revolutionary and defender of his liberty by others in a nation already in the throes of dividing itself into slave and free. Cinque electrified this bitter feud, as an ex-president came to his defense, raising issues that became the first civil rights case in the history of the United States to reach the Supreme Court. The master of historical fiction, Barbara Chase-Riboud brings all the glory and misery of a nation to these provocative, tumultuous figures. She creates the unforgettable Vivian Braithwaite and her family, born free but forced to face the ambiguities of the lives of black Americans caught between the Revolution and the Civil War. As the drama unfolds from an astounding evocation of the African experience to the power and politics of Washington D.C., the absence of the Amistad story from our history books becomes a shocking omission. Chase-Riboud's powerful reconstruction of these two heroes who never love each other but who find themselves fighting the same enemy, the victory of one becoming the vengeance of the other, makes ECHO OF LIONS a searing experience, and its denouement one that every reader will remember long after putting down this great American story of the sea, the law, and human bondage.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Chase-Riboud was established as one of our most passionate and distinguished historical novelists with her first book, SALLY HEMINGS, which won the 1979 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize as the best novel written by an American woman. She was awarded the 1988 Carl Sandburg Prize as best American poet for her second collection of poems a melologue, PORTRAIT OF A NUDE WOMAN AS CLEOPATRA. Chase-Riboud is also the author of VALIDE, a novel of white slavery. A graduate of Yale University who holds an honorary degree from Temple University.
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Chase-Riboud, Barbara. From Memphis & Peking: Poems. New York. 1974. Random House. 0394488997. 112 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The first book of poetry from an internationally acclaimed sculptor.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining' of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Portrait of a Nude Woman As Cleopatra. New York. 1987. Morrow. 0688064035. 110 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A series of poems offering a fresh perspective on the story of Antony and Cleopatra. The poet uses Plutarch as her source to provide a personal portrait of Cleopatra.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining' of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Sally Hemings. New York. 1979. Viking Press. 0670616052. 348 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting by Cornelia Gray.
DESCRIPTION - One of the greatest love stories in American history is also one of the least known, and most controversial. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, had a mistress for thirty-eight years, whom he loved and lived with until he died, the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings. But it was not simply that Jefferson had a mistress that provoked the scandal of the times; it was that Sally Hemings was a quadroon slave, and that Jefferson fathered a slave family, many of whose descendents, known and unknown, are alive today. In this moving novel, which spans two continents, sixty years, and seven presidencies, Barbara Chase-Riboud re-creates a love story, based on the documents and evidence of the day but giving free rein to the novelist's imagination. The story opens in the Paris of 1787, two scant years before the French Revolution and but a decade after the start of our own, where Thomas Jefferson is serving as the American ambassador to the court of France. A widower, Jefferson had brought his elder daughter, Martha, to France with him, but now he decides to bring over his younger daughter, Polly, as well. Sent with her as maid and servant is fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings. Over the next several months Jefferson grows increasingly infatuated with his slave, and before long becomes her lover. Highly intelligent and sensitive, and increasingly educated and sophisticated through her Paris sojourn, Sally Hemings could have opted not to return to America when Jefferson was called home, could have chosen freedom on the basis that slavery had been abolished on French soil. Bit she did return with Jefferson to Monticello, thus reenslaving herself to him. She never left Monticello again, and Jefferson, despite pressures to do so, did not remarry; the reason, no doubt, was Sally Hemings. Woven into this rich and complex narrative of love and enslavement is the story of the early Republic and of the personages of Aaron Burr, Dolley and James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and John Trumbull. And like a series of somber counterpoints to the compelling love story are three salient themes: the slave rebellions of Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner; murders, those of George Wythe, Jefferson's old professor and benefactor, and of George, the Lewis slave in Kentucky; and, above all, survival, that of Sally Hemings but also that of her indomitable mother, Elizabeth. Here were two generations of slave mistresses: Sally Hemings, mistress to a president, and her mother, mistress to a president's father-in-law. The strange and complex ties between these two American families - the Jeffersons and the Hemingses, one white, one black - form in a sense the underside of our history. In this brilliant novel, Barbara Chase-Riboud presents the remarkable love story of Jefferson and Hemings as a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable addendum to the history of the races, and of the sexes, in America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining' of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Chase-Riboud, Barbara. The President's Daughter. New York. 1994. Crown. 0517598612. 469 pages. hardcover. Jacket art: Monticello, 1821, by Jefferson Vail. Jacket design by Ken Sansome.
DESCRIPTION - In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud made literary history when she published SALLY HEMINGS to critical praise. Not only did the novel spend six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sell 1.6 million copies worldwide, SALLY HEMINGS also accomplished the impossible: It breathed life into a historical enigma. The novel also established Sally Hemings as the emblematic incarnation of many things that were forbidden in this country at that time. Now, Barbara Chase-Riboud is back with THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER, the provocative continuation of the irrefutable historical chronicle of Sally Hemings - Thomas Jefferson's mistress, the mother of his children, and the slave he would never set free - even when the scandal nearly cost him the presidency. Epic in proportion, yet rendered in exquisite detail by a writer with the eye of a historian and the heart of a storyteller, THE PRESIDENT‘S DAUGHTER begins in 1822 and tells the story of Harriet Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings's beautiful and headstrong slave daughter. Harriet is allowed to run away from Monticello and pass for white, as Jefferson had promised Sally their children would be able to do. Harriet experiences the turbulent events leading up to the American Civil War and is eventually thrust into the very heart of the Battle of Gettysburg, where she becomes a kind of Philadelphian Scarlett O'Hara. As THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER draws to a close during the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, Harriet receives an anonymous letter that contains the memoirs of her brother Madison Hemings - who is living his life on the black side of the color line. Harriet realizes that someone in her entourage, perhaps even her own husband, knows she is indeed the president's daughter. In the Chase-Riboud tradition, THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER is more than just the good read it seems at first glance. In truth, not since Mark Twain in the classic masterpiece PUDD'NHEAD WILSON has a major American writer evoked the ambiguity, pathos, complexity, and emotion of the American identity so brilliantly. Barbara Chase-Riboud has written another classic masterpiece of race, love, and color in America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining' of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Valide: A Novel of the Harem. New York. 1986. Morrow. 0688043348. 429 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Author's second novel - the story of the American Creole captured and sold into the harem of the Ottoman Sultan, who became the mother of Sultan Mahmud II - the story of a survivor of slavery.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining' of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Chavez, Cesar. AN Organizer's Tale: Speeches. New York. 2008. Penguin Books. 9780143105268. Introduction by Ilan Stavans. 288 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - One of the most important civil rights leaders in American history, Cesar Chavez was a firm believer in the principles of nonviolence, and he effectively employed peaceful tactics to further his cause. Through his efforts, he helped achieve dignity, fair wages, benefits, and humane working conditions for hundreds of thousands of farm workers. This extensive collection of Chavez's speeches and writings chronicles his progression and development as a leader, and includes previously unpublished material. From speeches to spread the word of the Delano Grape Strike to testimony before the House of Representatives about the hazards of pesticides, Chavez communicated in clear, direct language and motivated people everywhere with an unflagging commitment to his ideals.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cesario Estrada Chavez (March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) was an American labor leader and civil rights activist. Along with Dolores Huerta and lesser known Gilbert Padilla, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW) labor union. Ideologically, his worldview combined left-wing politics with Catholic social teachings.
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Chayefsky, Paddy. Altered States. New York. 1978. Harper & Row. 0060107278. 184 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Edward Jessup, a young psycho-physiologist, experiments with different states of consciousness, obsessed with an addiction to truth and knowledge. He injects himself with psychedelic drugs, lies locked in an isolation tank and experiences all the stages of pre-human consciousness until finally terrible changes take place with him: Jessup also physically transforms into a pre-human being. His thirst for knowledge drives him into ever new, increasingly irreversible transformations. Only the horror when his body begins to dissolve into pure energy brings him back to human bonds.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sidney Aaron 'Paddy' Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the 'kitchen sink realism' movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, 'He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism.' Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital 'daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.' Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in The Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions. Chayefsky was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Television Hall of Fame. He received this honor three years after his death, in 1984.
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Chayefsky, Paddy. The Bachelor Party. New York. 1957. Signet/New American Library. 127 pages. paperback. S1385.
DESCRIPTION - THE BACHELOR PARTY is a 1953 teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky which was adapted by Chayefsky for a 1957 film. The 1957 film was directed by Delbert Mann, with Don Murray, E.G. Marshall, Jack Warden and Carolyn Jones. Jones was nominated for the 1958 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of a party girl who is actually very lonely. Charlie Samson is a hard-working married bookkeeper, struggling to advance himself by attending night school to become an accountant. He and four other of his bookkeeper coworkers throw a bachelor party for one of them, Arnold Craig, who is about to get married. After the party, they decide to go bar-hopping. Charlie is Arnold's best man. Other coworkers attending the party including the older married man, Walter, who has an unspecified health problem, and Eddie, a happy-go-lucky bachelor. The night becomes a turning point for all five men.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sidney Aaron 'Paddy' Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the 'kitchen sink realism' movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, 'He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism.' Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital 'daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.' Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in The Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions. Chayefsky was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Television Hall of Fame. He received this honor three years after his death, in 1984.
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Chayefsky, Paddy. The Goddess. New York. 1958. Simon & Schuster. 167 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Goddess is a 1958 American drama film directed by John Cromwell and starring Kim Stanley and Lloyd Bridges. From a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, the film is an in-depth character study of the life of a troubled and lonely girl who becomes a movie star adored by millions, but is miserable in her private life. The movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Emily Ann Faulkner is born into poverty in the South, has no father, no friends, and is unloved by her indifferent mother, Laureen, who does not want to be tied down by a child. As a teenager, Emily is socially ostracized by the local townspeople, except for the boys who are attracted to her good looks and sexual availability. Emily lets them have sex with her to have some brief respite from her loneliness; the rest of the time, she retreats into Hollywood fantasies. During WWII, she meets and marries world-weary G.I. John Tower, who also suffers from his dysfunctional upbringing as the son of a well-known movie actor. Unable to cope with a rocky marriage and unwanted pregnancy, Emily soon escapes to Hollywood, leaving her baby daughter in John's care. In Hollywood, Emily soon marries Dutch Seymour, a former champion boxer turned Hollywood socialite. She initially enjoys the attention and social status she gets as Dutch's wife, but rejects his idea that they move to St. Louis so he can join his family's business. Anxious to further her career, Emily poses for risque magazine photos and has casting couch affairs, ending her marriage to Dutch. Emily is soon transformed into the glamorous superstar sex goddess, Rita Shawn. Despite her celebrity and wealth, she is still insecure and fears being alone, seeking comfort in drinking and promiscuity. Rita finally has a nervous breakdown requiring hospitalization, which causes her elderly mother Laureen to finally come to Hollywood for a visit. Rita is thrilled to see her mother and clings to her, trying to impress her. However, Laureen has turned from her past immorality to religious fervor, is unimpressed by Rita's money and success, and mainly seeks to convert her daughter. Rita has very few friends, and the visiting couple she introduces to her mother as her "dearest and oldest friends" privately tell Laureen that they barely know Rita and only met her a short time ago, adding that Rita should see a psychiatrist. Rita wants her mother to stay with her permanently, but Laureen insists on returning home to her simple life of attending church, caring for her sick brother, and helping her sister-in-law run the family store. As her mother is leaving, Rita becomes enraged and screams from the doorway that she hates her and wishes her dead. When her mother later dies, Rita has a drunken public breakdown at her grave. The self-destructive Rita now lives under the constant supervision of a stern secretary/nurse, Harding, who has become Rita's mother figure. John Tower tries to reconcile with Rita/Emily for the sake of their young daughter, whom John has learned to love, thus breaking the cycle of family dysfunction. But Rita is too psychologically damaged.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sidney Aaron 'Paddy' Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the 'kitchen sink realism' movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, 'He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism.' Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital 'daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.' Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in The Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions. Chayefsky was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Television Hall of Fame. He received this honor three years after his death, in 1984.
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Chayefsky, Paddy. The Tenth Man. New York. 1960. Random House. 333 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Tenth Man is a 1959 American play, adapted from The Dybbuk from S. Ansky. It had 623 performances over its year-and-a-half-long Broadway run. The play involves several elderly Jewish men from the old country, Russia, all members of a small synagogue in Mineola, Long Island. The play opens with the hapless Sexton's daily quest to gather ten males to constitute a minyan required in Jewish tradition to conduct a religious service. This search has suddenly become critical as the granddaughter of one of the men has apparently become possessed by the spirit of a dybbuk, an evil spirit. The grandfather leaves the girl sitting in the office of the temple's young rabbi, who is progressive and not likely to believe in the existence of evil spirits. The men then desperately begin to search for the necessary tenth man so they can hold the prayer service and attempt to exorcise the malevolent spirit. A young non-believing Jewish man wanders into the synagogue suffering a hangover from a night spent getting drunk. He sees the granddaughter sitting semi conscious and is moved and begins to fall in love. The older men are glad to welcome him because they now have the necessary ten males. The rabbi agrees to conduct the exorcism with the aid of an elderly robed man, the "cabalist" who had been praying in the temple.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sidney Aaron 'Paddy' Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the 'kitchen sink realism' movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, 'He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism.' Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital 'daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.' Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in The Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions. Chayefsky was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Television Hall of Fame. He received this honor three years after his death, in 1984.
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Cheever, Benjamin. Famous After Death. New York. 1999. Crown. 0609600052. 211 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A brilliant and wickedly comic novel about fame and its discontents. Noel Hammersmith has two dreams: to bring his weight down to a slim 138 pounds and to be famous. Despite being a diet book editor and exercising regularly, he can't lose a pound, and his hilarious timidity insures that he has a hard time getting attention at all, let alone fame. To express his growing frustration, Noel begins to write angry letters-to Brooks Brothers when they discontinue his favorite shirt, and to Golden Rule Vitamins, who makes fake promises of easy weight loss. Coincidentally, bombs start exploding after each of his letters, the most notorious leaving a seven-year-old chess prodigy dead. When one of Noel's authors, 'Che Guevera,' claims to know where the mysterious bomber will strike next, Noel's world gets turned upside down. .until a series of riotous and unexpected twists helps Noel attain his dreams, but at a strange price. Expertly skewering the cult of celebrity, this darkly comic satire is even more true-to-life than we might like.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benjamin Hale Cheever (born October 8, 1948) is an American writer and editor. He is the son of Mary (Winternitz) and writer John Cheever and brother of Susan Cheever.
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Cheever, John. Bullet Park. New York. 1969. Knopf. 0394418190. 245 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Bullet Park is a 1969 novel by American novelist John Cheever about an earnest yet pensive father Eliot Nailles and his troubled son Tony, and their predestined fate with a psychotic man Hammer, who moves to Bullet Park to sacrifice one of them.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. Falconer. New York. 1977. Knopf. 0394410718. 213 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by R.D. Scudellari.
