General book blog.
Twenty-Five German Poets: A Bilingual Collection by Walter A. Kaufmann (translator and editor) . New York. 1975. Norton. 039304405x. Introduction by Walter Kaufmann. 325 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Rosalind Lorber.
DESCRIPTION - When this book was originally published, twenty poets were represented. For this edition, new material has been added, including additional poems by Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche, as well as five poets not previously included. The book spans three centuries - opening with Angelus Silesius, Klopstock, Claudius, Goethe, and Schiller, and ending with Brecht and Boll - but it has considerable continuity. The prefaces for each of the twenty-five poets integrate the selections into a story, and often poems by different writers invite comparison. For example, almost all of the poets express an attitude toward death. Not only would many discussions of death be better if the authors had some inkling of the great variety of attitudes illustrated here, but one can also gain a better understanding of a poet's experience of life by comparing his attitude toward death with that of some other poets. The book should contribute to a better understanding of some of these twenty-five poets, of German literature, of intellectual history, and of some of the themes with which these poets deal.
The sequence of the poets, and of the poems by each poet, is roughly chronological. Walter Kaufmann has made all the translations and has endeavored to capture the distinctive tone of each of the poets. The original German texts are printed on facing pages.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany - September 4, 1980, Princeton, NJ) was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books on philosophy, religion, and poetry. His poetry has appeared in books and magazines, and he has contributed articles and essays to encyclopedias, books, and scholarly periodicals, including Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Commentary, The New Leader, Harper's, and The American Scholar.
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The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre. Princeton. 1949. Princeton University Press. Translated from the French by R. R. Palmer. 233 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - FROM THE TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE - ‘The present book was written long enough ago to have become a classic. It concerns only the beginning of the French Revolution. Its author, Georges Lefebvre. published it early in 1939 in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Revolution of 1789. A few months later the Second World War began. The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945. No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France, which drew their strongest support from anti-republican elements that were then significant in French political life. The Vichy government therefore suppressed the book and ordered some 8,000 copies burned, so that it remained virtually unknown in its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after its author's death. The present English translation appeared in 1947, as soon as possible after the Second World War. It has been widely read in English-speaking countries, where it is better known than in France itself. This new edition presents the translation of 1947 unchanged, but with a revised translator's preface and a few small changes in the translator's notes. What Lefebvre intended to mark the sesquicentennial of 1781 may now signalize its bicentennial fifty years later.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Georges Lefebvre (6 August 1874 - 28 - August 1959) was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He coined the term 'history from below', which was later popularised by the British Marxist Historians, and the phrase the 'death certificate of the old order' to describe the Great Fear of 1789. Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la REvolution française ('The Peasants of the North During the French Revolution'), which was the result of 20 years of research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period. R. R. Palmer is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He now lives in Princeton. New Jersey, where he taught at Princeton University from 1936 to 1963. His own books include TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION and the two-volume THE AGE OF DEMOCRACTIC REVOLUTION, the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in 1960. He also edited and translated THE TWO TOCQUEVILLES, FATHER AND SON: HERVE AND ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE ON THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOUTION.
