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'Re-Appraisals is a protest against the prevailing assumptions and directions of our whole literary culture- its arrogance, its irresponsibility, but above all its domination by the cliches of modern despair. Green is consistently asking a very simple question: is this book any good? And he shows us just how various and liberating a really steady response to that question can be.

There were nine of the Smith children, and the grandmothers and cousins, and there was a big house that never quite ended, and there were the smokehouse and hog-killing and the shaking of the pecan trees, and all the delicious doings that went on in a nineteenth-century kitchen, which lingered into the early decades of the twentieth century. But above all, there was a father who, as impresario and ritual maker, polished family events so that, as the author says," Even today, a half century later, they blind the eyes with their shine." She goes on to day, "But perhaps what holds it so fresh in my memory is the fact that along with all our physical play and work we lived a wild life of imagination: it was hard to keep it from spilling over into reality and painful when reality would step up and prune our flowering. That is why in this memory of Christmas in a small southern town there are sudden excursions to Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors and to the small-town Opera House and the jail in search of a Christmas gift for the parents; and it is why an elegant coffin could figure so prominently in the festivities. And why, one year, forty-eight 'real' convicts ate Christmas dinner with us."

And yet when independence came on the stroke of midnight of August 14, 1947, events unfolded with a violence that shocked the world: entire trainloads of Muslim and Hindu refugees were slaughtered on their flight to safety -- not by the British, but by each other. Macaulay's dream had become a flawed and bloody reality. The Proudest Day is a riveting account of the end of the Raj, the most romantic of all the great empires. Anthony Read and David Fisher tell the whole epic story in compelling and colorful detail from its beginnings more than a century earlier; their powerful narrative takes a fresh look at many of the events and personalities involved, especially the three charismatic giants --Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah --who dominated the final, increasingly bitter thirty years. Meanwhile, a succession of British politicians and viceroys veered wildly between liberalism and repression until the Raj became a powder keg, wanting only a match.

Donald Cuthbertson prided himself on being a model for his students and teachers, but he had lately begun to lose his focus. Degree Day is approaching, along with a birthday party for his wife, Lavinia, who is not going quietly into middle age. Her lavish costume party provides the revelers with a darkly comic resolution to romantic dalliance and political intrigue.

In this "hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity" ("Publishers Weekly"), "Zabor's knack for detail makes the absurd premise (a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear) believable" ("The New Yorker").

The text is fully annotated and includes a separate table of contents for the novel to assist readers in locating specific episodes or passages.Hardy's hand-drawn map of Wessex and the manuscript title page for the first edition of his novel are also included.Hardy and the Novel includes seven poems by Hardy that provide greater insight into his ethos; selections from Michael Millgate's biography of Hardy that depict the relationship between episodes in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and events in the author's life; and excerpts from Grindle and Gatrell's introduction to the 1983 edition that discuss Hardy's revision process in both manuscripts and early printed editions of the novel.Criticism features three contemporary reviews of the novel not printed in the earlier Norton editions, including the first feminist review of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.Also new are "A Chat with Mr. Hardy," a hitherto unprinted post-publication interview with the author about his new novel, and five carefully selected critical interpretations.Essays by Elliot B. Gose, Jr., Peter R. Morton, and Gillian Beer address Hardy's debt to Charles Darwin, perhaps the single most important influence on Hardy's thought and imagination; Raymond Williams's essay presents a Marxist perspective; and Adrian Poole discusses the significance of Hardy's wisdom concerning "the trouble men's words have with women and the trouble women have with men's words."A Chronology, new to this edition, and a Selected Bibliography are included.

Providing a glimpse into the shadowy reality of 1950s Hollywood in what was popularly considered a decade of innocence, this examination explores its obsessions and contradictions, provides accounts of public icons and explores the private scandals exploited by tabloids such as "Confidential".

Hailed as Elizabeth Spencer s best novel (Michael Gorra, New York Review of Books), this lost masterpiece of mid-century America finally returns to print."

