Woody Allen A humor classic by one of the funniest writers today, SIDE EFFECTS is a treat for all those who know his work and those just discovering how gifted he is. Included here are such classics as REMEMBERING NEEDLEMAN, THE KUGELMASS EPISODE, a new sory called CONFESSIONS OF A BUGLAR, and more.

Woody Allen Over the course of his long directing career, Woody Allen has portrayed contemporary American life with an unmistakable mixture of irony, neurotic obsession, and humor. Woody Allen on Woody Allen is a unique self-portrait of this uncompromising filmmaker that offers a revealing account of his life and work. In a series of rare, in-depth interviews, Allen brings us onto the sets and behind the scenes of all his films. Since its original publication, Woody Allen on Woody Allen has been the primary source of Allen's own thoughts on his work, childhood, favorite films, and inspirations. Now updated with one hundred pages of new material that brings us up to his Hollywood Ending, Woody Allen on Woody Allen is a required addition to any cinephile's library.

Guillaume Apollinaire Text by Guillaume Apollinaire. Translated by Remy Inglis Hall.

Guillaume Apollinaire An early and influential champion of cubism, the friend of Braque, Picasso, Dufy, Rousseau and Marie Laurencin (who became his mistress), Apollinaire was a seminal figure in the revolutionary art style known as "Surrealism," a term that he coined some seven years before Breton formally founded the movement.

In this charming book, published in 1910 and embellished with the graphically sophisticated and totally appropriate woodcuts of Dufy, we find the poet at his most accessible. His quatrains, printed in Dante italic and felicitously translated by Pepe Karmel, present a voice that ranges from the colloquial to the impassioned, a brisk combination of lyric imagery and bawdy humor (not surprising for a poet who, after a pious adolescence, supported himself by writing pornography). This is a small bijou of a livre de peintre, a lovely and lively ensemble of accessible poetry and striking woodcut art.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire Apollinaire was modernism's first champion, and after his early death in 1918, he became its first saint. Lying in a hospital bed in 1915, recovering from combat wounds suffered in World War I, Apollinaire assembled the fragments of a tragicomic, mock-epic, and occasionally obscene autobiography-a-clef: The Poet Assassinated. This novella recounts the life and death of Croniamantal, whose birth is "saluted" by the Eiffel Tower's "beautiful erection," who rises through the Parisian literary world to proclaim himself "the greatest of living poets," and who is then torn to pieces by a mob. A statue built "out of nothing, like poetry and glory," is constructed in his honor. This translation is by Matthew Josephson, an American editor who arrived in Paris just after the war and entered the circle of avant-garde artists and poets that had been galvanized by Apollinaire's life and death. Josephson was among the first to introduce these dadaists and surrealists to the U.S. via his archetypal small magazine, Broom, and among his most ambitious projects was this translation, published by Broom as a limited edition book in 1923 and never since reprinted.

Louis Aragon classic surrealist novel, tr Jo Levy

Louis Aragon By Louis Aragon. Translated and with an Introduction by Simon Watson Taylor.

Louis Aragon This is the first paperback edition in English of one of the most important and entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragon's 1922 novel boldly appropriates the title and plot of a didactic 17th-century epic, recounting the adventures of Odysseus' son Telemachus; but the moralistic underpinnings of the original are replaced by a Surrealist's dedication to the strange, the beautiful, and the erotic. Though a classic of Surrealism, this is not automatic writing; on the contrary, it is a wryly self-conscious book, full of the kinds of intertextual games associated with writers such as Borges and Calvino. As the Huberts comment in their Introduction, "Aragon did not have to liberate his mind through automatic exercises; but by mastering and playing with the narrative he succeeded in freeing himself from the constraints of mimeticism descend[ing] into the diabolical nirvana of dada."

Aristophanes The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Arist

Arnold Aronson This stunning contribution to the field of theatre history is the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States between the mid-1950's and the mid 1980's. American Avant-garde Theatre offers a definition of the avant-garde, and looks at its origins and theoretical foundations by examining: Gertrude Stein * John Cage * The Beat writers * Avant-garde cinema * Abstract Expressionism * Minimalism. There are fascinating discussions and illustrations of the productions of Living Theatre, the Wooster Group, Open Theatre and Performance Group, among many others. Aronson also examines why avant-garde theatre declined and virtually disappeared at the end of the twentieth century.

Jared Ash, Nina Gurianova, Gerald Janecek, Margit Rowell, Deborah Wye, Natalia Goncharova, Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko Russian avant-garde books made between 1910 and 1934 reflect a vivid and tumultuous period in that nation's history that had ramifications for art, society, and politics. The early books, with their variously sized pages of coarse paper, illustrations entwined with printed, hand-written, and stamped texts, and provocative covers, were intended to shock academic conventions and bourgeois sensibilities. After the 1917 Revolution, books appeared with optimistic designs and photomontage meant to reach the masses and symbolize a rational, machine-led future. Later books showcased modern Soviet architecture and industry in the service of the government's agenda. Major artists adopted the book format during these two decades. They include Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, the Stenberg brothers, Varvara Stepanova, and others. These artists often collaborated with poets, who created their own transrational language to accompany the imaginative illustrations. Three major artistic movements, Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism, that developed during this period in painting and sculpture also found their echo in the book format. This publication accompanied an exhibition of Russian avant-garde books at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. All of the books in the exhibition and this publication are part of a gift to the Museum from The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Paul Auster

Paul Auster

Banksy The collected works of Britain’s most wanted artist.

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable (except maybe when it’s squatting in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum or Museum of Modern Art.) Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world.

Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough you’ll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and witty comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals.

His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. And now for the first time, he’s putting together the best of his work—old and new—in a fully illustrated color volume.

Banksy, real name unknown, was born in Bristol, England.

Toby Barlow

Toby Barlow

Djuna Barnes Barnes's extraordinary first novel, illustrated

Djuna Barnes The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.

Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.

John Barth This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece.  This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide" (Time ).

John Barth Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction.  Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

Georges Bataille "Literature is not innocent," Bataille declares in the preface to this unique collection of literary profiles. "It is guilty and should admit itself so." The word, the flesh, and the devil are explored by this extraordinary intellect in the work of eight outstanding authors: Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Blake, Michelet, Kafka, Proust, Genet and De Sade.

Born in France in 1897, Georges Bataille was a radical philosopher, novelist and critic whose writings continue to exert a vital influence on today's literature and thought.

Charles Baudelaire poetry, tr William H Crosby, bilingual

Charles Baudelaire In his controversial 1857 work, Les Fleurs du mal, the 19th-century decadent poet addresses the conflict of good and evil by rejecting conventional distinctions to pursue beauty in perversity. This volume features selections from Baudelaire’s masterpiece, perhaps the most influential French poetry ever written, in an inexpensive edition that invites readers to explore the remarkable sensuality, depths of thought, and feeling in one of the most original and influential books of the age.

Charles Baudelaire From the introduction by Michael Hamburger:

"Baudelaire's prose poems were written at long intervals during the last twelve or thirteen years of his life. The prose poem was a medium much suited to his habits and character. Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty. His thinking about society and politics, as about everything else, was experimental; like the thinking of most poets it drew on experience and imagination, rather than on facts and general arguments. That is another reason why the prose poem proved a medium so congenial to Baudelaire."

Wolfgang Bauer The Feverhead is written in the form of letters between a couple of not-all-that-bright Austrians. Their correspondence is doomed to failure, nearly every letter crosses in the post and yet they succeed in their quest: the search for a perfect thermometer (and a serial murderer). In fact they both independently discover the secret of the universe in a remote spot thousands of miles from their intended (and different) destinations.Bauer’s comedy of errors is ennacted by an unusual cast that includes microscopic schoolgirls, ambigously sexed nuns, incompetent detectives, two ultimately bad poets, living steam engines and a venerable three-eyed sea-captain whose two bodies remain exactly 3.5 metres apart, not to mention: ULF.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett This collection gathers together the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett's English poems (including Whoroscope, his first published verse), English translations of poems by Eluard, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Chamfort, and poems in French, several of which are presented in translation.

Samuel Beckett This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play, Krapp's Last Tape, evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday.

The two radio plays were commissioned by the BBC; All That Fall "plumbs the same pessimistic depths [as Waiting for Godot] in what seems a no less despairing search for human dignity" (London Times), and Embers is equally unforgettable theater, born of the ramblings of an old man and his wife.

Samuel Beckett (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy's second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologue–delivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beauty–of what might or might not be an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. Within their linguistic terrain, where stories are taken up, broken off, and taken up again, where voices rise and crumble and are resurrected, we can discern the essential lineaments of our modern condition, and encounter an awesome vision, tragic yet always compelling and always mysteriously invigorating, of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature.

Samuel Beckett “It is one thing to be informed by Shakespeare that life “is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing”; it is something else to encounter the idea literally presented in a novel by Samuel Beckett. But I am reasonably certain that a sensitive reader who journeys through How It Is will leave the book convinced that Beckett says more that is relevant to experience in our time than Shakespeare does in Macbeth. It should come as no surprise if a decade or so hence How It Is is appraised as a masterpiece of modern literature. This poetic novel is Beckett at his height.” — Webster Schott

“A wonderful book, written in the sparest prose. . . . Beckett is one of the rare creative minds in our times.” — Alan Pryce-Jones

“What is novel is the absolute sureness of design. . . built phrase by phrase into a beautifully and tightly wrought structure — a few dozen expressions permuted with deliberate redundancy accumulate meaning even as they are emptied of it, and offer themselves as points of radiation in a strange web of utter illusion.” — Hugh Kenner

Samuel Beckett A seminal work of twentieth century drama, Waiting for Godotwas Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone — or something — named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

Samuel Beckett The abandoned manuscript of Samuel Beckett's first play, Eleutheria has finally found its way into print after a highly dramatic legal and literary battle. It is clear ... that Eleutheria merits both publication and production, but it must be placed into perspective.Waiting for Godot is revolutionary; Eleutheria is evolutionary. The play, a valuable addition to Beckett's body of work, will be of interest to anyone concerned with the author's art and with exploratory theater.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett Samuel Beckett's "high energy and boisterously libidinous"(Booklist) first novel—a wonderfully savory introduction to the NobelPrize-winning author during this centenary year.Written in the summer of 1932, when the 26-year-old Beckett was poor andstruggling, Dream of Fair to middling Women offers a rare and revealingportrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call thenovel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts." When hesubmitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, tooscandalous, or too risky, and it was never published during his lifetime. In the novel, Belacqua—a young version of Molloy, whose love is dividedbetween two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the Alba——"wrestles with his lustsand learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final relapseinto Dublin'" (The New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influencedby Joyce, Dream of Fair to middling Women is a work of extraordinaryvirtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language thatmark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that,like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.

Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, Jack Gelber, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter

Janine M. Benyus Biomimicry is a revolutionary new science that analyzes natures best ideas—spider silk and eyes, seashells and brain cells, photosynthesis and DNA—and adapts them for human use. Janine Benyus takes us into the lab and out in the field with the maverick researchers who are discovering natures ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival: studying leaves to learn how to make microscopic solar power packs that will clean up toxic spills and light our homes; harnessing DNAs coding power to make blindingly fast computers; discovering miracle drugs by observing what animals eat; and much more. The answers are there for the finding, poemlike in their elegance and economy.

Anyone interested in the people and ideas that are shaping our future must read this book to know where the most exciting revelations lie—literally all around us.

David Berman David Berman reinvents the overlooked and seemingly ordinary details of everyday life—from the suitcase of a departing girlfriend to a baseboard electrical outlet. His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. This debut collection has received extraordinary acclaim from readers and reviewers alike and is quickly becoming a cult classic. As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate said, "These poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. . . . It's a book for everyone."

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce, David E. Schultz, S. T. Joshi A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Ambrose Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.

This is the most extensively annotated edition of a work by Bierce ever published, and the first edition of The Devil's Dictionary to provide detailed bibliographical information on every entry. It will be celebrated by wits and word lovers everywhere.

