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The Spendthrifts
By Benito Pérez Galdós, Gamel Woolsey. 2017
Although Spain is a country which has always had a great attraction for English-speaking people, Spanish novelists are very little…
known to them. Yet Pérez Galdós is not only the most popular of writers in Spain, whose books are a household word among his countrymen, but he is a major European novelist who ranks with Balzac Dostoevsky and Dickens.In THE SPENDTHRIFTS (LA DE BRINGAS) the scene is laid in the Royal Palace at Madrid, where Bringas and his wife hold minor posts at the court of Queen Isabella. Rosalía Bringas is a woman whose passion for dress leads her steadily deeper into debt and who is obliged to resort to more and more ludicrous and precarious devices to conceal her extravagance from a model bureaucrat of a husband. Her friend the Marquesa de Tellería is in a similar plight, while Doña Cándida, a superb parasite and bore, has already reached the end of the same downward path. The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of a sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the Queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from the outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness.Thus THE SPENDTHRIFTS is both an allegory of the ending classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in DON QUIXOTE, of illusions and reality.The Man Whistler
By Hesketh Pearson. 2017
THIS AUTHOR’S favourite subjects for biography have been wits, and he has already written on Sydney Smith, William Gilbert, Henry…
Labouchère, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Benjamin Disraeli. His seventh and last choice of famous wit is James McNeill Whistler, whose personality aroused more controversy in the art world of the nineteenth century than that of anyone else.WHISTLER is chiefly remembered today as an exquisite painter who revealed the twilight beauty of London’s river to the world, and as one who revolutionized interior decoration. But in his own time he was mainly notorious of his mental and physical combats, for his cutting wit, violent quarrels, and devastating attacks on art critics and academic pundits.HESKETH PEARSON concentrates on Whistler’s personality, shows how his nature was reflected in his art, tells the story of his extraordinary career, describes his quarrels, records his witticisms, explains the causes that made his character prone to conflict, and helps the modern reader to see the man as his friends and enemies who saw him. Having met several people who knew Whistler, the author is able to add fresh material to his portrait of the artist.Illustrated with 15 gravure plates.The Sea and the Stone
By George Johnson, Charmian Clift. 2017
A POWERFUL NOVEL OF ELEMENTAL LOVE AND FURY ON A DOOMED, ENCHANTED ISLAND WORLD….In the cradle of civilization, rocked by…
the waters of the blue Aegean, lies the tiny, barren island of Kalymnos. It is cloaked in antiquity and rich with the vibrant life of a proud and passionate people who have stubbornly endured the ravages of man and nature for three thousand years. And yet Kalymnos is dying, its means of survival crushed beneath the juggernaut of progress.Here is a moving story of this doomed, enchanted island, of a strong man and a strange, haunting woman who lived there, of a tormented girl who fled there, and of a wanderer who came, seeking...It is a story of unique power and simple splendor, a fiction rooted deep in truth.“...stirring...It is an elemental story of the raging sea and the rocky land, of the fundamental urges of man and woman...a story of great beauty and surging excitement...”—Boston Herald“...what they have seen, heard, felt in Kalymnos...make a vivid story, written as modern painters paint, not lingeringly, nor sentimentally, but with great splashes of significant color...”—New York Herald Tribune“...a lyrical and rugged account...of a virile race, almost pure descendants from the men who once sent their war galleys to ancient Troy...”—Springfield Republican“...a powerful and sad, beautifully written tale.”—Newark News“This is stark, brutal fiction based on fact. The dynamic, incisive and beautiful prose is worthy of a Hemingway...”—Grand Rapids Herald“Kalymnos as a place is most effectively presented, with a fine feeling for wind and weather, sea and sky, and a sustained brightness of natural detail. Also, the collective life of the islanders is very convincingly treated, with understanding and concern.”—Chicago Tribune“…superb…It paints murals of truth…”—Saturday ReviewSnips and Snails
By Louise Maxwell Baker. 2017
“LITTLE did I suspect what I was grooming myself for when I used to sit up straight at table and…
eat my spinach like a good girl. I thought I was minding my Ps and Qs and my mother so I could have my dessert. But, actually, what I was unwittingly doing was nourishing my blood and sinew and building the Body Beautiful for sacrifice on the altar of Pedagogy. So help me—in my dewy innocence, I was growing up to be a schoolteacher…”In Snips and Snails, first published in 1953, the author of the hilarious bestseller Out on a Limb, Louise Baker, finds herself in an even more precarious position as teacher, “mother,” and town marshal at a boy’s school…Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit
By Hesketh Pearson. 2017
Few personalities in the history of literature have aroused so much interest as that of Oscar Wilde, yet the essentials…
