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War: A Novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New York. 2024. New Directions. 9780811237321. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. A Paperback Original. 109 pages. paperback. Cover design by Matt Dorfman.  

DESCRIPTION - In an incredible turn of events, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as if declaiming from his grave, thunders back to life: that inimitable, scorching, and monstrously powerful voice roars at us a new in this long-lost novel. Céline had long claimed that Death on the Installment Plan was part of a trilogy, and that the manuscripts of War and London had been stolen by the Resistance from his apartment, when he fled for his life―an abhorred collaborator―from Paris. Few believed him, but then, mysteriously, the manuscripts came to light in 2020. Greeted rapturously in France (“a miracle,” Le Monde; “the discovery of a great text,” Le Point), War is sure to be more controversy abroad. Though much revered as “the most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature” (London Review of Books), Céline is also reviled for his infamous antisemitic wartime pamphlets. War begins with Ferdinand waking in shock on the battlefield, grievously injured, with all his comrades sprawled out dead around him: it’s a scene of visceral horror, carnage, and pain.The novel’s key idea―that trench warfare lodges itself in the soldier’s head forever, goes on destroying him, cuts him off from those who have not been on the front, and makes the hypocrisies of their safe world repugnant―drives itself under the reader’s skin, powered by the sheer velocity of Céline’s voracious, gritty, raw, graphic style.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Fable for Another Time by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Lincoln. 2003. University of Nebraska Press. 0803215207. Translated from the French and with an introduction by Mart Hudson. With Explanatory notes and a new preface by Henri Godard. French Modernist Library Series. 239 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Fable for Another Time is one of the most significant and far-reaching literary texts of postwar France. Composed in the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, largely in the Danish prison cell where the author was awaiting extradition to France on charges of high treason, the book offers a unique perspective on the war, the postwar political purges in France, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s own dissident politics. The tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, the Fable follows its character’s decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings. In part because of the story’s clear link to his own case—and because of the legal and political difficulties this presented—Céline was compelled to push his famously elliptical, brilliantly vitriolic language to new and extraordinary extremes in Fable for Another Time. The resulting linguistic and stylistic innovation make this work stand out as one of the most original and revealing literary undertakings of its time.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Ballets Without Music, Without Dancers, Without Anything by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Kobenhavn & Los Angeles. 1999. Green Integer. 1892295067. Translated from the French by Thomas & Carol Christensen. Illustrations by Eliane Bonabel. 187 pages. paperback. Green Integer 18.

  
DESCRIPTION - Celine's fascination with the ballet spans his literary career: three of the pieces in this volume were written around the same time that he published his great novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, which he dedicated to the dancer Elisabeth Craig. At the time of his death, according to his wife - also a dancer - he was planning a book devoted to dance. ‘A man who doesn't dance confesses some disgraceful weakness,' he wrote Milton Hindus. ‘I put dancing into everything.' In 1936, after finishing his monumental second novel, Mort a credit, Celine visited Russia, where he hoped to have some of his ballets performed at the Theater Marinski in Leningrad. He failed to get any of them performed. But through this period he continued writing ballets. In 1959 five ballets were collected by Editions Gallimard with illustrations by Eliane Bonabel. The result is this edition, never before published in English, that reveals a central concern of Celine's writing while simultaneously displaying his comic structures and the struggle between idyllic beauty and inescapable deterioration, death, and the grotesque of his great fictions.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Rigadoon by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New York. 1974. Delacorte Press. 0440073642. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim. 273 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Celine, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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London Bridge by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Normal. 1995. Dalkey Archive Press. 1564780716. Translated from the French by Dominic Di Bernardi. 390 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I, Cline's autobiographical narrator recounts his uneasy relationship with London's pimps and whores, his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman, and, most scandalously, his affair with a baronet's 14-year-old daughter, an English angel whose descent into vice is suspiciously smooth. In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic Di Bernardi expertly captures Clines trademark style of prose which served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New York. 1966. New Directions. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim. This translation is significantly better than the 1938 translation. hardcover. Jacket designed by Alvin Lustig and Thomas Yee.  

DESCRIPTION - Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferdinand Celine's earlier novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Celine's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black humor."

