General book blog.
Moraga, Cherrie. Native Country of the Heart. New York. 2019. Farrar Straus Giroux. 9780374219666. 243 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Thomas Colligan.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherr e Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother's decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora. Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherr e Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother's journey--from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's--she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss. Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.
Cherríe Moraga (born September 25, 1952) is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena which is an organization of Xicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
Polyglots by William Gerhardi. New York. 1925. Duffield & Company. 375 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
THE POLYGLOTS, Gerhardie's comic masterpiece, is the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East through the uncertain years after the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during his military mission to the East. Filled with a host of bizarre characters - depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, sex maniacs, hypochondriacs - Gerhardie paints a wonderfully absurd and directionless world where the comic and tragic are irrevocably entwined.
William Alexander Gerhardie was a British novelist and playwright. Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s H. G Wells was a ferocious champion of his work. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of 'waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece Again it deals with Russia He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography 'The Casanova Fable', his friendship with Hugh being both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus. After World War II Gerhardie's star waned, and he became unfashionable, and although he continued to write, he had nothing published after 1939. After a period of poverty-stricken oblivion, he lived to see two 'definitive collected works' published by Macdonald More recently, both Prion and New Directions Press have been reissuing his works. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest 'Pronounced jer hardy, with the accent on the a: jer-har'dy. This is the way I and my relatives pronounce it, tho I am told it is incorrect. Philologists are of the opinion that it should be pronounced with the g as in Gertrude. I believe they are right. I, however, cling to the family habit of mispronouncing it. But I do so without obstinacy. If the world made it worth my while I would side with the multitude.'
Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes From The Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore (editor). New York. 2001. Penguin Books. Edited and with an introduction by Lucy Moore. 301 pages. Cover: Detail from ‘The Rake at the Rose Tavern’ from ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (1733) by William Hogarth. 9780140437607.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘I presume to set forth my wicked and melancholy circumstances.’ This enthralling anthology of eighteenth-century writings gives fascinating insights into the dreadful misdeeds of - and the horrible punishments meted out to - an array of rogues and criminals, from murderers and swindlers to prostitutes and pirates. Captured in memoirs, letters, ballads and court transcripts are some of the most colourful villains ever to take their last gasp in the hangman’s noose, including daring thief Jack Sheppard, highwayman Dick Turpin and ingenious pickpocket Jenny Diver. Taking us from back streets and brothels to Newgate Prison and the gallows at Tyburn, CON MEN AND CUTPURSES shows London’s murky underworld in all its squalor and exuberance. In her introduction, Lucy Moore provides an intriguing social and historical background to the texts. This edition also includes a glossary of contemporary slang and on appendix on ‘The Black Act.’ “Lively and fascinating’ - AMANDA FOREMAN, SUNDAY TIMES. ‘An excellent anthology. full of fun and interest’ - THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT.
Lucy Moore (born 1970) is a historian and writer. Moore was educated in Britain and the United States and studied history at Edinburgh University. She appeared in a BBC documentary 'Glamour's Golden Age' in 2013.
Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York. 1987. Farrar Straus Giroux. Translated From The Spanish By Alfred Mc Adam. 151 pages. Jacket design 1987 by Honi Werner. Author photo 1987 by Jerry Bauer. 0374289786. June 1987.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? Mario Vargas Llosa has turned to detective fiction. The setting is Peru in the nineteen-fifties. Near an Air Force base in the northern deserts, a young airman is found tortured and murdered. Two local policemen, Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma, set out to investigate. They are not glamorous detectives with modern resources at their disposal; they don't even have a squad car and have to cajole a local cabdriver to take them out to the scene of the crime. Not that anyone seems to care very much if Silva and Lituma capture Palomino Molero's killer. The commanding officer of the air base seems to do everything he can to impede their investigations, and their own superior officers are, at best, indifferent. But Silva and Lituma persevere, and, in the end, uncover the truth. WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? is an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery. It is also, as might be expected of any work by Mario Vargas Llosa, serious fiction. Deftly, unobtrusively, the book takes up some of the great themes of all of Vargas Llosa's novels: guilt and innocence, and despair at how difficult it is to be an honest man in a society based on the corruption both of motives and of feelings.
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. New York. 1927. Albert & Charles Boni. hardcover.