First time in paperback.

Harold Bloom For more than forty years, renowned literary critic Harold Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threaten to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.

Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. Bloom provides illuminating guidance on how to read the works of beloved writers such as William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Dickens; and he illustrates what such reading can bring — aesthetic pleasure, self-knowledge, and the lifetime companionship of the most intriguing and complex literary characters.

Bloom's engaging prose and brilliant insights will send you hurrying back to old favorites and entice you to discover new ones. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.

Jorge Luis Borges This remarkable book by one of the great writers of our time includes essays on a proposed universal language, a justification of suicide, a refutation of time, the nature of dreams, and the intricacies of linguistic forms. Borges comments on such literary figures as Pascal, Coleridge, Cervantes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Valéry, Wilde, Shaw, and Kafka. With extraordinary grace and erudition, he ranges in time, place, and subject from Omar Khayyam to Joseph Conrad, from ancient China to modern England, from world revolution to contemporary slang.

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers has been heralded as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century by Mortimer J. Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World. It has been acknowledged by its author as his most personal work. Composed of poems, parables, and stories, sketches and apocryphal quotations, Dreamtigers at first glance appears to be a sampler—albeit a dazzling one—of the master's work. Upon closer examination, however, the reader discovers the book to be a subtly and organically unified self-revelation.

Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies between the dreams of the creative artist and the "real" world. The central vision of the work is that of a recluse in the "enveloping serenity " of a library, looking ahead to the time when he will have disappeared but in the timeless world of his books will continue his dialogue with the immortals of the past — Homer, Don Quixote, Shakespeare. Like Homer, the maker of these dreams is afflicted with failing sight. Still, he dreams of tigers real and imagined and reflects upon of a life that, above all, has been intensely introspective, a life of calm self-possession and absorption in the world of the imagination. At the same time he is keenly aware of that other Borges, the public figure about whom he reads with mixed emotions: "It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."

Jorge Luis Borges Borges On Writing

In 1971, Jorge Luis Borges was invited to preside over a series of seminars on his writing at Columbia University. This book is a record of those seminars, which took the form of informal discussions between Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni—his editor and translator, Frank MacShane—then head of the writing program at Columbia, and the students. Borges's prose, poetry, and translations are handled separately and the book is divided accordingly.

The prose seminar is based on a line-by-line discussion of one of Borges's most distinctive stories, "The End of the Duel." Borges explains how he wrote the story, his use of local knowledge, and his characteristic method of relating violent events in a precise and ironic way. This close analysis of his methods produces some illuminating observations on the role of the writer and the function of literature.

The poetry section begins with some general remarks by Borges on the need for form and structure and moves into a revealing analysis of four of his poems. The final section, on translation, is an exciting discussion of how the art and culture of one country can be "translated" into the language of another.

This book is a tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of South America's—indeed, the world's—most distinguished writers and provides valuable insight into his inspiration and his method.

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish- language writer of the century. Now, for the first time in English, all of Borges's dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume—from his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose-poems of The Maker, up to his final, and never-before-translated, work from the '80s, Shakespeare's Memory. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story itself, Borges returns again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife fighters, transparent tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Collected Fictions is the perfect one- volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and the perfect introduction to the master's work for all those who have yet to discover him.

Jorge Luis Borges, Alexander Coleman When Viking published Borges's Collected Fictions last September, the book received nationwide acclaim. Richard Bernstein in The New York Times hailed the publication as "an event, and cause for celebration." The celebration continues this April with the next installment in Viking's projected three-volume set of the Collected Work: a new selection of Borges's finest poems edited by Alexander Coleman.

Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems—the largest collection of Borges's poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The selection draws from a lifetime's work—from Borges's earliest work in the 20s, his debut Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final poetic work, Los Conjurados (1985). Throughout the volume, the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W. S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.
"—In Borges's case I do not consider it rash to acclaim him as the most important thing to happen to imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times and as one of the most memorable artists of our age."— Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Luis Borges, Calin-Andrei Mihailescu Available in cloth, paper, or audio CD

Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.

Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history, and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own "poetic creed," Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the twentieth century will be long remembered. (20001106)

Jorge Luis Borges, Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby Take a new look at Labyrinths, the classic by Latin America's finest writer of the twentieth century—a true literary sensation—with cyber-author William Gibson.

The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.

This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition (as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical essay, a poignant tribute by André Maurois, and a chronology of the author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century.

Paul Bowles A Distant Episode conatins the best of Paul Bowle's short fiction, selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a best-seller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990.

Heinrich Böll

Andre Breton Mad Love has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now. 

"There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine," writes André Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and '30s. Mad Love is dedicated to defying "the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in its own dust." Celebrating breton's own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things.

Andre Breton Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life.The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work—pictures of various 'surreal' people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.

Andre Breton This is the first publication in English of the anthology that contains Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and his provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. While some of the authors featured in the Anthology of Black Humor are already well known to American readers-Swift, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Baudelaire among them (and even then, Breton's selections are often surprising)-many others are sure to come as a revelation.

The entries range from the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg, and Duchamp to the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, from the wry missives of Rimbaud and Jacques Vache to the manic paranoia of Dal, from the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Craven to the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire at his most spontaneous. For each of the forty-five authors included, Breton has provided an enlightening biographical and critical preface, situating both the writer and the work in the context of black humor-a partly macabre, partly ironic, and often absurd turn of spirit that Breton defined as "a superior revolt of the mind."

Andre Breton (1896-1966), the founder and principal theorist of the Surrealist movement, is one of the major literary figures of the past century. His best-known works in English translation include Nadja, Mad Love, The Manifestoes of Surrealism, The Magnetic Fields (with Philippe Soupault), and Earthlight. Mark Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton.

Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard This book collects together the two most vital "automatic" texts of Surrealism. Breton’s prefatory essay The Automatic Message relates this technique to the underlying concepts and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement.

The Magnetic Fields (1919) was the first work of literary Surrealism and is thus one of the foundations of modern European thought and writing. This authorised translation is by the poet David Gascoyne, himself a member of the group and a friend of both authors.

The Immaculate Conception (1930) traces the interior and exterior life of man from Conception and Intra-Uterine Life to Death and The Original Judgement. The central section is a celebrated series of "simulations" of various types of mental instability.

Maurice Nadeau (in The History of Surrealism) described the book as "An astonishing series of poems in prose, more brilliant than those of either Breton or Eluard on his own . . . if all that remained of the Surrealist movement were the pages of The Immaculate Conception, man, alerted, could not turn away from the astounding mystery of his condition."

Charles Burns An early classic from the author of Black Hole.

Meet El Borbah, a 400-pound private eye who wears a Mexican wrestler's tights and eerie mask. Subsisting entirely on junk food and beer, El Borbah conducts his investigations with tough talk and a short temper. He smashes through doors and skulls as he stalks a perfectly realized film-noir city filled with punks, geeks, business-suited creeps and mad scientists.

El Borbah features five science-fiction and true-detective episodes: In "Robot Love," rebellious kids in nightclubs replace their "parts" with mechanical substitutes as part of a new fad, only to find that their parents have been automating themselves all along; in "Love in Vein" a mad visionary sperm donor plans a master race and turns "his" kids against their parents; "Bone Voyage" details the exploits of a cult called the Brotherhood of the Bone, a kind of cross between the Masons and the Mansons. The fantastic plots take up the weird fears of a scientific society, but the action is pure pulp. Charles Burns effortlessly spins yarns with gritty punchlines and pictures so perfect they must have existed in some collective memory of junk drama. And through it all crashes El Borbah, trying to make an honest buck from dishonest people.

Burns is the author of Black Hole, the acknowledged masterpiece of the form that Fantagraphics serialized through the 1990s and will be collected into a massive graphic novel in 2005 by Pantheon Books. El Borbah is Burns' earliest work, created in the early 1980s, though the work remains eerily contemporary. Steeped in a "sci-fi-noir" aesthetic informed by Burns' steadily childhood diet of B-movies and comic books, but with a sophisticated sense of humor that is often as disturbing as it is funny, El Borbah is comics as its most entertaining.

Charles Burns Graphic novel pulp noir from the creator of Black Hole.

From the creator of the 2005 hit graphic novel Black Hole comes this new softcover of edition of his other masterpiece of modern horror. Big Baby is a particularly impressionable young boy named Tony Delmonte, who lives in a seemingly typical American suburb until he sneaks out of his room one night and becomes entagled in a horrific plot involving summer camp murders and backyard burials. Burns' clinical precision as an artist adds a sinister chill to his droll sense of humor, and his affection for 20th century pulp fiction permeates throughout, creating a brilliant narrative that perfectly captures the unease and fear of adolescence.

Charles Burns Winner of the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards

The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back.

As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.

And then the murders start.

As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.

To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…

A.S. Byatt From the award-winning author of Possession comes an ingenious novel about love and literary sleuthing: a dazzling fiction woven out of one man’s search for fact.

Here is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. In a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic, scientific and sensual, Phineas tracks his subject to the deserts of Africa and the maelstrom of the Arctic. Along the way he comes to rely on two women, one of whom may be the guide he needs out of the dizzying labyrinth of his research and back into his own life. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” in biography and our perennial quest for certainty.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Pierre Cabanne ”Marcel Duchamp, one of this century’s pioneer artists, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with impressionism into t field with impressionism into t field where language, thought and vision act upon one another, There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art...In the 1920s Duchamp gave up, quit painting. He allowed, perhaps encouraged, the attendant mythology. One thought of his decision, his willing this stopping. Yet on one occasion, he said it was not like that. He spoke of breaking a leg. ’You don’t mean to do it,’ he said.The Large Glass. A greenhouse for his intuition. Erotic machinery, the Bride, held in a see-through cage—’a Hilarious Picture.’ Its cross references of sight and thought, the changing focus of the eyes and mind, give fresh sense to the time and space we occupy, negate any concern with art as transportation. No end is in view in this fragment of a new perspective. ’In the end you lose interest, so I didn’t feel the necessity to finish it.’He declared that he wanted to kill art (’for myself’) but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, ’a new thought for that object.’The art community feels Duchamp’s presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here.”—Jasper Johns, from Marcel Duchamp: An Appreciation

Italo Calvino The three long stories in this volume show the range and virtuosity of Italy’s most imaginative writer. “Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams for us” (John Updike, New Yorker).Translated by William Weaver and Archibald Colquhoun. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. “Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. “Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty” (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Cosimo, a young eighteenth-century Italian nobleman, rebels by climbing into the trees to remain there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence and even has love affairs. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun.

Italo Calvino Two novellas: the first, a parody of medieval knighthood told by a nun; the second, a fantasy about a nobleman bisected into his good and evil halves. “Bravura pieces... executed with brilliance and brio”(Chicago Tribune). Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino A series of short, fantastic narratives inspired by fifteenth-century tarot cards and their archetypical images. Full-color and black-and-white reproductions of tarot cards. Translated by William Weaver.A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino This boxed paperback set includes three of Italian author Italo Calvino's best-known works: Invisible Cities - A beautifully written book in which the young Marco Polo sits in a garden with the aged Kublai Khan, weaving fantastic tales about cities that merge into one. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - a collection of ten stories that weave themselves into one incredible novel. The Baron in the Trees - A fantasy set in the 18th Century about a young Italian nobleman who rebels against parental authority by climbing into the trees, where he remains for the rest of his life. Calivino's style has been described, by turns, as light fantasy, postmodern, and magical realist. Whatever his style, these stories, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, are to be savored and enjoyed.

Italo Calvino (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Introduction by Peter Washington; Translation by William Weaver

Italo Calvino’s masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book’s central character.

Based on a witty analogy between the reader’s desire to finish the story and the lover’s desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book—IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER, by Italo Calvino, of course—are constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one another—an Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.