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Conversations with Professor Y by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Hanover. 1986. Brandeis University Press/University Press Of New England. 0874513634. Translated from the French by Stanford Luce. 190 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - "Here's the truth, simply stated . . . bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales." So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow CEline, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against convention and defend his idiosyncratic methods. In the course of their outrageous interplay, CEline comes closer to defining and justifying his poetics than in any of his other novels. But this is more than just an interview. As the book moves forward, Professor Y reveals his real identity and the characters travel through the streets of Paris toward a bizarre climax that parodies the author, the critic, and, most of all, the establishment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New York. 1968. Delacorte Press. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim. 238 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.

DESCRIPTION - It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy France government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hideaways. The group of 1,400 terrified officials, their wives, mistresses, flunkies, and Nazi protectors - including CEline, his wife, their cat, and an actor friend - attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation. With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, CEline paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of human society and the human condition. Called by Atlantic Monthly "the blackest of the black" of CEline's novels and hailed by the Washington Post Book World for its "intense sympathy with individual human beings," Castle to Castle is brilliantly rendered in Ralph Manheim's translation, for which he won the National Book Award.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Making Waves: Essays by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York. 1997. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374200386. Translated from the Spanish by John King. 338 pages. hardcover. Front jacket art: Mario Vargas Llosa, by Botero. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye.  

DESCRIPTION - Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned as a novelist, is one of our most brilliant and provocative public intellectuals as well. In Making Waves, the first collection of his essays, he explores, with characteristic brio and elegance, his long-standing preoccupations-literature and politics, Europe and the Americas, and the relations among them all. We follow Vargas Llosa from his native Peru to Madrid and then to Paris, the setting of essays on his great precursors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as a comic account of his visit to the tomb of Rin Tin Tin and an affecting memoir of his time in the city as an aspiring writer in the 1960s. In passionately critical essays on the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, Vargas Llosa takes up vital questions of Latin American independence, while in essays on Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, and Julio Cortázar-and in an exchange with Günter Grass-he ponders magic realism. In more recent articles, he considers the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori-and the failures of the English public-school system, which made his son into a Rastafarian. The essays in Making Waves are full of Mario Vargas Llosa's unflagging literary intensity and moral and political integrity. They are an important addition to the body of work of this major international writer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world. Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a liberal and held anti–left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru with the centre-right Democratic Front coalition in the 1990 election, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by the Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie Française.

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My Life With Mario Vargas Llosa  by Julia Urquidi Illanes. New York. 1988. Peter Lang. 0820406899. Translated from the Spanish by C. R. Perricone. Series XXII Latin American Studies Vol.1. 264 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Living in a Paris garret with a struggling young writer who has since become a famous author was not fictional for Julia Urquidi Illanes when she married Mario Vargas Llosa. This English translation is an incredible but true 'portrait of an artist as a young man' and of his aunt by marriage, whom he later fictionalized in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Married for 9 years, Julia typed the first of his best-selling novels, The Time of the Hero, only to be abandoned when Mario fell in love with his first cousin Patricia, who is now his second wife. Readers will find this behind the scene account of a writer nominated for the Nobel prize gives insights into the creative processes of a novelist as it relates the range of human emotions in real life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Urquidi Illanes (30 May 1926 - 10 March 2010) was a Bolivian writer. Urquidi was born in Cochabamba. She was famous as the first wife of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1955-1964) and also the namesake of one of his most famous novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In 1983 she published her memories titled Lo que Varguitas no dijo (English: What Varguitas did not say). She died in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, aged 83.The English translator Catherine R. Perricone is Professor of Foreign Languages at Auburn University specializing in current Spanish American literature. She edited Alma y Corazon (Heart and Soul) an anthology of Latin American poetesses, and has published articles on Vargas Llosa and other novelists, an extensive bibliography on feminist criticism and Spanish American poetesses, and other subjects in Hispanic literature which have appeared in such journals as Hispania, Foreign Language Annals, Circulo, USF Language Quarterly, and The Americas Review.

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The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert & Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York. 1986. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374230773. Translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat. Author photo by Alicia Benwides (1982).  