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To The Unknown Hero by Hans Erich Nossack. New York. 1974. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 0374278385.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Hans Erich Nossack belongs to the extraordinary lineage of German writers that includes Hesse, Kafka, Rilke, and Novalis. Jean-Paul Sartre has called him ‘the most interesting contemporary German writer.’ TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, the third of his novels to be published in English, shows Nossack’s inimitable wry conscience in a comic mood that promises to delight the reader. The book is both an adventure story and a proof of the limitations of historiography. ‘Professor Precise,’ German pedant, had early in his in academic career written a 200-page treatise called ‘To the Unknown Hero,’ about a bit of German history, ten event-filled days in 1919 that paved the way to the Weimar Republic. The hero of this brief revolution, praised as a tactical and political genius, was a man known only as Comrade Hein, a mysterious figure who disappeared from the midst of the first assembly of victorious revolutionaries and was never heard from again. ‘Professor Precise,’ with filial pride, had presented his middle-class, grocer father with a copy of his published book - with surprising results, for the father clearly knew a great deal more about Comrade Rein than the son dreamed could be known. For a long time, however, the implication of his father’s knowledge was not clear to the arrogant scholar; and then, reluctantly but inevitably, he realizes that his search for the truth about Comrade Hein has only just begun and that it is his obligation to embark on a new investigation of his once lionized hero. The suspense of the story and the skill with which Nossack has woven together its complex elements give this book the succinctness and resonance of a parable of modern and revolutionary times. The Times Literary Supplement, in reviewing the German edition, said: ‘Nossack has written a splendidly humorous book in which the comic - and at times almost burlesque - element brilliantly focuses the essential discontinuity in life. He has always evinced a predilection for the comic and dramatic in his works, but never before have they been so overt.’ Nossack’s brisk prose style has been admirably re-created by Ralph Manheim.
Hans Erich Nossack was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1901, and much of his writing was shaped by his relationship to his native city, where he died in 1976. His work was banned by the Nazi regime and most of his manuscripts were destroyed by the allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as one of the great German existentialist novelists, Hans Erich Nossack has long been considered a major writer throughout Europe. His essays, poems, plays and novels - of which TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, THE D’ARTHEZ CASE, AND THE IMPOSSIBLE PROOF have been translated into English - won him Europe’s most important literary prizes.
The Lew Archer mysteries of Ross MacDonald
"Kenneth Millar, who published most of his novels under the name Ross Macdonald, was a master of all the kinds of devices and deceptions on which mystery fiction depends. Books like The Galton Case and The Chill and The Far Side of the Dollar remain unsurpassed for the deepening intricacy of their narratives, the awesomely engineered dovetailing of hidden relationships and long-buried crimes. In his work, as he explained to his editor Alfred A. Knopf, the mystery is far more than a puzzle to be solved: “Plot is important to me. I try to make my plots carry meaning, and this meaning such as it is determines and controls the movement of the story.” The meanings he explored expressed both the privations and troubles of his own youth in Canada and a larger vision of the guilt and raging discontent simmering not far beneath the surface of the apparently thriving Southern California where he spent his adult life. The puzzles he so brilliantly constructed culminate in revelations not far from the stark clarity of tragedy." - from the Library of America site (https://www.loa.org/writers/272-ross-macdonald/)
The Moving Target. New York. 1949. Knopf. 245 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Moving Target is a 1949 mystery novel, written by Ross Macdonald, who at this point used the name John Macdonald. This is the first Ross Macdonald novel to feature the character of Lew Archer (for some reason changed to Lew Arless in this British edition) who would define the author's career. Lew Archer is hired by the dispassionate wife of an eccentric oil tycoon who has gone missing. Archer must dig through a strange cast of Los Angeles characters, finding crime after crime before he can get to the job he was hired to do. The novel became the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper, thanks in no small part to screenwriter William Goldman. Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) originally titled this book The Snatch. When the book was published, he chose the pseudonym John Macdonald after his father, John Macdonald Millar. It is believed he didn't want to use his own name as his wife, Margaret Millar, was already an established writer. Due this pen-name's similarity with the name of the writer John D. MacDonald, Millar later wrote as John Ross Macdonald and finally as Ross Macdonald.
The Drowning Pool. New York. 1950. Knopf. 244 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Archer is hired by Maude Slocum to investigate a libelous letter accusing her of adultery. He begins his enquiry at the Californian town of Quinto, north of Los Angeles, where the Slocums live on a mesa above the seedy oil-boom town of Nopal Valley on the other side. Also in the house live Maude's mother-in-law Olivia, who holds the family's financial reins, as well as her effeminate son James, Maude's husband, and their vulnerable teenage daughter Cathy. When the millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred—and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.
The Way Some People Die. New York. 1951. Knopf. 245 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men' and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts. Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.