DESCRIPTION - In a nightmarish prison a convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man. Out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. Oh What a Paradise It Seems. New York. 1982. Knopf. 0394513347. 100 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - John Cheever's last novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever's accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful. 'A luminous epiphany of life. engaging and complex. vivid and alive.'--Washington Post Book World. An old man falls madly in love and does valiant battle against polluters in this ineffably joyful novel--Cheever's last.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel. New York. 1961. Harper & Row. 176 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A beautiful duchess, a lush, a pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth rugby game, a lowboy, a hill town, and a mountain pass are a few of the people, places, and things that Mr. Cheever hopes to exorcise from his subsequent work by describing their lives, their triumphs and shortcomings. ‘In order to become readable again,' says Mr. Cheever, ‘to say nothing of recouping some of its lost importance, fiction can no longer operate as a sixth-rate boardinghouse. And in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive - where even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night - the process of eviction, of selecting characters of stature, can be as interesting as the final cast.' In a sense, then, these libelous and compassionate stories are a series of envoys to people and situations whose claim on our attention is intense but not (Mr. Cheever hopes) final. When THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE won the National Book Award for 1958, the citation singled out those qualities which, we believe, have distinguished all Mr. Cheever's works : ‘A novel, which records with humor, with candor, with complete originality, a variety of emotions and experiences. It conveys human qualities so intensely that they seem to rub off on everything else - furniture, houses, animals, the weather, even. .' Hailed by the New York Times as ‘one of our most entertaining story tellers,' Mr. Cheever's short stories have been acclaimed as ‘brilliant,' ‘superbly honest,' ‘rich and exciting,' and ‘an exhilarating experience.' This new collection will surely reinforce Mr. Cheever's reputation as one of America's foremost writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. New York. 1964. Harper & Row. 288 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Brigadier and the Golf Widow is a collection of short fiction by John Cheever, published by Harper and Row in 1964. These sixteen works were first published individually in The New Yorker. The works also appears in The Stories of John Cheever (1978). Several stories in this volume are among the most frequently anthologized of Cheever's work, notably "The Swimmer", "The Angel of the Bridge", "Clementina", and "The Music Teacher." STORIES INCLUDED (with date of publication in The New Yorker) - "The Chaste Clarissa" (June 14, 1952); "Just One More Time" (October 8, 1955); "The Bella Lingua" (March 1, 1958); "The Music Teacher" (November 21, 1959); "A Woman Without a Country" (December 12, 1959); "Clementina" (May 7, 1960); "The Seaside Houses" (July 29, 1961); "The Angel of the Bridge" (October 21, 1961); "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" (November 11, 1961); "A Vision of the World" (September 29, 1962); "Reunion" (October 27, 1962); "Metamorphoses" (March 2, 1963); "An Educated American Woman" (November 2, 1963); "The Ocean" (August 1, 1964); "Marito in Città" (July 4, 1964); "The Swimmer" (July 18, 1964).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The Housebreaker of Shady Hills and Other Stories. New York. 1958. Harper & Brothers. 143 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - One of Cheever's most well known and analysed short stories, about a man with a family in the suburbs who goes through a bunch of twists and turns.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York. 1978. Knopf. 0394500873. 693 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by R.D. Scudellari.
DESCRIPTION - When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. In the years since, it has become a classic. Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection. Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called 'the greatest generation.' From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in 'The Enormous Radio' to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in 'The Housebreaker of Shady Hill' and 'The Swimmer,' Cheever tells us everything we need to know about 'the pain and sweetness of life.' Winner of the 1981 National Book Award.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The Wapshot Chronicle. New York. 1957. Harper & Brothers. 307 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist. Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The Wapshot Chronicle/The Wapshot Scandal. New York. 1979. Harper & Row. 0060107413. 549 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Blanche Nonoo.
DESCRIPTION - Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence in New England, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The Wapshot Scandal. New York. 1964. Harper & Row. 309 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - This is a novel of large and tender vision, filled with pungent characters and outrageous twists of fate and, above all, with Cheever's luminous compassion for all his hapless fellow prisoners of human nature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, John. The World of Apples. New York. 1973. Knopf. 0394483464. 174 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Innocent, old-fashioned, self-aware, Cheever's people are summoned by strange and improbable events to ponder the values they have been taught to trust. .decency, common sense, nostalgia, even truth. Stunned by these encounters, they nevertheless survive. A worn-out poet finds peace in his heart as he lays his Lermontov medal at the foot of the sacred angel; a prosperous suburbanite contemplates his predicament when his wife joins the cast of a nude show; a guileless and romantic well digger, anxious for a bride, visits Russia, falls in love and returns home 'singing the unreality blues'; and a miserably married man fantasizes a beautiful lover who comes to him for strength, love and counsel while he tends the charcoal grill in the backyard.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 - June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.' His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.' While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,' ‘Goodbye, My Brother,' ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,' ‘The Country Husband,' and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both - light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
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Cheever, Susan. A Handsome Man. New York. 1981. Simon & Schuster. 0671423959. 234 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Publicist Hannah Bart goes to Ireland with her older lover, Sam Noble, to meet his estranged son, Travis, and finds herself in competition with the young man for his father's love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Cheever (born July 31, 1943), an American author, is a prize-winning best-selling writer well-known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history.
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Cheever, Susan. Doctors & Women. New York. 1987. Potter. 0517564378. 266 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Kate Loomis, a young, married journalist, finds her world coming apart when she falls in love with the powerful doctor who is treating her mother for cancer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Cheever (born July 31, 1943), an American author, is a prize-winning best-selling writer well-known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history.
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Cheever, Susan. Looking For Work. New York. 1979. Simon & Schuster. 067125054x. 188 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - The story of a young woman who grows up in a rich and intellectual family
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Cheever (born July 31, 1943), an American author, is a prize-winning best-selling writer well-known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history.
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Cheever, Susan. The Cage. Boston. 1982. Houghton Mifflin. 0395321115. 180 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Alone in their New Hampshire summer estate, magazine writer William Bristol and his suburb-bound wife, Julia, confront the fragmentation of their once-shared hopes amid the private-menagerie cages inherited from Julia's wealthy family
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Cheever (born July 31, 1943), an American author, is a prize-winning best-selling writer well-known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. (retold by Ray Anthony Shepard). Conjure Tales. London. 1975. Collins. 0001951114. Illustrated by John Ross & Clare Romano. Introduction by Ray Anthony Shepard. 100 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by John Ross & Clare Romano.
DESCRIPTION - Is it possible for a man to grow, wilt and grow again like a plant changing with the seasons? It is if he has been ‘goophered' by a conjure woman. Set in America's slave South before the Civil War, these tales of conjuring (or voodoo) are at once eerie, humorous and poignant. Sandy, for instance, whose Master planned to send him to work in another county, asked the conjure woman to turn him into a tree so he couldn't be sent away from his wife. This is a wonderful ghost story, but at the same time it gives much insight into the conditions of slavery, when a Master had every right to sell, lend or give away his slaves as if they were pieces of machinery. The stories first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press in the 1890s. Their author, Charles Chesnutt, a black lawyer, was anxious to reveal the evils and destructiveness of slavery. However, his white readers usually missed the point, partly because they thought the author was white, but also because the tales make very exciting reading and they did not wish to look for anything more than entertainment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt. New York. 1992. Mentor/New American Library. 0451628438. Edited & With An Introduction by William L. Andrews. 280 pages. hardcover. ME2843.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Charles Chesnutt deserves credit for almost singlehandedly inaugurating a truly African-American literary tradition in the short story.' - From the Introduction by William L Andrews. Black writer Charles Chesnutt published his first short story in an 1887 issue of the Atlantic Monthly - an authentic, innovative tale of hoodoo in the Old South told by a shrewd ex-slave raconteur named Uncle Julius McAdoo. Unlike the popular ‘Uncle Remus' stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Chesnutt's writing probed psychological depths in black people unheard of in Southern regional writing. His later stories went on to expose the anguish of mixed-race men and women and the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence, and moral compromise. With his scathing criticism of ‘the color line,' a turning point had been reached in the literary history of the United States. This important collection contains all the stories in Chesnutt's two published volumes, THE CONJURE WOMAN and THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH AND OTHER STORIES OF THE COLOR LINE, along with two uncollected works: the tragic ‘Dave's Neckliss' and ‘Baxter's Procrustes,' Chesnutt's parting shot at prejudice. Charles W. Chesnutt was the first writer to make the broad range of the African-American experience his artistic province, and in doing s placed his distinctive personal signature on the pages of American literary history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line. New York. 2000. Penguin Books. 0141185023. Edited & With An Introduction by William L. Andrews. 278 pages. paperback. Cover art - Romare Bearden 'The Prevalence of Ritual: Conjure Woman', 1964.
DESCRIPTION - At the turn of the nineteenth century, Charles W. Chesnutt was the most influential and widely respected African American fiction writer in the United States, reaching a significant portion of the national reading audience with his analyses and indictments of racism. This collection contains all the stories in Chesnutt's two pioneering volumes of short fiction, THE CONJURE WOMAN (1899) and THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH AND OTHER STORIES OF THE COLOR LINE (1899). Centered on the world of slavery and the voodoo beliefs and practices that black people in the antebellum South used to help them resist the injustices of their social condition, The Conjure Woman features a new kind of black storyteller, Uncle Julius McAdoo, who shrewdly adapts his recollections of the past to secure his economic advantage in the present, sometimes at the expense of his white employer. The Wife of His Youth probes the moral conflicts and psychological strains experienced by those African Americans who lived closest to the color line in Chesnutt's day. This Penguin Classics edition adds two remarkable, previously uncollected works: ‘Dave's Neckliss' and ‘Baxter's Procrustes.' Previously published as Collected Stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. Paul Marchand, F.M.C. Jackson. 1998. University Press Of Mississippi. 1578060559. Introduction by Matthew Wilson. 144 pages. hardcover. Cover illustration - The Historic New Orleans.
DESCRIPTION - After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand, a Free Man of Color, returns to his home in New Orleans. He discovers through a will that he is white and is now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal in Louisiana, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children. Charles W. Chesnutt wrote this novel in the 1920s at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance but set it in the past, a time and place favored by New Orleans novelist George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, PAUL MARCHAND, F.M.C., examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts here against the traditional stance that leading American writers of the previous generation - Cable, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells - had taken on the issue of miscegenation in their novels. Chesnutt resolves Marchand's dilemma with a surprising plot reversal that alters the traditional narrative that Cable, Twain, and Howells had developed for their fiction on mixed-race themes. In doing so, he exposes the issue of race as a social and legal fabrication. Moreover, he shows in Marchand that traits of inferiority and superiority are not based on ‘blood' but on other factors. In him Chesnutt has created an admirable character responsive to human needs and civility rather than to artificial institutions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income. Books by Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) include BAXTER'S PROCRUSTES, HOT-FOOT HANNIBAL, THE CONJURE WOMAN, THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS, MARROW OF TRADITION, and THE COLONEL'S DREAM. Matthew Wilson, author of the introduction, is an associate professor of humanities and writing at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. Boston. 1928. Houghton Mifflin. 229 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - One of Chesnutt's most important works was THE CONJURE WOMAN (first published in 1899), a collection of stories set in postbellum North Carolina in which Uncle Julius, a freed slave, entertains a white couple from the North with fantastical tales of antebellum plantation life. Julius's tales feature such supernatural elements as haunting, transfiguration, and conjuring that were typical of folk tales. While Julius's tales recall the Uncle Remus tales published by Joel Chandler Harris, they differ in that Uncle Julius' tales offer oblique or coded commentary on the psychological and social impact of slavery and racial inequality. While controversy exists over whether Chesnutt's Uncle Julius stories reaffirmed stereotypical views of African Americans, most critics contend that their allegorical critiques of racial injustice were surely not lost on some readers. Only seven of the Uncle Julius tales were collected in the THE CONJURE WOMAN. Chesnutt wrote a total of fourteen Uncle Julius tales, which were later collected in THE CONJURE WOMAN AND OTHER CONJURE TALES, published in 1993.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The House Behind the Cedars. New York. 1993. Penguin Books. 0140186859. Introduction by Donald B. Gibson. 195 pages. paperback. Cover painting by Elliott Daingerfield - 'Carolina Sunlight', c. 1915.
DESCRIPTION - THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life. This edition revitalizes a much-neglected masterpiece by one of our most important African-American writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The House Behind the Cedars. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Darwin Turner. Collier African American Library. 265 pages. paperback. 04938.
DESCRIPTION - CHARLES W. CHESNUTT was the first important Negro novelist to look, and look honestly, at the interracial and intraracial conflicts festering in the white society of the post-Civil War South. In The House Behind: the Cedars, his detached and compassionate presentation of individuals on different sides of the color line brings into sharp focus the race-consciousness and snobbery that existed among both blacks and whites in a schizophrenic and turbulent era. The novel tells of Rena Walden's withdrawal to the house behind the cedars, a flight from love in a world which could at any moment uncover the secret her family had so carefully tried to hide. And it explores the drastically changing views of the white man who loves her. In the development of Negro literature in America, THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS holds a place of great social and historical importance. It demands to be read. CHARLES W. CHESNUTT, school principal, lawyer, businessman, lecturer, and political activist, was one of the first black writers to make money from his writing. Many of his early short stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press. DARWIN T. TURNER is Dean at North Carolina A and T State University in Greensboro.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Durham. 1993. Duke University Press. 0822313790. Edited by Richard H. Brodhead. 186 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man's dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century. Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt's everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt's journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed - and, unexpectedly, assisted - a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. New York. 1993. Penguin Books. 0140186867. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes by Eric J. Sundquist. 346 pages. paperback. Cover Art: A scene of the Wilmington 'riot' as drawn by H. Ditzler for Colliers Weekly, November 26, 1898. Library of Congress.
DESCRIPTION - A fictional anatomy of America's harsh betrayal of the promise of racial equality. One of the most significant historical novels in American literature, THE MARROW OF TRADITION is based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, Massacre of 1898. Called a ‘race riot' by the inflammatory Southern press and engineered by white Democrats who had seen their political control slip into the hands of Republicans, many of whom were black, it was in fact a coup that restored power to the Democrats by subverting the principles of free democratic election. Some of Charles Chesnutt's relatives lived through the violence, and their accounts inspired this powerful and passionate novel. Originally published in 1901, THE MARROW OF TRADITION presents an unflinching portrayal of America's post-Reconstruction descent into a brutal world of segregation, and of a black culture caught between ideologies of assimilation and protest.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The Quarry. Princeton. 1999. Princeton University Press. 0691059969. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes by Dean McWilliams. 288 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Cati Laporte. Cover design by Tracy Baldwin.
DESCRIPTION - Was Donald Glover really what he seemed - a handsome, dedicated, and clever African-American star of the Harlem Renaissance, whose looks made him the ‘quarry' of a variety of women - or could the secrets of his birth change his destiny entirely? Focusing on the meaning of racial identity, this novel moves inexorably toward a surprising denouement. Although he was the first African-American writer of fiction to gain acceptance by America's white literary establishment, Charles Chesnutt (1858 - 1932) has been eclipsed in popularity by other writers who later rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. Recently, this path- breaking American writer has been receiving an increasing amount of attention. Two of his novels, PAUL MARCHAND, F.M.C. (completed in 1921) and THE QUARRY (completed in 1928), were considered too incendiary to be published during Chesnutt's lifetime. Their publication now provides us not only the opportunity to read these two books previously missing from Chesnutt's oeuvre but also the chance to appreciate better the intellectual progress of this literary pioneer. Bringing to life the culture of Harlem in the 1920s, Charles Chesnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and aesthetic milieu of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters, THE QUARRY is peopled with so many figures of the time - including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey - that it constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American history. Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man, whose adoptive black parents are determined that he become a leader in the black community. Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles W., Chesnutt is the author of many works, including THE CONJURE WOMEN & OTHER CONJURE TALES, THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS, THE MARROW TRADITION, and MANDY OXENDINE. Dean McWilliams is Professor of English at Ohio University. He is the author of books on Michel Butor and on John Gardner.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt. Washington DC. 1974. Howard University Press. 0882580124. Edited and With An Introduction by Sylvia Lyons Render. 422 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Roy E. La Grone.
DESCRIPTION - This volume contains all but four of Chesnutt's pieces of short fiction - excluding the sixteen tales and short stories in The Conjure Woman and those in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, both previously published. The anecdotes have never been published prior to this volume and the tales and short stories appear for the first time in book form. Charles W. Chesnutt was the first black American writer to receive major attention from literary critics. William Dean Howells likened the skill of his writing to the works of Maupassant, Turgenev, and Henry James. Chesnutt was published in the leading periodicals of the nineteenth century, as well as by Doubleday and Harper's. His work made an important contribution to nineteenth-century literature. He was among the first to create characters, white and black, that did not fit any previous stereotypic pattern. His depiction of blacks, in particular, added a realistic dimension to those of Thomas Dixon and Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" - type characterizations. Chestnutt's fresh and utilitarian use of humor and satire, as well as his exploitation of the elements and culture of the "low country" of North Carolina, rightfully place him as a major American literary figure. He was also a writer who had a deep commitment to his craft and to his people at a time when blacks were under intensive attack in the Post-Reconstruction era and no black writers and very few whites dared to make writing their sole means of support.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chesnutt, Charles W. To Be An Author: The Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt,1889-1905. Princeton. 1996. Princeton University Press. 0691036683. Edited by Joseph R. McElrath Jr. & Robert C. Leitz III. 248 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Diane Levy.