DESCRIPTION - A handful of fictional characters have marked my life more profoundly than a great number of flesh-and-blood beings I have known,' Vargas Llosa writes, but with none of them ‘have I had as clearly passionate a relationship as Emma Bovary.' His devotion to her, the novel, and its creator, ever since he first read Madame Bovary during his student days in Paris, when he had ‘very little money and the promise of a scholarship,' has been so complete that he has written an entire book about them. The Perpetual Orgy is his first nonfiction book to appear in English. The book's first section, ‘An Unrequited Passion,' is a tête-a-tête with Emma Bovary The second, ‘The Pen-Man,' traces the gestation and birth of the novel, as well as Flaubert's method, his mania for documentation, and the novel's literary sources. The third, ‘The First Modern Novel,' situates Madame Bovary in literary history. Only the greatest of novels deserves, or can support, this kind of analysis. It is a tribute to THE PERPETUAL ORGY (Flaubert's phrase for losing oneself in literature) that it sends the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world. Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a liberal and held anti–left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru with the centre-right Democratic Front coalition in the 1990 election, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by the Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie Française.

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Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha. Chicago. 1944. University of Chicago Press. Translated from the Portuguese & With An Introduction and Notes by Samuel Putnam. 526 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - One of the strangest stories ever found in a little-known corner of history, this is a human and military account of a war waged between a ragged religious mystic and the government of Brazil. It was a peculiarly personal war that had much in common with old-time Kentucky feuds and uprisings on the American frontier and it ended only when 5,200 houses and every man, woman, and child who had lived in them had been totally destroyed! This is the story of Antonio Conselheiro, the fanatic street preacher-Messiah to thousands-who led the rebellion in a primitive backwoods community of desert and mountains from December, 1896, to October, 1897. Mr. Putnam, in his excellent Introduction, reminds us that it required three months for a federal army of some 6,000 men to advance 100 yards against a handful of backwoodsmen. ‘Here is guerrilla warfare in its pristine form,' he says, ‘with the ‘scorched earth' and all the other accompaniments . . . a months-long house-to-house battle that recalls the contemporary epic of Stalingrad.' Universally known as Brazil's greatest book, Os Sertoes is now in its sixteenth Brazilian edition and has been translated into several foreign languages. ‘Os Sertoes is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism,' says Afrânio Peixoto . . . . It is a book that represents a moment in the history of humanity; and, thanks to its style, its art, and its science, that ephemeral moment is destined to be eternal.' Carleton Beals calls it ‘that great document, which, though not a novel, reads like fiction.' Stefan Zweig, in BRAZIL, LAND OF THE FUTURE, calls it a ‘great national epic . destined to outlive countless books that are famous today, by its dramatic significance, its spectacular wealth of spiritual wisdom, and the wonderful humanitarian touch Cunha himself called his book ‘a cry of protest' against what he regarded as - a crime and an act of madness on the part of the newly formed republican government of Brazil. Os Sertöes is a document against oppression of the weak by the strong-in current language, against totalitarianism. Cunha has been called a ‘son of the soil, madly in love with it,' but be was also a scientist, a military engineer by profession, a sociologist, a reporter, and a man of letters. In the first two chapters of his book he describes with precision and passion the geographic and geologic composition of the backlands, its botany, climate, and soil, all, however, as interpretation of the mestizo backwoodsman and his way of life. Cunha's hook was originally published in Rio in 1902. It bad an immediate and terrific impact upon Brazil-indeed, so much so that Cunha's assassination in 1909 by a soldier was said to be in retaliation for the exposures of the army in Os Sertöes and in fear of another book which Cunha was writing at the time of his death. This, the first translation of Os Sertöes into English, because of its importance to better understanding between South and North America, has had aid in publication from the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs. REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS is Mr. Putnam's twenty-fifth full-length published book translation. He has made available to American readers many of the great books from the French, Italian, and Portuguese.

And in a more recent transltion from Penguin Classics:

Backlands: The Canudos Campaign by Euclides da Cunha. New York. 2010. Penguin Books. 9780143106074. Translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe. Introduction by Ilan Stavans. 513 pages. paperback. Cover art: Elsa Chiao.  