Italo Calvino Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams-but the results are never the expected ones. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Tales of love and loneliness in which the author blends reality and illusion. “The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work,...and a certain lovable nuttiness make this collection well worth reading” (Margaret Atwood). Translated by William Weaver, Peggy Wright, and Archibald Colquhoun. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman’s breasts, or a gorilla’s behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume. Translated by Patrick Creagh. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Chosen as one of the New York Times’s ten best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists. Introduction by the Author; illustrations. Translated by George Martin. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino Italo Calvino, one of the world's best storytellers, died on the eve of his departure for Harvard, where he was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86. Reticent by nature, he was always reluctant to talk about himself, but he welcomed the opportunity to talk about the making of literature. In the process of devising his lectures—his wife recalls that they were an "obsession" for the last year of his life—he could not avoid mention of his own work, his methods, intentions, and hopes. This book, then, is Calvino's legacy to us: those universal values he pinpoints for future generations to cherish become the watchword for our appreciation of Calvino himself.

What about writing should be cherished? Calvino, in a wonderfully simple scheme, devotes one lecture (a memo for his reader) to each of five indispensable literary values. First there is "lightness" (leggerezza), and Calvino cites Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Leopardi, and Kundera—among others, as always—to show what he means: the gravity of existence has to be borne lightly if it is to be borne at all. There must be "quickness," a deftness in combining action (Mercury) with contemplation (Saturn). Next is "exactitude," precision and clarity of language. The fourth lecture is on "visibility," the visual imagination as an instrument for knowing the world and oneself. Then there is a tour de force on "multiplicity," where Calvino brilliantly describes the eccentrics of literature (Elaubert, Gadda, Musil, Perec, himself) and their attempt to convey the painful but exhilarating infinitude of possibilities open to humankind.

The sixth and final lecture - worked out but unwritten - was to be called "Consistency." Perhaps surprised at first, we are left to ponder how Calvino would have made that statement, and, as always with him, the pondering leads to more. With this book Calvino gives us the most eloquent, least defensive "defense of literature" scripted in our century - a fitting gift for the next millennium.

Esther Calvino has supervised the preparation of this book. She is Italo Calvino's Argentinian-born wife and a translator for several international organizations. Among Calvino's best-known works of fiction are Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, The Baron in the Trees, if on a winter's night a traveler, and Mr. Palomar.

Italo Calvino A major testament by an essential 20th century writer composed of five strikingly elegant "memory exercises" about his life and work—now available in paperback. With visionary passion, the author traces pieces of his childhood and adolescence, his experiences during WWII, and more. "Storytelling at its best."—Chicago Tribune.

Italo Calvino For the first time in paperback—a volume of thirty-seven diabolically inventive stories, fables, and "impossible interviews" from one of the great fantasists of the 20th century, displaying the full breadth of his vision and wit.  Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition.

Italo Calvino Italo Calvino's debut novel, updated to include changes that the author made for the definitive Italian edition, previously censored passages, and his newly translated, unabridged preface. "The Path to the Spiders' Nests," written when Calvino was twenty-three and first published in 1947—tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian Coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at the lowlife bar where he amuses the grownups. After a mishap with a Nazi soldier, Pin becomes involved with a band of partisans. Calvino's portrayal of this band, seen through the eyes of the child, is not only a revealing commentary on the Italian resistance, but also an insightful coming-of-age story. A bold, adventurous novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nests is animated by the formidable imagination that made Italo Calvino one of the most respected writers of our time.

Italo Calvino From the internationally-acclaimed author of some of this century's most breathtakingly original novels comes this posthumous collection of thirty-six literary essays that will make any fortunate reader view the old classics in a dazzling new light.

Learn why Lara, not Zhivago, is the center of Pasternak's masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, and why Cyrano de Bergerac is the forerunner of modern-day science-fiction writers. Learn how many odysseys The Odyssey contains, and why Hemingway's Nick Adams stories are a pinnacle of twentieth-century literature. From Ovid to Pavese, Xenophon to Dickens, Galileo to Gadda, Calvino covers the classics he has loved most with essays that are fresh, accessible, and wise. Why Read the Classics? firmly establishes Calvino among the rare likes of Nabokov, Borges, and Lawrence—writers whose criticism is as vibrant and unique as their groundbreaking fiction.

Italo Calvino Never before published in English, these essayistic writings enlarge our understanding of one of the twentieth centrury's most beloved authors.

In evocations of Italo Calvino's tumultuous teenage years—his life during Mussolini's rule, at the time of the liberation, and during the Cold War—we learn the story of the author's generation as it confronted moral, civil, and artistic dilemmas. In writings from the extended periods during which Calvino lived alone in Paris and New York, we witness his struggle to find "the right distance between being involved and being detached." In "American Diary" he recounts his peregrinations throughout the United States in 1959 and 1960: from New York to Texas, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston. He describes his bafflement with heretofore unimaginable technology, his fascination with the Beats, his horror at the squalor of the suburbs, the inspiration he derived from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words and actions, his impressions of myriad aspects of American culture.

Filled with the author's characteristic insight, intelligence, and brio, Hermit in Paris will take its place alongside Italo Calvino's seminal works.

From the Hardcover edition.

Albert Camus Get your "A" in gear!

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Albert Camus

ALBERT CAMUS

Leonora Carrington

Lewis Carroll

Michael Chabon By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Michael Chabon Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.

What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out — a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts? Or do they hold a significance both more prosaic and far more sinister?

Though the solution may be beyond even the reach of the once-famous sleuth, the true story of the boy and his parrot is subtly revealed in a wrenching resolution.

Michael Chabon For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

Michael Chabon

Anton Chekhov Incisive, masterfully written tales — set in Tsarist Russian milieux — reveal noted author's skills in character, nuance, and setting development. Includes "The Black Monk" (1894), "The House with the Mezzanine" (1896), "The Peasants" (1897), "Gooseberries" (1898), and "The Lady with the Toy Dog" (1899).

Mantak Chia

Daniel Clowes The bestselling author of Ghost World collects his acclaimed short stories from Eightball and Esquire in softcover for the first time.

The dramatic short stories included in this first softcover edition of Caricature have drawn comparisons to Nabokov for their complex naturalism and sense of humor. Anchored by the title story, considered the first great apotheosis of Clowes' seminal Eightball underground comic book series, Caricature also includes eight other stories, including "Green Eyeliner"—originally published in Esquire as the first work of comics to be featured in the magazine's fiction issue (and commissioned by then-editor Dave Eggers)—"Gynecology," "Blue Italian Shit," "The Gold Mommy," and more.

Clowes has been the most successful alternative cartoonist of his generation, and interest in Caricature should be significant. The film adaptation of Clowes' best-selling book, Ghost World, directed by Terry (Crumb) Zwigoff and starring Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi, will be released in summer 2001 by MGM/UA and has garnered advance critical praise. A new edition of the Ghost World graphic novel and the screenplay of the film—written by Clowes and Zwigoff—are both being published by Fantagraphics in conjunction with the film, while Clowes' last novel, Pantheon's David Boring (2000), was heavily promoted in 2000 with a national tour.

Daniel Clowes Meet David Boring: a nineteen-year-old security guard with a tortured inner life and an obsessive nature. When he meets the girl of his dreams, things begin to go awry: what seems too good to be true apparently is. And what seems truest in Boring's life is that, given the right set of circumstances (in this case, an orgiastic cascade of vengeance, humiliation and murder) the primal nature of humankind will come inexorably to the fore.For those interested in comic art's potential, Clowes's work offers exciting literary possibilities. Boring is Anything but. —Time Dan Clowes

Jean Cocteau fiction, tr Margaret Crosland

Max Allan Collins Footprints, a smoking revolver, broken glass . . . Whodunit? Get to the bottom of things with Max Allan Collins, who puts the enigmatic, endlessly fascinating world of the mystery genre under the magnifying glass in THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective Dupin, Collins tracks the modern detective story from its birth in Allan Pinkerton's Memoirs to its fullest flowering in the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald. Collins widens his scope to explore the rich narrative and visual history of detective comics and the legacy of mystery in radio, television, and film noir. This stunning volume presents a magical selection of pulp and dime-novel covers of the thirties and forties, gats-and-gals paperback covers of the fifties and sixties, the Sunday strips' yellow-trenchcoat-clad Dick Tracy, and portraits of the terribly proper and totally astute television dynamos Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Jessica Fletcher. En route, Collins reveals true tidbits about some of mystery's leading lights, like the little known fact that Dashiell Hammett was persecuted during the McCarthy era and opted for jail over betraying a friend, and that Nancy Drew posed for Playboy magazine. Arguably the most comprehensive survey ever published, THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY is sure to please the most discriminating sleuth.

Joseph Cornell, Catherine Corman Joseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes—toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. "Slot machines of visions," said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination—the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for Cornell studies. This new, shorter volume is a poetic addition to that literature, equally indispensible to those interested in Cornell as it contains previously unpublished writings, but also because it is as intriguing and mysterious to the uninitiated as the magical boxes themselves. They are not derived from waking life, but appear as if by chance. Cornell spends the day eating pastries and riding a bicycle. Falling asleep on the couch is like pulling the lever of the slot machines of visions. Images of naiads, lambs, and the ocean appear. -Catherine Corman

Edited and Introduction by Catherine Corman.

Paperback, 6 x 8 in./ 192 pgs

Joseph Cornell, Catherine Corman Joseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes—toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. "Slot machines of visions," said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination—the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for Cornell studies. This new, shorter volume is a poetic addition to that literature, equally indispensible to those interested in Cornell as it contains previously unpublished writings, but also because it is as intriguing and mysterious to the uninitiated as the magical boxes themselves. They are not derived from waking life, but appear as if by chance. Cornell spends the day eating pastries and riding a bicycle. Falling asleep on the couch is like pulling the lever of the slot machines of visions. Images of naiads, lambs, and the ocean appear. -Catherine Corman

Edited and Introduction by Catherine Corman.

Paperback, 6 x 8 in./ 192 pgs

Andrew Crumey Winner of Scotland's Saltire Prize for Best First Novel

Set in an imaginary police state in modern Britain, Andrew Crumey's debut novel explores the complex friendship between two men, Charles King and Robert Waters, a physicist and a historian who share a secret history of political and sexual dimensions. An underground magazine they had once co-published brings then under an investigation that pits one against the other. As the novel's narrator unfolds the tale, he reveals pieces of his own life. His autobiography is augmented by the story of the two friends like the melody and counterpoint of a fugue, until both movements inevitably join across time.

Andrew Crumey As the scientist D'Alembert nears the end of his life, he looks back on his friendships with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot and mourns his unrequited love for a woman who spent years deceiving him. At the same time, an exiled Jacobite dreams of journeying to the planets, and in a prison cell two unlikely captives discuss love, language, and fate. Meticulously crafted, D'Alembert's Principle is a fascinating historical triptych about memory, reason, and imagination set in the rich and lavish world of eighteenth-century Europe.

Andrew Crumey In Mobius Dick, physicist John Ringer, receives a mysterious text message that triggers an investigation into the development of new mobile phone technology in a research facility outside a remote Scottish village. Already the world is becoming a very different place: amnesia, telepathy, false memory, and inexplicable coincidences all seem to be occurring more frequently with humorous, brain teasing results. Could quantum experiments have caused the collapse of our universes space-time continuum? Could the multi-layered text we are reading come from another world altogether?

e. e. cummings e.e. cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of cumming's wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere. "e.e. cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance, 'a positive character'; and only ingenuousness could attempt to suggest in a word the 'heroic' aspect of his painting, his poems, and his resistances. He does not make aesthetic mistakes."-Marianne Moore; "To my way of thinking cummings is, within his field of personal emotion, the lyrical field, one of the inventors of our time. He puts his inventions down with an unexpected refurbishing of phrase and a filigree delicacy of hairbreadth exact statement that is a continual challenge."-John Dos Passos; "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader; since the early twenties, cummings has been more widely imitated and easily appreciated than any other modernist poet."-Randall Jarrell; "He has more control over language than any poet since Joyce. . . . Everybody delights in reading him."-Karl Shapiro.

e. e. cummings The author begins his "nonlectures" with the warning "I haven't the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer." Then, at intervals, he proceeds to deliver the following:

1. i & my parents
2. i & their son
3. i & selfdiscovery
4. i & you & is
5. i & now & him
6. i & am & santa claus

These talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e.e. cummings. Together, it forms a good introduction to the work of e.e. cummings.