This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence, and honesty. . . . In short, it s fully alive. Phillip Lopate"

Naomi Anstruther's undercover operation among the drug gangs, planned carefully by Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur, has ended in a bloody shoot-out. Naomi escapes, but both her ex-boyfriend and her current lover-who shouldn't have been there-are dead. Now the biggest danger to Naomi is a young woman named Esme, who believes that she and Naomi should personally avenge Donald's and Lyndon's deaths."One of the most exquisitely sardonic stylists writing crime fiction today."-Richard Lopez, Washington Post Book World "[A] black and zestful police series.... Matchless stuff by the genre's finest stylist."-Literary Review "One of the most exquisitely sardonic stylists writing crime fiction today."-Richard Lopez, Washington Post Book World "A tremendous writer. . . . Where else can you find a mystery series with as many layers of gorgeous stuff?"-Chicago Tribune "Bill James's Harpur and Iles books are deliciously unsavory.-John Harvey, "The Crime Writer's Crime Writer," The Guardian "[A] brilliantly stylish series of novels .... A unique author who is an acquired habit, but once discovered, impossible to kick."-Daily Express [London], Frances Fyfield "British mystery writing's finest prose stylist...startling, achingly funny and sometimes wholly surreal.... Essential reading."-The Observer [London], Peter Guttridge

It was tragic. There was no other word for it. Eleri ap Vaughan, sixty years old and still Keith Vine's best dealer, had turned for her supplies to other drug wholesalers: she had to die. For the threat of invasion by rival syndicates from other cities cannot be ignored, particularly as rumors reach Keith that an elegantly dressed spy from London, nicknamed Lovely Mover, is in the area. Eleri's death must serve as a warning to others to stay loyal. It's at times like these that Vine's new partner, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur, will prove invaluable - for example, in sweeping the murder scene for incriminating evidence. Harpur, however, is playing a dangerous undercover game, and he now finds himself in the precarious position of both covering up a murder and investigating it. Only one person suspects what Harpur is up to - his sneering superior, ACC Desmond Iles. And Iles is not always someone he dares trust. "Bill James's Harpur and Iles books are deliciously unsavoury: a brilliant combination of almost Jacobean savagery and sexual betrayal with a tart comedy of contemporary manners." - John Harvey, "The Crime Writer's Crime Writer," Guardian

Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso is here available in paperback for the first time. It is the most comprehensive yet written, and the only biography fully to appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art.Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. No painter of the first rank has been so awe-inspiringly productive. No painter of any rank has made so much money. A few painters have rivaled his life span of ninety years, but none has attracted so avid, so insatiable, a public interest.Patrick O'Brian knew Picasso sufficiently well to have a strong sense of his personality. The man that emerges from this scholarly, passionate, and brilliantly written biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite the relish of his fame. In his later years he professed communism, yet in O'Brian's view retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic outlook.Not that such matters were allowed to interfere with his vigorous sensuality. Sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedies and tragedies, suicides and wars tumble one another in the vast chaos of his experience. he was "a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce, burning life." It is with that impression of its subject that this book leaves its readers.

Roy Medvedev demonstrates, in engrossing and sharp detail, how the vast gulf between Marxist-Leninist principles and official Soviet attitudes and procedures turned vital theory into hollow dogma. Focusing on the rigidities of official ideology, he makes brilliantly clear the ways in which an excessively centralized and cumbersome bureaucratic structure was disastrous for the economic, intellectual, and moral development of Soviet society-keeping it dangerously insular in an era of increasing internationalism.

A portrait of the head of the Soviet Union whose rule followed Stalin's identifies his impact on the country and the rest of the world, tracing his efforts to reform communism and ease the cold war.

If there remains any doubt about Allan Gurganus s literary greatness, Local Souls should put this to rest forever. Jamie Quatro, New York Times Book Review"

The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII.Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: "On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation."

Cyberspace may seem an unlikely gateway for the soul, but as science commentator Wertheim argues in this "wonderfully provocative" ("Kirkus Reviews") book, cyberspace has in recent years become a repository for immense spiritual yearning. 37 illustrations.

Bitten by one of the snakes she is studying, Virginia Lee, an accomplished herpetologist, drives herself to the hospital, carrying a decaying antidote and using her pantyhose as a tourniquet to slow the poison's path in her bloodstream. Through the hideous traffic of L.A., she must reach her lover Terry McKechnie, who works as an emergency-room physician. Her hope and faith is in him, even as it has been withdrawn from her husband, Terry's college friend. After her arrival, Virginia desperately needs transfusions of her rare blood type-and only an explosive criminal-at-large with whom Terry has already clashed can save her life. In this "absolutely bewitching" (Jonathan Harr) novel, Craig Nova brings us into the moral morass of contemporary America, gripping us with the beauty of his exacting prose and the suspense of his riveting emotional drama. "I wouldn't delay reading a novel of Nova's, not even to complete one of my own."-John Irving "Craig Nova is a fine writer, one of our best, and if you haven't read him, the loss is yours."-Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (1997 Critic's Choice) "As skilled a piece of storytelling as Mr. Nova has yet pulled off."-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