DESCRIPTION - Written by a former army lieutenant, civil engineer, and journalist, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, is Euclides da Cunha's vivid and poignant portrayal of Brazil's infamous War of Canudos. deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict during the 1890s was between the government and the village of Canudos, in the northeastern state of Bahia, settled by 30,000 followers of the religious zealot Antonio Conselheiro. Far from just an objective retelling, da Cunha's story shows both the significance of this event and the complexities of Brazilian society. Featuring a new translation by Elizabeth Lowe, and an introduction by Ilan Stavans, one of Latin America's foremost scholars, this is sure to remain one of the best chronicles of war ever penned.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Euclides da Cunha (January 20, 1866 - August 15, 1909) was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer. His most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos. This book was a favorite of Robert Lowell, who put it above Tolstoy, the Russian writer. Jorge Luis Borges also commented on it in his short story ‘Three Versions of Judas‘. The book was translated into English by Samuel Putnam and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1944. It remains in print. Euclides da Cunha was also heavily influenced by Naturalism and its Darwinian proponents. Os Sertões characterised the coast of Brazil as a chain of civilisations while the interior was more primitively influenced. Euclides da Cunha was the basis for the character of The Journalist in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. Euclides da Cunha occupied the 7th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1903 until his death in 1909.

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Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 by Emilia Viotti Da Costa. New York. 1994. Oxford University Press. 0195082982. 378 pages. hardcover. Cover: David Tran.

DESCRIPTION - On the night of August 17, 1823, the distinctly African sounds of blaring shell-horns and beating drums signalled the start of one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the uprising in the British colony of Demerara (now Guyana). That evening, nine to twelve thousand slaves surrounded the main houses of about sixty plantations, armed with cutlasses, knives fastened on poles, and guns. They broke down doors, smashed windows, commandeered arms and ammunition, and put their masters and overseers in the stocks. Intent on avoiding a blood bath (over three days of fighting, colonial forces took the lives of more than 255 slaves, while only two or three white men were killed), the rebels spoke of 'rights,' and planned to present their grievances to the governor. For a few days, the slaves succeeded in turning the world upside down, treating masters the way masters had always treated slaves. Retaliation from colonial officials would be swift, bloody, and brutal. In Crowns of Glory, Emilia Viotti da Costa tells the riveting story of a pivotal moment in the history of slavery. Studying the complaints brought by slaves to the office of the Protector of Slaves, she reconstructs the experience of slavery through the eyes of the Demerara slaves themselves. Da Costa also draws on eyewitness accounts, official records, and private journals (most notably the diary of John Smith, one of four ministers sent by the London Missionary Society to convert Demerara's 'heathen'), to paint a vivid portrait of a society in transition, shaken to its foundations by the recent revolutions in America, France, and Haiti.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emilia Viotti da Costa (São Paulo, February 28, 1928 - São Paulo, November 2, 2017) was a Brazilian historian and professor.

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The Discovery and Conquest of Peru by Agustin de Zarate. New York. 1968. Penguin Books. Translated from the Spanish & With An Introduction by J. M. Cohen. 282 pages. paperback. L202. The cover shows a detail from a sixteenth-century map in the Bibliotheque du Ministers des Armees, Paris (Snark International).

  
DESCRIPTION - There is no full eye-witness account of the Spaniards' dramatic defeat of the Incas. For this new compilation, therefore, J. M. Cohen has translated the best contemporary history - that of Agustin de Zarate - and embellished it with firsthand descriptions of the country and the extraordinary exploits of the conquistadors. These graphic additions turn Zarate's history, with its careful record of the discovery and conquest of Peru and of the subsequent civil wars, into a rounded and continuous narrative which does justice to the landings, the heroic marches across the mountains, Atahuallpa's death, and the incredible harvest of treasure.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Agustín de Zárate (1514-1585) was an administrator, chronicler, and Spanish historian. For fifteen years he was an accountant for the Council of Castile and in 1543 was appointed accountant for the Viceroyalty of Peru and Tierra Firme. He arrived in Peru in 1544. In 1545 he returned to Spain where he faced an accusation of treason, because of the history that he wrote of the discovery and conquest of Peru. In 1555 Agustín de Zárate was assigned to a job within the fiscal administration and settled in Guadalcanal (Seville), where he monitored Spain's important silver mines that had just been discovered in that locality.