A brilliant novel of deceit and tragic intensity.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Ford Madox Ford has been among the neglected writers of the first quarter of this century. His tragic novel, THE GOOD SOLDIER, in which he portrays, in the stoical but fallible figure of Edward Ashburnham, an example of the English landed gentry at its best, was written just before the First World War. This unembittered story of deceit and hatred was readily termed 'great', 'a piece of art and therefore an enlightenment', and 'beautiful and moving' by contemporary reviewers. A more modern estimate of its worth is expressed by Walter Allen in Tradition and Dream: 'Ford's finest novel is probably THE GOOD SOLDIER, as formally perfect a novel as any in English and an amazingly subtle account, by one of them, of the lives of four people who appear to live in harmony and friendship.'
Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer, was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now remembered best for his publications The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's ‘100 Greatest Novels of All Time’, and The Guardian's ‘1000 novels everyone must read’. Ford was born to Catherine and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish the fellow Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a Catholic aristocrat. He used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and during 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly, in the aftermath of World War I because ‘Hueffer’ sounded too German) in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two ‘perfect couples’ using intricate flashbacks. In the ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, his wife, that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier ‘the finest French novel in the English language!’ Ford pronounced himself a ‘Tory mad about historic continuity’ and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time. Ford was involved with British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, with other writers and scholars who were popular during that time, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915). After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I. Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, ‘the swan song of historical romance.’ Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised during 1935) is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. During 1908, he initiated The English Review, in which he published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. During 1924, he initiated The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, he befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). As a critic, he is known for remarking ‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ George Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: ‘'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes.’ Ford says, ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway.’ Seldes observes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.’ Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s. During a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. During 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously. Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York. 1922. B. W. Huebsch. 299 pages. hardcover.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
First published in 1916, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is one of the masterpieces of modern fiction. James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical first novel, this is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family his education, and his country by committing himself to the artistic life. Joyce’s brilliant rendering of the impressions and experiences of childhood broke new ground in the use of language and in the structure of the novel. As the coming-of-age story of an extraordinary young man, James Joyce’s modern classic has become one of the twentieth century’s most popular works of fiction. As a bold literary experiment, it has had an important and lasting influence on the contemporary novel.
Other editions:
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family that experienced increasing financial difficulties during his childhood. After attending Clongowes Wood College and Belevedere College (both Jesuit institutions) in Dublin, he entered the Royal University, where he studied languages and philosophy. Upon his graduation, in 1902, Joyce left Ireland for France but returned the following year because his mother was dying. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle (they fell in love on June 16, ‘Bloomsday’), and in October of that year they went together to Europe, settling in Trieste. In 1909 and again in 1912 Joyce made unsuccessful attempts to publish Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories that he intended to be ‘a chapter of the moral history of my country focused on Dublin, ‘the centre of paralysis.’ In 1914 Dubliners finally appeared, followed by the semiautobiographical novel A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, a reworking of an earlier manuscript, STEPHEN HERO. During the First World War Joyce and Nora lived in Zurich; in 1920 they moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. FINNEGANS WAKE, Joyce’s most radical and complex work, began appearing in installments in 1928 and was published in its entirety in 1939. After the German occupation of Paris, Joyce and Nora (who were married in 1931) moved to Zurich, where he died in January. His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’
Manuel Puig and The Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions by Suzanne Jill Levine. New York. 2000. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. 448 pages. Jacket design by Jonathan D. Lippincott. Jacket photograph by Mario Fenelli. Photograph of author and Manuel Puig, 1981, by Lydia Rubio. 0374281904.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Manuel Puig (1932-1990), Argentinian author of KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN and pioneer of high camp, stands alone in the pantheon of contemporary Latin American literature. Strongly influenced by Hollywood films of the thirties and forties, his many-layered novels and plays integrate serious fiction and popular culture, mixing political and sexual themes with B-movie scenarios. When his first two novels were published in the late sixties, they delighted the public but were dismissed as frivolous by the leftist intellectuals of the Boom; his third novel was banned by the Peronist government for irreverence. His influence was already felt though-even by writers who had dismissed him-and by the time the film version of KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN became a worldwide hit, he was a renowned literary figure. Puig’s way of life was as unconventional as his fiction: he spoke of himself in the female form in Spanish, renamed his friends after his favorite movie stars, referred to his young male devotees as ‘daughters,’ and, as a perennial expatriate, lived (often with his mother) everywhere from Rome to Rio de Janeiro. Suzanne Jill Levine, his principal English translator, draws upon years of friendship as well as copious research and interviews in her remarkable book, the first biography of this inimitable writer.
SUZANNE JILL LEVINE is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a noted translator of contemporary Latin American literature. She is the author of three books, including THE SUBVERSIVE SCRIBE.