The Ivory Grin. New York. 1952. Knopf. 240 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer's empty wallet made him swallow the woman's phony story. And when he went looking for the girl she wanted found, he came up with a grisly love triangle where the price of desire added up to three: one body stabbed, one body shot and one body burned a crisp, dark brown. In The Ivory Grin, Macdonald again confirms his head-and-shoulders distinction in the mystery field. Here is a book to refute the charge that the detective has passed his peak in American fiction.
Find a Victim. New York. 1954. Knopf. 215 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a small-time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.
The Barbarous Coast. New York. 1956. Knopf. 247 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - THE BARBAROUS COAST is fast, tough, exciting, and brilliantly written. Set in Southern California, it takes Lew Archer in search of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living and leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a big-time gambler with a producer for a cover, the ghost of an eighteen-year-old girl whose murder was never solved, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.
The Doomsters. New York. 1958. Knopf. 251 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - The Doomsters is a 1958 mystery novel written by Ross Macdonald, the seventh book in the Lew Archer series. Archer is hired by drug addict Carl Hallman to investigate the deaths of his wealthy and influential parents. The title of the book is taken from the poem To an Unborn Pauper Child by Thomas Hardy. Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently, And though thy birth-hour beckons thee, Sleep the long sleep: The Doomsters heap; Travails and teens around us here. The poem reflects on the difficulty of escaping the lot to which we are born and this is an underlying theme of MacDonald's book. Many sources agree that this book marked a turning point in the series, wherein Macdonald abandoned his imitations of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and found his own voice. It also marks the fixing of Lew Archer's character as a man more interested in understanding the criminal than in catching him. Writing about the book in The New York Times, the critic Anthony Boucher called the book a study of the strands that shape complexity and doom and, talking about these strands, says it is an analysis at once compassionate and cruel giving dimension and meaning to an unusually well crafted mystery puzzle,
The Galton Case. New York. 1959. Knopf. 186 pages. hardcover. 242 pages.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer returns in this gripping mystery, widely recognized as one of acclaimed mystery writer Ross Macdonald's very best, about the search for the long lost heir of the wealthy Galton family. Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.
The Wycherly Woman. New York. 1961. Knopf. 278 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muni Lieblein.
DESCRIPTION - Her name was Phoebe Wycherly. Her age was twenty-one. She was last seen alive at the San Francisco docks, three months before Lew Archer was hired to search for her. The search led him first to her family and her college friends, then far afield from the respectable and monied world where Phoebe had been brought up, into the criminal lower depths where her young life had apparently ended in violence. Ross Macdonald, whose powers as a storyteller deepen with each new book, has never given us a more absorbing tale. It is written with the grace and wit and passion of a good novel and moves with penetration and sympathy on all the diverse levels of modern society. The characters, ranging from a millionaire Stanford alumnus to an unemployed actress writing a true-confession autobiography, are freshly seen and corrosively etched. As always with Macdonald, the story combines brilliant paradox and tragic surprise. J
The Zebra-Striped Hearse. New York. 1962. Knopf. 278 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
DESCRIPTION - Harriet was a big girl, twenty-five on her next birthday, but her father, Colonel Blackwell, persisted in treating her as a little one. When she came back from Mexico with a man she planned to marry, the Colonel assumed this match could not be suitable. Burke Damis, the prospective bridegroom, claimed to be a serious painter. Harriet considered him a genius, but nobody else had ever heard of him. So the Colonel hired Archer to look into Damis's background. AImost at once he discovered the body of a man stabbed to death with an icepick. Meanwhile Damis and Harriet had dropped out of sight. The story moves with grace and speed and steadily mounting excitement across the map of California and through its society, from Los Angeles to the Bay area, from the American colony on Mexico's Lake Chapala to the floating population of gamblers and their girls on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. This is Mr. Macdonald's tenth book about the physical and moral adventures of Lew Archer, and perhaps the most fascinating of a brilliantly sustained, and widely acclaimed, series. Like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him, Ross Macdonald writes for the general literate public. That mystery fans also like his work is all to the good.