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Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. New York. 1927. Tudor Publishing Company. Edited by Floyd Dell & Paul Jordan-Smith. 1036 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - An amazing and entertaining book on the causes, symptoms, varieties and cure of morbid depression. On its surface, The Anatomy Of Melancholy is presented as a medical textbook in which Burton applies his vast and varied learning, in the scholastic manner, to the subject of melancholia (which includes, although it is not limited to, what is now termed clinical depression). Though presented as a medical text, The Anatomy of Melancholy is as much a sui generis work of literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text, and Burton addresses far more than his stated subject. In fact, the Anatomy uses melancholy as the lens through which all human emotion and thought may be scrutinized, and virtually the entire contents of a 17th-century library are marshalled into service of this goal. It is encyclopedic in its range and reference.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Burton (8 February 1577 - 25 January 1640) was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Seagrave in Leicestershire.

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The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. Afterword By J. Sherwood Weber. 384 pages. paperback. CD27. Signet Classic original.

DESCRIPTION - This devastating indictment of Victorian values presents an ironic and incisive portrait, of a determined, young man in revolt against father, religion, society, self. In describing Ernest Pontifex's flight to freedom, Samuel Butler illustrated the emotional and intellectual experiences of every artist who educates himself through trial and error. He created a novel that was to inspire, in spirit and form, the works of such writers as Somerset Maugham, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe. George Bernard Shaw was deeply influenced by Butler's ideas on religion and money. In his preface to Major Barbara, Shaw recorded this debt and called Butler 'a man of genius' who was 'in his own department, the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day.

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re: f (gesture): poems by Percival Everett. Los Angeles. 2006. Black Goat. 1597090573. Series editor: Chris Abani. 70 pages. paperback. Cover art: Percival Everett.

DESCRIPTION - Praise for Percival Everett: “. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .” ―Terry D’Auray. “. . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human . . . ” ―Sven Birkets, The New York Times. “. . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . .” ―The Boston Globe. “. . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire.” ―Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Half an Inch of Water: Stories by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2015. Graywolf Press. 9781555977191. 166 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.  

DESCRIPTION - A new collection of stories set in the West from "one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers" (NPR). Percival Everett's long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004's Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog. For the plainspoken men and women of these stories―fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians―small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Damned if I Do: Stories by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2004. Graywolf Press. 1555974112. 206 pages. paperback. Cover design: VetoDesignUSA.com.  

DESCRIPTION - Damned If I Do is an exceptional collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel Erasure. People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid. A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem. Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Walk Me to the Distance by Percival L. Everett. New York. 1985. Ticknor & Fields. 0899193218. 209 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo: Martha Jordan.  

DESCRIPTION - David Larson can't go home again; that's given. So David, recently returned from Vietnam, heads for the West of his imagination. He fetches up in Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he settles in with a one-legged, widow-lady sheep rancher named Sixbury and her severely retarded son. When Butch, a seven-year-old Vietnamese war orphan, and Sixbury's son abruptly disappear, David is forced to a desperate - and correct - conclusion. In classic style, a posse is organized and goes about its mortal business. Like it or not, David makes his commitment. With spare strokes, Percival Everett paints the Western landscape as it is today, clinging to a mythical heritage and a frontier code that may be seriously skewed in a world that has passed it by. In big-sky country the mere act of living is hard and cruel and heart-stopping. Of Everett's first novel, SUDER, the Los Angeles Times said, ‘Percival Everett has created here a mad work of comic genius. . . to make up a narrative that has never, never been told before.' His new novel brings to mind the stark beauty of HUD and SHANE and THE OX-BOW INCIDENT.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Zulus by Percival Everett. Sag Harbor. 1990. Permanent Press. 0932966977. 245 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Bruce McGowin. Cover illustration by Robert Wade.  

DESCRIPTION - ZULUS is a difficult book to describe, for it is unlike any other novel one is likely to encounter, both for substance and style. It blends realism and surrealism; its very starkness creates the richest of images, and it features a most unlikely heroine who undergoes a bizarre transformation. It has comic moments in unlikely situations, and ambitiously attempts to grapple with the most serious issues before us today, though it takes place in the far future. ZULUS is set amidst the eerie landscape and society that has emerged years after the occurrence of a thermonuclear war, where Alice Achitophel, a 300-pound government clerk and misfit, has a well-kept secret: she is, perhaps, the last woman alive who is not sterile. As such, she poses a threat to the government and is coveted by rebels. Her plight, her experiences as an outcast, and her unusual love affair are not only engrossing in their own right, but serve to convey themes that Percival Everett has dwelt on in his other work: isolation, alienation, and a search for familial integrity. Ultimately, however, Alice's adventures raise the most fundamental issue of all: is the continuation of mankind  - with all of his culture and all of his craziness  - compatible with the survival of the planet Earth and the other life forms that inhabit it?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Suder by Percival L. Everett. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 0670681105. 171 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by David Fe Bland. Jacket design by George W. Sanders, Jr.  