DESCRIPTION - Long eclipsed by the writers who later rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) has received a steadily increasing amount of attention since the 1960s. In what he termed the 'Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem' phase of African-American cultural history, this pioneer in the world of black letters vied with Paul Laurence Dunbar for the honor of being the first to 'evince innate distinction in literature.' The major establishment critic of his day, William Dean Howells, recognized Dunbar's poetry thus in 1896. But it was Chesnutt who won Howells's praise for prose fiction a few years later when The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth (1899) appeared. His other books, Frederick Douglass (1899), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel's Dream (1905), have since secured his permanent place in the history of American belles lettres. Selected for inclusion in this first edition of Chesnutt's letters are those that best document the vibrant personality of a very successful Cleveland businessman who gave his free hours to the literary avocation that he had hoped would someday become his full-time career. Motivated as well by a desire to continue the noble work that the Abolitionists and Reconstruction Era reformers had begun, Chesnutt pursued the goal that he had announced in his journal years earlier in Fayetteville, N.C., before he emigrated to the North in 1883: he would not only demonstrate what African Americans were capable of intellectually but would, through his art, 'elevate the whites' above ignoble prejudice against those of his racial background. By 1905 he had both succeeded and failed. To his mind he had reached the goal of transcending the earlier achievements of reform-novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion W. Tourgee. But such fame as Booker T. Washington's at the turn of the century eluded him. By late 1905, it was clear that his 1880s' dream of professional authors.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
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Chester, Laura. The Stone Baby. Santa Rosa. 1989. Black Sparrow Press. 0876857756. 224 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Infidelity and sexual obsession, birth and loss – these are the themes of Laura Chester’s frank and powerful novel The Stone Baby . Julia Chapin is an aspiring painter in her mid-thirties, blessed with three sons and a circle of good women-friends. She is also bored with her marriage, and finds escape, release, and a kind of controlled recklessness through riding horses. Her weekend afternoons at a Western Massachusetts stable bring an encounter with Philip Mercato, a smooth-talking divorced Manhattan stockbroker. Julia is swept away on the wings of money and charm to a world of compulsive sensuality––a world that comes to a sudden, sobering end when she finds that she is pregnant. Laura Chester precisely charts the evolution of a doomed relationship, from first erotic rush to shattering disillusionment. Along the way, she explores the ways that women support one another in difficult times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laura Chester has published many volumes of poetry, prose and non-fiction. Most recently, "Holy Personal: Looking for Small Private Places of Worship," was made available from Indiana University Press, and a selection of prose-poems, "Sparks," was published by The Figures. Both books include extensive photographs by Donna DeMari. Station Hill Press released an updated version of "Lupus Novice," an account of Chester’s personal struggle and breakthrough with the auto-immune disease SLE, while Black Sparrow Press, published three of Chester’s early books of fiction. Chester has edited four important literary anthologies, including Deep Down and The Unmade Bed. She is currently completing a fifth, "Eros & Equus," a passion for the horse. Having grown up in Wisconsin, lived in Albuquerque, Paris, and Berkeley, she now travels between Patagonia, Arizona and the Berkshires of Massachusetts.
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Chestnut, Robert (Pseudonym of Clarence Cooper). The Syndicate. Chicago. 1960. Newsstand Library. Paperback Original. 128 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Andy followed orders from the ‘big boys' and uncovered the cool half million. then he uncovered the sizzling hot doll, just for the hell of it! Andy Sorrell, a syndicate muscle-man, was sent to the West Coast to find the man who had robbed a New Jersey bank of a half million dollars. His contract turned out to be a pansy nightclub owner whose sex-starved wife cooperated with Andy in more ways than he had counted on. ‘She was mountains of soft, virgin-like flesh. I watched her trembling, an arm across her eyes, and I was urged on by her fear. But there was something else, something that made me stand there for a long time and watch her that way, naked, soft and helpless. Made me stand there building up that perverted lust until it seemed to be coming out of my ears until it expanded and exploded in me, then finally throw myself on her like a wild animal!'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clarence Cooper Jr. (1934, Detroit, MI - 1978, New York City, NY) wrote seven crime novels, which describe life in Black America, in the underworld of drugs and violence and in jail (THE FARM). Cooper worked as an editor for The Chicago Messenger around 1955. He was said to have started taking heroin at this time. His first book, THE SCENE was a success with the critics. It had been published by Random House, but his other three books were published by Regency, a pure paperback publisher, while Cooper was in prison in Detroit: WEED (1961), THE DARK MESSENGER (1962) and YET PRINCESS FOLLOW together with NOT WE MANY, in BLACK!: TWO SHORT NOVELS (1962). Harlan Ellison was his editor. His last book, THE FARM, takes place at the Lexington prison for drug addicts, once called U.S. Narcotics Farm. Cooper's addiction and a growing alienation from those around him, perhaps driven by the hostile response to his fiction all contributed to his early destitute death.
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Childress, Alice. A Short Walk. New York. 1979. Coward McCann & Geoghegan. 0698108442. 333 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Janet Halverson.
DESCRIPTION - Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave - and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along tile way. Born to a black girl who died giving birth to this child of a white boy, five-year-old Cora hears these words from her foster father, Bill James, as they stroll through Charleston to see the Rabbit Ears Minstrel Show. It is there, seated in the heart of the ‘colored' section, hearing the jeers of the ‘crackers' and waiting fearfully as the crowd threatens to explode in racial conflict, that Cora first grasps the meaning of color in a white world - and forms her first dreams. From these rude beginnings in the early l900s to her struggle to survive the Harlem of the ‘40s, Cora James gives us a proud portrayal of one determined woman's ‘short walk' through life. A SHORT WALK is the remarkable story of Cora's vow to make a place for herself, of her search for a fulfilling love, of her reach for freedom and independence that lead to a life extraordinary for its richness. And from the fervent excitement of the Marcus Garvey movement to the free-and-easy life of dealing poker in a Harlem card parlor or the more grueling demands of the vaudeville circuit, Cora emerges larger than life, the classic survivor, the woman of stature she's vowed to become. With a series of memorable characters - the brave poor, the cowardly, Bible Thumpers, gamblers, hookers, homosexuals, politicians and Pullman porters - a sense of place and period is caught with unerring accuracy. Alice Childress has created a remarkable novel - at once a poignant portrait of one indomitable woman and an eloquent testimonial to the strength of the human spirit. An actress, director and playwright,
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Childress (October 12, 1912 - August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author. Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem where she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Though her grandmother had no formal education, she encouraged Alice to pursue her talents in reading and writing. Alice attended public school in New York for her middle school and attended the Wadleigh High School for her high school education, but had to drop out once her grandmother died. She became involved in theater immediately after her high school and she did not attend college. She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off-broadway union for actors. Her first play, Florence, was produced off-Broadway in 1950. Her next play, Just a Little Simple (1950), was adapted from the Langston Hughes' novel Simple Speaks His Mind. It was produced in Harlem at the Club Baron Theatre. Her next play, Gold Through the Trees (1952), gave her the distinction of being one of the first African-American women to have work professionally produced on the New York stage. Her next work, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, was completed in 1962. The setting of the show is South Carolina during World War I and deals with a forbidden interracial love affair. Due to the scandalous nature of the show and the stark realism it presented, it was impossible for Childress to get any theatre in New York to put it up. The show premiered at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and later in Chicago. It was not until 1972 that it played in New York at the New York Shakespeare Festival. It was later filmed and shown on TV, but many stations refused to play it. In 1965, she was featured in the BBC presentation The Negro in the American Theatre. From 1966 to 1968, she was awarded as a scholar-in-residence by Harvard University at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Alice Childress is also known for her literary works. Among these are Those Other People (1989) and A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973). Also, she wrote a screenplay for the 1978 film based on A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich. Her 1979 novel A Short Walk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Childress described her writing as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society. In conjunction with her composer husband, Nathan Woodard, she wrote a number of musical plays, including Sea Island Song and Young Martin Luther King.
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Chin, Frank. Donald Duk. Minneapolis. 1991. Coffee House Press. 0918273838. 173 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - "Welcome to Chinatown, Chinese New Year in San Francisco. Everybody's birthday. The lantern festival of the fifteenth day. Welcome home. Crashing Cantonese opera, dancing lions, comic book heroes, and a childhood among partying pagans. Donald Duk is a twelve-year-old kid with a name he doesn't like and a family that doesn't deserve him. As this novel opens, Donald would rather be Fred Astaire than the son of a Chinatown restaurateur. In this robust and vigorous work, Donald learns to see himself more clearly as he, and we, see his culture free of distorting stereotypes"--Back cover.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California on February 25, 1940; until the age of six, he remained under the care of a retired Vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At that time, his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area and thereafter Chin grew up in Oakland Chinatown. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965.He has won three American Book Awards: the first in 1982 for his plays The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, the second in 1989 for a collection of short stories titled The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., and the third in 2000 for lifetime achievement. Chin is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. He founded the Asian American Theatre Workshop, which became the Asian American Theater Company in 1973. He first gained notoriety as a playwright in the 1970s. His play The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first by an Asian American to be produced on a major New York stage. Stereotypes of Asian Americans, and traditional Chinese folklore are common themes in much of his work. Frank Chin has accused other Asian American writers, particularly Maxine Hong Kingston, of furthering such stereotypes and misrepresenting the traditional stories. Chin, during his professional career, has been highly critical of American writer, Amy Tan, for her telling of Chinese-American stories, indicating that her body of work has furthered and reinforced stereotypical views of this group. On a radio program, Chin has also debated the scholar Yunte Huang regarding the latter's evaluation of Charlie Chan in his writing. This discussion was later evaluated on the activist blog "Big WOWO." In addition to his work as an author and playwright, Frank Chin has also worked extensively with Japanese American resisters of the draft in WWII. His novel, Born in the U.S.A., is dedicated to this subject. Chin was one of several writers (Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong of CARP, Combined Asian American Resources Project) who worked to republish John Okada's novel No-No Boy in the 1970s; Chin contributed an afterward which can be found in every reprinting of the novel. Chin was also an instrumental organizer for the first Day of Remembrance. Chin is also a musician. In the mid-1960s, he taught Robbie Krieger, a member of The Doors, how to play the flamenco guitar. Early in his career, Chin worked as a story editor and scriptwriter on Sesame Street. Chin was married for five years to Kathy Chang. Kathleen Chang (October 10, 1950 - October 22, 1996), was known by her performance name Kathy Change. She was a Sino-American political activist, writer, and performance artist.
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Chin, Frank. Gunga Din Highway. Minneapolis. 1994. Coffee House Press. 1566890241. 404 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Nothing - not even Lassie - is held sacred when Frank Chin starts off by tilting at Hollywood's windmills and then moves on to topple many of today's other sacred cows. Rich with wicked humor and biting honesty, GUNGA DIN HIGHWAY is a freewheeling saga of two generations of the Kwan family: Longman, The Chinaman Who Dies in countless cinema epics, and his son Ulysses, who despises his father's dream of someday playing Charlie Chan. Joined by a broad assortment of complex and often hilarious characters, their story spans a lifetime - full of sixties protests, Chinese mythology, enduring friendships, bittersweet family conflict, the strains of flamenco guitar, and cameo appearances by Hollywood greats ranging from John Wayne to Annette Funicello. GUNGA DIN HIGHWAY is an impassioned and entertaining American tale, revealing big truths in a compelling, one-of-a-kind read.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California on February 25, 1940; until the age of six, he remained under the care of a retired Vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At that time, his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area and thereafter Chin grew up in Oakland Chinatown. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965.He has won three American Book Awards: the first in 1982 for his plays The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, the second in 1989 for a collection of short stories titled The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., and the third in 2000 for lifetime achievement. Chin is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. He founded the Asian American Theatre Workshop, which became the Asian American Theater Company in 1973. He first gained notoriety as a playwright in the 1970s. His play The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first by an Asian American to be produced on a major New York stage. Stereotypes of Asian Americans, and traditional Chinese folklore are common themes in much of his work. Frank Chin has accused other Asian American writers, particularly Maxine Hong Kingston, of furthering such stereotypes and misrepresenting the traditional stories. Chin, during his professional career, has been highly critical of American writer, Amy Tan, for her telling of Chinese-American stories, indicating that her body of work has furthered and reinforced stereotypical views of this group. On a radio program, Chin has also debated the scholar Yunte Huang regarding the latter's evaluation of Charlie Chan in his writing. This discussion was later evaluated on the activist blog "Big WOWO." In addition to his work as an author and playwright, Frank Chin has also worked extensively with Japanese American resisters of the draft in WWII. His novel, Born in the U.S.A., is dedicated to this subject. Chin was one of several writers (Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong of CARP, Combined Asian American Resources Project) who worked to republish John Okada's novel No-No Boy in the 1970s; Chin contributed an afterward which can be found in every reprinting of the novel. Chin was also an instrumental organizer for the first Day of Remembrance. Chin is also a musician. In the mid-1960s, he taught Robbie Krieger, a member of The Doors, how to play the flamenco guitar. Early in his career, Chin worked as a story editor and scriptwriter on Sesame Street. Chin was married for five years to Kathy Chang. Kathleen Chang (October 10, 1950 - October 22, 1996), was known by her performance name Kathy Change. She was a Sino-American political activist, writer, and performance artist.
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Chopin, Kate. A Vocation and a Voice: Stories. New York. 1991. Penguin Books. 0140390782. Edited & With An Introduction by Emily Toth. 202 pages. paperback. Cover painting: Mary Cassatt, Young Woman in Black (Mrs. Gardner Cassatt), 1883 Courtesy of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
DESCRIPTION - Published for the first time as the author intended, a collection of Kate Chopin's most avant-garde stories In 1900, after Chopin's novel THE AWAKENING was condemned, her publisher canceled her most innovative work - a collection of stories full of passion, decadence, and sensuality. Included here are ‘The Story of an Hour,' a shocking reversal of the most profound event of her childhood; ‘An Egyptian Cigarette,' the story of a drug trip; and the title story, about a sweet-voiced boy soprano who learns about adult life. Emily Toth, biographer of Kate Chopin as well as editor of her diaries and letters, discusses the author's style and the inspiration for her stories and provides insight into Chopin's controversial career in this long-awaited classic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 - August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century. From 1892 to 1895, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included ‘Desiree's Baby,' a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana (published in 1893), ‘The Story of an Hour‘ (1894), and ‘The Storm‘(1898). ‘The Storm' is a sequel to ‘The 'Cadian Ball,' which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk. Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana. Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, ‘some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius.'
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Chopin, Kate. At Fault. New York. 2002. Penguin Books. 0142437026. Edited and with an Introduction and Notes By Bernard Koloski. 177 pages. paperback. Cover painting – ‘The Land of Evangeline,’ 1874, by Joseph Rusling Meeker.
DESCRIPTION - Kate Chopin's powerful first novel about the challenge of balancing love and moral duty - Widowed at thirty, beautiful, resourceful ThErèse Lafirme is left alone to run her Louisiana plantation. When ThErèse falls in love with David Hosmer, a divorced businessman, her strong moral and religious convictions make it impossible for her to accept his marriage proposal. Her determined rejection sets the two on a tumultuous path that involves Hosmer's troubled former wife, Fanny. AT FAULT is set in the post-Reconstruction rural South against a backdrop of economic devastation and simmering racial tensions. Written at the beginning of her career, it has parallels to Chopin's own life and contains characters and themes that prefigure her later works, including THE AWAKENING.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 - August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century. From 1892 to 1895, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included ‘Desiree's Baby,' a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana (published in 1893), ‘The Story of an Hour‘ (1894), and ‘The Storm‘(1898). ‘The Storm' is a sequel to ‘The 'Cadian Ball,' which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk. Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana. Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, ‘some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius.'