The Chill. New York. 1964. Knopf. 280 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Arthur Hawkins.
DESCRIPTION - The Chill marks the eleventh appearance of Ross Macdonald's California detective, Lew Archer. Hired to trace a runaway bride, Archer uncovers a trail of murder that leads halfway across America and twenty years into the past. Beyond that, it need only be said that the story is every bit as exciting, baffling, and ultimately satisfying as would be expected from the author of The Zebra-Striped Hearse. In the direct line of succession that reaches from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald adds, to the crackling dialogue and narrative tightness of his illustrious predecessors, impressive qualities of his own: a depth of psychological under- standing, a sureness in handling a wide variety of social milieus, and a dazzling, unpredictable plot. All this explains why Mr. Macdonald's novels "even appeal to people who don't ordinarily read mysteries," as Publishers' Weekly says, and why they are gaining an increasing audience among lovers of good fiction.
The Far Side of the Dollar. New York. 1965. Knopf. 247 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Arthur Hawkins.
DESCRIPTION - To the hard-boiled story of violence and death, Ross Macdonald has brought substance and depth of characterization. It is often said that he follows in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but Macdonald has actually broken new ground. His novels have a social range and moral dimension that, in combination with a striking prose style and narrative drive, provide the reader with a rewarding experience. In this new and moving novel, Lew Archer, Macdonald's celebrated California investigator, is hired by the principal of a private reform school, to trace a missing boy. What appears to be an ordinary matter of juvenile delinquency is suddenly magnified, as Archer plunges into a web of murder and extortion. He ranges all over the Far West, tracking down men and women who are pursuing the fast buck, and hating to be reminded of what is waiting on the far side of the last dollar.
Black Money. New York. 1966. Knopf. 241 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Adelson & Eichinger.
DESCRIPTION - Ross Macdonald's famous private detective, Lew Archer, is the kind of man you can drop a secret into and never hear it hit bottom. In his thirteenth and strangest case he explores the secret life of a rich California residential community. A beautiful young woman has jilted her fiance and taken up with a mysterious character who represents himself as a French political refugee. Hired to investigate this man, Archer becomes involved in several murders and a gigantic swindle, Running through the case, as a central theme in this morally disturbing novel, is the corrupting influence of the underworld and its money in our society. BLACK MONEY is the most individual of the brilliant series of novels that have won Ross Macdonald international recognition. Ross Macdonald was born near San Francisco in 1915. He was educated in Canadian schools, traveled widely in Europe, and acquired advanced degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Michigan. In 1938 he married a Canadian girl who is now well known as the novelist Margaret Millar. Mr. Macdonald (Kenneth Millar in private life) taught school and later college, and served as Communications Officer aboard an escort carrier in the Pacific, For the past twenty years he has lived in Santa Barbara and has written mystery novels about the explosively changing society of his native state. His main interests, outside of literature, are conservation and politics. He is the current president of Mystery Writers of America. In 1964 his novel THE CHILL was given a Silver Dagger award by the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain, .
The Instant Enemy. New York. 1968. Knopf. 227 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muni Lieblein.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian, a Los Angeles business executive, to find his daughter Sandy, a high-school senior who has run off with a homeless boy. Sebastian and his wife, living on the edge of affluent bankruptcy, seem unable to communicate with their daughter. Archer finds the runaways easily enough, but before he can return Sandy to her parents, she has participated in a violent crime. Archer's efforts to save the girl from the consequences of her actions, and to understand those actions, involve him in a savage plot twisting deep into the past. At least one old murder and some new ones confound him and the police. Archer himself is very nearly killed by an ex-cop who wants to keep the case closed, but he finally manages to open it and let some daylight in. The Instant Enemy is Lew Archer at his toughest, and Ross Macdonald at his most trenchant in his observations of California society.