DESCRIPTION - With his beloved Charlie Parker record (‘Ornithology') tucked under one arm and a portable phonograph under the other; Craig Suder, black third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is headed out of town. He has lost touch with his wife, with his friends, with the ball. He is haunted by memories of a ghastly summer years ago when his mother was obsessed with running a full circle around Fayetteville in her winter coat, and he prays that insanity is not passed down through the blood. But Suder has begun to see things a little too clearly, to hear things a little too well. He is, in short, going crazy. On his way to the woods Suder adopts a companion, an elephant whom he wins fair and square and lovingly names Renoir, and is adopted in turn by a nine-year-old runaway named Jincy, sassy, exasperating, and lovable. Together the three friends hole up in a cabin and outfox au intruders - the local sheriff, a drug smuggler, an amateur taxidermist with a longing for Renoir (‘Call me if he dies?'), an overweight homosexual Chinaman, and an amorous barfly. Suder wants peace and quiet; he needs to concentrate on fulfilling a childhood dream: flight. Not running-away flight, but the soaring, swooping, gliding flight of a bird. What happens 2,000 feet in the air above Ezra Pond should come as a surprise to no one. But it will. Percival Everett's is an original and comic voice; he has taken the energies of jazz and transformed them into prose. He has located the heart of the absurd and found it full of tears. SUDER is a funny unsettling, and triumphant first novel by a gifted young writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair by Percival Everett. Little Rock. 1987. August House. 0874830133.  116 pages. paperback. Cover design by Communications Graphics. 

DESCRIPTION - A ranch hand inadvertently steps into the no-man's-land between an estranged father and son. A painter stakes his work and heart against the chic world of art speculation. A U.S. border patrolman hunts a desperate Mexican boy. A retired dentist turns his hands to the creation of miniature towns and landscapes and finds his fate entangled in theirs. These are some of the characters and situations you'll meet in THE WEATHER AND WOMEN TREAT ME FAIR, the first short story collection by novelist Percival Everett. Despite the wide-ranging action, these stories are unified by spare dialogue, tight plot development and a deadpan irony which is in evidence throughout. They are told in a casual, almost flat, tone - but don't be caught unawares: the understatement belies a vivid symbolic landscape that will suddenly appear before your eyes, like a mesa cropping up on the edge of the desert where Everett seems so at home. In all fifteen stories, heroes who tend to be loners grapple with alienation and falsity. Yet despite a surface pessimism, certain values emerge. Again and again, kinship, community and dignity prove resistant to the eroding and degrading forces of our times.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Cutting Lisa by Percival Everett. New York. 1986. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194125. 147 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Early one morning sixty-six-year-old John Livesey, a recently retired Virginia obstetrician, is called in on a bizarre case: a man with no medical training has successfully performed a Caesarean, without anesthesia, on his wife. The act itself appalls Livesey, but the man's uncompromising willfulness somehow moves him and continues to haunt him all the way to the Oregon coast, where he is to spend the summer with his son's family. Elgin worries that his widowed father may be at loose ends, but John is totally captivated by his granddaughter, starts an affair with a much younger woman, and drinks beer and eats bacon - to the horror of his fastidious daughter-in-law, Lisa. Lisa is pregnant, but something is amiss. In a dramatic mishap, John discovers the truth about Lisa's baby. Will he dare to play a wrathful God? In characteristically lean prose Percival Everett pits the harsh tenets of Old Testament retribution against a twentieth-century morality based on freedom of choice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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For Her Dark Skin by Percival Everett. Seattle. 1990. Owl Creek. 0937669458. 152 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Shere C. Everett.  

DESCRIPTION - FOR HER DARK SKIN is a tightly crafted exploration of the story of Jason and Medea weaving both traditional and contemporary fictional and thematic elements into a sharply ironic tale of revenge, ambition, passion and pride. Desires and consequences lead the all-too-human characters through a piercing new interpretation of classic themes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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