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. New York. 1979. Knopf. Translated From The Spanish By Thomas Colchie. 282 pages. Front of jacket based on a design by Josef Hotmann. 039450366. April 1979. Originally published in 1976 in Spain as El Beco de la Mujer Arana.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
From the celebrated author of BETRAYED BY RITA HAYWORTH -an intensely moving novel about love and victimization. Two men are cellmates in an Argentine prison. Molina is a window dresser, homosexual, sentenced to eight years for 'corruption of minors'; Valentin is a Marxist student, held without trial for three years for inciting 'disturbances' at an auto factory. Molina is self-obsessed, self-denigrating, but charming, too-he entertains himself by telling Valentin, in elegant detail, the plots of his favorite romantic Hollywood movies. Trapped in naive enslavement to an idea of men as powerful and responsible and strong, he sees himself as dependent, fragile, vulnerable; he identifies with the heroines of his films. Molina is haunted by the fear that his mother will die of heart disease before he is released, but he is still full of siy humor, brio, delight in life. Valentin is articulate, dogmatic, filled with revolutionary fervor, suppressing in shame his occasional spasms of longing for the ordinary comforts he has renounced and for the memory of a girl he left because she loved him more than politics, a girl 'with class. ' Their guarded but growing friendship - which is all they have and which slowly transfigures them - is threatened as prison officials try to enlist one of them to betray the other. As they live through crisis, caught in the tyranny of politics over feelings, caught in a profound test of human loyalty and in the corruption of their world - what happens to them is conveyed with extraordinary grace and power.
Manuel Puig was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traicion de Rita Hayworth, Boquitas pintadas, and El beso de la mujer arana, which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Hector Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical. He was born in General Villegas After unsuccessfully studying architecture in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, he began working as a film archivist and editor in Buenos Aires and later, in Italy after winning a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Buenos Aires. Puig's dream was to become a screenwriter to write TV shows and movies. His career as a screenwriter never took off, however. In the 1960s, he moved back to Buenos Aires, where he penned his first major novel, a Traicion de Rita Hayworth. Because he had leftist political tendencies also foresaw a rightist wave in Argentina, Puig moved to Mexico in 1973, where he wrote his later works Much of Puig's work can be seen as pop art. Perhaps due to his work in film and television, Puig managed to create a writing style that incorporated elements of these mediums, such as montage and the use of multiple points of view. He also made much use of popular culture in his works. In Latin American literary histories, he is presented as a writer who belongs to the Postboom and Post-modernist schools. Puig lived in exile throughout most of his life. In 1989 Puig moved from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1990. In the official biography, his close friend Suzanne Jill Levine, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fiction writes that Puig had been in pain for a few days prior to being admitted to a hospital, where he was told that his gallbladder was inflamed and would have to be taken out. After the surgery, while Puig was recovering, he began to choke and gasp. The medical team were unable to help Puig. His lungs had filled with fluid, and he died of a heart attack at 4:55am on July 22,1990.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1970. Walker & Company. Translated From The Polish By Joanna Kilmartin & Steven Cox. 216 pages. Jacket illustration by Jack Gaughan. 0802755267.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
When Kris Kelvin left Earth for Station Solaris, he was prepared for the hazards of space travel - solitude, hardship, exhaustion, perhaps death - but not for the cruel miracle of landing at his destination to find himself as he really is: to confront a presence and emotions long forgotten and suppressed, and no longer feared. An invisible, elusive spirit had taken possession of those stationed at Solaris - one that knew them better than they did themselves and held them prisoners of their own nightmares. One traveler takes his own life, another goes mad, a third disappears before the phenomenon of the 'Psi-creature' is explained. The 'ocean covering Solaris seems to be a gigantic fluid brain, prodigiously powerful and several million years beyond our own civilization, To the explorers on Solaris, it becomes a mysterious, alien force, threatening to their emotional endurance and challenging to their intellectual capacities. From the perspective of Solaris, emerges a new view of the nature of man: a creature who soars off into the cosmos in quest of other worlds and greedy for scientific knowledge, without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, without discovering what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
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.
Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror In The French Revolution by R. R. Palmer. Princeton. 1958. Princeton University Press. 417 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In its fifth year, the French Revolution faced a multifaceted crisis that threatened to overwhelm the Republic. In response the government instituted a revolutionary dictatorship and a 'reign of terror,' with a Committee of Public Safety at its head. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.
R. R. Palmer was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. For many years he taught at Princeton University, and several of his books have been published by Princeton University Press. These include CATHOLICS AND UNBELIEVERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRANCE (1939), TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1941 and 1958), and a translation of Georges Lefebvre's THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1947).