The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The Informers
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9780747596516
Paperback 352 pages
Price : £7.99

When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father’s anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and now lives in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, Spain, and Colombia, and he has translated works by E.M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in various magazines and literary supplements. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogota 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation.

Makhmalbaf - The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker

Mohsen Makhmalbaf at Large
The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker
Hamid Dabashi

I.B.Tauris
ISBN :9781845115326
Paperback 272 Pages
Price :£16.99

The name of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is almost synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and over the last quarter of a century, his career as filmmaker and writer has reflected the tumultuous history of his homeland and the fate of its neighbours. Hamid Dabashi draws from his friendship with Makhmalbaf, as well as his direct involvement with Makhmalbaf's films and thought, to give us this deeply engaging book on the tumultuous life and spectacular career of a great filmmaker. This is also the account of Makhmalbaf's transformation, from committed Muslim revolutionary, who was jailed for his part in the revolution, into an artistic humanist of great energy and elegance. His films, including "The Peddler" and "The Time for Love", "Salaam Cinema", "Gabbeh", "Silence" and "Kandahar", confound conventional genres and are always surprising. They represent his own journey and take part in it, in ways that Dabashi explores with great insight. Makhmalbaf's cinematic career started in Iran and has since expanded into Turkey, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and into Europe. Dabashi uncovers how, moving across boundaries, Makhmalbaf's creative genius can illuminate our contemporary world. And this book is in part the story of a friendship. As Mohsen Makhmalbaf writes in its Preface: 'Hamid Dabashi - this pious atheist friend of mine, the man who loves cinema and hates art, this political activist who abhors politics, this thinking, pondering, critical intellect...I have learned much from him. Perhaps he too, has learned from me. The times he and I have spent together have been occasions of discovery and illumination.'

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York. His acclaimed books include 'Dream of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema', and 'Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future'.

Che - A Memoir by Fidel Castro

Che
A Memoir
Fidel Castro

Leftword Books
978-81-87496-87-8
Paperback 237 Pages
Price: Rs 350.00

"For me, it has always been hard to accept the idea that Che is dead. I dream of him often, that I have spoken to him, that he is alive."
- Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro writes with great candor and emotion about a historic revolutionary partnership that changed the face of Cuba and Latin America. Fidel creates a vivid portrait of Che Guevara- the man, the revolutionary, and the intellectual - revealing much about his own inimitable determination and character.
This new edition of a unique political memoir includes Fidel's speech on the return of Che's remains to Cuba 30 years after his assasination in Bolivia in 1967, and provides a frank assessment of the Bolivian mission.

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate
On Human Nature
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault

The New Press
ISBN: 9781595581341
Paperback 240 Pages
Price :$14.95

In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world’s leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Elders to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as “innate” human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?
The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers, and above all serves as a concise introduction to their basic theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.
In addition to the debate itself, this volume features a newly written introduction by noted Foucault scholar John Rajchman and includes substantial additional texts by Chomsky and Foucault.

Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics at MIT and a world-renowned political thinker and activist. The author of numerous books, including On Language and Understanding Power (both available from The New Press), he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Michel Foucault (1926–84) held a chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. The New Press has published three previous volumes of his work as well as a collection, The Essential Foucault.
John Rajchman is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and author of Michel Foucault. He lives in New York City.

The Other by Ryszard Kupuscinski

The Other
Ryszard Kupuscinski
Antonia Lloyd-Jones - Translator
Neal Ascherson - Introduction

Verso Books
September 2009
Paper Back 128 Pages
ISBN :9781844674169
Price :$12.95

The master of literary reportage reflects on the West’s encounters with the non-European throughout the ages

Ryszard Kapuscinski witnessed and reported major wars, coups and revolutions as they happened throughout the developing world and global South. In this distillation of his reflections accumulated from a lifetime of travel, he takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other: the non-European or non-American.
Looking at this concept through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and considering its formative significance for his own work, Kapuscinski traces how the West has understood the Other from classical times to colonialism, from the age of enlightenment to the postmodern global village. He observes how today we continue to treat the non-European as an a lien and a threat, an object of study that has not yet become a partner in sharing responsibility for the fate of the world. In our globalised but increasingly polarised post-9/11 age, Kapuscinski shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times.

Born in Pinsk (in what is now Belarus), the celebrated Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski is the author of, among others, Shah of Shahs, Imperium, Shadow of the Sun and, most recently, the memoir Travels with Herodotus. His books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. He died in 2007.