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Chopin, Kate. Bayou Folk and a Night in Arcadie. New York. 1999. Penguin Books. 0140436812. Edited With An Introduction And Notes by Bernard Koloski. 369 pages. paperback. Cover painting: Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, 'Children on a Doorstep (New Orleans)' (detail), 1873, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen.
DESCRIPTION - In one volume, the two short-story collections that established Kate Chopin as one of America's best-loved realist writers In the decade before the appearance of her landmark novel, THE AWAKENING, Kate Chopin published BAYOU FOLK (1894) and A NIGHT IN ACADIE (1897), collections of stories set in New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Celebrations of people in their communities, the forty-four stories here depict a diversity of characters: Creoles, Acadians, and ‘Americans', people of color and of mixed blood, Native Americans and immigrants, adults and children, the educated and the illiterate, the rich and the poor. Some stories focus on the restrictions women face as they seek self-fulfillment - a theme Chopin would develop fully in THE AWAKENING - but many show people striving to establish better lives amid the devastation following the Civil War. With a compassionate, knowing gaze, Chopin not only evokes the distant world of plantations and ‘Cadian balls, but also anticipates the thoroughly modern, multi-ethnic, gender-sensitive, and sexually charged world that we know today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 - August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century. From 1892 to 1895, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included ‘Desiree's Baby,' a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana (published in 1893), ‘The Story of an Hour‘ (1894), and ‘The Storm‘(1898). ‘The Storm' is a sequel to ‘The 'Cadian Ball,' which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk. Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana. Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, ‘some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius.'
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Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York. 1984. Penguin Books. 0140390227. Edited & With An Introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert. 286 pages. paperback. The cover shows 'The Dreamer' (1894) by Cecelia Beaux.
DESCRIPTION - When THE AWAKENING, a daring novel of a woman's sexual and spiritual rebirth, was published in 1899, it was castigated as a sordid, immoral book. Kate Chopin's literary and social reputations suffered irreparable damage. Yet the issues Chopin explores in the novel and stories collected here grew out of traditional ‘feminist' literature of the nineteenth century and were the concerns of fin de siecle writers in both Europe and America. In their reflections on the place of women in society, these works also foreshadow to a remarkable degree contemporary feminist writings. Edna Pontellier, the heroine of THE AWAKENING, is a young wife and mother who refuses to be caged by the props of domesticity. Defying the conventions of marriage, she claims for herself moral and erotic freedom. Kate Chopin's careful, subtle changes of style bring Edna's transformation into sharp relief. As Sandra M. Gilbert points out in the Introduction, Chopin moves from an initial realistic portrait of Edna to an almost fairytale-like recounting of Edna's sexual liberation. Chopin returns again to the realistic at the conclusion when her heroine, at least superficially, meets the fate that would have befallen any nineteenth-century woman who had dared to make Edna's choices.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 - August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century. From 1892 to 1895, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included ‘Desiree's Baby,' a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana (published in 1893), ‘The Story of an Hour‘ (1894), and ‘The Storm‘(1898). ‘The Storm' is a sequel to ‘The 'Cadian Ball,' which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk. Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana. Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, ‘some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius.'
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Christensen, Thomas and Christensen, Carol (editors). The Discovery of America and Other Myths: A New World Reader. San Francisco. 1992. Chronicle Books. 0811801861. 256 pages. paperback. Frontis: the meeting of two worlds across the bridge of language: La Malinche as intermediary between the Aztecs and the Spaniards, (16th c.).
DESCRIPTION - Did the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago bring the benefits of western civilization to a new World of barbarians or did it bring death, slavery, and terror to long-established cultures? This controversial anthology brings together historical texts and contemporary fiction and essays that re-explore the conquest of the Americas and reveal issues that are still burning in the literature and imagination of the hemisphere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas W. Christensen (born September 29, 1948) is an American author, translator, and publisher. He is known for his publications on literature, history, and art; his literary translations from French and Spanish; and his work as an editor and publisher. Born in Myrtle Point, Oregon, Christensen received advanced degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After travels in Latin America he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as an editor and publishing executive at the independent trade book publishing companies North Point Press and Mercury House. Married to translator Carol Christensen, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Christopher, Nicholas. A Short History of the Island of Butterflies: Poems. New York. 1986. Viking Press. 0670808997. 81 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting by Henri Rousseau - 'The Flamingoes'.
DESCRIPTION - Nicholas Christopher's first book of poetry, ON TOUR WITH RITA, established him, in the words of Anthony Hecht, ‘as a major poet of his generation, and. eminently one of the most gifted.' This second collection delivers on all the promise of the first. Crafted with a masterly elegance and brilliance that recall the work of John Ashbery or James Merrill, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ISLAND OF BUTTERFLIES displays a lush and vivid imagery that nonetheless never appears indulged in for its own sake. Although most of these poems are what one would properly call lyric, a surprising number display a dramatic and narrative tension that is rare among lyric poets, and others express a vision that is both dark and magical. Yet Christopher's voice is original and versatile-he is as at home with the stark urban landscape as he is with the sunny Mediterranean-and with this collection it takes on a truly distinctive edge. Nicholas Christopher was born in 1951 in New York City, where he now lives, and was educated at Harvard College. His first book of poems, ON TOUR WITH RITA, was published in 1982, and his novel, THE SOLOIST, was published this year. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, Grand Street, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and The Paris Review In 1985, he was awarded the Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship. He has traveled widely and taught at several universities. He is currently Adjunct Professor of English at New York University. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. A Trip To the Stars. New York. 2000. Dial Press. 0385318049. 500 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye.
DESCRIPTION - At a Manhattan planetarium in 1965, a boy is kidnapped from his young adoptive aunt, an event that profoundly alters the rest of their lives. In an epic tale of love and destiny, A TRIP TO THE STARS charts their paths over the next fifteen years, as they search for each other and in the process, discover themselves. When ten-year old Loren is whisked away by strangers, he believes he has been mistaken for another child. But his abductor turns out to be a blood relative - his great-uncle Junius Samax, a wealthy former gambler who lives in a converted Las Vegas hotel, surrounded by a priceless collection of art and antiquities, and a host of idiosyncratic guests, each in search of the lost treasures of the universe. Finding his own place in Samax's magical world, Loren pieces together the story of his mother, and the complicated history that led to his adoption shortly before she died. But in New York, Loren's aunt, Mala, knows only that he has disappeared. Distraught after her year-long search for him proves fruitless, she quits college and enlists in the Navy Nursing Corps at the height of the Vietnam War. On a hospital ship in the South Pacific, her grief over Loren is subsumed by her love for a wounded navigator. Yet just as she opens her heart, he too vanishes-pronounced missing in action on his next mission. Devastated again, Mala begins a restless ten-year journey, moving from island to island around the globe, hoping to overcome the losses that have transformed her life. Fusing imagination, scholarship, and suspense with remarkable narrative skill, Nicholas Christopher builds a story of tremendous scope as he traces the intricate latticework of Mala and Loren's lives. Each remains separate from the other, but both are tied in ways they cannot imagine-until the final, miraculous chapter of this extraordinary novel comes to an end. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. Atomic Field: Two Poems. New York. 2000. Harcourt. 0151005532. 95 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo by Michel Semeniako.
DESCRIPTION - A poetic epic of a young man's entry into adulthood in 1960s and ‘70s America, by an award-winning poet and novelist. Nicholas Christopher is one of his generation's finest poets. The author of such masterpieces as IN THE YEAR OF THE COMET and THE CREATION OF THE NIGHT SKY, he has earned a reputation for the sheer beauty of his verse, for his elegiac voice, and for his lush, redolent vocabulary. Now he presents two extended poems, set in the years 1962 and 1972. Each year includes forty-five poems that evoke the life of a young boy and, later, a young man, during those alternately calm and turbulent decades. Comic books, a first bicycle, television, candy stores, the threat of nuclear war, drug experimentation, travel in Europe, love affairs, questioning the world: these subjects form a common thread of growing up in middle-class America and of a young man entering the adult world, feeling and trying to understand its complexities, pains, and joys. An exciting and moving illumination of age and experience, ATOMIC FIELD is a major work by a celebrated American poet.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. Desperate Characters: A Novella in Verse & Other Poems. New York. 1988. Viking Press. 0670823996. 99 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Geoffrey Gove.
DESCRIPTION - The jazzy, 70-page novelette-in-verse that comprises this book's title poem will strike some readers as deliciously chic, while others may find it an insipid joke that quickly palls. Transported to Hollywood, the anonymous narrator gets mixed up with Stella, hostess-cum-bodyguard who packs a revolver under her pink kimono, and with her ex-boyfriend, bighearted circus performer Rocco the Human Cannonball, fond of spinach and Charlie Parker saxophone riffs. Featuring a flimsy, ridiculous plot, bizarre characters, frenzied sex and the ever-present buzz of Los Angeles, this verse narrative burlesques Raymond Chandler's detective fiction, surrealist novels and classical odes. The language occasionally rises to beautiful heights, but the story is ultimately pointless. The remainder of the volume contains 14 shorter verses by a poet (A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ISLAND OF BUTTERFLIES ) whose whimsical mix of fantasy and observation reflects an esthetic, distanced approach to life, whether he is observing Bowery bums or a jet-setter. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. In the Year of the Comet: Poems. New York. 1992. Viking Press. 0670839639. 83 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye.
DESCRIPTION - After his success with Desperate Characters ( LJ 9/1/88), a novella-in-verse, Christopher has returned to his lyric mode, characterized by short, unadorned lines and lots of kinky, almost surreal detail. He likes to jazz up his poems with ‘girls,' who often seem to be dropped into the landscape: ‘In summer a girl sat/ there every afternoon/ in a yellow bikini,/ fedora, and wraparound/ sunglasses. ./ drinking Campari.' ‘Girls' also appear naked, wearing turbans, as comic strip characters, as lovers, as barefoot beggars, in silk pantaloons, in Columbus's dreams, in red leather, raped by imperialists, and made up as Mussolini, and Christopher's campy way of being serious can grow tiresome. But there are some gems here- ‘On the Peninsula,' for example, in which a sensuous sea floor of torch-lit fish and yellow crabs become ‘where our bodies, locked fast,/turn under a blue sheet.'-LIBRARY JOURNAL. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. The Creation of the Night Sky: Poems. New York. 1998. Harcourt Brace. 0151003440. 99 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo - 'Wooden Flames' by Clarence John Laughlin.
DESCRIPTION - In verses elegiac and surreal we are taken from the lush islands of Hawaii to the streets of Greenwich Village after midnight, from a sparsely attended Las Vegas funeral to a children's tea party. Whether he is describing items lost and found or a woman drowning in a stormy sea, Christopher's poetry is filled with moments of spiritual illumination that confirm his reputation as one of today's most gifted poets. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. The Soloist. New York. 1986. Viking Press. 0670809004. 306 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Michael Tedesco.
DESCRIPTION - Suffering a kind of housemaid's knee of the fingers, piano prodigy Max Randal stumbles over the keys trying to recover the virtuosity that for 10 years has made him the toast of the music world and will reaffirm his position when he plays at Carnegie Hall a few months hence. At the moment, however, he seems more involved with wine and women than with song; his first wife dies tragically, his second duns him for thousands in alimony, his third sets him up for re-seduction, and his interim companion goes after him with a knife. In between, his 9-going-on-19-year-old daughter Daphne is thrust upon him while her mother traipses around Europe, disregarding Max's need to practice undisturbed except by sex, speed and Scotch. His best friend, furthermore, flies off on a mysterious mission to (of all places) Albania, which eventually yields not only photographs never before revealed to the outside world, but a hitherto unknown Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody. There's intrigue aplenty, along with some homey scenes of Daphne and Daddy cooking, and a good deal of musical name-dropping and classy partying. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Christopher, Nicholas. Veronica. New York. 1996. Dial Press. 038531471x. 322 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality - a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragon-points and Tibetan mysticism, where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica's father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White's disappearance was no accident: He was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present. Until Veronica finds Leo. Born in a year of unusual lunar cycles, Leo is the only person who can travel through time to contact White and receive his coded messages, messages that mobilize a remarkable case of characters to help in his return.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children.
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Chrusciel, Ewa. Of Annunciations. Richmond. 2017. Omnidawn. 9781632430397. 104 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In her book, Chrusciel maps the biblical event of annunciation onto the current migration crises. Annunciation becomes a symbol of the "yes" that we utter in front of reality, particularly confronted with exiles, strangers-in other words, the other. The book quivers on the brink between openness to the other and the terror the other brings out in us. What does it mean to say "yes" to a stranger? What implications, threats, blessings and responsibilities do "yes" carry? Can we say "yes" to a dislocated soul in order to become more fully who we were meant to be?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ewa Chrusciel is a bilingual poet and a translator. Her two previous books in English are Contraband of Hoopoe and Strata. She is an associate professor of creative writing and poetry at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire.
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Chrusciel, Ewa. Strata. Richmond. 2018. Omnidawn. 9781632430564. 80 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In Ewa Chrusciel's first book in English, Strata, an exile's memories are. at once a rapture of possession (of being possessed) and defeatingly untotalizable. Strata is. a tumultuous revelation of how much of the past there still is, right here in the near flight of letters, and of the burn of being in time at all, the difficulty of catching up with oneself in a universe that is never one, but always scattered. Strata is a book of concuspiscences, of combings for pleasures, yes, but even more for the Sacred Book it wants to be. In its every line, it shows that the rhapsodic is the right approach to the truth about the world. - from the foreword by Calvin Bedient. Praise for Ewa Chrusciel's poetry: “With a wonderful insistence, each phrase in Ewa Chrusciel's prose poetry can be experienced as a moment of transition, of what Emerson would have called a darting aim. “Whenever we visited, my grandfather would put his chair on the road and wait,” Chrusciel writes. “Kraina na Bosaka. We were the apparition of deer. Pray, why chase each stalk of wounded light?”' - Tony Brinkley, Boston Review.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - EWA CHRUSCIEL is a bilingual poet and a translator. Her two previous books in English (besides this reprint of Strata) are Of Annunciations and Contraband of Hoopoe. She has also published three books in Polish: Tobo ek, Sopi ki (2009), Furkot. She is an associate professor of creative writing and poetry at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire.
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Ciabattari, Mark. Dreams of An Imaginary New Yorker Named Rizzoli. New York. 1990. Obelisk/Dutton. 0525485392. Illustrated by Istvan Banyai. 148 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - An imaginary New Yorker named Rizzoli dreams of being a real New Yorker. His vignettelike dreams are narratives of ordinary anxiety and unhappiness that survey the surrealisms of everyday life. But unlike dreams, the stories are linear, told in plain, nonpunning English, and they make immediate, if absurd, sense.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mark Ciabattari is the author of DREAMS OF AN IMAGINARY NEW YORKER NAMED RIZZOLI, THE LITERAL TRUTH: RIZZOLI EATS THE APPLE OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, Clay Creatures, and PRELUDES TO HISTORY.