The Goodbye Look. New York. 1969. Knopf. 243 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Summit Studios.
DESCRIPTION - Acknowledged master of the "whipcord thriller," Ross Macdonald is increasingly recognized as ' 'not only the best in his field but an important American novelist on any level" (Chicago Tribune). In his new novel, Macdonald's famous non-hero private eye Lew Archer—embodiment of cool—picks his way through the overheated and explosive mazes of a wealthy family's long-hidden secrets. Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect is their son, Nick, who has a real talent for disappearing. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, and a mysterious hobo. Then a dead body turns up in a car on an empty beach. And then Nick turns up with a Colt 45! A lost heirloom, a murder that breeds more murder, a boy's life poisoned by a money crime committed before he was born — these are the elements of The Goodbye Look- It is Ross Macdonald at his unnerving best: a novel at once brilliantly perceptive of the world it anatomizes—the freeway culture of Southern California—and from first to last unfaltering in its dramatic excitement and suspense.
The Underground Man. New York. 1971. Knopf. 0394434676. 272 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Hal Seigel.
DESCRIPTION - The Underground Man is Ross Macdonald at his most brilliant and brilliantly exciting. It is his first new novel since the best-selling and widely acclaimed The Goodbye Look—and it may well be the finest novel in what The New York Times has called "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American." The Underground Man brings Macdonald's cool, pragmatic detective, Lew Archer, to a tragic fire that ravages a hillside community in South- ern California. It enmeshes him in the lives of a group of troubled people searching for happy endings but fatally entangled in a web of murder and extortion stretching back through fifteen years—an angry father whose whole life has been a kind of breakdown, a mother using her son as a scapegoat, a pair of alienated adolescents who believe they are rescuing a child from the adult world, and a sad woman living with a dreadful secret. The result is a novel that mingles unfaltering suspense with that extraordinary perception of an American life-style (West Coast Affluent) that is the hallmark of Ross Macdonald.
Sleeping Beauty. New York. 1973. Knopf. 0394484746. 271 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands - including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald's masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written, Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best. If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.
The Blue Hammer. New York. 1976. Knopf. 0394404254. 270 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Hal Siegel.
DESCRIPTION - MacDonald's last novel featuring his celebrated California private detective Lew Archer. The theft of a valuable painting. The long-ago disappearance of a famous artist. A murder as deceptive as a magician's illusion. A horrendous - but now buried - explosion of family hatred. These are the nerve centers of Ross Macdonald's magnificent new Lew Archer novel, the richest we have had from the author of "the best detective novels ever written by an American" (The New York Times)—a fusion of unfaltering suspense with dramatic revelation of the way lives are shaped and mis-shaped in the flow of time, in the hidden and dangerous emotional currents beneath the surface of family history. The time is now; the place, Southern California. The stolen canvas that Archer has been hired to retrieve is reputed to be the work of the celebrated Richard Chantry, who vanished in 1950 from his home in Santa Teresa. It is the portrait of an unknown woman—and on its trail Archer moves with edgy competence among the intrigues of dealers and collectors. Until suddenly he finds himself drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years through a world where money talks or buys silence, where social prominence is a murderous weapon, where, behind the plausible facades of homes not quite broken but badly bent, a heritage of lies and evasions pushes troubled men and women deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait—and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry—Archer him- self is shaken as never before: Archer the solitary traveler, the loner who has through the years deliberately addressed himself to the deciphering of other people's lives, is thrust into an inescapable encounter with a woman who will complicate his own.... From its almost hushed beginning to its violent climax and its unexpected—indeed astonishing resolution. The Blue Hammer holds us riveted. This is Ross MacDonald at his incomparable best.