E. E. Cummings "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to both the general and the special reader."—Randall Jarrell

The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.

The selection includes most of the favorites plus many fresh and surprising examples of Cummings's several poetic styles. The corrected texts established by George J. Firmage have been used throughout.

E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings, John Rocco, Richard Kostelanetz

Les Daniels, Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear From the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, DC Comics blazed a creative, innovative trail in popular culture, and the company has remained at the forefront of the comics industry ever since. In one milestone after another, DC Comics introduced the fantastic characters that became everyone's favorite super heroes: Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, and Shazam! This brilliantly illustrated volume features entirely new, large-format photography of the original comic books, showcasing the fabulous visual world of the DC comic-book heroes and artists.

Comics historian Les Daniels, graphic designer Chip Kidd, and photographer Geoff Spear have delved deep into the DC archives, to which they were granted unprecedented access, highlighting not only the classics that have become pop-culture icons but also lost gems like More Fun Comics and Comics Cavalcade. The 365 images, shot especially for this book, along with the impeccably researched text and informative introductory essays, ensure that this blast from the past will have a huge appeal for both comic-book devotees and newcomers. AUTHOR BIO: Les Daniels is the author of the official histories of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, as well as DC Comics: A Celebration of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes and Abrams' Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics. Chip Kidd is an award-winning graphic designer and author of The Cheese Monkeys. His work has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time, Graphis, and Entertainment Weekly. Geoff Spear's award-winning photographs have appeared in magazines such as Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, and Newsweek, and in numerous books on comics.

Charles Darwin Perhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of the scientific imagination, The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England, and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly 'passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street.' Yet after reading it, Darwin's friend and colleague T. H. Huxley had a different reaction: 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.' Based largely on Darwin's experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species. A landmark contribution to philosophical and scientific thought, the book has fresh application today for its pioneering views on the ecology of plants and animals. This edition also includes an introductory historical sketch and a glossary Darwin later added to the original text.

Charles Darwin "The Descent of Man, Darwin's second landmark work on evolutionary theory (following The Origin of the Species), marked a turning point in the history of science with its modern vision of human nature as the product of evolution. Darwin argued that the noblest features of humans, such as language and morality, were the result of the same natural processes that produced iris petals and scorpion tails. To convey the revolutionary importance of this groundbreaking book, renowned evolutionary science writer Carl Zimmer edited this special abridged edition—made up of nine excerpts, each one representing one of Darwin's major themes—and wrote illuminating introductions to each section, as well as an overall introduction. Zimmer brilliantly places Darwin's basic ideas in the context of the current understanding of human nature and twenty-first-century DNA research. By accessibly presenting Darwin's thinking to a modern readership, Zimmer eloquently demonstrates Darwin's ever-increasing relevance and amazing scientific insight."

Matthew Derby With a heightened sense of the boundless possibility and lurking doom that Orwell and Huxley once envisioned, Matthew Derby's stories provide a glimpse into an intricately imagined world-a world in which clouds are treated with behavioral serum, children are handicapped by their ability to float, and all food (including Popsicles) is made of meat. They parody our contemporary notions of family, government, and science with razor-sharp wit and explore the darkest of human longings with heartbreaking sincerity. The result: a book that is both a brilliant satire and an assault on the senses.

Fyodor Dostoevsky The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us the definitive version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strikingly original short novels, The Double and The Gambler.

The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare–foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre–in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling, a compulsion that Dostoevsky–who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring–knew intimately from his own experience. In chronicling the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Brailovsky Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately lead to tragedy, he emerges as a unique combination of the Christian ideal of perfection and Dostoevsky's own views, afflictions and manners. His serene selflessness is contrasted with the worldly qualities of every other character in the novel. Dostoevsky supplies a harsh indictment of the Russian ruling class of his day who have created a world which cannot accomodate the goodness of this idiot.

Fedor Dostoyevsky Webster's edition of this classic is organized to expose the reader to a maximum number of synonyms and antonyms for difficult and often ambiguous English words that are encountered in other works of literature, conversation, or academic examinations. Extremely rare or idiosyncratic words and expressions are given lower priority in the notes compared to words which are ¿difficult, and often encountered¿ in examinations. Rather than supply a single synonym, many are provided for a variety of meanings, allowing readers to better grasp the ambiguity of the English language, and avoid using the notes as a pure crutch. Having the reader decipher a word's meaning within context serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. Each page covers words not already highlighted on previous pages. If a difficult word is not noted on a page, chances are that it has been highlighted on a previous page. A more complete thesaurus is supplied at the end of the book; synonyms and antonyms are extracted from Webster's Online Dictionary.

PSAT¿ is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT¿ is a registered trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE¿, AP¿ and Advanced Placement¿ are registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT¿ is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT¿ is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Unabridged audiobook in MP3 format.

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children—the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.

Dave Eggers When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

Dave Eggers When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

T. S. Eliot A modern verse play about the search for meaning, in which a psychiatrist is the catalyst for the action. “An authentic modern masterpiece” (New York Post). “Eliot really does portray real-seeming characters. He cuts down his poetic effects to the minimum, and then finally rewards us with most beautiful poetry” (Stephen Spender).

T. S. Eliot A dramatization in verse of the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. “The theatre as well as the church is enriched by this poetic play of grave beauty and momentous decision” (New York Times). “Within its limits the play is a masterpiece.... Mr. Eliot has written no better poem than this and none which seems simpler” (Mark Van Doren, The Nation).

T. S. Eliot The basis for the musical phenomenon Cats, this collection of 14 inviting rhymes — the mixture of the real and the impossible, the familiar and the fantastic — make for a set of poems that no child or adult can possibly resist.

T. S. Eliot, Helen Vendler A collection of Eliot's first three volumes of verse While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, -The Waste Land- is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective. This edition includes -The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,- -Portrait of a Lady,- -Gerontion,- and more.

T.S. Eliot This new addition to the elegant Library of Classic Poets series features selections from one of the best-loved poets of the early twentieth century. Elegantly packaged in a handsome edition with a satin ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library. From the prolific T.S. Eliot, a pioneer of modernism, here are his most groundbreaking works, including:

• "The Wasteland"
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"

Paul Eluard Paul Éluard was one of the most important of the early surrealists. Born in Paris in 1895, Éluard first became involved with the Dada movement, and after the war, disgusted by the commonly accepted laws of bourgeois morality, involved himself with surrealism. His fame as a poet began with Capitale de la Douleur (1926) and continued over the next 26 years with over 50 books. Une Leçon de Morale (A Moral Lesson) appeared in 1949, three years before his death.

Martin Esslin

Euripides Athens of the fifth century B.C.E. represents one of the towering achievements of civilization. It is the crucible in which Western Civilization was given form. It created democracy: rule by the people. Of the three supreme tragedians of Classical Athens; Aeschylus, Sophokles and Euripides, Euripides (480's-406 B.C.E.) is the most modern. His people are no longer the heroes of Aeschylus, inspired by Homer and the Heroic world of war and warriors. Nor are they the more humanistic characters of Sophokles, who created men and women of grand moral integrity. Rather, Euripides' people are pyschologically drawn, they are frequently petty, conniving, and conflicted. In other words, they are like us.

The plays included are: PHOENICIAN WOMEN ORESTÊS BAKKHAI IPHIGENEIA IN AULIS RHESOS

Patrick Fetherston

Martin Fitzgerald Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. Woody Allen has written and directed almost 30 movies in an equal number of years. He may be a funny man, but he is also one of the most serious American film-makers of his generation. He made his directing debut in 1969 with Take the Money and Run, and followed it up with a series of slapstick comedies, and then romantic comedies with the brilliant Annie Hall and Manhattan. Allen’s fascination with the theatrical history of New York shines though in Bullets Over Broadway and Celebrity, and there are the more recent family dramas and crises of Hannah and Her Sisters, Deconstructing Harry, and Husbands and Wives. As well as having an introductory essay, in this book each of Allen's films is individually reviewed and analyzed, and there is a handy multimedia reference guide for further study.

Bo Florin

John Fowles Well-known as an international bestseller and award-winning film, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is magnificent entertainment. This virtuoso reading by Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons is storytelling at its best. Fowles' intricate portrait of Victorian relationships and love, brought to life by Irons' artistry, will haunt you long after the story ends. 2 cassettes.

Andre Gide Superb novel by modern French master deals with the consequences of amoral hedonism. It is the story of Michel, who tries to rise above good and evil and give free rein to his passions. In so doing, he neglects his wife, with tragic consequences. Introductory Note. Map. Footnotes.

Sam B. Girgus Sam Girgus argues that Allen has consistently been on the cutting edge of contemporary critical and cultural consciousness. Allen continues to challenge notions of authorship, narrative, perspective, character, theme, ideology, gender and sexuality. This revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that examine Allen's work since 1992. Girgus thoughtfully asserts that the scandal surrounding Allen's personal life in the early 1990s has altered his image in ways that reposition moral consciousness in his work.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Goethe viewed the writing of poetry as essentially autobiographical, and the works selected in this volume represent more than sixty years in the life of the poet. In early poems such as “Prometheus,” he rails against religion in an almost ecstatic fervor, while “To the Moon” is an enigmatic meditation on the end of a love affair. The Roman Elegies show Goethe’s use of Classical meters in an homage to ancient Rome and its poets, and “The Diary,” suppressed for more than a century, is a narrative poem whose eroticism is combined with its morality. In selections from Faust, arguably his greatest and most personal work, Goethe creates an exhilarating depiction of humankind’s eternal search for truth.

“Faithful and felicitous, these verse translations . . . are an excellent introduction to [Goethe’s] genius.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)

Nikolai Gogol Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, born at Sorochintsky, Russia, on 31st March 1809. Obtained government post at St. Petersburg and later an appointment at the university. Lived in Rome from 1836 to 1848. Died on 21st February 1852. "Dead Souls" is one of his most important work.

Nikolai Gogol This expanded collection of influential Russian satirist Nikolay Gogol’s ingenious pieces now includes his most famous play.

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol Volume 2 of The Complete Tales includes Gogol's Mirgorod stories—among them that masterpiece of grotesque comedy, "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," the wonderfully satiric "Old World Landowners," and the Cossak epic "Taras Bulba." Here also is "The Nose," Gogol's final effort in the realm of the fantastic, as well as "The Coach," "The Portrait" (in its final version), and the most influential of his Petersburg stories, "The Overcoat."

Edward Gorey The title of this deliciously creepy collection of Gorey's work stems from the word amphigory, meaning a nonsense verse or composition. As always, Gorey's painstakingly cross- hatched pen and ink drawings are perfectly suited to his oddball verse and prose. The first book of 15, "The Unstrung Harp," describes the writing process of novelist Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel." In "The Listing Attic," you'll find a set of quirky limericks such as "A certain young man, it was noted, / Went about in the heat thickly coated; / He said, 'You may scoff, / But I shan't take it off; / Underneath I am horribly bloated.' "

Many of Gorey's tales involve untimely deaths and dreadful mishaps, but much like tragic Irish ballads with their perky rhythms and melodies, they come off as strangely lighthearted. "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," for example, begins like this: "A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL assaulted by bears," and so on. An eccentric, funny book for either the uninitiated or diehard Gorey fans.

Edward Gorey

Remy De Gourmont Number Two in 'Documents of the Avant-Garde'

Alasdair Gray A fantasy novel of border warfare — military and erotic — in Scotland's Ettrick Forest in the 23rd century A.D. Gray's writing style is highly unique and refreshing, and his insights into ways of being are eye-opening.

Alasdair Gray POOR THINGS revises the story of FRANKENSTEIN by replacing the traditional "monster" with Bella Baxter—a young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of a child. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, POOR THINGS is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking contrast between the ambition of men and the knowledge of women.

Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray Fans of the work of Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, and T. Coraghessan Boyle will revel in Alasdair Gray's masterful, witty collection. Gray's stories defy genre, and his angular, playful style, prodigious wit, and razor-sharp intellect are matched by his remarkable skill with the short-story form. In "Job's Skin Game," the narrator humbly tells his life story like the evenings news. During a moment of awkward revelation, he shares the strangely exquisite pleasure he receives from scratching at the skin condition he's developed since losing his two sons in the Twin Towers tragedy and a small fortune in the dot-com meltdown. In "Big Pockets with Button Flaps," a wily old man teases and taunts a pair of punk teenage girls as their confrontation takes on social implication through lightning-fast transfers of power and wit. The Ends of Our Tethers is vintage Gray—accessible, experimental, mischievous, wide ranging, beautifully written, and wise.

ANDREA GRONEMEYER

Jane Alison Hale

Paul Hammond The Shadow and Its Shadow is a collection of classic writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing.

The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions in this anthology document Surrealism’s scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement.

Knut Hamsun Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Originally published in 1890, this classic of modern literature follows an impoverished Norwegian writer through the streets of Christiania (now Olso) as he struggles on the edge of starvation. Existing on what little money he makes from selling the occasional article to the local paper, and down to pawning the clothes on his back, the young writer slowly loses control of his reason and begins to slip increasingly into bouts of madness, paranoia, and despair.

A gripping portrait of an artist struggling for integrity, Hunger mirrors the dire straits of Hamsun's own life when he brought this, his then incomplete first novel, to a publisher in 1888.

Knut Hamsun In a Norwegian coastal town, society’s carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. At once arrogant and unassuming, righteous and depraved, Nagel seduces the entire community even as he turns it on its head—before disappearing as suddenly as he arrived.

Robert Harris, Michael Lasky

Alfred Hitchcock

Klaus Honnef

Khaled Hosseini Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him. The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of their lies. Written against a history that has not been told in fiction before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devastation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption.

Richard Huelsenbeck, Malcolm Green "Dada Means Nothing!" So proclaimed Tristan Tzara, the movement’s tireless publicist. Yet this did not prevent the most fanatical and talented artists ans writers across Europe from rushing to join its ranks. Anti-war, anti-art, anti-dada, from its beginnings in Zurich during the first World War the dadas swept aside the cultural, philosophical and political norms of their time. Utter disgust with a society that had created the war (and then expected to survive the peace) spurred them to ever greater demonstrations of revulsion and derision. Yet it was not all nihilism: many factions worked within the Dada Movement and it was Huelsenbeck’s intention to embody most of them in the Dada Almanac. The largest collection of Dadaist texts ever assembled by the movement, it was originally published in 1920 in a mixture of French and German.

The Dada Almanac was truly international in scope, with substantial sections from the Swiss and French sections of the movement, it embodies Dada’s failings as well as its sucesses, its excesses, its seriousness, its idiocy, but above all the anarchic vitality which made it such a vital precondition for so much that followed in the fields of art, literature and general cultural terrorism.

The editors of this first English translation have added dozens of other relevent texts, documents, portraits etc, as well as explaining contemporary references and events and providing biographies of the numerous personalities involved.

Robert Hughes This authoritative, lively book, based on the BBC Time-Life television series, provides a comprehensive survey of the birth and development of modern art and an updated discussion of the European and American art movements in the 70s and 80s including minimalist and public art, 70s American painting, German Neo-Expressionism, art by women, and environmental art. "The Future that Was," the final chapter, is completely rewritten and updated. 75% of the 275 illustrations in the revised edition are in 4-color.

J. K. Huysmans One of the gems of the French Decadent genre and a reference for Oscar Wilde, it details the life of an eccentric and recluse into his own world of unconventional sensory exploration.

Henrik Ibsen

Eugene Ionesco 1963 Grove Press. First Edition. Hardcover, 95 pages. Exit the king is a highly stylized, ritualistic death rite, in which a once great king, Berenger I, is shown during his last hours of life, surrounded by his two wives, his physician, and a few other members of the decayed court. The setting is the king's throne room, in which all the action takes place. But perhaps action is too strong a word: for what we are given is the slow, ceremonial movement of the wasting Berenger towards his death....

Eugene Ionesco

Eugene Ionesco The author of such modern classics as The Bald Soprano, Exit the King, Rhinoceros, and The Chairs, Eugène Ionesco is “one of the most important and influential figures in the modern theater” (Library Journal). This crucial collection combines The New Tenant with Amédée and Victims of Duty—the plays Richard Gilman has called, along with The Killer, Ionesco’s “greatest plays, works of the same solidity, fulness, and permanence as [those of] his predecessors in the dramatic revolution that began with Ibsen and is still going on.”

Eugene Ionesco

Eugene Ionesco In Rhinoceros, as in his earlier plays, Ionesco startles audiences with a world that invariably erupts in explosive laughter and nightmare anxiety. A rhinoceros suddenly appears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two, then three, until the “movement” is universal: a transformation of average citizens into beasts, as they learn to move with the times. Finally, only one man remains. “I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”

Eugene Ionesco Exit the King is a highly stylized, ritualized death rite unfolding the final hours of the once-great king Berenger the First. As he dies, his kingdom also dies. His armies suffer defeat, the young emigrate, the seasons change overnight, and his kingdom’s borders shrink to the outline of his throne. At last, as the curtain falls, the king himself dissolves into a gray mist.

Eugene Ionesco

Lewis Jacobs

Alfred Jarry A stunning, controversial work that immediately outraged audiences with its scatological references during the 1896 premiere, the farce satirizes the tendency of the successful bourgeois to abuse his authority and become irresponsibly complacent. Championed as the first absurdist drama, Ubu Roi features a main character that is cruel, gluttonous, and grotesque.

Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry, Roger Shattuck Jarry is best known as the author of the proto-Dada play Ubu Roi, but this anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Written in 1989 and refused for publication in the author's lifetime, Exploits and Opinion of Dr. Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of "Pataphysics . . . the science of imaginary solutions." Pataphysics has since inspired artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and the 60s rock band Soft Machine, as well as the mythic literary organization the Coll ge de Pataphysique. Simon Watson Taylor's superb annotated translation (which in turn inspired a new French edition of the text) was first published by Grove Press in 1965 as part of their now out-of-print collection, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. As a result this most important novel by Jarry has never before been published under its own title in English.

Pauline Kael, Herman J. Mankiewicz

Franz Kafka The only available collection that brings together all of Kafka's stories—those published during his lifetime and those released after his death.

Franz Kafka Description: "Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding." —Library Journal From late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka stopped writing entries in his diary, which he kept in quarto-sized notebooks, but continued to write in a series of smaller, octavo-sized notebooks. When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks—which include short stories, fragments of stories, and other literary writings—because, "Notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception." The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known yet are among the most characteristic of Kafka's work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms in their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence.

Chip Kidd Described as "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design today (USA Today), Chip Kidd is universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design. At the forefront of a revolution in publishing, Kidd's iconic covers, with their inventive marriage of type and found images, have influenced an entire generation of design practitioners in many fields.Chip Kidd: Book One collects all of his book covers and designs for the first time, as well as hundreds of developmental sketches and concepts-annotated by Kidd and by many of the best-selling authors he's worked with over the years. The result is an important contribution to the design canon today as well as a visually dazzling (and often hilarious) insider's look at the design and publishing process.The book also showcases Kidd's work with comics and graphic novels, including his collaborations with leading artists and writers in the field. Featured are projects for DC Comics, including Batman and Superman, as well as Kidd's award-winning exploration of the art of Charles M. Schulz. Chip Kidd: Book One is sure to enthrall design aficionados, book lovers, pop-culture fanatics, comics fans, and design students.

Galway Kinnell Galway Kinnell's poetry has always been marked by richness of language, devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and an effort to transform every understanding into the universality of art.

Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell This volume brings together BODY RAGS and MORTAL ACTS, MORTAL WORDS and THE PAST, three books that are central to the life's work of one of the masters of contemporary poetry. Included here are many of Galway Kinnell's best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

Jim Kline

Ira Konigsberg More than 3,000 entries, illustrated with 151 line drawings and 80 photographs, provide definitions in all of the following categories: practical terminology; historical terms; and the language of film criticism and theory.

Rudolf E. Kuenzli This groundbreaking collection of thirteen original essays analyzes connections between film and two highly influential twentieth-century movements. The essays, which comment on specific films and deal with theoretical and topical questions, are framed by a documentary section that includes a photographic reproduction of the manuscript scenario for Robert Desnos's and Man Ray's L'Etoile de mer, and an introduction by the editor that provides a cogent working model for the difference between Dada and Surrealist perspectives.

Jarek Kupsc An in-depth, illustrated look at "the liveliest art" that enlightens and entertains, this "For Beginners" book spans over 100 years of film history, including its invention.

Comte de Lautréamont

Comte de Lautréamont Andr Breton wrote that Maldoror is "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846), and early death in Paris (1870). Lautr amont's writings bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his lawless black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted slogan, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition...and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger." This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautr amont's writings available in English, in a superior translation.

Alan Lightman Alan Lightman's first novel, Einstein's Dreams, was greeted with international praise. Salman Rushdie called it "at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written." Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the novel creates "a magical, metaphysical realm . . . as in Calvino's work, the fantastical elements of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose." With The Diagnosis, Lightman gives us his most ambitious and penetrating novel yet.

While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The maximum information in the minimum time.

When Bill's memory returns, "his head pounding, remembering too much," a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition.

By turns satiric, comic, and tragic, The Diagnosis is a brilliant and disturbing examination of our modern obsession with speed, information, and money, and what this obsession has done to our minds and our spirits.

From the Hardcover edition.

Alan Lightman The New York Times has called Alan Lightman “highly original and imaginative.” Each of his novels is a new exploration of that imagination, utterly unlike the others. Einstein’s Dreams, an international best-seller, was a whimsical and provocative tone poem about time. The Diagnosis, hailed by the Washington Post as a “major accomplishment” and a finalist for the National Book Award, was a disturbing examination of our obsession with speed, information, and money, and the resulting poverty of our spiritual lives. Lightman’s new novel, Reunion, is a delicate and haunting story of how we shape our identity through memory.

Charles is a middle-aged professor at a minor liberal-arts college, a once promising poet, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Without knowing why, he decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion. And there, he magically witnesses a replay of his senior year.

Drawn back into his memories, Charles watches his tender and romantic twenty-two-year-old self embark on an all-consuming love affair with a beautiful dancer. As the two young people struggle to find themselves amidst the social and political chaos of the late 1960s, the older Charles recalls contradictory versions of his past, ultimately confronting for the second time a series of devastating events that would forever change his life.
Written with crystalline prose, at once precise and mysterious, Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the impossible hopefulness of youth.

From the Hardcover edition.

Alan Lightman Lightman vividly recreates Einstein's discovery of the nature of time. 2 cassettes.

Stephane Mallarme

Ben Marcus In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus' first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

Ben Marcus Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.

On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ben Marcus Behold a stunning world, made mostly of water, where clothing changes people's behavior and time itself can be worn and discarded like cloth. Witness a father who takes his two boys out to sea, in flight from some menace at home, thus launching their adventures in a strange and dangerous territory. Artist Matthew Ritchie's striking images blend scientific diagramming with vivid, colorful renderings of the apocalypse, while writer Ben Marcus's cold prose plumbs the inner workings of two boys caught out at sea with a father whose costumes grow increasingly menacing. In this collaborative work, Ritchie's and Marcus's shared obsessions of mythology, physics, and ancient texts have produced a conjunction of text and image in which people themselves are merely costumes for the darker needs that drive them.

Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus is a classic; its imaginative boldness and vertiginous ironies have fascinated readers and playgoers alike. But the fact that this play exists in two early versions, printed in 1604 and 1616, has posed formidable problems for critics. How much of either version was written by Marlowe, and which is the more authentic? Is the play orthodox or radically interrogative?