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Cintrón, Esperanza M. Shades: Detroit Love Stories. Detroit. 2019. Wayne State University Press. 9780814346884. Made in Michigan Writers. 144 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Esperanza Cintron's Shades: Detroit Love Stories is a short story collection that is distinctly Detroit. By touching on a number of romantic and sexual encounters that span the historical and temporal spaces of the city, each of these interconnected stories examines the obstacles an individual faces and the choices he or she makes in order to cope and hopefully, survive in the changing urban landscape. Shades begins in the 1960s by following two young, black women who are determined to find joy in their lives even as they struggle to make ends meet. Their lives continue to evolve under triumphant and disappointing conditions-falling in and out of love, giving birth, raising children, and struggling to "make it" despite disappointing and tenuous love affairs and relationships. The setting throughout the eighteen stories shifts as these women age and their children extend the timeline, reflecting on the city's social and political changes over three decades, as well as the pitfalls, tragedies, and opportunities these linked families encounter. Cintron favors an everyday vernacular for her characters' voices in order to reflect the complexities of their working/middle-class, ethnic, and racial identities. Divided into two sections, Eastside and Westside, the collection gives a nod to the sometimes contentious geographical split marked by Woodward Avenue. Cintron takes readers through city streets-from neighborhood bars to burger joints-while painting lyrical portraits of the unique and multifaceted characters whose honesty shatters the illusion of endless love and happily-ever-after fantasies, as they clash with the circumstances of economics and race. Cintron's stories capture the rhythms of language and the poetry of the people and will interest readers of fiction or poetry who seek to understand love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Esperanza Cintrón is the author of three books of poetry that include Chocolate City Latina, the 2013 Naomi Long Madgett Award winner What Keeps Me Sane, and Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise. She is a native Detroiter of Puerto Rican descent who holds a doctorate in English literature and teaches at a local college.
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Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York. 2002. Knopf. 0679435549. 447 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph Rose, Mexico, 1926 by Edward Weston (c)1981. Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. Print courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, NY. Jacket image: a flower motif detail from a Mexican retablo. Courtesy of Colonial Arts, San Francisco, CA. Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson. Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, New York.
DESCRIPTION - The celebrated author of THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET gives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy - the very stuff of life. Lala Reyes' grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala's possession. The novel opens with the Reyes' annual car trip a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels from Chicago to ‘the other side': Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family's stories, separating the truth from the ‘healthy lies' that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the ‘Paris of the New World' to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties-and, finally, to Lala's own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas. CARAMELO is a romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country's most beloved storytellers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and the American Book Award, and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of numerous books, including a children's book, Hairs/Pelitos. She lives in the Southwest.
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Cisneros, Sandra. Loose Woman: Poems. New York. 1994. Knopf. 0679416447. 144 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Loose Woman is a collection of love poems for the nonbeliever, some sheer jade and some for the jaded, a noose for the lover on the loose, a net for the next novio. A candid, sexy and wonderfully mood-strewn collection of poetry that celebrates the female aspects of love, from the reflective to the overtly erotic. 'Poignant, sexy. lyrical, passionate. cool and delicate. hot as a chili pepper.' - Boston Globe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and the American Book Award, and of fellowships.
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Cisneros, Sandra. My Wicked Wicked Ways. Bloomington. 1987. Third Woman Press. 0943219019. 93 pages. paperback. Cover photo by Ruben Guzman Cover. Design by Ricardo Gonzalez Sapien.
DESCRIPTION - Poetry by the author of House on Mango Street. ‘Sandra Cisneros is one of the most brilliant of today's young writers. Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful. It is rich with music and picture.' - Gwendolyn Brooks. ‘Here, the young voice of Esperanza of The House on Mango Street merges with that of the grown woman/poet. As promised, she has ‘gone away to come back.' Cisneros writes, ‘One day I'll write my name on everything. .' My Wicked Wicked Ways is a kind of international graffiti, where the poet - bold and insistent - puts her mark on those traveled places on the map and in the heart.' - Cherrie Moraga. ‘These are poems of edge, but not without mercy, mercy which here is careful, fleeting, spare. These are glimpses into the moment of fragility, though outwardly tough. Never once do they fail to identify happiness, that it always belongs to someone else. The poems of Sandra Cisneros work hard for a living.' - Alberto Rios.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Her first collection of poetry, Bad Boys (1980), was published by Mango Press as part of the Chicano Chapbook Series. In 1985, her book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (Arte Publico Press), was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship; an Illinois Arts Council Artist Grant; and the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters' Dobie-Paisano Fellowship. Ms. Cisneros is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop.
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Cisneros, Sandra. The House On Mango Street. New York. 1991. Vintage Books. 0679734775. 110 pages. paperback. Cover: Nivia Gonzalez.
DESCRIPTION - Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature. Cisneros's early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the USA instilled in her the sense of ‘always straddling two countries. but not belonging to either culture.' Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel. Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.
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Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek & Other Stories. New York. 1991. Random House. 0394576543. 165 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - These stories, breathtaking in their precision and filled with unending moments of infinite and intimate wisdom, depict the variety of life around the Mexican border while bringing us to an awareness of the commonality of our fears, desires and dreams. From the award-winning author of The House on Mango Street.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature. Cisneros's early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the USA instilled in her the sense of ‘always straddling two countries. but not belonging to either culture.' Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel. Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.
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Clair, Maxine. Coping With Gravity: Poems. Washington DC. 1988. Washington Writers' Publishing House. 0931846323. 53 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Maxine Clair's first book of poetry. One of two winners of an annual Washington, D.C.-area competition sponsored by the publisher.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maxine Clair was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, in the 1950s. She is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. She attentded the University of Kansas in Lawrence where she studied science. Clair went on to a career in medical technology as chief technologist at a children's hospital in Washington, D.C. It was while working there that Clair became interested in writing. She pursued and achieved her M.F.A. at George Washington University where she is currently an associate professor of English. Her first book, a collection of poetry, Coping With Gravity, was published in 1988. In 1992 she published a fiction chapbook entitled October Brown, which earned her an Artscape Prize for Maryland Writers. Her next book, Rattlebone, was published in 1994 and is perhaps her most well-known work. Rattlebone is a collection of interrelated stories revolving around the life of a young African-American girl coming of age in a small African-American neighborhood called Rattlebone, in Kansas City, Kansas. Clair got the name of her book from Rattlebone Hollow, a North Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood. Her most recent work is October Suite, published in 2001. This novel takes a character from her chapbook October Brown and her novel Rattlebone and explores her life and experiences as an unwed teacher and African-American mother in the 1950s. The novel is a journey of self discovery for its lead character, October Brown, and was well received by critics.
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Clair, Maxine. October Suite. New York. 2001. Random House. 0375506306. 326 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - OCTOBER SUITE is a beautifully written coming-of-age story that centers on a young woman struggling to overcome her family's frightening legacy and keep her own child from similar emotional harm. It is 1950 and October Brown is a twenty-three-year-old first-year teacher thanking her lucky stars that she found a room in the best boardinghouse for Negro women teachers in Wyandotte County, Kansas. October falls in love with an unhappily married handyman, James Wilson, but when she becomes pregnant, James deserts her. Stunned, and believing that James will eventually come back to her, October decides to have the baby. But he doesn't come back. As her reputation suffers, and with her job in jeopardy, she spends her days in self-deception and denial. Her best friend, Cora, contacts October's family: her older sister, Vergie, and her aunts Frances and Maude, who raised the sisters after their mother was killed by their father. October goes back to her family in Ohio and gives birth to her son. Numb, she gives the child - David - to Vergie and her husband to raise as their own, then returns to Kansas City to rebuild her life. But something is missing - and, apparently too late, October realizes what she has done. What follows is the heartrending account of October's efforts to reclaim her dignity, her profession, and her son, efforts that lead her into a bitter struggle with her sister and a confrontation with her parents' violent past. The Midwest, the flourishing of modern jazz, and the culture of segregation form a compelling historical backdrop for this timeless and universal tale of one person's battle to understand and master her own desires, and to embrace the responsibilities and promise of mature adulthood. OCTOBER SUITE plays a beautiful, haunting melody, turning everyday life into exceptional art. ‘Told in a melody all its own, this story touches many lovely and unexpected notes. October Brown chooses to reinvent herself, only to inadvertently discover herself, and the final chord of accepting herself (and others) reverberates poignantly.' - ELIZABETH STROUT.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MAXINE CLAIR was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. She has published a volume of poetry entitled COPING WITH GRAVITY, and her stories have appeared in Antietam Review, Icarus, and The Kenyon Review. She currently teaches writing at George Washington University in Washington. D.C.
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Clair, Maxine. Rattlebone. New York. 1994. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374247161. 1st Novel. 213 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Debbie Glasserman. Jacket art: William H. Johnson, ‘Three Girls Playing,’ 1942.
DESCRIPTION - In Rattlebone, a 'fictional' black community north of Kansas City, the smell of manure and bacon from Armour's Packing House is everywhere; Shady Maurice's roadhouse plays the latest jazz, the best eggs are sold by the Red Quanders, and gospel rules at the Strangers Rest Baptist Church. This is the black Midwest of the 1950s, when towns could count their white folks on one hand - the years before the civil rights movement came along and changed everything. In perfectly cadenced vernacular, Maxine Clair speaks to us through the voices of Rattlebone's citizens: October Brown, the new schoolteacher with a camel's walk and shoulder-padded, to-the-nines dresses; Irene Wilson, naive and wise, who must grapple with her parent's failing marriage as she steps eagerly into adulthood; and Thomas Pemberton, owner of the local rooming house, an old man with a young heart. Sparkling with lyricism, Clair's interconnected stories celebrate the natural beauty of the Midwest and the dignity and vitality of these most ordinary lives.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MAXINE CLAIR was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. She has published a volume of poetry entitled COPING WITH GRAVITY, and her stories have appeared in Antietam Review, Icarus, and The Kenyon Review. She currently teaches writing at George Washington University in Washington. D.C.
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Clampitt, Amy. Archaic Figure: Poems. New York. 1987. Knopf. 039475090x. 115 pages. paperback. Cover: Chip Kidd.
DESCRIPTION - ARCHAIC FIGURE, which followed WHAT THE LIGHT WAS LIKE in 1987, continues in the vein of Clampitt's ‘idiosyncratic style,' as William Logan called it in the Chicago Tribune. But he added that in this volume ‘style occasionally lapses into mannerism: the long, sometimes wearying sentences; the sharp enjambments that seem a nervous mania; the vocabulary whirled through a Waring Blender.' New York Times Book Review contributor Mark Rudman maintained, however, that the collection ‘gets better as it goes along - as it becomes less archaic, less mythy, less Grecian and moves into cooler climes and grassier realms.' Rudman also approved of the poet's ‘spontaneity and humor; she is quick to react, hasty, impulsive, responsive to place - and to space.' In the London Sunday Times, David Profumo further praised Archaic Figure. Taking the example of the poem ‘Hippocrene,' the critic asserted that this work ‘demonstrates her new powers of economy, the sureness of her rhythmic touch and the sheer readability of her magnificent narrative skills.' - From The Poetry Foundaation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Amy Clampitt (June 15, 1920 - September 10, 1994) was an American poet and author. Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens, appeared in 1994. She also published a book of essays and several privately printed editions of her longer poems. She taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith College, and Amherst College, but it was her time spent in Manhattan, in a remote part of Maine, and on various trips to Europe, the former Soviet Union, Iowa, Wales, and England that most directly influenced her work.[citation needed] Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994. Clampitt earned a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 for her writing. She was also awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US and Canada, in 1982, under the poetry category.
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Clark, Tom. The Exile of Celine. New York. 1987. Random House. 0394553128. 214 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Accused Nazi sympathizer Celine--author, doctor, anti-semite--is hunted by the French Resistance, and is arrested and hospitalized to await his seemingly inevitable fate, in this fictional recreation of the controversial writer's last days
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Clark (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet, editor and biographer. Clark was born on the Near West Side of Chicago and educated at the University of Michigan where he received a Hopwood Award for poetry. On March 22, 1968, he married Angelica Heinegg, at St. Mark's Church, New York City. Currently (as of 2013) residing in California, Tom Clark's recent books of poetry are Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2006) and Threnody (effing press, 2006).
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Clark, Tom. The Last Gas Station and Other Stories. Santa Barbara. 1980. Black Sparrow Press. 0876854579. 151 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Tom Clark's collection of short fiction, The Last Gas Station, is in two contrasting parts. It opens with 23 very short prose pieces—amusingly surreal California vignettes, some no longer than a page, peopled by denim-clad cowgirls, itinerant lover boys, Martin Heidegger, Boris Pasternak, Muslim college students, Vietnam vets, Ty Cobb, Ted Berrigan, and a great dinosaur poet of the Jurassic period. These are followed by the novella "Incident at Basecamp," an odd matter-of-fact account of a close encounter between a young married couple and a spindly, three-toed, mind-reading extraterrestrial somewhere deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness. "Clark is versatile," wrote the Los Angeles Times; he's "a poet turned sportswriter turned novelist" whose range is brilliantly showcased by this substantial collection. The opening sketches are playful and delightful, but "in the tradition of 'biggest is best,' The Last Gas Station closes with a wallop: 'Incident at Basecamp' [is] a sturdy science-fiction novelette."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Clark (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet, editor and biographer. Clark was born on the Near West Side of Chicago and educated at the University of Michigan where he received a Hopwood Award for poetry. On March 22, 1968, he married Angelica Heinegg, at St. Mark's Church, New York City. Currently (as of 2013) residing in California, Tom Clark's recent books of poetry are Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2006) and Threnody (effing press, 2006).
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Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451518926. Afterword by Walter Prescott Webb. 224 pages. paperback. CE1892. Signet Classic reprint.
DESCRIPTION - This is a searing study of mob justice. The story takes place in the Old West, but it could happen anywhere, anytime that men of action let their anger goad them into taking the law into their own hands. Published in 1940, this powerful narrative was immediately hailed as a work of art. 'The Ox - Bow Incident is a triumph of restraint and workmanship. The tenseness that builds and eddies and comes back stronger is beautifully geared to the temper of each central character and the shifting emotions of the mob, as doubt, anger, stubbornness, physical cold, pity and revulsion hold them in turn,' said Max Gissen in the New Republic. Ben Ray Redman described it in The Saturday Review as 'A sinewy, masculine tale that progressively tightens its grip on the reader.' And Clifton Fadiman summed up the verdict of all the critics when he called this modern classic 'a masterpiece.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 - November 10, 1971) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels and short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
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Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Track of the Cat. New York. 1949. Random House. 404 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Clark's classic novel is a compelling tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it. It is also a story of violent human emotions—love and hate, hope and despair—and of the perpetual conflict between good and evil.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 - November 10, 1971) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels and short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
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Clarke, Breena. River, Cross My Heart. Boston. 1999. Little Brown. 0316144231. 245 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Jane Yeomans. Jacket design by Leslie Goldman.
DESCRIPTION - A remarkable new writer makes her debut - with a novel of tragedy and triumph in the life of an African American family in Georgetown, circa 1925. Six-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of an apparently haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. In scenes olive with emotional truth, RIVER, CROSS MY HEART weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents, Alice and Willie Bynum, torn between the old world of their rural North Carolina home and the new world of the city, to which they have moved in search of a better life for themselves and their children; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family in the Georgetown neighborhood they now call home; and, most especially, Clara's sister, twelve-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions sparked by her sister's death as she struggles to decide and discover the kind of woman she will become. This highly accomplished first novel resonates with ideas, impassioned lyricism, and Poignant historical detail as it captures an essential part of the African American experience in our century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - BREENA CLARKE grew up in Washington, D.C., and was educated at Webster College and Howard University. Her writings have appeared in the anthologies CONTEMPORARY PLAYS BY WOMEN OF COLOR and STREET LIGHTS: ILLUMINATING TALES OF THE TKBAN BLACK EXPERIENCE. She currently administers the Editorial Diversity Program at Time Inc. in New York City. She lives in New Jersey.
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Clarke, John Henrik (editor). Harlem: Voices From the Soul of Black America. New York. 1970. Signet/New American Library. 222 pages. paperback. Q4336.