Apocalypse and Other Poems by Nicaragua's revolutionist poet-priest, Ernesto Cardenal, is the author's second book, the first of poetry, to be published by New Directions. The editors of this volume, Robert Pring-Mill and Donald D. Walsh, have chosen a representative selection of Cardenal's shorter protest poems, epigrams, religious, and Amerindian verse. Also included are two of Cardenal's most impressive longer works: the haunting and melodic elegy, "Coplas on the Death of Merton," and the title poem, "Apocalypse," in which the theme of an ever-threatening nuclear holocaust is the core of a modern rendering of the Book of Revelations. At Our Lady of Solentiname, his religious community on an island in Lake Nicaragua, living and working in the manner of the early Christians, Father Cardenal embodies what he professes: "Now in Latin America, to practice religion is to make revolution." An informative introduction has been contributed by Robert Pring-Mill of Oxford University. The translations are by Thomas Merton, Robert Pring-Mill, Kenneth Rexroth and Mireya Jaimes-Freyre, and Donald D. Walsh, who also translated In Cuba, Cardenal's assessment of Fidel Castro's revolutionary society, published by New Directions in 1974.

A novel that interweaves the mysticism of the Jewish occult and the court intrigue of 17th-century Prague, its protagonist is Rochel, a bastard seamstress who escapes poverty through an arranged marriage but falls in love with the Golem created by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish community.

Ethereal and sensual, these intensely vivid poems capture the sights and textures of new places, people, and landscapes as experienced with a poet's fresh eye.

From a marketplace in Bangkok to the fields of New Hampshire, from recollections of her own childhood to celebrations of an infant grandson, Kumin stakes her far-flung claims with authority in her tenth book of poetry.

The earlier chapters recapitulate in condensed form the principles laid down in his Theory of Harmony; the later chapters break entirely new ground, for they analyze the system of key relationships within the structure of whole movements and affirm the principle of "monotonality," showing how all modulations within a movement are merely deviations from, and not negations of, its main tonality.Schoenberg's argument is supported by music examples, which range from entire development sections of classical symphonies to analyses of the experimental harmonic progressions of Strauss, Debussy, Reger, and Schoenberg's own early music. The final chapter, "Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch," discusses the music of our time, with particular reference to the possibility of new methods of harmonic analysis.Structural Functions of Harmony is a standard work on its subject and provides an invaluable key to the development of musical structure during the last two hundred and fifty years. This new edition, with corrections, a new preface, and an index of subject headings, has been prepared under the editorial supervision of Leonard Stein.

This outstanding book treating the three most beloved composers of the Vienna School is basic to any study of Classical-era music. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in clear and persuasive language. For this expanded edition, now available in paperback for the first time, Rosen has provided a new, 64-page chapter on the later years of Beethoven and the musical conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The author has also written an extensive new preface in which he responds to other writers who have commented on his ideas.

All Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea. While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the center stage for the dockyards and salons of Malta are alive with Napoleon's agents, and the admiralty's intelligence network is compromised. Maturin's cunning is the sole bulwark against sabotage of Aubrey's daring mission.

Girl with Curious Hair is replete with David Foster Wallace's remarkable and unsettling reimaginations of reality. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, where terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, the familiar strange.

Kay Boyle's Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience. Now in her ninetieth year, Kay Boyle dares us, in this most comprehensive collection of her stories, to explore the themes that have preoccupied her for a lifetime: "the inviolate integrity of the human soul, the impact of external events on the most intimate of feelings, our fractured experience of love versus duty, self-respect versus hubris, social convention versus personal ethic...She is still unquestionably modern" (Ann Hornaday, The New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed novelist Louise Erdrich has provided a very personal appreciation of Boyle's power and grace. As she comments in the Introduction: "Kay is a citizen whose life and art are intertwined, one morally dependent on the other, both inexhaustible."

'In her delightful sequel to My Small Country Living (Norton, 1984), McMullen tells tales about her Welsh farm and its incredible assortment of goats, sheep, dogs, horses, and people...for fans of Herriot, a new voice from the country.' --Booklist