"He again had the sense that all this order, balance and security in his life were really an illusion and a lie".... "Everything seemed to be slipping from his grasp; everything was becoming increasingly unreal, even his home, his wife, his child, his profession, his very identity." Originally published in 1926, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel is a psychological novella written by Arthur Schnitzler. Following Doctor Fridolin and his wife, Albertine, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel sees the couple embark on a two-day odyssey in the erotic underworld. One night a successful doctor, Fridolin, and his beautiful wife, Albertine, attend a masked masquerade ball. Seeing naked men and women and propositioned for sex, the lust-filled couple are inspired to make love to one another; and Albertine-in the heat of passion-admits a sexual fantasy she had the previous summer. Taken slightly back, Fridolin admits his own fantasies to his wife and begins to question his place in their marriage, the strength of their love and the middle class life he has found himself living. Filled with erotic fun, secrets, and sensuality, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel is a psychoanalytic novella that explores sexual guilt, fantasy, love and death. This edition of Rhapsody: A Dream Novel is a classic of erotic literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

In Stagestruck noted novelist and outspoken critic Sarah Schulman offers an account of her growing awareness of the startling similarities between her novel People in Trouble and the smash Broadway hit Rent . Written with a powerful and personal voice, Schulman's book is part gossipy narrative, part behind-the-scenes glimpse into the New York theater culture, and part polemic on how mainstream artists co-opt the work of "marginal" artists to give an air of diversity and authenticity to their own work. Rising above the details of her own case, Schulman boldly uses her suspicions of copyright infringement as an opportunity to initiate a larger conversation on how AIDS and gay experience are being represented in American art and commerce. Closely recounting her discovery of the ways in which Rent took materials from her own novel, Schulman takes us on her riveting and infuriating journey through the power structures of New York theater and media, a journey she pursued to seek legal restitution and make her voice heard. Then, to provide a cultural context for the emergence of Rent-- which Schulman experienced first-hand as a weekly theater critic for the New York Press at the time of Rent 's premiere--she reveals in rich detail the off- and off-off-Broadway theater scene of the time. She argues that these often neglected works and performances provide more nuanced and accurate depictions of the lives of gay men, Latinos, blacks, lesbians and people with AIDS than popular works seen in full houses on Broadway stages. Schulman brings her discussion full circle with an incisive look at how gay and lesbian culture has become rapidly commodified, not only by mainstream theater productions such as Rent but also by its reduction into a mere demographic made palatable for niche marketing. Ultimately, Schulman argues, American art and culture has made acceptable a representation of "the homosexual" that undermines, if not completely erases, the actual experiences of people who continue to suffer from discrimination or disease. Stagestruck 's message is sure to incite discussion and raise the level of debate about cultural politics in America today.

Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood , tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself. Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.

San Francisco Beat is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America-somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s-was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet. Thirty years ago, poet David Meltzer interviewed his poet friends for The San Francisco Poets. Now in San Francisco Beat he has combined these classic interviews with recent follow-up. San Francisco Beat features major new interviews with Philip Lamantia, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Jack Hirschman, Diane di Prima, Jack Micheline, Philip Whalen, and David Meltzer himself. David Meltzer is the author of many books of poetry, including Tens, The Name, Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992, and No Eyes: Lester Young. He is the editor of Birth, The Secret Garden, Reading Jazz, and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include The Agency Trilogy. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the band, Serpent Power. Meltzer teaches poetics at New College of California. Table of Contents/Interviewed Authors Preface Acknowledgments Diane di Prima (1999) William Everson (1971) Remembering Everson (1999) Lawrence Ferlinghetti I (1969) Lawrence Ferlinghetti II (1999) Jack Hirschman (1998) Joanne Kyger (1998) Philip Lamantia (1998) Michael McClure I (1971) Michael McClure II (1999) David Meltzer (1999) Jack Micheline (1994) Kenneth Rexroth (1971) Remembering Rexroth (1971) Gary Snyder (1999) Lew Welch (1971) Philip Whalen (1999) Bibliographies Preface Nothing is hidden; As of old All is clear as daylight -Anonymous haiku, 16th century San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Po

New York Times Notable Book of the Year Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 With an Introduction by Robert Giroux, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book," Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by readers, who embraced the book as they might a displaced person in one of Malamud's stories, now returned to us, complete and fulfilled and recognized at last. The volume gathers together fifty-five stories, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), and including the immortal stories from The Magic Barrel and the vivid depictions of the unforgettable Fidelman. It is a varied and generous collection of great examples of the modern short story, which Malamud perfected, and an ideal introduction to the work of this great American writer.

