In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence as though to seize on a new life. Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief."

The surviving authors of Our Examination have very kindly asked its former publisher to contribute to the re-issue of their work a few words about its origin. Many of the essays include were first published by Eugene Jolas in his review, transition: what, therefore, could be more fitting than an introduction by Mrs. Eugene Jolas? But she has declined the honour, Mr. Stuart Gilbert has too, so it is left to me to tell how this little volume came about.

This book talks about William Carlos Williams's work in poetry, friction, autobiography, drama and essays-shows conclusively that his prose was also remarkably original, versatile and powerful.

Lovers and Tyrants is at once an erotic, urgent, and beautifully written novel that established Francine du Plessix Gray as one of the most brilliant and exuberant fiction talents to emerge in America s literary history. This is the story of Stephanie, whose life we follow from her extraordinary childhood in France, through her father's mysterious disappearance, her emigration with her mother to America, her private schooling in New York, her tempestuous sexual relationships with a European nobleman, her marriage to an American, her children, and ultimately, her self-liberation. Every phase of Stephanie s life illustrates our painful ambivalence toward the irreconcilable poles of love and liberation, security and freedom."

The tomboy narrator of this funny, sad, ultimately disturbing novel is wise and compassionate beyond her years, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. And she s as cynical as The Catcher in the Rye s Holden Caulfield. But Maggie is very much her own person all six of them. Carol Peace, People"

'Stories of Happy People' is a collection of ten short fictions that maps the range of contentment, from inner joy to the edges of despair.

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game."

Steinbeck's letters were written on the left-hand pages of a notebook in which the facing pages would be filled with the test of East of Eden. They touched on many subjects—story arguments, trial flights of worknamship, concern for his sons.

Part autobiography, part writer's workshop, these letters offer an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck's creative process, and a fascinating glimpse of Steinbeck, the private man.

Drawing on his own experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, Jack London's stories, originally published in three volumes between 1900 and 1902, bring to life the harrowing hardships of life in the lawless wilderness.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and their Lost Generation confrères are memorably brought to life in Cowley’s classic memoir.

WINNER OF THE PORTICO PRIZE 2006 Anthony Burgess has always attracted acclaim and notoriety in roughly equal measure. He is admired for his literary novels, but known to a wider audience as the author of the ultra-violent shocker, A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a brilliant polymath, a composer, and a man for whom chaos and creativity, fact and fiction, existed in a complex and unique balance. Drawing on his fraught relationships with publishers, friends and his first wife, as expressed in interviews, unpublished writings, letters and diaries, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess reveals both the professional writer and the private man as he has never been seen before. 'The Real Life of Anthony Burgess is the biography all Burgess fans have been waiting for and which the great man himself richly deserves: revelatory, scrupulous, sincere and fascinating' William Boyd, Books of the Year Guardian 'Biswell's absorbing new life . . . is a work of scholarship, understanding and sympathetic portraiture' Observer 'He has shed great light on a writer, his personality and his work. This is a biography of the highest class' Herald 'As the first Burgess biography of any consequence it is long overdue' Sunday Telegraph The Real Life of Anthony Burgess was shortlisted for the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award.

With the expressions "Lost Generation" and "The Men of 1914," the major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative, historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can be heard to stir in these words?
Vincent Sherry reopens these long unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of the English war. He reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity--the idioms of public reason and civic rationality--marked the sizable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. If modernist writing characteristically attempts to challenge the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this study recovers the historical cultural setting of its most substantial and daring opportunity. And this moment was the occasion for great artistic innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
Combining the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture with abundant visual illustration, Vincent Sherry provides the framework for new interpretations of the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. With its relocation of the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.

Following the success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, author L.Frank Baum produced a sequel, The Land of Oz, in which he introduced a whole new set of characters.

Here we meet a young boy named Tip from the country of the Gillikins (slightly north of the Land of Oz), who creates a friend named Jack Pumpkinhead with the aid of the marvelous powder of life; General Jinjur, who, commanding an army of girls, lays siege to the Emerald City; and the mysterious Queen Ozma, who is crowned rightful ruler of Oz.