Michael Keefer's early work helped to establish the current consensus that the 1604 text was censored and revised; the first Broadview edition, praised for its lucid introduction and scholarship, was the first to restore two displaced scenes to their correct place. All competing editions presume that the 1604 text was printed from authorial manuscript, and that the 1616 text is of little substantive value. But in 2006 Keefer's fresh analysis of the evidence showed that the 1604 quarto's Marlovian scenes were printed from a corrupted manuscript, and that the 1616 quarto (though indeed censored and revised) preserves some readings earlier than those of the 1604 text.

This revised and updated Broadview edition offers the best available text of Doctor Faustus. Keefer's critical introduction reconstructs the ideological contexts that shaped and deformed the play, and the text is accompanied by textual and explanatory notes and excerpts from sources.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Randolf Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.

The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women—the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar—who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitudedoes the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."

With One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. —Alix Wilber

Gabriel Garcia Marquez "These stories are told in spare, unpretentious but picturesque prose, compassionate of human frailty, but also rich in wit and irony. The characters are all too human, alternately humorous and tragic."— Library Journal

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Carole Maso Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonmentCatherine's lover of ten years has left hershe falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness.

With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar. "And I would like to help her," the one who watches says, "but I can't."

This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution is played out against the dazzling backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

Raymond Queneau and Carole Maso

Harry Mathews At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the coast of an uncharted French island.

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

Harry Mathews Fiction. Available again, along with TLOOTH, as part of Dalkey Archive's American Literature Series, CIGARETTES has been called "A brilliant and unsettling book ..." — Tom Clark, Los Angeles Times Book Review. It is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. "CIGARETTES has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination" — Gilbert Sorrentino.

Harry Mathews This selection of Harry Mathews’s longer prose writings attests his innovative genius in sevenradically differing works:

Country Cooking in Central France is perhaps the longest, most demanding and surely the most extravagant recipe ever concocted. (Mathews’s best piece — The Guardian). Singular Pleasures: 61 pungent demonstrations of masturbation by both sexes, from Almaty to Zizanga. The Orchard is the author’s memorial of his close friend Georges Perec, composed in startlingly succinct and revealing glimpses. Armenian Papers, a sequence of prose poems that recounts a glittering epic of servitude, love and war in a land remote both in time and place. Translation and the Oulipo: the Case of Preserving Maltese, an essay that establishes with persuasive guile a context for the practices of the Oulipo or, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for potential literature), the provocative group of writers and mathematicians of which Mathews is the only active English-speaking member. The Way Home, a story derived from a series of drawings by Trevor Winkfield (incorporated here in the text) that! explores the dreamlike life within an ordinary man’s ordinary day. Autobiography, an exceptional example of the genre in which the author tells his own story entirely in terms of the people who have marked his life.

This is a revised edition of a collection first published in the UK in 1988 and not previously available in the USA. The London Times described the original collection as an almost pugnacious demonstration of his talents.

Daniel C. Matt The author of Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment has written an essential guide to Jewish mysticism——"a striking anthology, an original meditation, and a mystic philosophy of life" (David Wolpe, author of The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God).

Harry Matthews Anthology of prose, poetry and literary critcism. "OULIPO COMPENDIUM is a late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The editors have done an astounding job putting together this nutty, one-of-a-kind book. It is the definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic" — Paul Auster. "Oulipo was—is—a seedbed, a grimace, a carnival. This is an indispensable book for everyone who cares about literature"—Susan Sontag. The OULIPO COMPENDIUM abounds in material for writers, teachers and scholars; it also offers a cornucopia of entertainment for curious readers. "Oulipans: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" — Raymond Queneau.

Gerald D. McDonald

Henry Miller

Henry Miller

Tony Millionaire A new oversized (12" x 7") hardcover collection of one of America's most beloved weekly comic strips. Tony Millionaire's Maakies is one of the most popular weekly comic strips in America, running in over ten of the largest US weekly newspapers, including the New York Press, New Times Los Angeles, and Seattle's The Stranger. Maakies features the comical adventures of a drunken crow on the high seas, blending vaudeville-style humor and a breathtaking line that harkens back to the glory days of the American comic strip. Designed by publishing's foremost graphic designer, Chip Kidd, The House at Maakies Corner features a year's worth of Maakies in a beautiful, deluxe hardcover format that complements the strip's elegant and classical style.

Maakies suggests a contemporary collaboration between E. C. Segar, creator of Popeye, and seafaring novelist Patrick O'Brian (Millionaire is a tremendous fan of both). Millionaire has won multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards and Maakies has appeared as a series of animated segments on NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Tony Millionaire Collecting the first five years of the world's most riotous comic strip.

Tony Millionaire's Maakies is one of the best and most popular weekly comic strips in America, running in over a dozen of the largest U.S. weekly newspapers including the Village Voice, L.A Weekly and Seattle's The Stranger. The strip is currently being developed for the Cartoon Network's popular Adult Swim. Maakies features the comical adventures of a drunken crow on the high seas, blending vaudeville-style humor and a breathtaking line that harkens back to the glory days of the American comic strip.

Designed by publishing's foremost graphic designer, Chip Kidd, Premillennial Maakies is a newly designed edition of the long out-of-print first Maakies collection, featuring the first five years of the strip, re-formatted in a beautiful, deluxe, landscape hardcover format that complements the strip's elegant and classical style.

Maakies suggests a contemporary collaboration between E.C. Segar, creator of Popeye, and seafaring novelist Patrick O'Brian (Master and Commander). Millionaire has won multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards and Maakies has appeared as a series of animated segments on NBC's Saturday Night Live. He is also the creator of the popular Sock Monkey and Billy Hazelnuts books.

Herbert Mitgang A prize-winning book critic for The New York Times offers vivid sketches of the writers he has interviewed in their native elements, from Samuel Beckett to Ralph Ellison, and recounts the stories behind those extraordinary meetings.

Kees Moerbeek Known worldwide as the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) had an incredible directing career that spanned five decades and more than fifty films. He earned numerous awards, inspired countless publications and festivals, and spawned a new era in suspense cinema.

This spectacular pop-up pays tribute to the great filmmaker and features seven of his most influential films: Saboteur, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, and Frenzy. With stunning three-dimensional paper engineering by Kees Moerbeek highlighting pivotal moments and Hitchcock's cameo in each film, Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense will be treasured by fans and film lovers alike for years to come.

Moliere

Warren F. Motte Jr. essays, manifestos etc by Oulipo members & others

Haruki Murakami

Eadweard Muybridge Best, most representative sequences have been specially selected from the monumental original and are presented here in crisp, double-page plates printed on high-quality stock. Horses hauling, walking, trotting, etc., plus sequences of donkeys, an ox, pig, dog, cat, deer and other animals capture details of anatomy and movement with astonishing clarity.

Francis M. Naumann, Beth Venn, Allan Antliff

Gerard De Nerval Aurelia is a document of dreams, obsession, and insanity. An account of Nerval's unrequited passion for an actress and subsequent descent into madness, this book was a favorite of artist Joseph Cornell's, and its author was championed by both Marcel Proust and Andre Breton. One of the original self-styled "bohemians," Nerval was best known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and for his suicide in 1855, hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba. Geoffrey Wagner's translation of Aurelia was first published by Grove Press in 1959, but has remained out of print for nearly twenty years. Included are previously untranslated stories, and poet Robert Duncan's version of the sonnet cycle "Chimeras"- making this the most complete collection of Nerval ever published in English.

Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra as his most important work, and his story of the wandering Zarathustra has had enormous influence on subsequent culture. Nietzsche uses a mixture of homilies, parables, epigrams and dreams to introduce some of his most striking doctrines, including the Overman, nihilism, and the eternal return of the same. This edition offers a new translation by Adrian Del Caro which restores the original versification of Nietzsche's text and captures its poetic brilliance. Robert Pippin's introduction discusses many of the most important interpretative issues raised by the work, including who is Zarathustra and what kind of "hero" is he and what is the philosophical significance of the work's literary form? The volume will appeal to all readers interested in one of the most original and inventive works of modern philosophy.

Anais Nin

ANAIS NIN

Anais Nin Author's first novel, a dream-like reverie, stands among her most-challenging. With illustrations. First published by the Villa Seurat Press (Henry Miller's short-lived imprint in Paris.)

Anais Nin

Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

Eugene Ostashevsky It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished-and then only in samizdat and émigré publications. Some called it the last of the Russian avant-garde, and others called it the first (and last) instance of Absurdism in Russia; however difficult to classify, it was OBERIU (from an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art), and the pleasures of its poetry and prose are, with this volume, at long last fully open to English-speaking readers.

This anthology includes the work of three writers, Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky, who, between 1927 and 1930, made up the core of OBERIU, and of three others, Nikolai Oleinikov, Leonid Lipavsky, and Yakov Druskin, who, although not members of OBERIU, worked in the same vein. Skillfully translated to preserve the weird charm of the originals, these poems and prose pieces display all the hilarity and tragedy, the illogical action and puppetlike violence and eroticism, and the hallucinatory intensity that brought down the wrath of the Soviet censors. Today they offer an uncanny reflection of the distorted reality they reject.

Charles Baudelaire and others Fine anthology of French Poetry: Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Cocteau, Breton, Perse, Prevert and everyone inbetween. Thirty-one poets and 150 poems. Original French with English prose translations, critical notes, biographies and bibliography. Alot crammed into one litte book.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters and others Willard Bohn’s collection of Dada poetry is the most comprehensive ever compiled. Forty-two poets writing in seven different languages (French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Dutch) are presented in a bilingual format, where appropriate, with the original text and its English translation on facing pages. The collection, which opens with a critical and historical introduction, spans the years from 1914 to 1923 and includes such poets as Walter Conrad Arensberg, André Breton, Malcolm Cowley, Max Ernst, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. Twelve works by ten Dada visual artists (six of whom are also represented by their poetry) illustrate the book.

Dada’s overriding concern was liberty—social, moral, artistic, and intellectual. While rebelling against bourgeois values and all forms of authority, the Dadaists venerated scandalous behavior, spontaneity, and a general joie de vivre. Their adherents questioned the basic postulates of rationalism and humanism as few had done before. In trying to strip artistic expression down to its bare essentials, these writers often created works that were experiments in sound or typography.

Milorad Pavic A national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.

Milorad Pavic Two lovers in Belgrade, one from the 1700s, the other from the 1900s, reach out to each other across a gulf of time, in a story that parallels the myth of Hero and Leander. By the author of Dictionary of the Khazars.

Georges Perec Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.

But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

Georges Perec With the American publication of Life, a User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was immediately recognized in the U.S. as one of this century's most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today's readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our obsession with society's trappings the seductive mass of things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning.

Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership." Surrounded by Paris's tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.

In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie's cravings, the nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.

Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate.

Georges Perec Perec has rightfully assumed his position in the pantheon of truly original writers of the past century. Godine has issued all but one of is his books in this country, including his masterpiece Life, A User's Manual. Here, in one volume, are three "easy pieces" by the master of the verbal firecracker and Gallic wit. The novella "The Exeter Text" contains all those e's that were omitted from A Void (Perec hated waste) and no other vowel (honest). In "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?" we are introduced to Sergeant Henri Pollak and his vehicle (the aforementioned moped) that carried him between Vincennes and Montparnasse; in "A Gallery Portrait", the sensation of the 1913 exhibition in Pittsburgh depicts the artists' patron, beer baron Hermann Raffke, sitting in front of his huge art collection, which includes (of course) "A Gallery Portrait" of the baron sitting before "A Gallery Portrait," etc.

Georges Perec The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances ...

A Void is a metaphysical whodunit, a story chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which afford Perec occasion to display his virtuosity as a verbal magician, acrobat, and sad-eyed clown. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. Adair's translation, too, is astounding; Time called it "a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."

