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Guzman, Martin Luis. The Eagle and the Serpent. New York. 1930. Knopf. Translated from the Spanish by Harriet De Onis. 360 pages. hardcover. Originally published as EL AGUILA Y LA SERPIENTE, 1928 - Madrid.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

A revolutionary novel, inspired by the experiences of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The Eagle and the Serpent (El águila y la serpiente, 1928) depicts the Mexican Revolution and its political aftermath both of which Guzman was familiar with, having contributed both to revolutionary agitation and to the formation of the new revolutionary government.

   In order that readers not familiar with the origin and nature of the Mexican Revolution may better understand the spirit of this book, we have thought it advisable to give a brief resume of the political events that took place in Mexico from 1910 to 1913. In 1910 Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship was still supreme in Mexico-a liberal, progressive dictator. ship. That same year, as the time for presidential elections approached-a periodical farce by which the letter of the Constitution was observed-the nation began to give evident signs that it wanted to regain possession of its civic will, which had been lost since 1850s. In opposition to the invariable candidacy of Diaz, which satisfied only the groups in power, the nation put forward another, that of Francisco I. Madero. The dictator, however, paid no attention to these premonitory indications; he and his supporters attempted to continue in power, whereupon Madero, at the head of a rising which was not merely political, but revolutionary in character, overthrew Porfirio Diaz and took over the presidency after new elections held in 1911. Madero was a reformer of gentle, apostolic character. He preached ideals of justice and a faith in the triumph of the right. As head of the government he attempted to divert the revolutionary tendencies he headed into legal channels, He also decided, in order to preserve the material well-being of the country, not to destroy the administrative machinery or the political instruments created by the dictatorship. He maintained the existing army; he respected the courts and the legislative bodies and made no changes in the personnel of the government departments. And in this way he lost the sympathy and support of his friends and delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, with results that were soon to prove fatal, A part of the army, headed by two ambitious generals, Bernardo Reyes and Felix Diaz, rose in February, 1913; another division, under the command of Victoriano Huerta, revolted a few days later, after solemnly swearing its loyalty. And then, all joining forces, Huerta had the revolutionary President assassinated a few hours after usurping his office. The indignation and anger of the populace were so great that the day after Madero's death the real revolution broke out; the ideals of justice and agrarian reform the 'martyr President' had advocated seemed too conservative; a vehement desire to regenerate everything asserted itself, an impulse to transform the whole social fabric of Mexico in its diverse aspects; and before the end of February the conflict had been kindled again. Venustiano Carranza, the governor of Coahuila, a civilian, was named First chief of the revolutionary army; the political purposes of the new uprising were outlined in the Plan of Guadalupe, drawn up on March 27, 1913. This new phase of the revolution was much more widespread than the first. From the beginning there were four principal centres of revolutionary action, three in the north: Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila; and one in the south: Morelos. The military leaders in the various sections of the north were respectively, Alvaro Obregon, Francisco Villa, and Pablo Gonzalez; the leader in the south was Emiliano Zapata. The advance of the four revolutionary armies, which was very slow at first, finally became irresistible, especially after the big battles won by Villa and Felipe Angeles in Torreon and Zacatecas. In the northwest, through the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit and Jalisco, Obregon marched from victory to victory, all the way from the American border to the heart of Mexico, After Villa had broken through the main division of Huerta's army, Pablo Gonzalez could move forward from the states of the northeast-that is to say, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and San Luis. And as Zapata was becoming more and more of a menace from the south-his activities had spread through the states of Morelos, Mexico, and Puebla, surrounding the capital-Huerta fled from the country seventeen months after his crime. After wiping out a part of Porfirio Diaz's former army and discharging from the service those who surrendered, the revolutionary troops marched into the city of Mexico in August 1914. But the revolution was already divided in its hour of triumph. Carranza, whose background and formation were those of the dictatorship, and who was devoid of ideals and eager only for power, from the first moment did all he could to bar the advancement of all those revolutionists whose independence or whose faith in the just character of the revolution might prove a stumbling.block to the new leaders in the race of their personal ambitions. He was supported in this by Obregon and by the groups of Sonora and Coahuila, and he even went so far as to put obstacles in the way of Villa's and Angeles's military operations. This lost him the support of many leaders and large sections of the country; and it brought about a wide breach, which was already evident in December 1913, and of a frankly hostile character by August 1914. To put an end to these dissensions, which threatened to destroy the fruits of the revolution's military victories, the leaders of the different groups decided to call an assembly which should have sovereign authority, to be composed of generals and governors. This was the Convention. It met in October 1914, first in Mexico City and then in Aguascalientes, and voted to remove both Carranza and Villa from their commands, as their quarrels were the principal cause of strife, and to name General Eulalio Gutierrez president pro tern. of the Republic. The generals and governors in favour of Villa submitted to the terms laid down by the Convention; but as Carranza and his adherents demanded, as a preliminary to their obedience of orders, the fulfilment of certain conditions that could not be accepted, the new President had to temporize with Villa while waiting for the Carranza faction to recognize his authority. Finally, dis. owned by the one and at the mercy of the other, he left the power in December 1914 and took refuge with his soldiers. By the beginning of 1915 the revolution had degenerated into a veritable state of anarchy, into a simple struggle between rivals for power. This went on until 1916, when Obregon and Carranza, in great part with the help of the United States, managed to reduce Villa to a position in which he could do nothing, though without ever conquering him. As a guerrilla leader Villa was invincible. In May 1920 he was still lording it in the stronghold of the sierras, His energy and his daring were unrivalled. Even General Pershing's famous expedition.-the ten thousand men that Wilson sent to Mexico, with Carranza and Obregon's approval, 'to get Villa dead or alive'-had to relinquish the undertaking.  