Archer short story collections
The Name is Archer New York. 1955. Bantam Books. 194 pages. paperback. 1295. Cover by Mitch Hooks.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer, private detective in the land of dreams - California; in the land of peaches and honey, misery and murder - male and femaie! The name is Archer and don’t get me wrong - It’s not that women are greedier than men, No, it’s not that, necessarily, or even that they cause more trouble than men, it’s just that - well - If you stick a lighted match into a barrel of gasoline something’s going to happen, and as far as men are concerned that’s what women are - a lighted match. Take the case of The Guilt-Edged Blonde or the Gone Girl or - better yet, just turn the page - and don’t forget - the name is Archer. The Name Is Archer is a collection of short stories written by Ross Macdonald and featuring his detective hero, Lew Archer. Originally compiled in 1955 and published under the name John Ross Macdonald, more stories were added in later collections under different titles. The stories that first appeared in The Name Is Archer were as follows: Find the Woman (originally titled Death by Air in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 1946); Gone Girl (original title Imaginary Blonde, Manhunt, February 1953); The Bearded Lady, (American Magazine, October 1948); The Suicide (original title The Beat-Up Sister, Manhunt, October 1953); Guilt-Edged Blonde (Manhunt, January 1954); Wild Goose Chase (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 1954).
Lew Archer: Private Investigator by Ross MacDonald. New York. 1977. Mysterious Press. . 254 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer, the quintessential American detective, is the most famous private eye in contemporary literature. In the tradition of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Archer is a hard-boiled dick - but one with greater compassion than his predecessors. Lonely, cynical and introspective, Archer moves in the Southern California milieu, unraveling the complex mysteries of other people’s lives. This is the first hardcover edition of Lew Archer short stories, and the first complete collection, with a new introduction by the author..
The Archer Files, The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Including Newly Discovered Case Notes by Ross MacDonald. Norfolk. 2012. Crippen & Landru. 9781932009637. Edited by Tom Nolan. 351 pages. paperback. Cover art by Jeff Wong (after Mitch Hooks).
DESCRIPTION - Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) was the author of eighteen books that a New York Times critic called the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American : the Lew Archer canon, which included such breakthrough best-sellers as The Underground Man, The Goodbye Look, and The Blue Hammer. Macdonald (born Kenneth Millar) also wrote several novelettes and short-stories involving Southern California private-detective Lew Archer. The Archer Files for the first time collects all the brief Archer fiction: the stories from Macdonald s 1955 paperback-original The Name Is Archer, the additional tales included in the Otto Penzler-edited 1977 volume Lew Archer: Private Investigator, and the three then-unknown novellas presented in Crippen & Landru s 2001 book Strangers in Town. Also included in The Archer Files are several lengthy, never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories: case notes, as it were, from the files of Lew Archer. Edited by Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan, The Archer Files is prefaced with Nolan s biographical sketch of Lew Archer himself -- the character Eudora Welty described as a champion and a distinguished creation ... As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness. Jeff Wong s cover is adapted from the 1955 paperback original, but depicting Ross Macdonald rather than Lew Archer.
Archer anthologies
Archer in Hollywood: The Moving Target, the Way Some People Die, the Barbarous Coast. New York. 1967. Knopf. 676 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jean Carlu.
DESCRIPTION - This first omnibus of novels by Ross Macdonald presents his famous detective, Lew Archer, in three stylish and explosive cases. They take Archer and the reader through the upper levels and lower depths of California society, casting a sardonic eye on Hollywood and its outposts in Las Vegas and Palm Springs. In The Moving Target (recently made into the hit movie Harper) the disappearance of an oil millionaire with Hollywood connections touches off a series of violent crimes. In The Way Some People Die Lew Archer tracks down some missing persons, living and dead, on a trail that twists from Palm Springs to San Francisco. In The Barbarous Coast Archer's pursuit of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a bigtime gambler who died by his own knife, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.