Georges Perec, John Sturrock

Bob Perelman A paradox: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky all wrote their central works to be "masterpieces," synoptic views of the world that would change the very consciousness of the public. And yet these writings are so hard to read that instead of producing social change, they have produced critical industries dedicated to decoding them.
In new, provocative readings of these demanding authors, Bob Perelman shows how the inaccessibility of their writing reveals the conflict between the goals of social relevance and literary innovation. As self-proclaimed geniuses, they used language in new ways that were inevitably incomprehensible to the large audiences that they sought to instruct, change, or simply dazzle. By seeing genius as a role that is simultaneously social and poetic, Perelman reads the difficulty of their works as rooted in the cultural relationship between authors and their readers.
Perelman's brilliant analysis offers scholars new insight and opens these works to readers who have been frustrated by their difficulty. The Trouble with Genius is one poet's passionate attempt to make sense of the stylistic and political challenge of these modernists and to find, although not uncritically, the value of their work for readers and writers today.

Fernando Pessoa Fiction. Autobiography. Translated from the Portuguese with an introduction and translator's notes by Alfred Mac Adam. These short, aphoristic paragraphs, ranging in size from a few sentences to a few pages, comprise the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa's many devastatingly captivating literary alter egos. Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers in one: his works were composed by what he named "heteronyms," alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, horoscopes. THE BOOK OF DISQUIET was found after Pessoa's death, on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, and was finally published nearly 50 years later. "A fractured assemblage of quasi-symbolist reveries, cynical epigrams, musings on quotidian torpor, and gorgeously wrought depressive fits, the book is probably as close as Pessoa could ever come to writing an autobiography." (—VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT) "I was a genius more than in my dreams and less than in life. This is my tragedy. I was the runner who fell almost at the tape, and when I was almost there, I was the first." If genius consists of complicated and heartfelt musings, delightful and incisive use of language (not to mention magnificent translation), and brilliance of mind and expression, then certainly this book is an act (or perpetration?) of genius.

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa

Luigi Pirandello Celebrated title story plus "Little Hut," "Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law," "Citrons from Sicily," "With Other Eyes," "A Voice," and 5 other tales from the 1934 Nobel Prize-winning author.

Luigi Pirandello This famous play, an expressionistic parable by the Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright, explores such themes as the relativity of truth, the vanity and necessity of illusion and the instability of the human personality. It is presented here in an excellent new English translation by Stanley Appelbaum.

Sylvia Plath

Edgar Allan Poe

MIchael Pollan

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound New compilation of 70 early poems from the founder of the Imagist movement and one of America's most influential and controversial poets. Among them are poems from Personae (1909), Exultations (1909) and Ripostes (1912), including a number not found in other anthologies; "Cathay" from Lustra (1916); and selections from the major poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).

Editors of Phaidon Press The Art Book is the first fully illustrated art dictionary. It presents a feast of famous, varied and colourful images by 500 of the greatest artists from the Middle Ages to the present day. Arranged in alphabetical order by artist, it is easy to use. With one large, quintessential image per artist, and an informative text that discusses the work in detail as well as offering information about its creator, The Art Book is both educational and fun.

With the turn of every page The Art Book reveals the works that make up the rich heritage of Western Art, including altarpieces, installations, books of hours, oil paintings, frescos, sculptures, watercolours, prints, ready-mades, collages and many more.

Aimed at teenagers and adults alike The Art Book is for all those who wish to learn about art without being overwhelmed by complicated theories and art historical developments.

Easy to use cross references take you on a journey through the book, to other artists who worked in the same style and other ways the same subject has been treated across the centuries. Glossaries of movements and technical terms explain the sometimes confusing jargon of art historians in simple terms; and an international directory of galleries and museums list the works that are on view to the public.

Presenting a fresh way of looking at art, this book is an invaluable resource for reference and inspiration in every home, school, library or studio. Ideal for those coming to art for the first time, it also serves as a visual sourcebook for teachers and designers, and will be a constant source of stimulus and delight for anyone wishing to look at art with a fresh eye.

Editors of Phaidon Press One of the most complete representations of this century's art to hit the shelves in years, The 20th-Century Art Book offers 500 full-page reproductions, each by a different artist. No matter how famous, each artist has but one page, accompanied by a concise, informative block of text. Presented in alphabetical order, each artist, regardless of stature, is treated in exactly the same manner as the other 499 others in the book. Some images are delightfully complimented, others deeply agitated by the work that, by chance of the alphabet, happens to lie on the facing page.

Leonard Cabell Pronko

Marcel Proust Long out of print, the many adaptations that Russell has done of famous operas are finally collected again in 3 volumes, in the wake of his highly successful massive recent adaptation of Wagner¹s Ring of the Nibelung. This first volume presents his adaptation of one of Mozart¹s most famous works, a farcical tale mixed with fantasy. The story begins as the Queen of the Night sets Prince Tamino on a quest to rescue her daughter, Pamina from the evil Sarastro. On the way, he meets the bird-catcher Papageno, who is ³persuaded² to help Tamino in his quest. Tamino¹s spiritual quest is counterpoised with Papageno¹s own earthly search for his one true love, Papagena. Both couples¹ strivings are juxtaposed with the eternal conflict between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night.

Marcel Proust Long out of print, the many adaptations that Russell has done of famous operas are finally collected again in 3 volumes, in the wake of his highly successful massive recent adaptation of Wagner¹s Ring of the Nibelung. This first volume presents his adaptation of one of Mozart¹s most famous works, a farcical tale mixed with fantasy. The story begins as the Queen of the Night sets Prince Tamino on a quest to rescue her daughter, Pamina from the evil Sarastro. On the way, he meets the bird-catcher Papageno, who is ³persuaded² to help Tamino in his quest. Tamino¹s spiritual quest is counterpoised with Papageno¹s own earthly search for his one true love, Papagena. Both couples¹ strivings are juxtaposed with the eternal conflict between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night.

Marcel Proust Including THE GUERMANTES WAY and CITIES OF THE PLAIN.

Alexander Pushkin Introduction by John Bayley; Translation by Natalie Duddington

Thomas Pynchon The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men — one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose — and "V.," the unknown woman of the title.

Thomas Pynchon The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.

Raymond Queneau

Raymond Queneau

Raymond Queneau A twentysomething bus rider with a long, skinny neck and a goofy hat accuses another passenger of trampling his feet; he then grabs an empty seat. Later, in a park, a friend encourages the same man to reorganize the buttons on his overcoat. In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, this determinedly pointless scenario unfolds 99 times in twice as many pages. Originally published in 1947 (in French), these terse variations on a theme are a wry lesson in creativity. The story is told as an official letter, as a blurb for a novel, as a sonnet, and in "Opera English." It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathematically. The result, as translator Barbara Wright writes in her introduction, is "a profound exploration into the possibilities of language." I'd say it's a refresher course of sorts, but it's more like a graduate seminar. After all, how many of us are familiar with terms such as litote, alexandrine, apheresis, and epenthesis in the first place?

Raymond Queneau We Always Treat Women Too Well was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara, but this novel by Raymond Queneau is a further manifestation of his sly, provocative, wonderfully wayward genius. Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter rebellion, it tells of a nubile beauty who finds herself trapped in the central post office when it is seized by a group of rebels. But Gertie Girdle is no common pushover, and she quickly devises a coolly lascivious strategy by which, in very short order, she saves the day for king and country. Queneau's wickedly funny send-up of cheap smut—his response to a popular bodice-ripper of the 1940s—exposes the link between sexual fantasy and actual domination while celebrating the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pleasure pure and simple.

Raymond Queneau

Raymond Queneau "profound, complex, likable" novel, tr B Wright

Raymond Queneau Fiction. First published in France in 1937, this brilliant, moving novel is about the devastating psychological effects of war, about falling in love, about politics subverting human relationships, and about life in Paris during the early 1930s amid intellecturals and artists whose activities range from writing for radical magazines to conjuring the ghost of Lenin in seances. Raymon Quneau (1903-1976) has been one of the most powerful forces in shaping the direction of French fiction in the past fifty years. His other novels includes THE LAST DAYS, PIERROT MON AMI, AND SAINT GLINGLIN.

Raymond Queneau The first paperback edition of the last of Queneau's novels to be translated into English. Saint Glinglin is a tragicomic masterpiece, a novel that critic Vivian Mercier said "can be mentioned without incongruity in the company" of Mann's Magic Mountain and Joyce's Ulysses. "By turns strange, beautiful, ludicrous, and intellectually stimulating" (as Mercier goes on to say), Saint Glinglin retells the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father in an array of styles ranging from direct narrative, soliloquy, and interior monologue to quasi-biblical verse. In this strange tale of a land where it never rains, where a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day, Queneau deploys fractured syntax, hidden structures, self-imposed constraints (no words with the letter x until the final word of the novel), playful allusions, and puns and neologisms to explore the most basic concepts of culture. In the process, Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology, all the while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale.

Raymond Queneau Stories and Remarks collects the best of Raymond Queneau's shorter prose. The works span his career and include short stories, an uncompleted novel, melancholic and absurd essays, occasionally baffling "Texticles," a pastiche of Alice in Wonderland, and his only play. Talking dogs, boozing horses, and suicides come head to head with ruminations on the effects of aerodynamics on addition, rhetorical dreams, and a pioneering example of permutational fiction influenced by computer language. Also included is Michel Leiris's preface from the French edition, an introduction by the translator, and endnotes addressing each piece individually.

Raymond Queneau—polyglot, novelist, philosopher, poet, mathematician, screenwriter, and translator—was one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French letters. His work touches on many of the major literary movements of his lifetime, from surrealism to the experimental school of the nouveau roman. He also founded the Oulipo, a collection of writers and mathematicians dedicated to the search for artificial inspiration via the application of constraint.

Raymond Queneau fiction, tr Barbara Wright

Raymond Queneau Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and heartwarming characters living on the sleazy outskirts of the city of lights. Witch Grass (previously titled The Bark Tree) is a philosophical farce, an epic comedy, a mesmerizing book about the daily grind that is an enchantment itself.

Raymond Queneau Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women's skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity. This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau's principle translator).

François Rabelais Rip-roaring and rib-tickling, François Rabelais's irreverent story of the giant Gargantua, his giant son Pantagruel, and their companion Panurge is a classic of the written word. This complete translation by Donald Frame, helpfully annotated for the nonspecialist, is a masterpiece in its own right, bringing to twentieth-century English all the exuberance and invention of the original sixteenth-century French. A final part containing all the rest of Rabelais's known writings, including his letters, supplements the five books traditionally known as Gargantua and Pantagruel.
This great comic narrative, written in hugely popular installments over more than two decades, was unsparingly satirical of scholarly pomposity and the many abuses of religious, legal, and political power. The books were condemned at various times by the Sorbonne and narrowly escaped being banned. Behind Rabelais's obvious pleasure in lampooning effete erudition and the excesses of society is the humanist's genuine love of knowledge and belief in the basic goodness of human nature. The bawdy wit and uninhibited zest for life that characterize his unlikely trio of travelers have delighted readers and inspired other writers ever since the exploits of Gargantua and Pantagruel first appeared.

Man Ray

Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, Jacques Vache, Arthur Cravan, Roger Conover, Terry J. Hale, Paul Lenti, Iain White 4 "writers" on the fringe of 1920s Paris Dada mvmt

Rainer Maria Rilke It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in love with Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the end of this millennium, his slender book holds everything a student of the century could want: the unedited thoughts of (arguably) the most important European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote these 10 sweepingly emotional letters in 1903, addressing a former student of one of his own teachers. The recipient was wise enough to omit his own inquiries from the finished product, which means that we get a marvelously undiluted dose of Rilkean aesthetics and exhortation.

The poet prefaced each letter with an evocative notation of the city in which he wrote, including Paris, Rome, and the outskirts of Pisa. Yet he spends most of the time encouraging the student in his own work, delivering a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop:

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you mustcreate. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.