of his nature are still not recognized and we are left to catch glimpses of the real man in the scattered reminiscences of the period.Here, at last, is the whole life of the man who was probably the most delightful and witty conversationalist the world has ever seen. Hesketh Pearson has succeeded in presenting Oscar Wilde as he was at the Café Royale in London, and in making the reader see him as the darling of the drawing rooms, the conversationalist, not the convict.But this is not a hero-worshipping book—Pearson shows Wilde’s shortcomings and gives instances when Wilde was over-dramatic and when he failed to come off as a writer and a talker.This is a remarkable recreation of a genius set sharply in contrast to a period that battened on his wit, persecuted him, failed to understand him. Some of Wilde’s stories make their first appearance in this book as do some of the conversational original s of several witticisms in his plays.“The most true, the most sensible and the fairest book which has yet been written about Oscar Wilde.”—Harold Nicholson in The ObserverIllustrated with 15 gravure plates.The Red House
By George Agnew Chamberlain. 2017
For fifty years fear of the vanishing red house in the Jersey Barrens had warped the lives of Ellen and…
Pete Yocum.Old Pete swore that the house moved from place to place and that screams heard within it put a hex on anyone who ventured near.Meg Yarrow, raised by the Yocums since childhood, experienced the same terror until Nathan, the new farmhand, arrived.One day they started on a search for the red house in the Oxhead woods, only to encounter violent danger—whether due to natural or supernatural causes, they could not tell.How they found the house and unraveled its eerie secret forms the powerful climax of this outstanding mystery novel.G.B.S.: A Postscript
By Hesketh Pearson. 2017
This book, first published in 1951, is a Postscript to Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality—Hesketh Pearson’s biography of Bernard…
Shaw, published in 1942, which became the standard work on Bernard Shaw. It was unique among other books on the same subject because Shaw himself gave every possible help to his biographer, allowing him to quote whatever he wished from published and unpublished correspondence. Shaw answered every question put to him and willingly revealed a great deal of information about his own life that had not been available hitherto.G.B.S. A Postscript continues the story from the point at which the biography left off. It describes the intimate discussions and not infrequent but always friendly disagreements which took place while it was bring written.Hesketh Pearson was in constant touch with Shaw throughout the last decade of his life, and, with Shaw’s knowledge, kept the biography up to date, noting down immediately after their occurrence accounts of their many discussions. Shaw subsequently recalled many things about his past which had previously escaped him, and so many fresh sidelights on Shaw and his contemporaries are included here. Not the least illuminating feature of this book is the obituary which Shaw himself contributed.The Moneyman
By Thomas B. Costain. 2017
THE THRILLING STORY OF A GREAT CONSPIRACY AND A GREAT LOVE IN THE COURT OF KING CHARLES VIIHis name was…
Jacques CoeurIn the fashionable court of France’s Charles VII he was the King’s “moneyman.” He was also a powerfully rich and jealously feared merchant prince.He exerted enormous influence over King Charles, partially because of his great wealth which enabled him to help support the war against England and partially through his friendship with and influence over the King’s mistress, the ailing Agnes Sorel.When it became obvious that Agnes Sorel would have to be replaced, it was Jacques Coeur who chose her successor—the astonishingly beautiful sixteen-year-old Valerie.What Jacques Coeur couldn’t have known was that his choice of this lovely girl was to weave the first strands in a fatal net of love and intrigue.Ebony and Ivory
By Llewelyn Powys, Edward Shanks. 2017
First published in 1923, this book is a wonderful collection of short stories and sketches from the British novelist Llewelyn…
Powys—who also happens to be the younger brother of John Cowper Powys, another renowned British novelist of the twentieth century.“When Llewelyn Powys puts pen to paper, something miraculous happens with words. And that’s literature.”—New York Herald Tribune“This writer has a great gift of saying the essential thing in a few words. Not one of these essays extends beyond half-a-dozen pages yet how full of good matter they are.”—C. K. Shorter“Llewelyn Powys is a poet in the loving, absorbing, indwelling quality of his experience.”—Basil de SelincourtSpiritual Values in Shakespeare
By Ernest Marshall Howse. 2017
The Moral Qualities Revealed in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, The TempestEight…
masterpieces of the theater are explored in light of the universal moral problems they dramatize. Dr. Howse finds that while each play indicates moral responsibility it also invites the reader’s independent judgment on the complex questions posed by human nature. He draws upon the important Shakespearean criticism and comment to substantiate his conclusions.Teachers, classes, ministers, Shakespeare readers—all will find new depth and insight in the works of the world’s greatest dramatist.“Here is a useful, carefully thought, richly developed study which will add depth to any man’s learning and breadth to any minister’s preaching.”—The PulpitA Life of Matthew G. Lewis
By Louis F. Peck. 2017
Matthew Lewis (17775-1818), author of The Monk—one of the most famous of gothic novels—is attracting increasing attention for his own…
talent and his pre-eminence in the gothic school. The gothic mode, aside from its intrinsic interest, is important because of its distinct influence in British, continental, and American literature. Yet a full-length biography of Lewis has not appeared since 1839.For the nonspecialist seeking an introduction to Romanticism and the Regency, Lewis is a valuable man to know, with his varied literary interests—poetry, the novel, drama—and his wide acquaintance: royalty, the peerage, literary celebrities like Byron, Scott, Shelley, Sheridan, and the theatrical world. As a writer he showed uncanny anticipation of popular literary trends and a talent for the spectacular. This new biography, based on information which has appeared since 1839 and on new material, presents the whole man, not a selection of eccentricities. It includes treatment of all his works and a section of newly edited correspondence.Steps Going Down
By John T. McIntyre. 2017
STEPS GOING DOWN by Philadelphian writer John T. McIntyre is the work of a mature and seasoned talent, instinct with…
life, rich with experience, yet spectacularly exciting, and most magnificently modern in spirit. It is something more than the product of literary craftsman of the first order: it is a recreation of the very pulse of the life of men and women today. Seldom has so memorable a novel appeared, or one which reveals more powerfully the shape of human living and experience.First published in 1936, John T. McIntyre’s novel was selected as the American Contender in the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition, sponsored by the Literary Guild, Warner Brothers, and publishers in some eleven foreign countries.“In John T. McIntyre’s novel I think we have come upon a fresh note in American fiction, a book that may serve as a reviving influence in a field with which most readers have become impatient. Mr. McIntyre has contrived to represent a new, hard deflated, American mood with superb realism. His book comes to us with sirens screaming, at 80 miles an hour.”—William Soskin“I had read no more than two or three pages of STEPS GOING DOWN when I stopped thinking of it as a novel and began to feel it as a history of actual persons. There is hardly a page without an act, thought, or speech which is as natural as experience.”—Carl Van DorenArctic Doctor
By Joseph P. Moody. 2017
Arctic Doctor is an account of the true adventures of Joe Moody, the heroic young medical doctor whose practice covered…
600,000 square miles of Canada’s East Arctic. Headquartered at Chesterfield Inlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay, Joe Moody made “routine” calls to his 2,000 Eskimo patients that required to take perilous trips by aircraft, dog sled, and canoe; to direct complicated surgery by telephone; and to confront Eskimo practices of infanticide and the “assisted suicide” of the age.Dr. Moody’s book is an exciting and suspenseful account of his years in the East Arctic—years of courageous effort on behalf of his profession, years devoted to scientific and human observation of the most fruitful kind, and years of heady adventure rarely matched in the annals of northland fiction.Amy Lowell
By Clement Wood. 2017
Originally published in 1926, this book by Clement Wood is a critical study of the creative work and influence of…
noted American poet Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925), whose “glittering verses, her militant prefaces and critical studies, her constant packed platform appearances had elevated her to a commanding place,” and had earned her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Amy Lowell, who was sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, published her first work in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly. This was followed two years later by her first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.An avid adherent to the “free verse” method of poetry, Amy Lowell became one of the major champions of this method of poetry-writing. Throughout her working life, she was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her 1921 book Fir-Flower Tablets was a poetical reworking of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably Li Tai-po (A.D. 701-762). Her writing also included critical works on French literature. At the time of her death in 1925, she was attempting to complete her two-volume biography of John Keats, of whom she wrote: “the stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.”Out On a Limb
By Louise Maxwell Baker. 2017
At the age of eight, Louise Baker lost her right leg above the knee as a result of a road…
accident; she was on her very first bike ride. With a grand sense of humor and great spiritual courage, she faced life with a seemingly irreconcilable handicap. OUT ON A LIMB, her personal story, is not only one of the most stimulating and amusing books; but even more, it will be a revelation to all who have at any time been faced with personal disaster.Louise Baker mastered her tragedy and had a whale of a lot of fun doing it. One moment, she would play the part of a dare-devil female parachute, the next, a fearless alpine skier whose foot had been frozen rescuing a snowbound child—she had to fabricate the most fantastic tales to crush the typical little boy question, “Hey, Lady! Where’s your leg?”She made her very crutches a part of woman’s vanity—using different colors for different ensembles. She did everything a normal woman could do and more: competed with other reporters on a news beat, discovered her own and highly unconventional means of holding her beaux in college, went to live with her new husband in the wilds of Arizona, set out on a hilarious trip to Europe. Whenever the world seemed totally against her, she could console herself with Webster’s definition of “handicap”: “A race…in which an artificial disadvantage is imposed on a superior contestant.”OUT ON A LIMB has a special significance for these times. Louise Baker’s story is told with sympathy and an understanding for all who have suffered similar misfortunes. Her life was not one colored with unhappiness, but filled with energy and purpose—the picture of a woman who enjoyed each day to the fullest.Keeper of the Flame
By I. A. R. Wylie. 2017
THE WOMAN HE LOVED WAS SWORN TO GUARD THE LEGEND OF THE GREAT LEADER—HE WAS HONOR-BOUND TO DESTROY IT…The governor…
of a New England state has died suddenly in an unwitnessed automobile accident. He was the coming man, widely mentioned for the presidency, a champion of the underprivileged, and especially of the younger generation, who had formed Robert Forrest clubs the country over. The shock and the sorrow over his death is nationwide. Steve O’Malley, ace war correspondent, whose passion for truth has got him kicked out of all the warring countries abroad, is at a loose end at home and is assigned by his paper to the job of writing the life of the man as he really was. Disastrously, he falls in love with Forrest’s young wife. What he finds, the development of the love affair, the rumble of great events in the background, make a tale of rare intensity.Forbidden City
By Muriel Molland Jernigan. 2017
A fictionalized account of the Empress Dowager of China, Tsu Hsi, last of the Manchus.She was one who “ate life,”…
one for whom all the power of the Dragon throne could not give her what she sought. This is the story of Nala, born to luxury, who was sent at sixteen to the Summer Palace, to be the Emperor’s concubine, and who lived to wrest the throne from the dying monarch. It is the story of Jung Lu, the Manchu Lord who gave her the only love she was ever to know, and whose quiet and wise counsel gave her the wisdom to rule. It is the story of a country, a people, a way of life, and a hatred born of misunderstanding which carried tragic consequences. For nothing Jung Lu could say or do could soothe her hatred of the “foreign devils” and their woman ruler who dared to call herself by a name that meant “victorious.” For the first time the full picture of the Empress Dowager of China, Tsu His, last of the Manchus, is drawn to life.From her seat on the Dragon throne she commanded an Empire. The decisions she made still leave their mark on the world. Few women in history have held as much power. Yet the days were never long enough for all she wanted to do.Mrs. Jernigan tells the strange story of Tsu His’s love for her Prime Minister, which defied tradition, with smooth-paced narrative power, in an absorbing novel, full of pageantry and turbulence. FORBIDDEN CITY is a vivid portrait of one of the least-known but one of the most remarkable figures of history.Life Was Simpler Then
By Loula Grace Erdman. 2017
In this charming book of personal recollections, the author, Loula Grace Erdman, returns to her childhood in western Missouri and…
recreates the way of life as she then knew it. There is, for instance, and amusing section on the series of hired men who helped on the farm, followed by chapters on spring house cleaning, on family reunions, on church attendance, on the Chautauqua. It was a time where there was a second table for the children at dinner parties, when a helpful, omniscient Central was at the other end of the telephone wire, when harvesting ice or making apple butter was a neighborhood affair. It is only yesterday in a small American town.These lively reminiscences are touched here and there with humor and pathos and everywhere with that nostalgia which springs from the near resemblance of the author’s recollections to our own. Of Ms. Erdman’s many successful books, Life Was Simpler Then is likely to be remembered most fondly—and longest.All the Voices
By Murray Gitlin. 2017
Originally published in 1960, this novel tells the moving and thought-provoking story of an extraordinary white man married to a…
unique black woman.Coming from an ignorant and unambitious farm family, Claude Depler, after several years of unsuccessful job-hunting, finally makes a name and a place for himself as head of a community center in Chicago. Here he meets and marries an outstanding black woman whose name is nationally recognized as an enlightened and vigorous advancer of the American Negro’s interests. The larger part of their married life is spent in Milan, where Claude is now an administrator of a post-war refugee program.Their soul- searching inner struggles and their quest for peace of mind and heart, intimately involved with the problems of racial discrimination, are sensitively developed by the author.The Story of the Gypsies
By Konrad Bercovici. 2017
With this book, first published in 1928, Romanian-born American author Konrad Bercovici has written a sympathetic, thorough, and fascinating account…
of an extra-ordinary people. Long an admirer of the Gypsies, he was determined to penetrate their mysteries. He listened to their legends, traced their history, and here presents all that he knows and could learn from others about their origins, customs and lives down through the centuries and throughout the world.