Martín Luis Guzmán Franco (October 6, 1887 – December 22, 1976) was a Mexican novelist and journalist. Guzmán was born in Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Along with Mariano Azuela, he is considered a pioneer of the revolutionary novel, a genre inspired by the experiences of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. His novels La sombra del caudillo (1929) and El águila y la serpiente (1928) depict the Mexican Revolution and its political aftermath, both of which the author was familiar with, having contributed both to revolutionary agitation and to the formation of the new revolutionary government. For several months in 1914, he was under the direct orders of General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa. He later wrote a five-volume biography of Villa, Memorias de Pancho Villa (1936-1951). Martin Luis Guzmán died suddenly on December 22, 1976 in Mexico City due an acute myocardial infarction. His widow Ana West, died seven years after him, on October 21st, 1983. She was 95 years old when, after being hospitalized for some days due to an acute bilateral pneumonia, she suffered a cardiac arrest and died.

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Lorde, Audre. Our Dead Behind Us: Poems. New York. 1986. Norton. 039302329x. 75 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ann Cammett.

  
FROM THE PUBLISHER -

In this collection, Audre Lorde gives us poems that explore 'differences as creative tensions, and the melding of past strength / pain with future hope / fear; the present being the vital catalyst, the motivating force - activism.'As Marilyn Hacker has written, 'Black, lesbian, mother, cancer survivor, urban woman: none of Lorde's selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems.'

Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992) was an American writer, poet and activist. Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem. Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Lorde was nearsighted and legally blind. The youngest of three daughters, she grew up in Harlem, hearing her mother’s stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four. Her mother taught her to write during this time. She wrote her first poem when she was in the eighth grade. After graduating from Hunter College High School, she attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959, graduating with a bachelors degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself working various odd jobs: factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period described by Lorde as a time of affirmation and renewal because she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. Lorde furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in library science in 1961. During this time she also worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins; they later divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City where she remained until 1968. During a year in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Lorde met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, the woman who was to be her romantic partner until 1989. Lorde was then involved with Gloria Joseph, who was Lorde’s partner until Lorde’s death from breast cancer. Lorde died November 17, 1992 in St. Croix after a 14 year struggle with the disease. In her own words, she was a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet‘.Lorde took the name Gamba Adisa, which means ‘Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known,’ in an African naming ceremony before she died. Lorde’s poetry was published regularly during the 1960s: in Langston Hughes’s 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time she was politically active in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet’s Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that ‘[Lorde] does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.’ Lorde’s second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addresses themes of love, betrayal, childbirth, and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem ‘Martha’, in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: ‘we shall love each other here if ever at all.’ Later books continued her political aims in Lesbian and Gay rights and feminism. In 1980, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and several other lesbians co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of color. Lorde was named State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York. 1997. Norton. 0393040909.  500 pages. hardcover. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

Every poem ever published by the late poet, who is noted for the passion and vision of her poems about being African-American, a lesbian, a mother, and a daughter, is collected in a definitive anthology of her work.

Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992) was an American writer, poet and activist. Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem. Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Lorde was nearsighted and legally blind. The youngest of three daughters, she grew up in Harlem, hearing her mother’s stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four. Her mother taught her to write during this time. She wrote her first poem when she was in the eighth grade. After graduating from Hunter College High School, she attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959, graduating with a bachelors degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself working various odd jobs: factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period described by Lorde as a time of affirmation and renewal because she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. Lorde furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in library science in 1961. During this time she also worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins; they later divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City where she remained until 1968. During a year in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Lorde met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, the woman who was to be her romantic partner until 1989. Lorde was then involved with Gloria Joseph, who was Lorde’s partner until Lorde’s death from breast cancer. Lorde died November 17, 1992 in St. Croix after a 14 year struggle with the disease. In her own words, she was a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet‘.Lorde took the name Gamba Adisa, which means ‘Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known,’ in an African naming ceremony before she died. Lorde’s poetry was published regularly during the 1960s: in Langston Hughes’s 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time she was politically active in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet’s Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that ‘[Lorde] does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.’ Lorde’s second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addresses themes of love, betrayal, childbirth, and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem ‘Martha’, in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: ‘we shall love each other here if ever at all.’ Later books continued her political aims in Lesbian and Gay rights and feminism. In 1980, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and several other lesbians co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of color. Lorde was named State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis. New York. 1953. Noonday Press. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell. 283 pages. hardcover. Cover: Format by Sidney Solomon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER - 

Considered by many Machado’s greatest work, DOM CASMURRO is a novel of love and suspected betrayal. It traces the flowering and destruction of a childhood romance. In Portuguese, casmurro means a morose, tight-lipped man, withdrawn within himself. Bento Santiago, hero and narrator of this novel, is such a person, ironically called ‘Dom Casmurro’ by his friends. The darkness and shadows of the present dissipate as Bento sketches his memories of youth. We are introduced to his childhood friend Capitu, (with her beautiful hair and ‘her eyes like the tide’) and we see her change from playmate to sweetheart. The dilemma of young love is made poignant through the efforts of the young people to resist Bento’s mother’s intention to make him a priest. The quarrels, the desire for each other, so clumsy and youthful, the complex evasion of adult watchfulness, are described so adroitly that the reader feels his own life being told. But Bento’s tragedy is already implicit in these apparently idyllic moments. He is a man born to be deceived or to deceive himself. The startlingly original denouement of this novel permits either interpretation. Those who read DOM CASMURRO will not easily forget it.

Other editions:

Assis, Joaquim Machado de. Dom Casmurro. New York. 1994. Penguin Books. 0140446125. Translated from the Portuguese & With An Introduction by Robert Scott-Buccleuch. 216 pages. paperback. The cover shows a detail from a contemporary photograph of Gloria, Rio de Janiero reproduced by courtesy of Peter Owen Ltd.

Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de. Dom Casmurro. London. 1953. W. H. Allen. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell. 240 pages. hardcover.

Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de. Dom Casmurro. New York. 1997. Oxford University Press. 0195103084. Foreword by John Gledson. Afterword by Joao Adolfo Hansen. Translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson. Library of Latin America series.. 258 pages. hardcover. Cover art - Jose Ferraz de Almeida Junior-'Violeiro (Guitar Player)'.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado’s works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.’ Son of Francisco José de Assis (a mulatto housepainter, descendent of freed slaves) and Maria Leopoldina Machado de Assis (a Portuguese washerwoman), Machado de Assis lost both his mother and his only sister at an early age. Machado is said to have learned to write by himself, and he used to take classes for free will. He learned to speak French first and English later, both fluently. He started to work for newspapers in Rio de Janeiro, where he published his first works and met established writers such as Joaquim Manuel de Macedo. Machado de Assis married Carolina Xavier de Novais, a Portuguese descendant of a noble family. Soon the writer got a public job and this stability permitted him to write his best works. Machado de Assis began by writing popular novels which sold well, much in the late style of José de Alencar. His style changed in the 1880s, and it is for the sceptical, ironic, comedic but ultimately pessimistic works he wrote after this that he is remembered: the first novel in his ‘new style’ was Epitaph for a Small Winner, known in the new Gregory Rabassa translation as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (a literal translation of the original title, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas). In their brilliant comedy and ironic playfulness, these resemble in some ways the contemporary works of George Meredith in the United Kingdom, and Eça de Queirós in Portugal, but Machado de Assis’ work has a far bleaker emotional undertone. Machado’s work has also been compared with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Machado de Assis could speak English fluently and translated many works of William Shakespeare and other English writers into Portuguese. His work contains numerous allusions to Shakespearean plays, John Milton and influences from Sterne and Meredith. He is also known as a master of the short story, having written classics of the genre in the Portuguese language, such as O Alienista, Missa do Galo, ‘A Cartomante’ and ‘A Igreja do Diabo.’ Along with other writers and intellectuals, Machado de Assis founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1896 and was its president from 1897 to 1908, when he died.