In addition to Baum's delightful story, The Land of Oz contains essays by major Oz experts-including award-winning author Harlan Ellison- certain to give the reader even greater insight to the world and characters created by one of America's most influential children's book writers.

This is the second in a series of definitive new and collectable Oz editions prepared in conjunction with The Baum Family Trust.

Throughout his life, Sir Kingsley Amis was a prolific, and outrageous correspondent. In his letters to friends such as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he was able to unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than 700 letters contained in this volume contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings.;The letters reveal Amis's youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his successful first novel, "Lucky Jim"; his passionate love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about the vicissitudes of family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his relationship with his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; and his development into one of the country's most revered - yet also uniquely controversial - literary figures.;Seldom can any writer have provided such a

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels, Tom Robbins's shorter work has appeared in publications ranging from "Esquire" to "Harper's," from "Playboy" to the "New York Times." Collected here for the first time in paperback, the essays, articles, observations--and even some untypical country-music lyrics--offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original.
Whether rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso's "Guernica, " lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls "the genius waitress," Tom Robbins's briefer writings exhibit the five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are brand-new short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an offbeat assessment of our divided nation. Wherever you open Wild Ducks Flying Backward," " you'll encounter the serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described "romantic Zen hedonist" and "stray dog in the banquet halls of culture."

Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel.

Written in 1967 from the vantage point ot the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz gives a fascinating portrait of the young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination from an early age to be an important American writer.

The twentieth-century novelist Neil M. Gunn is best remembered for his evocative accounts of Highland life as given in The Silver Darlings, Morning Tide and Highland River. In The Fabulous Matter of Fact, Richard Price goes beyond this starting point and provides the reader with both a comprehensive study of all Gunn's extant novels (including an early unpublished novel), and a detailed account of the literary context within which Gunn worked. Close textual criticism is enriched by references to Gunn's poetry, short stories, essays and letters, and many of his key sources and allusions are identified for the first time. Price explores Gunn's early literary relationship with the Celtic Twilight writers of the late nineteenth century, and his subsequent relation to the work of modernists such as Eliot and Proust, showing that Gunn was much more aware of literary movements than has been believed. Price also describes the historical context of the 1940s, focusing on Gunn's complex reaction to the war and his views on the nature of freedom, and he traces the extent, in Gunn's later novels, of his increasing interest in the limitations and loci of human compassion. Including useful plot summaries and a radical re-reading of the novels from the mid-1940s onwards, this is the most wide-ranging, approachable and informative guide to the work of Neil M. Gunn available.

This study considers Angela Carter's work in media, a critically neglected body of work comprising five radio plays, two film adaptions and a television documentary, as well as two unrealized screenplays, an operatic libretto and a stage play. Charlotte Crofts undertakes detailed textual analysis of unpublished work, including the poem Unicorn (1966) and The Holy Family Album (1991). She refers extensively to exclusive interviews with directors and producers with whom Carter collaborated. Included are the first publication of photographs from the set of The Magic Toyshop (1986), and excerpts from the script and storyboard of The Holy Family Album.

When Calista Jacobs, whose young son Charlie already shows signs of his father's scientific brilliance, discovers that her husband has been murdered, she sets out to track down his killer in this novel of murder and Harvard University politics.

Much good criticism of Mrquez came in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the perception of his fiction has been dominated by that novel. It seemed the implicit goal to which the earlier fiction has been striving. By concentrating on the later novels, including The General in his Labyrinth, this study brings out the internal dialogue between the novels so that One Hundred Years of Solitude then stands out, like Don Quixote in Cervantes' oeuvre, as untypical yet more deeply representative. Behind the popular impact of its 'magical realism' lies Mrquez' abiding meditation on the nature of fictional and historical truth.

Considering William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy, from the antebellum period through to the New Deal, this book seeks to link the occlusive stylistics of Faulkner's writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centered on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. By way of close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.