DESCRIPTION - HARLEM ON THEIR MIND - America's foremost black writers recreate the people, the landscape, the joy, and the horror of their ghetto heartland. Here is a unique and superb collection of tales which recapture the essence of Harlem and its people. Here Ann Petry tells of how one small flame of anger in a black man mourning a son ignites a riot in the ghetto. Here Chester Himes writes of a young soldier and a lovely black girl tasting all the sensuous joys of Harlem. Here Clayton Riley describes a wild and fateful party attended by a fantastic crowd of pimps and hustlers, whores and bums. Here Ray Meaddough spins a wry tale of the star black athlete chosen to squire the white prom queen. HERE IS A RICH AND REVEALING PORTRAIT OF BLACK AMERICA'S SPIRITUAL HOMELAND - THE FASCINATING PLACE AND ITS PEOPLE THAT ARE ON EVERYBODY'S MIND.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark, January 1, 1915 - July 16, 1998), was a Pan-Africanist American-African writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
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Clarke, John Henrik (editor). William Styron's Nat Turner-Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston. 1968. Beacon Press. Includes Contributions From Lerone Bennett, Jr. , Alvin F. Poussaint, Vincent Harding, John Oliver Killens, John A. Williams, Ernest Kaiser, Loyle Hairston, Charles V. Hamilton. 120 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - As THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER moved into the marketplace and onto the bestseller lists, it became clear to some black readers that something was wrong. Why had no black novelist or black historian been persuaded to review this book in the national press? Why was Styron's novel such a success? John Henrik Clarke, associate editor of Freedomway, began to talk with novelists, historians, intellectuals, his friends in the black community. The result is this angry book of ten essays, and the full text of the original confessions of Nat Turner. Here is part of the excitement: ‘Black people today must not permit themselves to be divested of their historical revolutionary leaders. And it is incumbent upon blacks to make this clear to the Styrons and to all those who read his book and are soothed.'- CHARLES V. HAMILTON. ‘The wanderings of Styron's mind seem to focus mainly on [Nat Turner's] relations with white people. Is this because of a commonly held racist view that a Negro who achieves must be doing so primarily because of his associations with whites?' - ALVIN F. POUSSAINT, M.D. ‘Instead of admitting to the curdling of blood and letting things stand, William Styron's novel becomes an exercise in domestication, assimilation, and finally destruction.' - VINCENT HARDING. ‘Styron's CONFESSIONS, despite the revealing hosannas of the white culture structure, is a record of the hallucinatory silence of our history, of 350 years ‘of talk buried deep in dreams.' Styron dreams, but he refuses to confront history and that refusal tells us little about Nat Turner and a great deal about William Styron and the white culture structure which made the book a modern literary happening.' - LERONE BENNETT, JR. ‘Why has the book received so much applause from the established press and a large number of well known ‘scholars'?. Have they failed to see Nat Turner as a hero and revolutionist out of fear that they might have to see H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael the same way?' - JOHN HENRIK CLARKE. ‘As though bedeviled by white-supremacist-inspired fears, William Styron triumphantly reduces his slave to a religious celibate - a kind of self-castration. Poor Nat Turner's only sexual experience is - alas! - a homosexual one. When masturbating, in his youth, he always envisioned himself between the legs of ‘a nameless white girl. with golden curls.' There are other instances where his religious armor gives way momentarily to passions of the flesh, driving him to an uncontrollable desire to ‘violate' a white woman! This is pure racism. Slaveholders themselves could not have dredged up more repugnant notions about the ‘nature' of black men.' - LOYLE HAIRSTON.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark, January 1, 1915 - July 16, 1998), was a Pan-Africanist American-African writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
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Clay, Bernard. English Lit: Poems. Athens. Ohio University Press. 9780967542478. 142 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Hailed as one of the most authentic black voices of his generation, in this autobiographical debut collection, poet Bernard Clay artfully renders coming of age in the predominately black “West End” of Louisville, Kentucky. Balancing the spirited grit of a farmer and the careful lyricism of a poet, English Lit is a triumph of new Affrilachian - African-American and Appalachian - literature. “There is no other poet living or dead that I can say this about but I’ve been waiting on a book from Bernard Clay for more than twenty years. Every time I’ve ever read a single poem by him or heard him read a poem aloud I’ve wanted a volume of his work in my hands.” - Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence. “English Lit is a rich debut collection which is certain to become a classic of Kentucky literature.” - Kelly Norman Ellis, author of Tougaloo Blues and Offerings of Desire. “Kentucky lit, American lit, have a new force that will be felt for years to come.” - Gurney Norman, author of Allegiance and Ancient Creek. “Here’s our Affrilachian progeny’s first book. Crafted with a black farmer’s heart, the poems in English Lit blast off from the West End (the best end) into a brave new world. One of the most rooted and nappiest voices of his generation, Clay delivers a beautiful tribute to his people, his community, and his generation’s dance with words, adding his name to the litany of Kentucky poets who love both the land and its people.” - Frank X Walker, author of Affrilachia and Black Box.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bernard Clay is a Louisville, Kentucky, native who grew up in the shadow of the now demolished Southwick housing projects on the “West End” of town. He has spent most of his life in Kentucky cultivating an appreciation, over the years, for the state’s disappearing natural wonders and unique but sparse urban areas. Bernard received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work has been published in various journals and anthologies. He currently resides on a farm in eastern Kentucky with his wife Lauren. English Lit is his first book.
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Cleage, Pearl. Deals With the Devil & Other Reasons To Riot. New York. 1993. Ballantine/One World. 0345382781. 199 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Dead-on, to the point, fearless. A third-generation black nationalist feminist, Pearl Cleage recognizes the pure power of telling the uncompromising truth - about African-American life and about the fate of race in racist America. Whether she's writing about her - and her sisters' - definition of a good brother, or the terror of the little black dress, DEALS WITH THE DEVIL is filled with Pearl's provocative insights - and she never takes the easy way out.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer and performance artist. She is the artistic director of Just Us Theater Company, editor of Catalyst Magazine and a columnist for the Atlanta Tribune. She writes regularly for Essence and many other periodicals.
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Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. Trumansburg. 1984. Crossing Press. 0895941406. 167 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Abeng (Ä běng) is a novel related to Maroons, published in 1984 by Michelle Cliff. It is a semi-fictional autobiographical novel about a mixed-race Jamaican girl named Clare Savage growing up in the 1950s. It explores the historical repression resulting from British imperialism in Jamaica. Facts regarding imperialism of the island are dispersed throughout the narrative, as well as facts about slavery in Jamaica and Jamaican folklore. It is emphasized that the protagonists are generally unaware of these facts, which often serve to reveal the brutal nature of both slavery and imperialism. In this way Cliff reveals her intentions for the book. It is a piece of revisionist literature meant to challenge the mainstream narrative of Jamaican history. The character Clare Savage would return in Michelle Cliff's next novel, No Telephone to Heaven (1987).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
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Cliff, Michelle. Bodies of Water. New York. 1990. Dutton. 0525248641. 155 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Caribbean writer Michelle Cliff, author of the highly acclaimed novel Free Enterprise, presents a brilliant collection of 10 short stories dealing with oppression and liberation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
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Cliff, Michelle. Free Enterprise. New York. 1994. Plume/New American Library. 0452271223. 213 pages. paperback. Cover design by Daniel Rembert.
DESCRIPTION - This message was found on John Brown's body following his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. History books do not record the contribution of his mysterious collaborator, 'M.E.P.,' but in Free Enterprise, acclaimed novelist Michelle Cliff tells the remarkable story of frontier legend Mary Ellen Pleasant. In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that cater to wealthy whites and secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown's doomed enterprise, and barely escape with their lives. In 1858, two black women meet and later join John Brown's doomed raid on Harper's Ferry, barely escaping with their lives. Acclaimed author Michelle Cliff places an actual historical figure at the center of her powerful new novel, which brings to life the passionate struggle for liberation that began not long after the first slavers landed in Virginia.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
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Cliff, Michelle. Free Enterprise. New York. 1993. Dutton. 0525937048. 213 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Daniel Rembert.
DESCRIPTION - Mary Ellen Pleasant, the owner of a string of hotels that double as havens for runaway slaves, and her young Jamaican friend, Annie Christmas, join John Brown's doomed raid on Harper's Ferry.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
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Cliff, Michelle. If I Could Write This in Fire. Minneapolis. 2008. University of Minnesota Press. 9780816654741. 91 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Michelle Cliff has always been a fierce and fearless writer. In this incendiary collection Cliff examines place and race and legacy, the things we carry with us in our memory and blood. ‘Revolutionaries are made, not born.' This book could make them. Be prepared.' - Rebecca Brown. A deeply personal meditation on history and memory, place and displacement by a major writer Born in a Jamaica still under British rule, the acclaimed and influential writer Michelle Cliff embraced her many identities, shaped by her experiences with the forces of colonialism and oppression: a light-skinned Creole, a lesbian, an immigrant in both England and the United States. In her celebrated novels and short stories, she has probed the intersection of prejudice and oppression with a rare and striking lyricism. In her first collection of nonfiction, Cliff displays the same poetic intensity, interweaving reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injustice. IF I COULD WRITE THIS IN FIRE begins by tracing her transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of her childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark-skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. In other essays and poems, Cliff writes about the discovery of her distinctive, diasporic literary voice, recalls her wild colonial girlhood and sexual awakening, and recounts traveling through an American landscape of racism, colonialism, and genocide - a history of violence embodied in seemingly innocuous souvenirs and tourist sites. IF I COULD WRITE THIS IN FIRE explores the complexities of identity as they meet with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and the legacies of the Middle Passage and European imperialism. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Michelle Cliff has lectured at several universities and was Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature at Trinity College in Hartford. She is the author of the acclaimed novels ABENG, NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN, and FREE ENTERPRISE, as well as two collections of short fiction, BODIES OF WATER and THE STORE OF A MILLION ITEMS. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
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Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone To Heaven. New York. 1987. Dutton. 0525245081. 211 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In this poetic novel about colonialism and contemporary Jamaica, a light-skinned woman must find the courage to face the violence that can arise from oppression and divided loyalties.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
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Coates, Robert M. The Bitter Season. New York. 1946. Harcourt Brace & Company. 180 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Novel of men unable to join the military in World War II, “the civilian in wartime; the men a little too old, or a little too frail, to be warriors.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Myron Coates (April 6, 1897 - February 8, 1973) was an American writer and a long-term art critic for the New Yorker. He coined the term ‘abstract expressionism‘ in 1946 in reference to the works of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. As a writer of fiction, he is considered a member of the Lost Generation, having spent part of his life abroad in Europe. His first three novels are highly experimental, drawing upon Dada, surrealism and expressionism for their effect. His last two novels are examples of crime fiction in which the narrator presents a psychopathological case study of the protagonist. Nowadays, Coates is best known for The Outlaw Years (1930), which deals with the history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace. Coates was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1897 and died at the age of 75 in New York City in 1973.
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Coates, Robert M. Wisteria Cottage. New York. 1948. Harcourt Brace & Company. 212 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - To Florence Hackett and her daughters Elinor and Louisa, Richard Baurie, a handsome young bookstore clerk and aspiring poet, seems a little odd but harmless enough. With his amusing conversation and his eager-to-please attitude, Richard works his way into the Hacketts’ confidence until he is almost one of the family. When he suggests they rent Wisteria Cottage, a charming seaside residence, it seems to promise a summer of pleasant companionship and fun. What the Hacketts don’t know is that Richard is a deeply troubled individual, recently released from a mental institution, and that their relaxing summer holiday will soon turn into a terrifying nightmare.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Myron Coates (April 6, 1897 - February 8, 1973) was an American writer and a long-term art critic for the New Yorker. He coined the term ‘abstract expressionism‘ in 1946 in reference to the works of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. As a writer of fiction, he is considered a member of the Lost Generation, having spent part of his life abroad in Europe. His first three novels are highly experimental, drawing upon Dada, surrealism and expressionism for their effect. His last two novels are examples of crime fiction in which the narrator presents a psychopathological case study of the protagonist. Nowadays, Coates is best known for The Outlaw Years (1930), which deals with the history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace. Coates was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1897 and died at the age of 75 in New York City in 1973.
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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York. 2015. Spiegel & Grau. 9780812993547. 155 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Greg Mollica. Jacket art: Bridgeman Images.
DESCRIPTION - Hailed by Toni Morrison as 'required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by 'the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States' (The New York Observer). 'This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.' In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of 'race,' a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son - and readers - the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. Praise for Between the World and Me - 'Powerful and passionate. profoundly moving. a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.' - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. 'Brilliant. a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision.' - The Washington Post. 'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. As profound as it is revelatory.' - Toni Morrison. 'Coates has distilled four hundred years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country. An instant classic and a gift to us all.' - Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns. 'I know that this book is addressed to the author's son, and by obvious analogy to all boys and young men of color as they pass, inexorably, into harm's way. I hope that I will be forgiven, then, for feeling that Coates was speaking to me, too, one father to another.' - Michael Chabon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ta-Nehisi Coates (born September 30, 1975) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. His second book, Between the World and Me, was released in July 2015. It won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2015.
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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. New York. 2008. Spiegel & Grau. 9780385520362. 227 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Honi Werner.
DESCRIPTION - An exceptional father-son story from the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us. Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence - and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack - and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free. Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father's steadfast efforts - assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present - to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction. With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father's generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ta-Nehisi Coates (born September 30, 1975) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. His second book, Between the World and Me, was released in July 2015. It won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2015.
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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York. 2017. One World Publishing. 9780399590566. 373 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ben Grandgenett.
DESCRIPTION - “We were eight years in power,” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's “first white president.” But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period - and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation's old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective - the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president. We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates's iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates's own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ta-Nehisi Coates (born September 30, 1975) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. His second book, Between the World and Me, was released in July 2015. It won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2015.
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Cobb, Humphrey. Paths of Glory. New York. 2010. Penguin Books. 9780143106111. Introduction by James H. Meredith. 224 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Familiar to many as the Stanley Kubrick film starring Kirk Douglas, Paths of Glory explores the perilous complications involved in what nations demand of their soldiers in wartime. Humphrey Cobb's protagonists are Frenchmen during the First World War whose nightmare in the trenches takes a new and terrible turn when they are ordered to assault a German position deemed all but invulnerable. When the attack fails, an inquiry into allegations of cowardice indicts a small handful of lower-ranked scapegoats whose trial exposes the farce of ordering ordinary men to risk their lives in an impossible cause. A chilling portrait of injustice, this novel offers insight into the tragedies of war in any age.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Humphrey Cobb (September 5, 1899 – April 25, 1944) was an Italian-born, Canadian-American screenwriter and novelist. He is known for writing the novel Paths of Glory (1935), which was made into an acclaimed 1957 anti-war film Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick. Cobb was also the lead screenwriter on the 1937 film San Quentin, starring Humphrey Bogart.
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Codrescu, Andrei. A Bar in Brooklyn: Novellas & Stories 1970-1978. Santa Rosa. 1999. Black Sparrow Press. 1574230972. 241 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Since emigrating to the U.S. from his native Romania in 1966, Andrei Codrescu has blazed a rocket-bright trail across the cultural landscape of his adopted country, gaining a national audience as a public radio commentator, television personality, and editor of the radical literary journal EXQUISITE CORPSE. A BAR IN BROOKLYN collects his shorter fiction of the 1970s. 'Older exiles who, as myself, had come here without speaking a word of English, guarded their simple secrets carefully because their vampiric ambitions depended on them. I had to go it alone, something I have a horror of.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. A Craving For Swan. Columbus. 1986. Ohio State University Press. 0814204155. 314 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Essays deal with Stalin, time, television, bears, eternal youth, fashion, summer, the imagination, longings, metaphors, science, shopping, and the future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. Aggressive Hospitality: A Story. Minneapolis. 1990. Coffee House Press. Illustrated by Leslie Ross. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A limited edition of a three page story by Andrei Codrescu.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. An Involuntary Genius in America’s Shoes (And What Happened Afterwards). Santa Rosa. 2001. Black Sparrow Press. 1574231596. 358 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Multimedia culture critic, novelist, poet, editor of the radical literary journal Exquisite Corpse, Andrei Codrescu proves also a candid, witty, iconoclastic and exuberant commentator on his own colorful life.The self-invented Codrescu was born Andrei Perlmutter in the medieval town of Sibiu, Romania in 1946. A dissident student-intellectual and draft-dodger, he experienced a chequered adolescence under a draconian Communist regime. Beguiled by ideal photographs of places out of reach , at the age of 19 the young rebel fled his Transylvanian homeland -- this drab military country where young men turned old before they had a chance to look -- for the Land of Opportunity. It was my great luck , Codrescu remarks with characteristic sly irony in his introduction, coming into America in the late Sixties, to encounter several wayward myths ready-made for me, Transylvania being but one of them. Transylvania at the time of my arrival was a growing myth, full of potential, and anybody who bought stock in Dracula then must feel like an investor in early McDonald. In the past two decades I have seen Halloween overtake Christmas as the nation s greatest holiday, and Dracula become bigger than Jesus Christ, and even John Lennon. Queasy at first about this Hollywood fantasy, I later considered it as a gift. The dark stranger who bites blond Anglosaxony in her semisleep is the outsider, par excellence, the exile who brings history to a halt with his story. His bite ends being in time, it jumpstarts eternity, overthrows daytime and the bourgeoisie, reinstates aristocracy and difference. And it was a great way to meet girls. I never abandoned the profoundly gloomy existentialist disposition ofmy rebellious Romanian generation within which I had been raised as a baby dissident destined for great things and prison. No, I just put on a cape to complete the picture. Ionesco, my previous totem, was only a literary Dracula. To be bit by the absurd is every bit as liberating as being bit by an immortal, but why not be bit by both?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. Comrade Past ad Mister Present: New Poems and a Journal. Minneapolis. 1986. Coffee House Press. 0918273218. 110 pages. paperback. cover illustrator - Claudia Tantillo.