Archer at Large: Three Great Lew Archer Novels of Suspense - the Galton Case, the Chill, Black Money. New York. 1970. Knopf. 626 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - With the publication in 1969 of The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald's brilliant series of Lew Archer novels achieved extraordinary public recognition as one of the great creations in the con- temporary literature of suspense. Greeted with unqualified praise on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, The Goodbye Look soon became a nationwide bestseller, and for more than three months held its place as one of the country's leading fiction successes. Its publication also helped maintain and increase interest in the earlier Lew Archer books—most of which continue to find readers in both hardcover and paperback editions- Now three of the finest Macdonald thrillers are reissued in this superb collection, a companion volume to the Archer in Hollywood omni- bus of 1%7- In The Galton Case, Archer is asked to find Maria Galton's lost son, and his search carries him across the continent and back through a tangle of scarred families. In The Chill, the private detective's job is to locate a bride who walked out on her investigations lead to three apparently unconnected murders, with the year's most startling surprise solution (The New York Times). In Black Money, when a beautiful young woman jilts her fiancé and takes up with a presumed French political refugee, Archer becomes involved in several murders and a gigantic swindle that underscores the corrupting influence of the underworld and its money in our society. Altogether, a boon for Ross Macdonald fans, old and new.
Archer in Jeopardy: The Doomsters, the Zebra-Striped Hearse, and the Instant Enemy. New York. 1979. Knopf. 0394508041. 757 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Crime novelist without peer (‘author of the best detective novels ever written by an American’—The New York Times Book Review) Ross Macdonald has been acclaimed equally for his mastery of suspense, for his vision of the family as a complex and mysterious organism moving through time, and for the stunning perception of a kind of American life that resonates, always, through his novels—the freeway culture of Southern California, from opulent old money and the beach-cabana luxury of the new rich to the threadbare melancholy of shabby backstreet bars. Macdonald’s unforgettable detective is Lew Archer—the wearily wise, infinitely resourceful private investigator who so often finds in the tangled past, with its long-buried guilty secrets, a fertile source of clues to the murderous present- Archer, whose very humanity puts him constantly in jeopardy. He is at his incomparable best in the three splendid novels brought together here: The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Instant Enemy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Brought up in Ontario, he eventually settled in California, where he died in 1983.
Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move by Nanjala Nyabola. New York. 2021. Oxford University Press. 9781787383821. 264 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - What does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? What are the joys and pains of holidays for people of colour, when guidebooks are never written with them in mind? How are black lives today impacted by the othering legacy of colonial cultures and policies? What can travel tell us about our sense of self, of home, of belonging and identity? Why has the world order become hostile to human mobility, as old as humanity itself, when more people are on the move than ever? Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others'. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking and sometimes funny
answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nanjala Nyabola is a writer and political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology and politics, as well as migration and human mobility. A constant traveller, at the time of writing she has visited over seventy countries across four continents.
James by Percival Everett. New York. 2024. Doubleday. 9780385550369. 307 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Emily Mahon.
DESCRIPTION - When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated
writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] 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.
Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss by Juliet Hooker. Princeton. 2023. Princeton University Press. 9780691243030. 341 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Heather Hansen.
DESCRIPTION - In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence—the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege. Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. She connects today’s Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post–Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till’s funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of white
victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juliet Hooker is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, which was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
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Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? by Elijah Millgram. New York. 2023. Oxford University Press. 9780197669303. 370 pages. hardcover. Jacket image: Monochrome drawing by Jan Rieckhoff of Friedrich Nietzsche.
DESCRIPTION - Nietzsche wrote the philosophical work for which he is most famous while he was coming apart at the seams. The circumstances of Nietzsche's dramatic psychological disintegration make his writing, while popular, often hard for readers to understand. Elijah Millgram here argues for a new framework for making sense of Nietzsche-one that transforms the way we read him. Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? argues that Nietzsche's late works (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards) should not be read as straightforwardly endorsing a consistent or systematic set of philosophical claims. Rather, these late works display Nietzsche living through a series of different personalities or philosophical perspectives. Each perspective embodies a different way of seeing the world, deploys different values, highlights certain features while occluding others, and is motivated by a different dominant drive. What one perspective emphasizes can be left out by another; what one perspective presents as valuable can be seen as neutral or even as damaging from another; what engenders the appearance of coherence or order in one perspective can do the opposite in another. Millgram claims that insofar as each human life embodies a perspective, and
insofar as each of Nietzsche's late texts exhibits a distinct perspective, we can think of each of the late works as written by a different author.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elijah "Lije" Millgram (born 1958) is an American philosopher. He is E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research specialties include practical reason and moral philosophy. Elijah Millgram received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. He taught at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University before moving to Utah. He is a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.
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The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South by Vijay Prashad. New York. 2012. Verso. 9781844679522. 292 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off. Since the '70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issuebased movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival - in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism. In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad “has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today's global situation and standoff.” The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2013–2014, he was the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut. Prashad is the author of seventeen books. In 2012, he published five books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press) and Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (The New Press). His book The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007) was chosen as the Best Nonfiction book by the Asian American Writers' Workshop in 2008 and it won the Muzaffar Ahmed Book Award in 2009. In 2013, Verso published his The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. He is author of No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (LeftWord Books, 2015) and the editor of Letters to Palestine (Verso Books, 2015), a book that includes the writings of Teju Cole, Sinan Antoon, Noura Erakat, and Junot Diaz.Prashad is also a journalist. He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun, and is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian. He usually writes on the Middle Eastern politics, development economics, North-South relations and current events. In 2015, Prashad joined as the Chief Editor of the New Delhi-based publisher LeftWord Books. He is also an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the global BDS movement.
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Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City by Paulette Nardal. Albany. 2009. SUNY Press. 9781438429465. Translated and with an introduction by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. SUNY series, Philosophy and Race. 119 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - In the aftermath of World War II, Paulette Nardal, the Martinican woman most famously associated with the Negritude movement and its founders Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, and Leon Damas during Paris's interwar years, founded the journal Woman in the City. This annotated translation, with an introduction and essay summaries by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, collects work from that journal, and presents it in both the original French and in English. Never before translated, these essays represent a lens through which to view the evolution of Nardal's intellectual thought on race, gender, politics, globalization, war, religion, and philosophy. The journal's arrival announced Martinican women entering the public sphere--the city--and from its internationalist perspectives, the world stage where they would take up their responsibilities as citizens of their little island and the greater French Republic. Published from 1945 to 1951, it was, with its Christian humanist undertones and feminist inclinations, the first theologically and philosophically woman-centered liberationist journal in print.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paulette Nardal (1896-1985) was an Afro-Martiniquais writer and journalist and one of the drivers of the development of a black literary consciousness. She was one of the authors involved in the creation of the Negritude genre and introduced French intellectuals to the works of members of the Harlem Renaissance through her translations. Born into the upper-middle class on Martinique, Nardal became a teacher and went to complete her education in Paris. She was the first black person to study at the Sorbonne and established an influential literary Clamart Salon with her sisters which explored the experiences of the African diaspora. As a journalist and author, she published works which advocated a Pan-African awareness and acknowledged the similarities of challenges faced by people due to racism and sexism. Though an ardent feminist, she was not radical, encouraging women to work within the existing social structures to achieve political influence. At the beginning of World War II, Nardal fled France, but was injured when a submarine attacked her ship, causing a lifelong disability. Returning to Martinique, she established feminist organizations and newspapers encouraging educated women to channel their energies into social improvement. She sponsored home economic training and founded nursery schools for impoverished women. Thanks to her understanding of issues facing the populations of the Caribbean, she was hired to work as an area specialist at the United Nations. Nardal was the first black woman to hold an official post in the Division of Non-Self Governing Territories at the UN. When she returned to Martinique after her UN position, she worked to preserve the music traditions of the country. She wrote a history of traditional music styles for the centennial celebration of the abolition of slavery on the island and developed a choir which celebrated the African-roots of the music of Martinique. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and Professor of French at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of several books, including Negritude Women and the Emily Toth Award–winning Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, and the editor of The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's “A More Perfect Union.”
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