Simone de Beauvoir - The Making of an Intellectual Woman

Simone de Beauvoir
The Making of an Intellectual Woman
Toril Moi

Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN13: 9780199238712
Hard Back 368 pages
Price:$59.95

In Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman , Toril Moi shows how Simone de Beauvoir became the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century. Blending biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, this book provides a completely original analysis of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows that we constantly make something of what the world tries to make of us. By reconstructing the social and political world in which Beauvoir became the author of The Second Sex , and by showing how Beauvoir reacted to the pressures of that world, Moi applies Beauvoir's ideas to Beauvoir's own life.
Ranging from an investigation of French educational institutions to reflections on the relationship between freedom and flirtation, this book uncovers the conflicts and difficulties of an intellectual woman in the middle of the twentieth century. Through her analysis of Beauvoir's life and work Moi shows how difficult it was - and still is - for women to be taken seriously as intellectuals. Two major chapters on The Second Sex provide a theoretical and a political analysis of that epochal text. The last chapter turns to Beauvoir's love life, her depressions and her fear of ageing.
In a major new introduction, Moi discusses Beauvoir's letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Algren, as well as her recently published student diaries from 1926/27.

Toril Moi was born and raised in Norway, and worked in England in the 1980s, before moving to Duke University in 1989, where she is now the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. She is the author of numerous influential books on feminist theory. Her study of Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism was published to wide critical acclaim in 2006.

The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy

The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy
A New Translation
C. P. Cavafy
Aliki Barnstone - Translator


W.W.Norton
ISBN 9780393328998
Paperback 304 pages
Price: $15.95


C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) wrote some of the most powerful poems in world literature. His work uncannily translates history, the record of the many, into an individual personal document. He draws on the spectrum of Greek poetic tradition to write wickedly satirical yet internal poetry, whether his speaker is a spoiled rich boy planning to enter politics or a poor, ostracized, pure young man destroyed by poverty and priggish social mores.

Literary Criticism: A New History

Literary Criticism: A New History
Gary Day

Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9780748615636
March, 2009
Hard Back 352 pages
Price :$95.00

Did you know that Aristotle thought the best tragedies ended happily? Or that the first mention of the motor car in literature was in Boswell's Life of Johnson, written in 1791? In the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for book reviews to be 30,000 words long.
These are just a few of the fascinating facts to be found in this absorbing history of literary criticism. From the Ancient Greeks to the present day, Gary Day gets the scoop on the lives of critics, the times in which they lived, and the problems of interpretation and valuation that have persist throughout the ages. Day questions whether the “theory wars” of recent years have lost sight of literature itself, and makes surprising connections between criticism and a range of subjects, including the growing influence of money.
General readers will appreciate this informative, intriguing, and often provocative account of the history of literary criticism, students will value the clear way in which criticism is put into context, and academics will enjoy the inherent challenge to prevailing views about the current nature of theory.
Gary Day is principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University.

The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays

The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays
Lawrence D. Kritzman

Colombia University Press
ISBN: 9780231119924
June, 2009
Hard Back 240 pages
Price :$29.50 / £20.50

Michel de Montaigne's (1533-1592) Essais was a profound study of human subjectivity. More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Montaigne embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. Through the questions How shall I live? How can I know myself? he explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the act of anticipating and coping with death.
In this book, Lawrence D. Kritzman traces Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe that influences both the body and the mind. Imagination is essential to human experience. Although Montaigne recognized that the imagination can confuse the individual, "the fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship.
Kritzman begins with Montaigne's study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death. Kritzman concludes with Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion. His reading demonstrates that the mind's I, as Montaigne envisioned it, sees by imagining that which is not visible, thus offering an alternative to the logical positivism of our age.

Lawrence D. Kritzman is professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth and director of the Institute of French Cultural Studies. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford universities and is the author of several books on the French Renaissance. A frequent contributor to the media on French intellectual life, he is also editor of the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought and the Columbia University Press series European Perspectives.

Journals & Notebooks of Susan Sontag

Reborn
Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963
Susan Sontag
Edited by David Rieff


Picador - 27th October 2009
ISBN: 9780312428501
Trade Paperback 336 pages
Price :$15.00


"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself."
The first of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, Reborn (1947-1963) reveals one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century, fully engaged in the act of self-invention. Beginning with a voracious and prodigious fourteen-year-old, Reborn ends as Sontag, age thirty, is finally living in New York as a published writer.