DESCRIPTION - Poems and a journal entry from writer, poet, and sometime NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu. CONTENTS: Blues For Cassanova; Cohere Britannia; Comrade Past & Mister Present; Dear Masoch; En Passant; The Fourth Of July; The Inner Source; Momentary Bafflement With Return Home At Dawn; Music; November 6, 1984; Petite Madeleine; School Daze; Volcanic Dirge & Co.; When Lightning Struck, 1.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. In America's Shoes. San Francisco. 1983. City Lights Books. 0872861481. 194 pages. paperback. Cover photo by Barry Holniker.
DESCRIPTION - The dissident Romanian poet (now a cultural commentator on The Baltimore Sun) here continues his story begun in the popular LIFE AND TIMES OF AN INVOLUNTARY GENIUS which celebrated his luck at having crashed through a crack in the Iron Curtain at a propitious time in the history of the -world. The pleasure of being alive, young and angry in the late 1960s was matched by the euphoria of the American sub-culture which seemed everywhere to be ‘expanding the area of consciousness.' It was in this wide-open counter-culture that the young emigre first found himself in this country. During the revisionist 1970s (in which many of the Sixties' ‘break-throughs' were reconsidered and turned backward toward a new reactionary status quo) it became tougher to walk in America's shoes. In them, Codrescu - like a Transylvanian Everyman - points to the snares that have tripped up his generation, satirizing the literary bohemians who were homogenized, technocratized, programmed, or ‘lost to gurus.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. Messiah. New York. 1999. Simon & Schuster. 0684803143. 368 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Set from December 1999 to Mardi Gras 2000, Messiah introduces two remarkable young women: Felicity, a girl detective in New Orleans, and Andrea, a Sarajevan orphan who has found asylum in Jerusalem after internment in a Serbian POW camp. Felicity and Andrea, both presciently self-aware, come to believe they are the two severed halves of a whole entity, eventually finding each other amid the chaos of millennial fervor. Their special mission: to fulfill an extraordinary destiny as Armageddon sweeps the earth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems. Minneapolis. 2012. Coffee House Press. 9781566893008. 408 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Raconteur, poet, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu delivers in his inimitable, irreverent style a collection that traverses subjects from aging to consumerism, to religion to mass media. Brilliantly funny yet deeply insightful, these poems illuminate Codrescu's acerbic tone and outsized personality and capture the best of his oeuvre. Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. The author of more than thirty-five books, Codrescu has edited the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse, and his provocative commentary is featured regularly on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Codrescu currently resides in Arkansas.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Essays. New York. 2000. St Martin's. 0312202946. 244 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Kerry McGaffety.
DESCRIPTION - The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world - not even in Codrescu's native Transylvania - is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture (‘a pre-apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single whoosh-) in one of his commentaries on National Public Radio, NPR received forty thousand letters in a protest spearheaded by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Codrescu was warned to ‘stay away from eschatology.' Thankfully for us, he hasn't. In THE DEVIL NEVER SLEEPS, one of America's shrewdest social critics sets our to uncover the Devil's most modern and insidiously banal incarnations. Once easily recognizable by his horns, tail, and propensity for plague, today's Devil has become embedded in every fiber of our culture. Discussing everything from rock 'n' roll to William Burroughs to New Orleans bars to the Demon of Prosperity. Codrescu mockingly unmasks Old Nick as the opportunistic technocrat he really is. Embracing cell phones, cable access, and cyberspace, the ubiquitous Devil of secular culture embodies the true evil facing us today - banality. In a world teeming with distraction, we are still more than capable of being bored to death. Tormented as much by insomnia and its ravages as the Devil (perhaps they're one and the same), we've become a twenty-four-hour society, swinging desperately between tedium and terror and sleeping fitfully, if at all. As Codrescu points out, the Devil never sleeps because we just won't let him. With his characteristic charm and playful exuberance, Andrei Codrescu has successfully teased the Devil our from the darkest recesses and comic excesses of the human experience. THE DEVIL NEVER SLEEPS is his most wonderfully perverse book yet.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. The Disappearance of the Outside. Reading. 1990. Addison Wesely. 0201121948. 216 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Gary Koepke.
DESCRIPTION - When an excerpt from this book first appeared, The Nation called it ‘a remarkable essay the sort of social-cultural-political analysis the mind longs for when it's been fed for months on Wonder Bread while roaring for raw meat.' This analysis could only have come from Andrei Codrescu: born in Stalinist Romania, exploring the world during the turbulent 1960s, and now an American poet, essayist, and commentator. In the late twentieth century, he writes, people fear the Outside - that which holds everything beyond our control and current understanding. We yearn to escape into the familiar, not into the unknown. Minds are no longer open to mystery. The rulers of the Eastern bloc tried to close off the Outside with barbed wire and censorship, driving away creative minds. An exile himself, Codrescu looks at Czeslaw Milosz, whose literary Lithuania has become more famous than the region itself; Vàclav Havel, recently a prisoner of the Czechoslovak state and now its leader; Milan Kundera, who sought a free press and now refuses all interviews; and many other authors who fled and fought oppression. Now popular revolutions are bringing East and West together. Codrescu was once so unwelcome in Romania that his name could not appear in crossword puzzles; in December 1989, he relates, he returned and was invited to go on national television. Yet here in the West, Codrescu points out, the Outside is blocked by billboards, drowned out by commercials. There is free expression, but can we really think about what anybody says? What will flow eastward through the cracks in the Iron Curtain - freedom of thought or ‘freedom to shop'? Part memoir of crossing East and West, part critique of our current world literature, and part jeremiad against how we ignore imagination as a force in our lives, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE OUTSIDE is an extraordinary piece of writing that holds challenges for years ahead.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution. New York. 1991. Morrow. 0688088058. 249 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Barbara M. Bachman.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Suddenly there, under the cold moon, there it was, the Romanian flag with the socialist emblem cut right out of the middle. It's through that hole that I am returning to my birthplace.' These were Andrei Codrescu's words as he began a journey of discovery. On the eve of the Christmas 1989 revolution, the exiled poet returned to his homeland to witness firsthand the changes occurring in Eastern Europe. The impetus was an assignment from National Public Radio, which Codrescu snatched at immediately. It had been twenty-five years since he left Romania as a dissident poet. THE HOLE IN THE FLAG is Andrei Codrescu's personal account of the fall of a tyrannical regime, and the exhilaration of a country reborn. He shares the triumph of the workers and citizens on the festive New Year's streets, and reunites with old friends and colleagues that he left behind. With the keen eye of a reporter, Codrescu reveals the hideous secrets of the Ceausescu nightmare that lasted forty-five years. Yet the reality of what Romania has in store once the parades have ended is described from the heart of a poet The combination of sensibilities creates a startlingly truthful perspective - a personal portrayal of political history. From the Orient Express to his childhood haunts in Bucharest and Sibiu, we follow Codrescu as he chronicles the insurrection - from the battlefield villages where the revolution was supposedly fought to the television studio where the revolution was won, and then stolen. Codrescu uncovers the chilling realities behind the ‘democratic' transformation of this history-haunted corner of Europe, a cynical deception that has largely misled hearts and minds around the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Codrescu, Andrei. The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans and Other Essays. New York. 1993. St Martin's Press. 0312093543. 199 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Biting social commentary from a popular radio journalist offers a displaced European's view of the current state of America in elegant essays that are incisively witty, sometimes soothing, and always trenchant and intelligent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair's Artists and Writers' Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award'. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers' by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News' Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe', a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine', an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas'. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
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Coen, Ethan. Gates of Eden. New York. 1998. Reisbach/Morrow. 0688159141. 261 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A hapless private investigator who loses his hearing after having one ear bitten off, a maverick weights-and-measures man who gets pulled into a sinister blackmailing scheme by a seductive Japanese woman, a college kid so desperate to avoid an office job that he tries to break into boxing and organized crime: the characters in Gates of Eden grapple with their place in the world, trying to comprehend what fate has placed before them.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) is an American filmmaker. Working alongside his brother Joel, he has directed, written, edited and produced many feature films, the most acclaimed of which include Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). The duo began directing separately in the 2020s. Ethan's first solo directorial work was Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, a documentary about the titular singer-songwriter. His first solo feature film was 2024's Drive-Away Dolls, which was co-written by his wife Tricia Cooke. His following solo feature film, Honey Don't!, premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The brothers, together, have won four Academy Awards from 13 nominations; one for writing Fargo, and three for writing, directing, and producing No Country For Old Men. They also won a Palme d'Or for Barton Fink.
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Cole, Norma. Fate News. Richmond. 2018. Omnidawn Publishing. 9781632430588. 6 x 9. 104 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - All timing all the time! Fate News is poetry in the crosshairs of action (kairos) and clock time (chronos), relentlessly piercing the surface of lyric gesture. Its osmotic exchanges and searching encounters vibrate with the clarity of fiercely delicate shouts and murmurs, undertones and overtones. The vision of “Mount Fiasco” is on fire. “In Fate News, fate (the past, love, destiny, and the future) comes to fruition through an ecstatic synesthesia. With her signature deftness, Cole guides her lines directly into your heart. ‘Your somatics are your own' but, you will find, it is your destiny to be enlightened by this News.” Laura Moriarty, author of A Tonalist.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - norma cole is a poet, translator, and visual artist. Her books of poetry include Actualities, Where Shadows Will, and Win These Poster and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside. Born in Toronto, Canada, Cole lives in the sanctuary city of San Francisco. Topical poems that present the life of the mind - mourning and celebrating who and what is lost as time goes by.
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Coleman, Aaron. Threat Come Close. New York. 2018. Four Way. 9781945588044. Stahlecker Selections. 72 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - in his debut collection, Aaron Coleman writes an American anthem for the 21st century, a full-throated lyric composed of pain, faith, lust and vulnerability. Coleman's poems comment on and interrogate the meaning of home and identity for a black man in America, past and present. Guided by a belief system comprising an eclectic array of invented saints - Trigger, Seduction, Doubt and Who - Coleman's quest finds answers in the natural world where “[t]he trees teach me how to break and keep on living.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - AARON COLEMAN is the author of St. Trigger and winner of the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, he received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow in their Comparative Literature PhD program.
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Coleman, Anita Scott. Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance: The Life and Writings of Anita Scott Coleman. Norman. 2008. University of Oklahoma Press. 9780806139562. 6 x 9. 26 b&w illus. 240 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Recovers Coleman's life and literary legacy One of the most distinctive and prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Anita Scott Coleman (1890-1960) found popular and critical success in the flourishing African American press of the early twentieth century. Yet unlike many of her New York-based contemporaries, Coleman lived her life in the American West, first in New Mexico and later in California. Her work thus offers a rare view of African American life in that region. Broader in scope than any previous anthology of Coleman's writings, this volume collects the author's finest stories, essays, and poems, including many not published since they first appeared in African American newspapers during the 1920s, '30s, and '40's. Editors Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell introduce these writings with an in-depth biographical essay that places Coleman in the context of the Harlem Renaissance movement. The volume also features vintage family photographs, a detailed chronology, and a genealogical tree covering five generations of the Coleman family. Based on extensive research and written with the full cooperation of the Coleman family, Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance gives readers new understanding of this overlooked writer's life and literary accomplishments.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cynthia Davis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, University College. She is coauthor of Dynamic Communication for Engineers. Verner D. Mitchell is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Memphis. He is the author of This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance and, with Cynthia Davis, editor of Dorothy West: Where the Wild Grape Grows.?
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Coleman, Wanda. A War of Eyes and Other Stories. Santa Rosa. 1988. Black Sparrow Press. 0876857373. 245 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Tales of the black urban poor from Wanda Coleman, a poet who grew up in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Wanda Coleman - poet, storyteller and journalist - was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. She is the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine and was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wanda Coleman (birth name, Wanda Evans) (born November 13, 1946) is an American poet. Coleman was born Wanda Evans, and grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1960s. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and the California Arts Council (in fiction and in poetry). She was the first C.O.L.A. literary fellow (Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003). Her many honors include an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, The 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize (for ‘Bathwater Wine'), and a nomination for the 2001 National Book Awards (for ‘Mercurochrome'). She was a finalist for California poet laureate (2005). While critically acclaimed for her creative writing, Coleman's greatest notoriety came as a result of an unfavorable review she wrote in the April 14, 2002 edition of The Los Angeles Times Book Review of Maya Angelou's book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Coleman found the book to be ‘small and inauthentic, without ideas wisdom or vision'. There was a huge outpouring some positive and much negative, which resulted in Coleman's invitation to certain events being cancelled. Her account of this incident appeared as an essay in the August 29, 2002 edition of The Nation.
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Coleman, Wanda. Hand Dance. Santa Rosa. 1993. Black Sparrow Press. 0876858981. 271 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Barbara Martin.
DESCRIPTION - The poems and prose of Coleman's sixth book, Hand Dance, show a wry political awareness (‘inside this poor person is a rich one / struggling to come out'), a streetwise knowledge of what it means to be black in urban American (‘in the world i come from / violence is a language and a bullet / sudden insight'), as well as a heady sensuality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wanda Coleman (November 13, 1946 - November 22, 2013) was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles". Wanda Evans was born in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. She is the eldest of four children. Her parents were George and Lewana (Scott) Evans, who were introduced to one another at church by his aunt. In 1931, her father had relocated to Los Angeles from Little Rock, Arkansas, after the lynching of a young man who was hung from a church steeple. He was an ex-boxer and long-time friend and sparring partner of Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore. In Los Angeles, he ran a sign shop during the day and worked the graveyard shift as a janitor at RCA Victor Records. Her mother worked as a seamstress and as a housekeeper for Ronald Reagan, among other celebrities. After graduating from John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles, Wanda Evans enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California. She transferred to California State University at Los Angeles, but did not complete a degree. Shortly after finishing high school, she married white Southerner Charles Coleman, a troubleshooter for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Their union produced two children, Luanda and Anthony. She went on to marry two more times. Her third husband was poet Austin Straus, whom she married in 1981. Coleman received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council (in fiction and in poetry). She was the first C.O.L.A. Literary Fellow (Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003). Her honors included an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize (for Bathwater Wine), and a nomination for the 2001 National Book Awards (for Mercurochrome). She was a finalist for California poet laureate (2005). While critically acclaimed for her creative writing, Coleman's brush with notoriety came as a result of an unfavorable review she wrote in the April 14, 2002, issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review of Maya Angelou's book A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Coleman found the book to be "small and inauthentic, without ideas wisdom or vision". Coleman's review provoked positive and negative responses, including the cancellation of events and the rescinding of invitations. Her account of this incident appears in the September 16, 2002, edition of The Nation.