The Translator, HELEN CALDWELL, is a member of the Department of Classics of the University of California. Her varied career includes such positions as lecturer on Anthropology for the Los Angeles Board of Education and dancer with Michio Ito and Company. She was awarded first prize in a translation contest sponsored by Mademoiselle in conjunction with the Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America and the Pan-American Union. Format by Sidney Solomon.

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Tsvetayeva, Marina. Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva . New York. 1987. Dutton. 0525482830. Translated and introduced by Elaine Feinstein. 108 pages. paperback. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

Elaine Feinstein's translations of Tsvetayeva have been greatly admired. Charles Tomlinson, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, describes how 'the sense of inner pressure' in the poet-translator herself 'makes vivid those versions ... translations that embody for us the tortured years of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, and the way they were suffered by a very un-English sensibility ... that has, at last, found for itself a style in English . . . This is a new and enlarged edition of Marina Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems that was first published ten years ago. Feinstein has added twenty-four pages of new poems mostly chosen from Tsvetayeva's later work in order to give a more accurate impression of her range. Elaine Feinstein is the author of eight novels and five collections of poetry. Her biography of Tsvetayeva, A Captive Lion, is being published simultaneously by E. P. Dutton. ‘ . . . among the best readers and translators we have of modern Russian verse ... Everything she has published is instinct with caring, with a rare intelligence of pain.' - GEORGE STEINER, The New Yorker.

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.

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The End Of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky. New York. 1990. Norton. Translated From The Czech By Paul Wilson. 185 pages. Jacket design by Linda Kosarin. 0393027856. February 1990.

Join the melancholy Lieutenant Boruvka once again for this third installment in the series by Josef Skvorevcky.

FROM THE PUBLISHER - 

    Third in the series of linked detective tales featuring the 'downbeat Prague cop' of THE MOURNFUL DEMEANOUR OF LIEUTENANT BORUVKA and SINS FOR FATHER KNOX, this collection of six stories takes place around the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The stories include a murder in which a famous writer and supporter of Alexander Dubcek is implicated, but evidence uncovered by Boruvka points elsewhere. In a second story the murderer has reached a position of influence by the time our detective comes on the scene. A Soviet army sentry turns out to be responsible for a third murder. In the final story Boruvka must decide whether to jeopardize his career as he pursues an American gangster. In each of these cases, some of which are based on actual events, Boruvka is pitted against his colleagues, the secret police, and even his country. This third volume of tales 'demonstrates Skvorecky's formidable story-telling gifts, sharp wit, and understanding of the human heart' 'Boruvka is, I suppose, in the British or European tradition of developed detective characters-he has problems, he even falls in love. If Woody Allen were stouter, he could play the part. ' -Josef Skvorecky, commenting on his sad-eyed detective.

Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and was for many years a professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, ran a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto, and were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Skvorecky’s novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER’S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He was the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

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Sins For Father Knox by Josef Skvorecky. New York. 1989. Norton. Translated From The Czech By Kaca Polackova Henley. 268 pages. Jacket design by Linda Kosarin. 0393025128. January 1989.

The second book in Josef Skvorecky's Lieutenant Boruvka series.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Readers of THE MOURNFUL DEMEANOUR OF LIEUTENANT BORUVKA will welcome the second book in the Boruvka series, although the lieutenant appears in only two of the ten stories The heroine in this volume is a nightclub singer called Eve Adam, a garrulous meddler in other people's affairs, Under contract from the State Concert Agency, she sings in various cities around the world. As Eve Adam travels and a crime occurs, each story violates one of the rules of the Detective Story Decalogue by Father Ronald A. Knox, probably the best-known set of rules for writing detective fiction. And so the task for the reader is two-fold: to decide which rule has been broken and to identify the murderer--in Prague, in Stockholm, in Rimini, in Berkeley, and in all the other cities. This book, newly translated, has never before appeared in English. Two more Boruvka books, of quite a different nature but equally remarkable, will follow.

Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and was for many years a professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, ran a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto, and were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Skvorecky’s novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER’S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He was the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

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The Mournful Demeanour Of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky. New York. 1987. Norton. Translated From The Czech By Rosemary Kavan, Kaca Polackova & George Theiner. 288 pages. Jacket Design By Linda Kosarin. 0393024709.

The first of Josef Skvorecky's Lieutenant Boruvka mysteries.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   From the internationally acclaimed writer Josef Skvorecky we have the first in a series of linked detective tales featuring a highly intelligent member of the Czechoslovak police force and his agreeable colleagues. Many of the tales are delightful parodies of 'standard' mysteries, and most are set in the author's native Czechoslovakia. Lieutenant Boruvka himself is splendidly realized--a pensive, conscience-stricken man driven to melancholy by the fiendish truths of murder, yet always wide awake to the strange methods of murder he encounters. Twelve bizarre plots involve theatrical people or musicians, and one concerns a band of mountaineers. Its solution reveals pent-up emotions of love, jealousy, and envy. Other cases involve blackmail, apparent suicide, and unusual trajectories for weapons--a wealth of gruesome circumstances, The entire book is intended to be read as a continuous account; in the last tale, the reader learns the secret of Boruvka's past. Never before published in the United States, this unusual volume introduces the sad lieutenant and his developing fortunes to all who relish ingenious puzzles. Three other books will follow, all abounding in the wit and irony that characterize the writing of this remarkable author.

Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and was for many years a professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, ran a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto, and were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Skvorecky’s novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER’S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He was the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

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Another Way To Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos by Rosario Castellanos. Athens. 1990. University of Georgia Press. Translated From The Spanish & Edited Myralyn F. Allgood. Foreword By Edward D. Terry. 146 pages. Cover photograph courtesy of Oscar Bonifaz. 0820312401.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   ANOTHER WAY TO BE is a multifaceted selection of the writings of Rosario Castellanos, one of Mexico's most distinguished literary personalities. Poet, novelist, journalist, philosopher, and diplomat, Castellanos was a woman whose life and art reflected her commitment to the problems and promise of her native land. The daughter of a wealthy landowner who had married a seamstress from a lower class, she saw during her childhood the clash of cultures and social classes in tradition-bound communities where women were condemned to lives of submission and Indians were regarded as nothing more than chattel. From these experiences she came to see the world as a place where races and individuals are caught up in an ongoing struggle for justice and dignity, for 'another way to be human and free. ' In her work she focuses a penetrating light on interpersonal and interracial conflicts, denouncing the pervasive injustice as she created a literature that she hoped would be a catalyst for change. ANOTHER WAY TO BE opens with selections from her poetry, presented both in Spanish and in English translation. In such poems as 'Wailing Wall' and the previously unpublished 'Ritual Bath in the Grijalva,' there are echoes of Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, whom she greatly admired. Poems like 'Indian Mother' and 'The Indian's Prayer' express empathy and compassion for the native of Chiapas. Selections from Castellano's prize-winning fiction reflect her concern with the hostility and prejudice that cripple human relationships and her refusal to depict women and Indians as stereotypes. This collection closes with a group of essays, the product of the latter phase of Castellanos's creative evolution. Written with keen insight and satirical humor, these essays - like her other writing - reflect her training in philosophy, her intellectual debt to Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir, and the kinship she felt with Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Together with the introductory essay by Myralyn Allgood and an extensive bibliography, the selections in ANOTHER WAY TO BE - most appearing in translation for the first time - give a rich and full sense of the diverse talents of a remarkable writer.

Rosario Castellanos (25 May 1925 – 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Along with the other members of the Generation of 1950 (the poets who wrote following the Second World War, influenced by César Vallejo and others), she was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today.

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Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York. 2010. Random House. 9780679444329. 625 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph: ‘Spectators Watching Negro Elks Parade from Building and Streeet,’ 1939. (Bettmann/Corbis). Jacket design by Daniel Rembert. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an ‘unrecognized immigration’ within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first African American to win for individual reporting, she has also won the George Polk Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has lectured on narrative at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book.