What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than 30 years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles; strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of America's shifting political gales.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the great works in classical literature, and a primary source for our knowledge of much of classic mythology, in which the relentless theme of transformation stands as a primary metaphor for the often cataclysmic dynamics of life itself. For this book, British poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun have invited more than forty leading English-language poets to create their own idiomatic contemporary versions of some of the most famous and notorious myths from the Metamorphoses . Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Proserpina, Marsyas, Medea, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice--these and many other immortal tales are given fresh and startling life in exciting new versions. The contributors--among them Fleur Adcock, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Charles Simic, and C. K. Williams--constitute an impressive roster of today's major poets. After Ovid is a powerful re-envisioning of a fundamental work of literature as well as a remarkable affirmation of the current state of poetry in English.

Already considered a classic of Holocaust literature, The Seventh Well is a novel of total absorption, a heroic achievement, and one destined for literary transcendence. Fred Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise, and The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante's Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle.

In 1921, Ben Hecht wrote a column for the Chicago Daily News that his editor called "journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature." Hecht's collection of sixty-four of these pieces, illustrated with striking pen drawings by Herman Rosse, is a timeless caricature of urban American life in the jazz age, updated with a new Introduction for the twenty-first century. From the glittering opulence of Michigan Avenue to the darkest ruminations of an escaped convict, from captains of industry to immigrant day laborers, Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale' In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago . . .

In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem, it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Streetin Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. --

A literary investigation of how the modern metropolis--intoxicating, disturbing, powerful--changed perceptions and irrevocably altered the Western imagination. Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent--a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses--and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city. In interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination.--From publisher description.

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism -- a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world. Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all here: the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life. Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with an articulateness, a passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, Nelson Algren's A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill -- Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore -- collectively represent the aspirations and the achievement of gay writing during and after the gay liberation movement. This social history shows how the works of these authors both reflected and criticized the values, principles, and prejudices of the culture of gay liberation. In spinning many of the most important stories gay men told of themselves in the short period between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, the Violet Quill exerted an enormous influence on gay culture.

A celebration of subversives: the first one-volume history of the greatest cultural movement since the Enlightenment. Peter Gay's most ambitious endeavor since Freud explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. A work unique in its breadth and brilliance, Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffiths; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years. Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superlative achievement by one of our greatest historians.

This wonderful collection of Marcel Proust's Letters, selected and translated by Mina Curtiss, is both a revelatory introduction to the great writer and a treasure trove for those readers more familiar with "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu". Mina Curtiss especially chose them as apt illustrations of Proust's growing sensibility and intellectual power during the gestation of the novel. Indeed, many of the characters in the book are drawn from the men and women we meet here. The letters are also exciting as an unfolding panorama of the Belle Epoque and for their superb insights into literature, art and music. Published by Helen Marx Books and Books & Co.

Hebrew fiction has emerged as a vital modern literary force, and the scope and riches of this literature is brilliantly exemplified by the eight short novels included in this landmark collection. Some of the authors represented here, like S.Y. Agnon, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua are internationally celebrated. Others, like David Vogel, are writers of rare genius whose work until now had not been widely avaliable. Earlier writers like Y.H. Brenner and Uri Gnessin virtually created modern Hebrew literature, yet are rarely read by modern audiences. Writing in Hebrew, these writers tell of earlier European experiences, of emigration to Israel and of the lives of modern Israelis. Chosen and introduced by Alan Lelchuk, the American novelist, and Gershon Shaked, the Israeli critic, 8 Great Hebrew Short Novels has been superbly translated. This is an outstanding introduction to classic and contemporary Hebrew writing, now avaliable to English readers.