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Coleman, Wanda. Mambo Hips and Make Believe. Santa Rosa. 1999. David Godine/Black Sparrow Press. 1574230948. 407 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Wanda Coleman's novel traces the friendship of two women, one white, one black, one from the suburbs, one from the ghetto, but both aspiring writers, who for two decades share each other's troubles and triumphs in and out of work and love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wanda Coleman (birth name, Wanda Evans) (born November 13, 1946) is an American poet. Coleman was born Wanda Evans, and grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1960s. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and the California Arts Council (in fiction and in poetry). She was the first C.O.L.A. literary fellow (Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003). Her many honors include an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, The 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize (for ‘Bathwater Wine'), and a nomination for the 2001 National Book Awards (for ‘Mercurochrome'). She was a finalist for California poet laureate (2005). While critically acclaimed for her creative writing, Coleman's greatest notoriety came as a result of an unfavorable review she wrote in the April 14, 2002 edition of The Los Angeles Times Book Review of Maya Angelou's book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Coleman found the book to be ‘small and inauthentic, without ideas wisdom or vision'. There was a huge outpouring some positive and much negative, which resulted in Coleman's invitation to certain events being cancelled. Her account of this incident appeared as an essay in the August 29, 2002 edition of The Nation.
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Coleman, Wanda. Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors. Santa Rosa. 1996. Black Sparrow Press. 1574230239. 1 of 200 hardcover trade copies. 295 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Barbara Martin.
DESCRIPTION - Satire and journalism are alive and well in L.A., at least when poet Coleman (African Sleeping Sickness) is doing the biting and reporting. Her collection of articles, essays, columns and interviews is more than a paean to her birthplace. She gives us L.A. as a microcosm of what America is today and where it is heading. The picture is not always hopeful. She describes the suicide of a friend as a ‘failed struggle in a metropolis gone mad, where the only politics is survival and success is measured in multiples of zero.' Hers is a sociology of stories, anecdotes and observations, but her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable. She has a progressive agenda that is insistent but reasonably argued. And, even though she describes herself as ‘hard boiled, quiet, dismally realistic,' she has a wry sense of humor. One of her Swiftian solutions to the plight of inner cities is to start schools for wanna-be thugstas. ‘How about a school that teaches the well-heeled the ins and outs of hard-core urban warfare?' She reasons that the schools would give employment to gangstas, ex-cons and rehab program internees. Attendees would come from the ranks of novelists, Hollywood directors, talk-show hosts, scriptwriters and amateur slummers. Although she is sardonic when it comes to politics and groups, she is tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals. In a letter to the late Hakim A. Jamal, who was her first mentor after Watts in the summer of 1965, she writes: ‘I will do my level best to clothe those bone-cold statistics in human flesh.' ‘I have kept The Faith, Jamal,' she concludes, ‘but it hasn't kept me.' - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wanda Coleman (November 13, 1946 - November 22, 2013) was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles". Wanda Evans was born in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. She is the eldest of four children. Her parents were George and Lewana (Scott) Evans, who were introduced to one another at church by his aunt. In 1931, her father had relocated to Los Angeles from Little Rock, Arkansas, after the lynching of a young man who was hung from a church steeple. He was an ex-boxer and long-time friend and sparring partner of Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore. In Los Angeles, he ran a sign shop during the day and worked the graveyard shift as a janitor at RCA Victor Records. Her mother worked as a seamstress and as a housekeeper for Ronald Reagan, among other celebrities. After graduating from John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles, Wanda Evans enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California. She transferred to California State University at Los Angeles, but did not complete a degree. Shortly after finishing high school, she married white Southerner Charles Coleman, a troubleshooter for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Their union produced two children, Luanda and Anthony. She went on to marry two more times. Her third husband was poet Austin Straus, whom she married in 1981. Coleman received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council (in fiction and in poetry). She was the first C.O.L.A. Literary Fellow (Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003). Her honors included an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize (for Bathwater Wine), and a nomination for the 2001 National Book Awards (for Mercurochrome). She was a finalist for California poet laureate (2005). While critically acclaimed for her creative writing, Coleman's brush with notoriety came as a result of an unfavorable review she wrote in the April 14, 2002, issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review of Maya Angelou's book A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Coleman found the book to be "small and inauthentic, without ideas wisdom or vision". Coleman's review provoked positive and negative responses, including the cancellation of events and the rescinding of invitations. Her account of this incident appears in the September 16, 2002, edition of The Nation.
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Coleman, Wanda. The World Falls Away. Pittsburgh. 2011. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822961642. Pitt Poetry Series. 132 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The burnings from which Coleman culls her work casts a glow and unique warmth that invites the reader to sit by her metaphorical hearth, to laugh and enjoy their 'conversation.' The contemplative and philosophical have entered her voice as she continues to explore the conflicts and confusions that shape the aesthetic terrain of Southern California and beyond--as she continues to grapple with cultural bias, malignant domestic neglect, poverty, and the damages of racism, yet broadening her palette of social ills to include the privacies of grief, loss and transcendence. A nominee and finalist for Poet Laureate of California, she continues to reflect the ethnic scramble of Los Angeles, where she has been honored by proclamations from the city's elected officials, including the mayor's office, the city council and the Department of Cultural Affairs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wanda Coleman (November 13, 1946, Watts, South Los Angeles, CA - November 22, 2013, Los Angeles, CA) was a poet and writer from Los Angeles, California. Her numerous poetry collections include Mercurochrome: New Poems, nominated for the National Book Award; Bathwater Wine, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Ostinato Vamps. She was the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Emmy Award as a writer for Days of Our Lives.
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Coll, Susan. Karlmarx. com. New York. 2000. Simon & Schuster. 0743200039. 255 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Rex Bonomelli/Sopt Design.
DESCRIPTION - Ella Kennedy may not be perfect, but she's smart, she's dedicated, and she's finally managed to find a fascinating thesis subject in the morass of Marxist political theory: Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl and a bright light in the Marxist movement, who famously declined after a disastrous love affair. With tenacity, with vigor, Ella Kennedy, Ph.D. student extraordinaire, begins delving into the world of Eleanor just as she takes a job setting up a Marxist mail-order catalogue at the fledgling Institute of Thought in Washington, D.C. - a veritable three-ring circus. When Ella's own life begins to parallel Eleanor's - right down to the domineering father (Ella's is known as the king of discount merchandising) and the distant yet brilliant lover - the theoretical, the political, and the personal collide in a hilarious romp of a novel. Wacky, heartwarming, and deliciously smart, this novel of heartbreak and hilarity on the doctoral circuit is the intersection of Laura Zigman, Nora Ephron, and Richard Russo.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Susan Coll is the author of the novels The Stager, Beach Week, Acceptance, Rockville Pike, and karlmarx.com. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR.org, theatlantic.com, The Millions, and a variety of other publications including The Asian Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune.
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Collins, Billy. Picnic, Lightning. Pittsburgh. 1998. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822956709. Pitt Poetry Series. 104 pages. paperback. Cover art by Martin Johnson Heade, 'Salt Marsh Hay,' c.1865. Cover design by Kachergis Book Design.
DESCRIPTION - In these playful, conversational poems, Billy Collins immerses us in the minutiae of a life. What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Billy Collins, named U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2001 and reappointed to the post in 2002, has published seven collections of poetry, including The Apple That Astonished Paris; Nine Horses; The Art of Drowning; Picnic, Lightning; Questions about Angels; and Sailing Alone Around the Room. A professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he lives in Somers, New York.
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Collins, Billy. Questions About Angels: Poems. Pittsburgh. 1999. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822956983. 94 pages. paperback. Cover design by Ann Walston.
DESCRIPTION - Selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series, Questions About Angels, Billy Collins's fourth book of poems, is available again. Remarkable for their wry, inquisitive voice and their sheer imaginative range, these poems are probing explorations, journeys into the unexpected. Questions About Angels reinforces Collins's place among the most talented poets of this generation. 'Billy Collins can be downright funny; he's a parodist, a feigning trickster, an ironic, entertaining magician-as-hero. Without question, Collins writes with verve, gumption and deep intelligence. Not many poets can infuse humor with such serious knowledge; not many can range so far throughout history and look so freshly into the future. Not many can please so thoroughly and still manage to chide, prod, urge, criticize, and teach.' - David Baker, Poetry.This volume was selected by Edward Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Billy Collins, named U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2001 and reappointed to the post in 2002, has published seven collections of poetry, including The Apple That Astonished Paris; Nine Horses; The Art of Drowning; Picnic, Lightning; Questions about Angels; and Sailing Alone Around the Room. A professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he lives in Somers, New York.
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Collins, Michael. The Keepers of Truth. London. 2000. Phoenix House. 1861591780. This Book Was Shortlisted For The Booker Prize. 297 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the Truth, the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the Truth, Then, old man Lawton goes missing, and suspicion fixes on his son, Ronny. Paradoxically, the specter of violent death breathes new life into the town. For Bill, a deeper and more disturbing involvement with the Lawtons ensues. The Lawton murder and the obsessions it awakes in the town come to symbolize the mood of a nation on the edge. Compulsively readable, THE KEEPERS OF TRUTH startles both with its insights and with Collins's powerful, incisive writing. Michael Collins was born in Limerick, Ireland, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His first book, THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF LOBSTERS, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1993. Michael Collins received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Chicago. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Collins was born in Limerick, Ireland, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His first book, THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF LOBSTERS, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1993. Michael Collins received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Chicago.
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Collins, Michael. The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters. New York. 1993. Random House. 0679420908. 225 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph - 'Untitle' by Jaromir Funke.
DESCRIPTION - In this first story collection, Collins, Irish-born and distantly related to the Irish revolutionary who is his namesake, charts out new territory for the discussion of age-old problems. His perspective on life in Ireland is that of disaffected youth who are tired of political strife, the romanticization of bankrupt ways and the abdication of the fathers, who have left the children no legacy but violence and an oppressive church. In First Love, kids left in a car in a pub parking lot are horrified as their fathers' dogs tear at the dead rabbits that have been bagged earlier in the day, the fathers oblivious over their pints. In The Butcher's Daughter a pregnant young woman sits in a pub with a doll in a pram as the place fills with soldiers, the workings of a violent cataclysm ticking away in the doll's belly. And in The Whore Mother, Collins crafts a tale that is both quintessentially Irish (a brewery worker drowns in a vat of Guinness) and wickedly subversive (his impoverished widow, who in the absence of decent death benefits has taken up prostitution, is meted out the most terrible kind of justice). Collins's gift is his ability to find intricate metaphors to describe lives so grim that only anger lights the way. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Collins was born in Limerick, Ireland, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His first book, THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF LOBSTERS, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1993. Michael Collins received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Chicago.
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Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln. 1990. University of Nebraska Press. 0803214456. 211 pages. hardcover. Jacket: ‘Bright Blankets’ by Dolona Roberts.
DESCRIPTION - In Winged Words Laura Coltelli interviews some of America's foremost Indian poets and novelists, including Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch. They candidly discuss the debt to old and the creation of new traditions, the proprieties of age and gender, and the relations between Indian writers and non-Indian readers and critics, and between writers and anthropologists and historians.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laura Coltelli is an associate professor of American literature at the University of Pisa.
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Colter, Cyrus. A Chocolate Soldier. New York. 1988. Thunder's Mouth Press. 0938410423. 279 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Loretta Li.
DESCRIPTION - Acclaimed for his previous novels and stories as ‘a writer of distinction' (Choice), Cyrus Colter, in his ambitious new novel, A CHOCOLATE SOLDIER, continues his exploration of the human psyche at war with itself, a profound struggle that underlies some of history's most extraordinary and far-reaching events. This dark, riveting novel reveals a long-buried rivalry between two men: one who died young, the other who lives on to regret his own crimes and, in retrospect, to exalt, even canonize, his long-dead friend. It is about destiny and these men's inexorable progress toward its fulfillment: one reprobate, the other a horrifying and twisted ideal. Seeking expiation through confession, Meshach Barry, who was once a preacher and respected chaplain - tells the story of Rob Ezekiel Lee, known as ‘Cager,' ‘seer, soothsayer, crystal gazer, but also a chameleon. and murderer.' As a divinity student, Meshach came to know Cager when they both attended Gladstone College, a small black institution in Valhalla, Tennessee, during the forties. Cager was full of contradictions. A brilliant student in his first year, infatuated with military history that fed his vision of black liberation, he advocated militancy, going so far as to organize a black military force - shocking blacks and whites alike in this quiet southern town. Rebuffed by beautiful redheaded Flo Ransom, Cager began to fail in his studies. Falling steadily deeper into his private world, devouring military histories, he envisioned himself as both martyr and redeemer. His imagination seized by the chronicle of an unsuccessful slave rebellion led by one Ofield Smalls during the Civil War, Cager formed a terrible determination to emulate this tragic event in the black struggle in America. Disturbing and powerful, A CHOCOLATE SOLDIER parallels in some ways CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE IDIOT - Colter's Cager is part Raskolnikov, part Mishkin. Like Dostoevski, Cyrus Colter writes of men and women caught between good and evil, faith and despair, transgression and salvation, in this ambitious novel that addresses the great moral complexities of human existence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The distinguished African-American writer and educator Cyrus Colter was born in Noblesville, Indiana, on January 8, 1910. A recipient of the prestigious University of Iowa School of Letters first prize award for short fiction, Colter published many short stories and poems, as well as six novels, throughout his career. Colter worked for the Illinois Commerce Commission before resigning to take a faculty position at Northwestern in the Department of African-American Studies. He remained at Northwestern until his retirement in 1978. Colter died in 2002. Colter was one of two children born to James Alexander Colter and Ethel Marietta Basset Colter. His father's various jobs included insurance salesman, actor, musician and regional director of the Central Indiana division of the NAACP, which took the family from Noblesville to Greensboro, Indiana, and later to Youngstown, Ohio. Cyrus Colter graduated from Rayen Academy in Youngstown and pursued his undergraduate degree at Youngstown University (Ohio) and Ohio State. In 1940 he earned a degree from the Chicago-Kent College of Law. On January 1, 1943, he married Imogene Mackay, a teacher, who served as his supporter and critic until her death in 1984. Colter's early life was marked by his legal and military pursuits. After a brief stint as an agent for the Internal Revenue Agency, Colter served in World War II as a field artillery captain and saw combat in Europe in the Fifth Army under General Mark Clark. In 1946, he returned to civilian life and the practice of law in Chicago. Four years later, Governor Adlai Stevenson appointed him to the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), where his twenty-three year tenure was the longest in that agency's history. In 1960, at the age of fifty, Colter reassessed his life's work and began an accelerated reading program that focused on Russian literature. Colter became more and more impressed with the range of characters depicted by Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and Chekhov, and he recognized the deficiency of African-American literature in this regard. When his wife challenged him to address this problem in fiction, Colter began to write. Colter's first short story, “A Chance Meeting,” was published in 1960 in Threshold, a little magazine out of Belfast, Ireland. Ten years later, a collection of his short stories, The Beach Umbrella (1970), won the prestigious University of Iowa School of Letters first prize award for short fiction (chosen by Kurt Vonnegut). In the years that followed, he published countless short stories and poems, and six novels: The Rivers of Eros (1972), The Hippodrome (1973), Night Studies (1979), A Chocolate Soldier (1988), The Amoralists and Other Tales (1988) and City of Light (1993). Now widely read, his works have been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, Danish, French, and Japanese. Colter resigned from the ICC in 1973 in order to accept a professorship of creative writing in Northwestern's Department of African-American Studies, then two years old. A year later Colter was named as the first Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities, a post he held until his retirement in 1978. Colter died on April 17, 2002. Throughout his lifetime, Colter received countless accolades, including an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Illinois (Chicago). One of the highest honors was bestowed in 1990 when Colter's was one of the names engraved on the frieze of the new Illinois State Public Library alongside such Illinois literary figures as Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Studs Turkel and Gwendolyn Brooks.
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