"I intend to do everything...to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!"
So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City.
Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America’s greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag’s voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag’s complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself—all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

Knowledge of Hell by António Lobo

Knowledge of Hell
António Lobo Antunes
Translator: Clifford E. Landers

Dalkey Archive
ISBN :9781564784360
Paper Back 312 Pages
Price:$13.95

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric “advances” that destroy rather than heal.

António Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1942. He began writing as a child, but at his father’s wishes, went to medical school instead of pursuing a career in writing. After completing his studies, Antunes was sent to Angola with the Portuguese Army. It was in a military hospital in Angola that Antunes first became interested in many of the subjects of his novels. Antunes lives in Lisbon, where he continues to write and practice psychiatry.
Clifford E. Landers has translated fifteen novels from Brazilian Portuguese, and was awarded both the Mario Ferreira Award in 1999 from ATA’s Portuguese Language Division, as well as a Prose Translation grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2004.

Son of Man by Augusto Roa Bastos

Son of Man
Augusto Roa Bastos
Translated by Rachel Caffyn
Jean Franco - Afterword

Monthly Review Press in 1988
ISBN :9780853457336
Paperback 279 pages
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Roa Bastos’s novel Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man) was an overwhelming critical and popular success. It recreates Paraguay’s history from the dictatorship of José Gaspar de Francia early in the 19th century through the Chaco War. By carefully juxtaposing alternate narrative voices, Roa Bastos creates a tension that signals the moral and political situations in Paraguay’s history .

To say that Roa Bastos is the paradigm of the Latin American writer in exile would be no exaggeration. After spending 25 years in Buenos Aires following an abortive conspiracy in the 1940s to overthrow a dictatorship, Roa accepted a teaching position at the Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail, from which he is now retired. In the mid-1980s, he accepted an offer of Spanish citizenship, resigned to his never again living in his native country. Roa Bastos's complex fiction is the attempt to record the "inner" history of Paraguay and to record the many silenced voices: those of the indigenous population (including those who speak the Guarani language, which dominates in Paraguay's bilingual and bicultural society); the original independence fighters and their revolutionary offspring; the marginalized artist who is forced to live, if not an actual exile, an interior exile; and those decent men and women whose very decency exposes them to exploitation and oppression. Roa Bastos's novel Son of Man is his effort to create such an inner history. Passages in an almost biblical style create a panoramic transition between vignettes in which Christ figures represent the injustices of Paraguayan society and its victims' sacrifices. I, the Supreme (1974) is the first-person narrative of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, the Enlightenment-inspired Paraguayan strongman of the mid-1800s who sought to create an autochthonous utopia in the Paraguayan heartland. Francia fought against the overwhelming odds of international forces desiring to thwart Paraguay's political independence and to appropriate its natural resources, and Roa Bastos portrays him as a tragic figure. In the novel, he is caught between, on the one hand, the historical necessities of brutal dictatorship and the inevitable destiny of the young South American republics, and, on the other, the profoundly seductive chimeras of sociocultural independence.

I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos

I the Supreme
Augusto Roa Bastos
Translator: Helen Lane

Dalkey Archive
ISBN :1-56478-247-6
Paperback 433 Pages
Price:$13.95

Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814.
By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I the Supreme is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power—over men, over events, over language itself.

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005) is considered one of Parguay's greatest novelists. He is best known for his novel I the Supreme, but he wrotes many books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He spent much of his life outside of his home country, both as a foreign correspondent and in exile for his opposition to the ruling governments of his country.
Helen Lane was the preeminent translator of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fiction. Among the long list of authors she translated are Augusto Roa Bastos, Jorge Amado, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras, Nélinda Piñon, and Curzio Malaparte.

A Captive Spirit by Marina Tsvetaeva

A CAPTIVE SPIRIT
Collected Prose
Marina Tsvetaeva
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Translated and edited by J. Marin King

Ardis Publishing
ISBN 0-88233-353-4
Paper Back 491 Pages
Price :$21.95

A Captive Spirit shows Marina Tsvetaeva's genius at the peak of its power. The selections are from her mature period, the 1930s, and include almost all of her autobiographical writings, her major literary portraits, and her literary criticism.
Exiled in Paris and isolated in the emigre community during this period, Tsvetaeva became increasingly aware of the importance of biography, history, and myth. Her famous portraits of Maximilian Voloshin and Andrei Bely reveal her remarkable capacities as an eyewitness, while her moving accounts of her father and mother, sisters and brother, seen through a child's eyes, comprise the most lyrical of family chronicles. The final section of the book, juxtaposing two works of literary criticism, demostrates her formidable critical and analytical intelligence.
Tsvetaeva composed her prose to be read aloud, and these essays, full of extraordinary vitality, reflect the urgency of one who writes to discover the essential truths hidden in the past. A Captive Spirit is a remarkable collection of work from, as Vladimir Nabokov described her, "a writer of genius."

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A Dictionary of Haiku
Classified by Season Words with Traditional and Modern Methods
Jane Reichhold

Under the five traditional seasons, [spring, summer, autumn, winter and New Year's] each season is divided into seven parts. Under each of these divisions the elements of that season are then arranged alphabetically.
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Social Structures and Forms of Consciousness by István Mészáros

Social Structures and Forms of Consciousness
István Mészáros

Monthly Review Press
ISBN: 978-1-58367-204-4
Paperback 432 Pages
February 2010
Price :$29.95

This new work by the leading Marxian philosopher of our day is a milestone in human self-understanding. It focuses on the location where action emerges from freedom and necessity, the foundation of all social science.
Today, as never before, the investigation of the close relationship between social structure — defined by Marx as “arising from the life-process of definite individuals” — and the various forms of consciousness is particularly important. We can only perceive what is possible by first identifying the historical process that constrains consciousness itself, and therefore social action.
The relationship between social structure and forms of consciousness discussed in this volume is multifaceted and profoundly dialectical. It requires the presentation of a great wealth of historical material and the assessment of the relevant philosophical literature, from Descartes through Hegel and the Liberal tradition to the present, together with their connections with political economy and political theory. István Mészáros moves beyond both abstract solutions to the surveyed methodological questions and one-sided structuralist evaluation of the important substantive issues, bringing the process of our understanding of social structure and consciousness to a level not previously attained.
Above all, in the spirit of the Marxian approach, even the most complicated problems are analyzed in relation to the major practical concerns of our time. The primary aim of this work is to outline the dialectical intelligibility of historical development toward a viable societal reproductve order. Social Structures and Forms of Consciousness is of the highest importance as both a political and philosophical work, illuminating the place from where we must act, today.
István Mészáros left his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He is professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of philosophy for fifteen years. Mészáros is author of The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, and Marx’s Theory of Alienation, among other books.

Venezuelan Revolution by Hugo Chávez

UNDERSTANDING THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION
Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker
by Hugo Chávez and Marta Harnecker
Translated by Chesa Boudin

Monthly Review Press
ISBN:1-58367-127-7
Paper Back 232 Pages
Price :$15.95

Marta Harnecker’s interviews with Hugo Chávez began soon after one of the most dramatic moments of Chávez’s presidency—the failed coup of April 2002, which ended with Chávez restored to power by a massive movement of protest and resistance. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Chávez talks to Harnecker about the formation of his political ideas, his aspirations for Venezuela, its domestic and international policies, problems of political organization, relations with social movements in other countries, and more, constantly relating these to concrete events and to strategies for change.

The exchange between Harnecker and Chávez—sometimes reflective, sometimes anecdotal, always characterized by their passionate commitment to the struggles of the oppressed—brings to light the process of thought and action behind the public pronouncements and policies of state.

The interviews are supplemented by extracts from Chávez’s most recent pronouncements on the ongoing transformation in Venezuela and Latin America, an analysis by Harnecker on the role of the military, and a chronology.

Hugo Chávez has become a symbol of defiance of U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America. His importance for the future of the region makes this book essential reading.

Viva South America! by Oliver Balch

Viva South America!
Oliver Balch

ISBN: 9780571237036
Paperback 416 Pages
Price :£14.99 Sp.Price :£7.75

Simon Bolívar once inspired a continent to rise from serfdom and throw off the shackles of Spanish rule. With lance and law book, he and his fellow Liberators set the course for independence, freedom and equality. ¡Viva South America! sets out to discover if that dream lives on. Is it fair to describe a land as ‘independent’ while poverty still enslaves millions, where violence lurks in the shadows and where lawlessness gnaws away at progress? Did the Liberators fail? Or are leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales resurrecting those long-ago ideals?Armed with a reporter’s notebook and an open mind, the author hits the road in search of answers. Cutting a path along the highways and byways of the continent, this book lifts the lid on the Liberators’ legacies and sniffs behind their modern-day statues.With the ghost of Bolívar as guide, the quest takes the reader off the tourist trail and into the weird and wonderful worlds of South American culture and society. By stepping into people’s homes and into inmates’ prison cells, by climbing on to dance floors and over road blocks, Oliver Balch unearths untold stories from the front line of South America’s contemporary fight for freedom.

Oliver Balch works as an independent journalist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he writes regularly for the Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the Observer and Fortune magazine. Away from his laptop, he has had jobs as a labourer in Peru, a Bollywood extra in India, a missionary in Bolivia and an English teacher to exiled Tibetan monks. Viva South America! is his first book.

Stories of the Modern South

Stories of the Modern South
Ben Forkner & Patrick S. J. Samway - Editors

ISBN 9780140247053
Paperback 544 pages
Price :$17.00 Sp.Price :$11.00

Rich in irony, sly humor, and vivid, dramatic imagery, the literature of the modern South is a vital amalgam of a once-rural society's storytelling tradition and the painful contradictions and cultural clashes brought about by rapid change. This excellent collection includes works by Truman Capote, James Agee, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Tyler, Reynolds Price, and many others.

For Table of Contents Please Click Here

Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligensia

The Philosophy Steamer
Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligensia
Lesley Chamberlain

Atlantic Books
Paperback 432 pages
ISBN: 9781843540939
Price :£9.99 Sp.Price :399.00

In 1922, Lenin personally drew up a list of some 220 ‘undesirable’ intellectuals to be deported from the country in preparation for the creation of the Soviet Union in December of that year. Two ships sailed from Petrograd that autumn, taking around 70 of these eminent men and their families away to what became permanent exile in Berlin, Prague and Paris. Using diaries, letters and memoirs, The Philosophy Steamer tells the story of the philosophers, writers, journalists and scholars thrown out of their homeland and forced to join émigré communities. It also explores the fate of ideas: not just those of Lenin, but also of the men who, though forced to leave their homeland, made unique contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the twentieth century.

Selected Prose of Vaclav Havel

Open Letters
Selected Prose of Vaclav Havel

ISBN: 9780571165216
Paperback 432 Pages
Price :£14.99 Sp.Price :£10.50

This selection of Havel's 25 best essays written since 1965 is a fascinating chronicle of the development and ideas of the greatly admired Czechoslovakian dissident turned president. Whether he muses on Gorbachev, his harassment by the police, or the ever-present danger of injustices being committed in service of noble words, Havel writes with clarity, wit, eloquence, a steadfast optimism, and remarkable courage. Although some of the pieces were already published in Vaclav Havel, or Living in Truth ( LJ 8/87), such as the influential essays on the nature of totalitarianism ("Power of the Powerless") and on the global crises of human responsibility ("Politics and Conscience"), this is an important book.
In a prescient 1987 essay, Czech playwright Havel, mocks those who look to "Glasnost Czar" Gorbachev as a liberator. Many of the pieces in this stirring collection of political essays, letters, speeches, autobiographical sketches, interviews and musings prefigure the upsurge of suppressed longings for freedom that toppled Czechoslovokia's totalitarian regime. A recurring theme is that fundamental change, whether in the East or the West, must begin with the individual conscience, with people resisting bureaucracy, ideologies and sloganeering.The book closes with Havel's ringing 1990 New Year's address envisioning a democratic, prosperous republic that has overcome an obsolete economy, bankrupt school system and polluted environment.

Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert

The Collected Poems 1956 - 1998

Zbigniew Herbert

Atlantic Books

ISBN: 978 1 84354 882 9

Hardback 624 pages

RRP: £30.00 Sp.Price : £ 22.50

Zbigniew Herbert is one of the outstanding poets of the last century. This exceptional new translation brings together, for the first time in English in one volume, his entire poetic output – from his first book of poems, String of Light, in 1956, to his .nal volume, previously unpublished in English, Epilogue of the Storm. As Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert’s Selected Poems, this definitive collection is ‘bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate’.

This volume is edited and translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles, with additional translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, and an introduction by Adam Zagajewski.

Zbigniew Herbert was one of the greatest Polish writers of this century. He is a figure comparable to, say, T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden.’ New Yorker‘Herbert’s poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.’ A. Alvarez, New York Review of BooksZbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) was a spiritual leader of the anti-communist movement in Poland. His work has been translated into almost every European language, and he won numerous prizes, including the Jerusalem Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His books include Selected Poems, Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, Mr Cognito, Still Life with a Bridle, and King of the Ants.

A Philosophical History of Russia

Motherland
A Philosophical History of Russia
Lesley Chamberlain

Atlantic Books
ISBN :9781843542862
Paperback 336 Pages
Price :£14.99 Sp.Price :599.00

Lesley Chamberlain, novelist, traveller and historian of ideas, has been pondering the enigma of Russia for over thirty years. She finds that during the last two centuries Russian intellectuals have asked two fundamental questions: 'what makes a good man?' and 'what is the right way to live?' Motherland is a unique introduction to the key Russian thinkers and an eloquently-narrated journey in the history of ideas. By examining Russian thought over the past two centuries, Lesley Chamberlain has produced a radical new interpretation of Russian intellectual history that, finally, gives us a glimpse in to the soul of that singular country.

Lesley Chamberlain is a writer and reviewer distinguished for her wide-ranging work from travel (In the Communist Mirror) to philosophy (Nietzsche in Turin). In 2003 she published her first novel, Girl in a Garden. She is the author of Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia (2005) and The Philosophy Steamer (2006).

Europe by Habermas

Europe: The Faltering Project
Jürgen Habermas

ISBN: 978-0-7456-4649-7
Paperback 192 pages
Price: $19.95

The future of Europe and the role it will play in the 21st century are among the most important political questions of our time. The optimism of a decade ago has now faded but the stakes are higher than ever. The way these questions are answered will have enormous implications not only for all Europeans but also for the citizens of Europe’s closest and oldest ally – the USA.
In this new book, one of Europe’s leading intellectuals examines the political alternatives facing Europe today and outlines a course of action for the future. Habermas advocates a policy of gradual integration of Europe in which key decisions about Europe’s future are put in the hands of its peoples, and a ‘bipolar commonality’ of the West in which a more unified Europe is able to work closely with the United States to build a more stable and equitable international order.
This book includes Habermas’s portraits of three long-time philosophical companions, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Ronald Dworkin. It also includes several important new texts by Habermas on the impact of the media on the public sphere, on the enduring importance religion in “post-secular” societies, and on the design of a democratic constitutional order for the emergent world society.
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The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño

The Skating Rink
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews

New Directions
August 2009 Release
ISBN :978-0-8112-1713-2
Hard Cover 208 Pages
Price: $21.95

Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.A complex book, The Skating Rink’s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it’s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it’s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers.

Poetry, etcetera by Jacques Roubaud

Poetry, etcetera: Cleaning House
Jacques Roubaud
Translated from the French by Guy Bennett

Green Integer
ISBN: 1-933382-53-1
Paper Back 286 Pages
Price: $12.95

What is poetry today, and how does it fit into our lives? Through a series of intelligent, personal, and often humorous essays, the great French poet and fiction writer explores the role of poetry in society and what poetry means to each of us. This is simultaneously a profound and highly readable work on language and meaning.Born in 1932, Jacques Roubaud is a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and is one of the most accomplished members of Oulipo, the workshop for experimental writing founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais.

Roubaud has published writing in nearly all genres: prose, theater, and poetry, and he has translated Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark and contemporary American poetry into French. Among his many works are the novels Our Beautiful Heroine and The Great Fire of London; the collections of poetry La pluralité des mondes de Lewis and Mono no Aware; and a collection of essays, Poésie: récit. His works have been translated

Hell Has No Limits by José Donoso

Hell Has No Limits

José Donoso

Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine

Green Integer

ISBN: 1-892295-14-8

Paper Back 163 Pages

Price: $10.95

With its stark atmosphere, powerful characterizations, and dazzling alterations of perspective in time and gender, José Donoso's early masterwork, Hell Has No Limits, anticipates the qualities of better-known works of this Chilean magic-realist.Originally published in 1966, this grimly vivid novel evokes the sweetness and despair during one fateful day in the collective existence of Estación El Olivo, a decayed community marked for doom as surely as Donoso's central character, the transvestite dancer/prostitute la Manuela, whose virginal daughter operates the brothel out of which she/he works.La Manuela is menaced both by his would-be protector, the local politician/land baron who wants to raze Estación El Olivo for his expanding vineyards, and by a coldly vengeful trucker, nursing a lifetime of hurts, deprivation, and suppressed sexual ambiguity. The lives of this trio—past and present—are indelibly forged in the novel's stunning climax, which combines a shocking act of violence in the present with a bizarre erotic encounter from decades before.

Author of A House in the Country, The Obscene Bird of Night, Coronation, This Sunday, Curfew, and numerous other works, Donoso is one of the great Latin American “boom” novelists. He was awarded the International Prize of the Americas Awards in 1996, shortly before his death.

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Memoirs of José Saramago

Small Memories

José Saramago

translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Harvill Secker

ISBN :9781846551482

Publication date: 05/11/2009

B format Hardback 208 pages

Original Price :£12.99

Born in Portugal in 1922 in the tiny village of Azinhaga, José Saramago was only eighteen months old when he moved with his father and mother to live in a series of cramped lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence, its river landscape and olive groves seeping deep into his memory.Shifting back and forth between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories, a gathering together of the fragmented recollections that make up the idea of one’s youth. Lust, love, humiliation, aspiration - the raptures and miseries of childhood are beautifully captured: Saramago’s grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed to keep them warm; the young José proudly carrying his first balloon on a string, only to be mocked by two strangers as it empties of air, the shrivelled remains dragging behind him; his first encounter with literature as he listens entranced to a friend’s mother reading out weekly instalments of Maria, the Fairy of the Forest, and the seven-year-old José doggedly teaching himself to read by deciphering articles in the daily newspaper brought home by his father.

José Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922 and has been a full-time writer since 1979. His oeuvre embraces plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and eleven novels, which have been translated into more than forty languages and have established him as the most influential Portuguese writer of his generation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

Trouble with Strangers by Terry Eagleton

Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics
Terry Eagleton

John Wiley Books
ISBN: 978-1-4051-8572-1
Paperback 360 pages
Price: $29.95


In this major new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the world’s greatest cultural theorists, writes with wit, eloquence and clarity on the question of ethics. Providing rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton examines key ethical theories through the framework of Jacques Lacan’s categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, measuring them against the ‘richer’ ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

• a major new book from Terry Eagleton, one of the world’s greatest cultural theorists
• investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek
• engages with the whole modern European tradition of thought about ethics
• brings together personal and political ethics and makes a passionate case for political love

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Reason, Faith, and Revolution by Terry Eagleton

Reason, Faith, and Revolution
Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton

Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300151794
Hardback 200 Pages
Price :$25.00

Terry Eagleton’s witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager to understand the God Debate. On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the “superstitious” view of God held by most atheists and agnostics and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity.

There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade—Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular—nor for many conventional believers. Instead, Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.

Terry Eagleton is Bailrigg Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, England, and Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He lives in Dublin.

Terry Eagleton reflects on the issues that animate Reason, Faith, and Revolution. . .

Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology. I therefore have a good deal of sympathy with its rationalist and humanist critics. But it is also the case, as this book argues, that most such critics buy their rejection of religion on the cheap. When it comes to the New Testament, at least, what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion’s own. It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood’s opinions of it.

It is with this ignorance and prejudice that I take issue in this book. If the agnostic left cannot afford such intellectual indolence when it comes to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, it is not only because it belongs to justice and honesty to confront your opponent at his or her most convincing. It is also that radicals might discover there some valuable insights into human emancipation, in an era where the political left stands in dire need of good ideas. I do not invite such readers to believe in these ideas, any more than I myself in the archangel Gabriel, the infallibility of the pope, the idea that Jesus walked on water, or the claim that he rose up into heaven before the eyes of his disciples.

If I try in this book to “ventriloquise” what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists, I do not wish to be mistaken for a dummy. But the Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions—death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like—on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence. It is time for this politically crippling shyness to come to an end.

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Tragic hero: Laurie Taylor interviews Terry Eagleton