Every page is stamped with Rilke's characteristic grace, and the book is free of the breathless effect that occasionally mars his poetry. His ideas on gender and the role of the artist are also surprisingly prescient. And even his retrograde comment on the "beauty of the virgin" (which the poet derives from the fact that she "has not yet achieved anything") is counterbalanced by his perception that "the sexes are more related than we think." Those looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist—and for an astonishing quotient of wisdom—will find both in Letters to a Young Poet. —Jennifer Buckendorff

Arthur Rimbaud Schizophrenic disassociation of life and mind make for a double tragedy in this young man's early death. A. Ginsberg longed for that ancient connection with the starry dynamo in the night; Rimbaud's brain shook with its deadly current and it made him feel quite odd among the emissaries of French bushwa normality, wearing buttoned coats, with eyes averted, as they stepped over the alter-ego of the boy, the poet in heat, in the gutter of the whorehose they were leaving.

The poems typify European longing for escape from the feudal history of their rigid societies, and make one think of a dog yowling at the moon while teathered to the rock that Sisyphus rolled up the hill.

A highly introverted exposay of French longing for the nobel savage, dramatically punctuated with images as consoling as the sun going nova, blazing in the eye of a mad dog.

Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud poetry, tr Bertrand Mathieu, bilingual

Graham Roberts This is the first comprehensive study of the group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, "The Association for Real Art". Graham Roberts reexamines commonly-held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics, its relationship to the formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and its place within Russian and European literary traditions. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU—its metafiction—occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.

David Robinson The unparalleled career of the Little Tramp

Charles Chaplin’s Little Tramp is the supreme icon of motion pictures—still recognized and loved throughout the world, more than 90 years since he first burst on the screen. The shabby little figure—with derby hat, too-tight jacket, oversized boots and pants, dandified bow tie, and swagger cane—seemed to symbolize the hopes and fears, defeats and optimism of all humanity. Chaplin’s own biography was a rags-to-riches story that saw the product of a destitute childhood in Victorian London become one of Hollywood’s first millionaires and the owner of his own studio before he was 30. His supreme gift was to transform his experience and knowledge of the human lot into comedy, for which his invention and skill have never been surpassed.

Jacques Roubaud The second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed "Hortense" series opens with a murder of a dog at the Church of Saint-Gudule. Chief Inspector Blognard and his sidekick Arapede are on the scene, as is our narrator, Jacques Roubaud. While they track down the Poldevian criminal, teenage girls argue the relative merits of the boy bands Dew-Pon Dew-Val and Landau Valley, Pere Sinouls tries to program a computer to take his place at the organ so that he can continue to practice Beeranalysis, and the clientele of the Gudule Bar debate the reality of Infinity. Time is running out for the Inspector, however, as the murderer puts into action his plot to kidnap our heroine Hortense, a 22-year-old philosophy student whose buttocks are so beautiful their description has been banned from the printed page.

Jacques Roubaud Part novel and part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of the last fifty years. At various times exasperating, daunting, moving, dazzling, and challenging, it has its origins in Jacques Roubaud's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young wife Alix, whose presence both haunts and gives meaning to every page. Having failed to write his intended novel ("The Great Fire of London"), instead he creates a book that is about that failure, but in the process opens up the world of the creative process, which is at once an attempt to bring order to his ravaged personal life and to construct an intricate literary project that functions according to strict rules, one of them being the palindrome. But rather than a confessional novel about himself and his wife, Roubaud follows in the tradition of the troubadours, where the objects of grief and love are identified obliquely and through literary artifice. At all times, Alix and his anguished loss of her are paramount, but usually couched or disguised by the writer's obsessive need to filter that anguish through reflections of the art of writing.

The Great Fire of London consists of a main text ("story") and two sets of digressions ("interpolations" and "bifurcations"). Although best to read the insertions as they appear (indicated in the main text with cross-reference markers), this is an "interactive" text in which readers can decide for themselves how they wish to proceed. Roubaud's novel stands as a lyrical counterpart of those great postmodern masterpieces by fellow Oulipians Georges Perec (Life: A User's Manual) and Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler).

Jacques Roubaud

Raymond Roussel

William S. Rubin

Antoine de Saint-Exupery Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.

Jean-Paul Sartre 4 plays about an existential portrayal of Hell, the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict and an arresting attack on American racism.

Helen G. Scott, Francois Truffaut Any book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock is valuable, but considering that this volume's interlocutor is François Truffaut, the conversation is remarkable indeed. Here is a rare opportunity to eavesdrop on two cinematic masters from very different backgrounds as they cover each of Hitch's films in succession. Though this book was initially published in 1967 when Hitchcock was still active, Truffaut later prepared a revised edition that covered the final stages of his career. It's difficult to think of a more informative or entertaining introduction to Hitchcock's art, interests, and peculiar sense of humor. The book is a storehouse of insight and witticism, including the master's impressions of a classic like Rear Window ("I was feeling very creative at the time, the batteries were well charged"), his technical insight into Psycho's shower scene ("the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the [editing]"), and his ruminations on flops such as Under Capricorn ("If I were to make another picture in Australia today, I'd have a policeman hop into the pocket of a kangaroo and yell 'Follow that car!'"). This is one of the most delightful film books in print. —Raphael Shargel

Erich Segal In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries, Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its early origins in a misogynistic quip by the sixth-century B.C. Susarion, through countless weddings and happy endings, to the exasperated monosyllables of Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd.

An exploration of various landmarks in the history of a genre that flourished almost unchanged for two millennia, The Death of Comedy revisits the obscenities and raucous twists of Aristophanes, the neighborly pleasantries of Menander, the tomfoolery and farce of Plautus. Segal shows how the ribaldry of foiled adultery, a staple of Roman comedy, reappears in force on the stages of Restoration England. And he gives us a closer look at the schadenfreude—delight in someone else's misfortune—that marks Machiavelli's and Marlowe's works.

At every turn in Segal's analysis—from Shakespeare to Molière to Shaw—another facet of the comic art emerges, until finally, he argues, "the head conquers and the heart dies": Letting the intellect take the lead, Cocteau, Ionesco, and Beckett smother comedy as we know it. The book is a tour de force, a sweeping panorama of the art and history of comedy, as insightful as it is delightful to read. (20010701)

George Bernard Shaw A native country maid from Domremy obeys voices from God and charms her way to the head of the French army and the coronation of the Dauphin. Her simplicity confounds a world unready to accept her. Three 90-minute cassettes.

George Bernard Shaw The complete five-act version of Caesar and Cleopatra for performance and study includes both prologues and the author's own stage directions and explanatory notes. Elizabeth T. Forter's introduction focuses on Shaw's calculated and integral development of the plot, juxtaposition of characters, and use of dramatic devices to convey the play's central theme, the measure of the truly heroic.

Sophocles Three Theban Plays, by Sophocles, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

  The pinnacle of classical drama in Greece, the three-part, 2,500 year-old Oedipus cycle remains a touchstone of Western culture. Nearly perfect technically, the plays feature headstrong heroes, intense plots, and breathtaking imagery that have influenced generations of artists, philosophers, and statesmen. These fresh, historically faithful renditions by renowned translator Peter Constantine bring new life to civilization’s most meaningful dramas.   Rich in sex and violence, the plays follow the tragic downfall of King Oedipus, a man who mistakenly believes he can control his own destiny. In Oedipus the King, we watch as the hero learns the truth about his past, including his murder of his father, Laius, and marriage to his mother, Jocasta. Written just before the death of Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus features a more subdued tone as the blind, exiled king reflects on his passing from this world. Antigone, the earliest written of the three, presents the powerful story of the iron-willed daughter of Oedipus as she takes a fatal stand against her uncle Creon, the new ruler of Thebes. Favoring her own moral code to the dictates of an unjust ruler, Antigone becomes the first heroine in Western literature and a model of civil disobedience.   Pedro de Blas holds degrees in law and classics and has taught Greek at Columbia University and the CUNY Latin/Greek Institute. He has acted in several productions of Greek tragedy in the original and he is the author of the introduction and notes to Essential Dialogues of Plato, also published by Barnes & Noble Classics.

Gertrude Stein 'I always wanted to be historical,' Gertrude Stein once quipped. In 1932, Stein began writing the 'autobiography' of her longtime friend and companion, Alice B. Toklas. The book, an immediate bestseller, guaranteed them both a place in history. An account of their life together in Paris before, during, and after World War I, it is full of the atmosphere of the changing life of the city and of idiosyncratic glimpses of such figures as Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Cocteau, Apollinaire, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and other luminaries and aspirants who were their close friends. But at the center of the narrative there is always the titanic figure of Gertrude Stein, the self-proclaimed 'first-class genius' who some dismissed as the 'Mother Goose of Montparnasse,' presiding over her celebrated residence-salon-art gallery at 27, rue de Fleurus. William Troy remarked about her: 'It is not flippant to say that if she had not come to exist . . . it would be necessary to invent Miss Gertrude Stein.'

Gertrude Stein Published in 1909, Three Lives was Gertrude Stein's first published work. The book is separated into three stories, "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena." The three stories are independent of each other, but all are set in the fictional town of Bridgepoint. Stein and her brother Leo were avid art collectors, and among the paintings was a portrait of Madame Cezanne which provided Stein with inspiration as she began to write (see book cover).

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein a sampling of the books content:

OBJECTS

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

***

FOOD

ROASTBEEF; MUTTON; BREAKFAST; SUGAR; CRANBERRIES; MILK; EGGS; APPLE; TAILS; LUNCH; CUPS; RHUBARB; SINGLE; FISH; CAKE; CUSTARD; POTATOES; ASPARAGUS; BUTTER; END OF SUMMER; SAUSAGES; CELERY; VEAL; VEGETABLE; COOKING; CHICKEN; PASTRY; CREAM; CUCUMBER; DINNER; DINING; EATING; SALAD; SAUCE; SALMON; ORANGE; COCOA; AND CLEAR SOUP AND ORANGES AND OATMEAL; SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE; A CENTRE IN A TABLE.

ROASTBEEF.

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

***

ROOMS

Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation.

A whole centre and a border make hanging a way of dressing. This which is not why there is a voice is the remains of an offering. There was no rental.

So the tune which is there has a little piece to play, and the exercise is all there is of a fast. The tender and true that makes no width to hew is the time that there is question to adopt.

Gertrude Stein

Jordan Stump Naming and Unnaming is a dazzling study that centers on the work of Raymond Queneau, one of the most influential French novelists of the twentieth century. Jordan Stump takes as his subject the many implications—epistemological, political, literary, sometimes even physical—of naming in Queneau’s remarkable novels.

From the idea that the names of characters offer a more immediate and perhaps even a more intimate understanding of their souls than we might glean from their words and deeds has grown the broad field of inquiry known as literary onomastics. Stump argues that there is another approach to the literary proper name, one that concentrates not on the meaning of names but on the meaning of the use of those names—the ways in which the characters and narrator of a novel address or refer to others.

Naming and Unnaming considers the literary and philosophical implications of names and naming. Stump examines four issues in Queneau’s novels—the nature of writing and of creation in general, the possibility or impossibility of knowledge, the relationship between the individual and the group, and the uses of power and control—in relation to which naming emerges as a force both powerful and utterly impotent. By exploring these forces and their evocation, Stump reveals the complexity of both the act of naming and the novels of Queneau.

Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson This is the first U.S. publication of two riotous novels by the Polish-born British writer Stefan Themerson (1910-1988), who with his wife Franciszka ran the Gaberbocchus Press in London. Gaberbocchus published both Kurt Schwitters and Bertrand Russell - and these extremes unite in Themerson's highly individual brand of philosophical Dadaism. Bayamus recounts the adventures of a self-proclaimed mutant with three legs (one is attached to a roller skate) and his efforts to propogate a new species; it includes an instructive visit to the "Theatre of Semantic Poetry," where old rhymes mutate into new truths. Cardinal Polatuo is the biography of Apollinaire's anonymous father, who turns out to be a ecclesiast with a murderous interest in poetry, a faith based on science, and a dreamlife so frankly obscene that only a dictionary of Freudian symbols can explain its innocence.

Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson