General book blog.
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard. New York. 1980. Arbor House. 275 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Antler & Baldwin.
DESCRIPTION - Ride down Woodward Avenue into the Motor City, toward a deadly show-down between dedicated homicide detective Raymond Cruz and a psychopathic murderer, 'Oklahoma Wildman' Clement Mansell, who picked the wrong town to kill someone, even if it was only a crooked judge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elmore John Leonard Jr. (born October 11, 1925), better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are GET SHORTY, OUT OF SIGHT, HOMBRE, MR. MAJESTYK and RUM PUNCH, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. Leonard's short stories include ones that became the films 3: 10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the current TV series on FX, Justified.
Old Man Goriot by Honore de Balzac. New York. 2011. Penguin Books. 9780140449723. Translated from the French by Olivia McCannon. Introduction by Graham Robb. 289 pages. hardcover. Cover: ‘Louis-Francoise Bertin’ (1832) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
DESCRIPTION - ‘So many mysteries in one boarding house!' Not everyone who lodges with Madame Vauquer is quite what they seem. The penniless student Rastignac is poised to buy the finest waistcoat in Paris; old man Goriot, lodged in the cheapest room, is visited by two wealthy women; while the jovial merchant, Vautrin, makes clandestine midnight excursions. As the fates of the three intertwine, Rastignac faces terrible choices that will define the man he is to become. The keystone of Balzac's HUMAN COMEDY and his acknowledged masterpiece, OLD MAN GORIOT is the tale of an old man's obsession and a young man's ambition. Set in the wake of the Revolution, when old aristocracy and new wealth vied for supremacy, it portrays a world where love and money are tragically conjoined. This new translation by Olivia McCannon captures all the wit and adventure of the original, and includes detailed notes, a map, reading list and chronology. Graham Robb's introduction vividly sets the work in its literary and social context, considering its genesis, innovations and its influence on the novelists who followed in Balzac's footsteps.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The son of a civil servant, Honore de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Insulted and the Injured by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Grand Rapids. 2011. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 9780802825902. Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Boris Jakim. 338 pages. paperback. Cover photo: Marinka van Holten. Cover design: Willem Mineur.
DESCRIPTION - A bold new translation of a literary classic. The Insulted and Injured, which came out in 1861, was Fyodor Dostoevsky's first major work of fiction after his Siberian exile and the first of the long novels that made him famous. Set in nineteenth-century Petersburg, this gripping novel features a vividly drawn set of characters -- including Vanya (Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical hero), Natasha (the woman he loves), and Alyosha (Natasha's aristocratic lover) -- all suffering from the cruelly selfish machinations of Alyosha's father, the dark and powerful Prince Valkovsky. Boris Jakim's fresh English-language rendering of this gem in the Dostoevsky canon is both more colorful and more accurate than any earlier translation. ‘Boris Jakim is one of the best translators from the Russian in our time. He has given us superb English versions of a series of major works from Russian philosophy, and more recently he has turned his hand to Dostoevsky. After Notes from Underground, he now offers us a fresh translation of an important and neglected novel, The Insulted and Injured, originally published in 1861, a fascinating prelude to the later 'novel tragedies' for which Dostoevsky is chiefly known. Jakim's ambition to 'get into the word-fabric' of the original is beautifully realized.' - Richard Pevear.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. Boris Jakim is the foremost translator of Russian religious thought into English. His published translations include works by S.L. Frank, Pavel Florensky, Vladimir Solovyov, and Sergius Bulgakov.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Strange News From Another Star and Other Tales by Hermann Hesse. New York. 1972. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374510180. Translated from the German by Denver Lindley. 145 pages. paperback. Cover art By Milton Glaser.
DESCRIPTION - In 1919, the same year DEMIAN was published, seven of these stories appeared as a book entitled ‘Marchen' - literally, Fairy Tales. For this first edition in English, we have followed the arrangement Hesse made for the final collected edition of his works, where he added an eighth story, ‘Flute Dream.' The new note so clear in DEMIAN was first sounded, Hesse believed, in some of these tales written during the years 1913 to 1918, the period that brought him into conflict with supporters of the war, with his country and its government, with conventional intellectual life, with every form of orthodoxy both in the world and in himself. Unlike his earlier work, from PETER CAMENZIND through KNULP, the stories in STRANGE NEWS FROM ANOTHER STAR do not allow for an essentially realistic interpretation. They are concerned with dream worlds, the subconscious, magical thinking, and the numinous experience of the soul. Their subject is the distilling of wisdom. The eight stories are ‘Augustus,' ‘The Poet,' ‘Flute Dream,' ‘Strange News from Another Star,' ‘The Hard Passage,' ‘A Dream Sequence,' ‘Faldum,' and - perhaps the masterpiece of the collection - 'Iris.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HERMANN HESSE was born at Calw, Germany, July 2, 1877. He started life as a bookseller at Tubingen and Basle, and began to publish poetry at the age of 21. Five years later he had his first great success with his novels on youth and educational problems: first PETER CAMENZIND, then UNTERM RAD (THE PRODIGY), followed by SIDDHARTHA, ROSSHALDE, DEMIAN, and others. All of them sold by the hundred-thousand; and when, as a protest against German militarism in the First World War, he settled permanently in Switzerland, he was established as one of the greatest literary figures of the German-speaking world. His deep humanity, his searching philosophy developed further in such novels as DER STEPPENWOLF and NARZISS UND GOLDMUND (GOLDMUND), while his poems and critical writings won him a leading place among contemporary thinkers. The Nazis abhorred and suppressed his books; the Swiss honoured him by conferring on him the degree of Ph.D.; the world finally, by bestowing upon him in 1946 the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award richly deserved by his great novel MAGISTER LUDI (DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL).
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1977. Seabury Press. . Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel. . 239 pages. hardcover. Front cover art: Drawing from ‘Une Semaine de Bonte’ by Max Ernst.
DESCRIPTION - For Stanislaw Lem, the renowned author of classics in meta-fiction, the creation of machines that think raises troubling moral questions. At the same time, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence presents a delightful opportunity for the mordant satire and verbal slapstick which readers world-wide have come to expect from him. The stories comprising MORTAL ENGINES range stylistically from pathos to fantasy to realism. Here are fables for robots glistening with humor and yet having ominous overtones. ‘The Mask,' on the other hand, with its deeply tragic poetry and its building tension, represents a strange twist of the Frankenstein theme and is reminiscent of the macabre as portrayed by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe. Michael Kandel, whose brilliant translations of Lem's THE CYBERIAD and THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS were both nominated for the National Book Award in 1975, discusses in his introduction Lem the man and the writer, and provides some scientific background in cybernetics, information theory and advances in artificial intelligence. Stanislaw Lem of Poland, one of Europe's most prolific and articulate writers, has written more than thirty books which have sold millions of copies worldwide. Ranging from novels and film scenarios through philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, to parody and satire, they have been honored with awards and prizes in many countries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories by Herodotus . New York. 2007. Pantheon Books. 9780375421099. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. A New Translation by Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. 959 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kim Llewellyn. Jacket map by Edward Wells from 'A New Set of Maps'.
DESCRIPTION - From the editor of the widely praised The Landmark Thucydides, a new Landmark Edition of The Histories by Herodotus, the greatest classical work of history ever written. Herodotus was a Greek historian living in Ionia during the fifth century BCE. He traveled extensively through the lands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and collected stories, and then recounted his experiences with the varied people and cultures he encountered. Cicero called him ‘the father of history,' and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose that harks back to the time of oral tradition, Herodotus set a standard for narrative nonfiction that continues to this day. In The Histories, Herodotus chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire and its dramatic war with the Greek city-states. Within that story he includes rich veins of anthropology, ethnography, geology, and geography, pioneering these fields of study, and explores such universal themes as the nature of freedom, the role of religion, the human costs of war, and the dangers of absolute power. Ten years in the making, The Landmark Herodotus gives us a new, dazzling translation by Andrea L. Purvis that makes this remarkable work of literature more accessible than ever before. Illustrated, annotated, and filled with maps, this edition also includes an introduction by Rosalind Thomas and twenty-one appendices written by scholars at the top of their fields,
covering such topics as Athenian government, Egypt, Scythia, Persian arms and tactics, the Spartan state, oracles, religion, tyranny, and women. Like The Landmark Thucydides before it, The Landmark Herodotus is destined to be the most readable and comprehensively useful edition of The Histories available.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herodotus was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484–425 BC). Widely referred to as 'The Father of History' (first conferred by Cicero), he was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically and critically, and then to arrange them into a historiographic narrative. The Histories - his masterpiece and the only work he is known to have produced - is a record of his 'inquiry', being an investigation of the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars and including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Although some of his stories were fanciful and others inaccurate, he claimed he was reporting only what had been told to him. Little is known of his personal history.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hamlet by William Shakespeare. New York. 1980. Penguin Books. Edited by Professor T. J. B. Spencer. Introduced by Anne Barton. 384 pages. Cover illustration by Paul Hogarth. 0140707344.
The greatest of Shakespeare's plays. This Penguin edition has best notes in my opinion, even if one has to flip to the back of the book to read them.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in the Kingdom of Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, firstly for murdering the old King Hamlet (Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father) and secondly for then succeeding to the throne and marrying Gertrude (the King Hamlet's widow and mother of Prince Hamlet). The play vividly portrays real and feigned madness - from overwhelming grief to seething rage - and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.
William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer. New York. 1975. Viking Press. 067023883x. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Craig Dodd.
DESCRIPTION - A wealthy industrialist, attractive to women and not yet fifty, Mehring wants for nothing that white privilege in a black country can bring him. With a luxury flat in the city and an expense-account farm in the country, what he is prepared at all costs to conserve is his way of life. Neither his Leftist mistress nor his long-haired schoolboy son - both of whose love he is confident he can do without - can shake his faith in his unalienable right to his possessions. No one successfully disputes his claims - not Jacobus and the other ragged black workers who tend his four hundred acres of the Transvaal, or the Indians who run the country store, or the Boer farmers who regard him as an amateur, or the 150,000 blacks who live in a segregated township between farm and city. Only the presence of a dead man, abandoned near the river, asserts that Africa, in the end, is something a white man can't buy. The Conservationist is a deeply fascinating study of a man both reckless and calculating, subconsciously seeking human alienation as a form of self-preservation. Because he has maneuvered himself into a position where life, he thinks, cannot move him, he sees himself as
impregnable, the ultimate ‘conservationist' clinging to patterns that reassure him of his power. Played out in vivid counterpoint to Mehring's memories and fantasies are the lives of those who serve but scarcely notice him - his victims and his benefactors. And the overwhelming third presence is the calm beauty of the land they contend.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 - 13 July 2014) was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity". Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nabokov's Quartet by Vladimir Nabokov. New York. 1966. Phaedra. 104 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - NABOKOV'S QUARTET is a collection of four of Vladimir Nabokov's short stories. The collection was first published by Phaedra, New York in 1966. It contains the following short stories: ‘An Affair of Honor‘; ‘Lik‘; ‘The Vane Sisters‘; ‘The Visit to the Museum.‘ The latter two were reprinted in 1968 in NABOKOV'S CONGERIES, and ‘Lik' and ‘The Vane Sisters' are included in TYRANTS DESTROYED AND OTHER STORIES (1975). All four stories were published again posthumously within THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers in Russian and English. Poet, novelist, dramatist, memoirist, critic, translator, essayist, and scientist, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1973. He taught creative writing and Russian literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Among his most celebrated works are LOLITA; PALE FIRE; ADA; SPEAK, MEMORY; and his translation of Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. Berkeley. 2009. University of California Press. 9780520257504. 10 color illustrations, 10 b/w photographs, 48 line illustrations. 296 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Janet Wood. Jacket illustration: Grass, Milk, and Food Vendors, illustrations by Carlos Julio, ca. 1776.
DESCRIPTION - The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods-millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the ‘Asian' long bean, for example-are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting,
original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots–'botanical gardens of the dispossessed'–became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Judith A. Carney is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of the award-winning book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Richard Nicholas Rosomoff is an independent writer.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________