Laurie Taylor meets the Marxist critic gunning for the New Atheists

Tower Struck by Lightning by Fernando Arrabal

Tower Struck by Lightning

by Fernando Arrabal

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN-13: 978-0140130218

Paperback: 256 pages

Price: $15.00 Sp.Price: $10.00

Acclaimed Spanish avant-garde playwright Arrabal has delivered himself of a bracingly intelligent, caustically funny first novel. Rebellious, artistic, ex-Jesuit seminarian Elias Tarsis, an Andorran Spaniard, is locked in struggle with Marc Amary, a coldly brilliant Swiss physicist turned financial speculator and Marxist terrorist. The battlefield: the final game of the world chess championship. Ostensibly the antithesis of one another, each protagonist increasingly appears to be the other's doppelganger, as the book progresses with the aid of diagrams and flashbacks of their lives. Master chess player himself, Arrabal uses the final round of the world chess championship to flesh out a personal and political confrontation between Andorran Elias Tarsis and Marc Amary, a Swiss physicist who desires victory for the greater Communist glory of the "Party of the Poor." For his opponent, Amary is an implacable robot who "reeks of assassination," so when the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs is the victim of a sensational kidnapping,Tarsis is convinced that Amary is behind the Paris kidnapping of a top-ranking politburo official and the ensuing demand that the Soviet Union bomb the Saudi Arabian oil fields. This mysteryand the matchare resolved to considerable effect with a surprising twist. Despite a tendency to be overly didactic, this is a stimulating examination of how emotion drives intelligence and how the innocent become pawns in the cycle of evil and human suffering. As the two make their moves on the chessboard (diagrams of which are provided), their lives unfold and the contest becomes ideological.As can be expected from this avant-garde maverick, dogmas cannot be depended on and the ending has an O. Henry-like twist.

A Memoir of Gioconda Belli

The Country Under My Skin
A Memoir of Love and War

Gioconda Belli

Product Details:- Bloomsbury Paperbacks ISBN: 9780747558996

Format: Paperback, 352 pages,

RRP: £8.99 Sp.Price : 650.00

Synopsis

Lives don't get much more quixotic or passionately driven than that of the Nicaraguan revolutionary Gioconda Belli. She may have been educated by nuns and dazzled all as a well-heeled society girl, but Gioconda lifted her 'guilt of privilege' by joining the Sandinistas in her twenties, to serve and then lead in their underground resistance. If part of her wanted to fulfil society's classic code of femininity and produce four children (which she did), there was also part which wanted the privileges of men - the freedom to carry out clandestine operations, to forge the Sandinista resistance effort even with toddler and infant in tow.'Conspiracy came easy to me,' confesses Belli. She hid political pamphlets from her first husband as she hid her love affairs with remarkable men. This remarkable book is a journey of the heart, through marriages and grand passions, as well as an insider's view of a revolutionary movement. From Nicaragua and its intrigue to Cuba where she locked horns with Castro, to exile in Costa Rica where she organised an underground network, back to a triumphant if short-lived Sandinista government where she was in charge of State television, Gioconda Belli's life is one of real-life intrigue - political and romantic - and hard-won wisdom. And as a novelist and poet, Belli has created her self-portrait with great skill and eloquence.

About The Author

Gioconda Belli's poetry and fiction have been published in many languages. Her first novel, The Inhabited Woman, was an international bestseller; her collection of poems Linea de Fuego won the prestigious Casa de Las Americas prize in 1978. She lives in santa Monica and Managua.Gioconda Belli has lived an extraordinary life. Find out more in the editorial review of her autobiography, The Country Under My Skin, published by Bloomsbury in paperback version in August 2003.

The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky

Stalin's Nemesis
The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
Bertrand Patenaude

Product Details :- Faber and Faber / ISBN: 9780571228751

Hard Cover / Price :£20.00 / Sp.Price :799.00

The story of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political murders: the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Synopsis

Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, and a brilliant writer and orator. He was also a ruthless and authoritarian figure who could have become Lenin’s successor as ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time of the Second World War, he was a powerless exile in Mexico who had been refused entry to every country in Europe. Living in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky was protected by naive young American acolytes who saw him as the supreme theoretician of world revolution. The hothouse atmosphere of the villa was heightened by emotional turmoil in the relations between Trotsky and Rivera, a volcanically unstable man, and the sexual tension in his relations with the beautiful Frida Kahlo. Trotsky’s wife was restless and jealous. Exotic visitors like the Surrealist poet André Breton came and went. The puritanical Trotsky drove his young followers hard.Outside, the wolves were gathering. Mexican communists, led by the celebrated painter David Siqueiros, tried to storm the house and kill the man they regarded as the supreme traitor to their cause. The Trotskys’ younger son, apolitical and harmless, had been liquidated in Russia, and their older son had died under mysterious circumstances in a Paris clinic, apparently poisoned by Stalin’s assassins. In Moscow, Stalin himself ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic, at any cost. By the summer of 1940, after Trotsky had moved to new quarters, Stalin’s agents had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around their enemy in far-away Mexico.Bertrand Patenaude’s book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and the page-turning qualities of a true-crime classic. It gives us a humane and panoramic view of Trotsky’s life and of Russia in revolution, as well as a story of deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

About The Author

Bertrand M. Patenaude is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He is the author or editor of several books on Russian and Soviet history, including The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), which won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize.