"To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrième Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a masterpiece of the young American novel," Lepape declared it was "the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway." Lepape went on to speak of the "incredible verbal virtuosity" by which the reader is led through this "laby-rêve," and it is this image of the "labyrinth-dream" which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor. Being thus very far from the kind of novels produced by Ferlinghetti's immediate contemporaries (whether Beat or academic) this book has met with little but bafflement among American critics. With well over 50,000 now in print Her nevertheless continues to make its own way.

"James Salter (born James Horowitz in 1925) has been known throughout his career as a "writer's writer," acclaimed by such literary greats as Susan Sontag, Richard Ford, John Banville, and Peter Matthiessen for his lyrical prose, his insightful and daring explorations of sex, and his examinations of the inner lives of women and men. Conversations with James Salter collects interviews published from 1972 to 2014 with the award-winning author of The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All That Is. Gathered here are his earliest interviews following acclaimed but moderately selling novels, conversations covering his work as a screenwriter and award-winning director, and interviews charting his explosive popularity after publishing All That Is, his first novel after a gap of thirty-four years. These conversations chart Salter's progression as a writer, his love affair with France, his military past as a fighter pilot, and his lyrical explorations of gender relations.The collection contains interviews from Sweden, Chile, France, and Argentina appearing for the first time in English. Included as well are published conversations from the United States, Canada, and Australia, some of which are significantly extended versions, giving this collection an international scope of Salter's wide-ranging career and his place in world literature"--

BEAUTIES, BEASTS AND ENCHANTMENT CLASSIC FRENCH FAIRY TALES Edited and translated by Jack Zipes A wonderful new collection of 36 French fairy tales translated into English by renowned writer and authority on fairy tales, Jack Zipes. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleepy Beauty, Puss In Boots, Bluebeard, and Little Red Riding Hood are some of the classic fairy tales in this amazing book. There are many stories here by Charles Perrault, the most famous author of French conte de fées. Features a new introduction by editor Jack Zipes. Includes a generous number of exquisite illustrations from fairy tale collections. This is a clothbound edition, with gold letters embossed on a blue cloth cover, and a colour flyleaf. 'Terrific... a succulent array of 17th and 18th century 'salon' fairy tales' - The New York Times Book Review 'These tales are adventurous, thrilling in a way fairy tales are meant to be... The translation from the French is modern, happily free of archaic and hyperbolic language... a fine and sophisticated collection' - New York Tribune 'Enjoyable to read... a unique collection of French regional folklore' - Library Journal 'Charming stories accompanied by attractive pen-and-ink drawings' - Chattanooga Times 'An excellent collection' - Booklist. JACK ZIPES is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in Europe and the United States. Some of Jack Zipes' major publications include Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (1979), Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983, rev. ed. 2006), Don't Bet On the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986), The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988), Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2000), Speaking Out: Storytelling and Creative Drama For Children (2004), Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller (2005), and Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2006). Jack Zipes has also translated The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) and edited The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000), and The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (2001). Most recently he has translated and edited The Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitre (2008) and Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales (2008) by Kurt Schwitters. Includes illustrations and a new introduction. ISBN 9781861717474. 612 pages. www.crmoon.com

Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential editors of our era, Gordon Lish has quite simply changed the face of American literature. The stunning list of writers with whom he has worked closely includes Harold Brodkey, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Anne Carson, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Will Eno, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and many more. But it is in his own writing that his genius is made manifest. There, his quick wit and black humor are on full display, as well as a merciless intellect that skewers no one so thoroughly as, and more often than, a narrator most often known as "Gordon." In the stories in Goings, Lish wrestles with memory; self-knowledge (the lack and the impossibility thereof); friendship; mothers, sons and lovers. More than that, the language here is a collective paradigm of Lishian prose: a great writer's attempt to leap off the page.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

This masterpiece novel -- by the internationally acclaimed, young South African writer Damon Galgut--about E.M. Forster, his life, struggles with homosexuality, and the writing of his universally loved novel A Passage to India will call to mind the international success of Colm Toibin's The Master . For readers of Colm Toibin, Ian McEwan, and J.M. Coetzee. In 1912, the SS Birmingham approaches India. On board is Morgan Forster, novelist and man of letters, who is embarking on a journey of discovery. As Morgan stands on deck, the promise of a strange new future begins to take shape before his eyes. The seeds of a story start to gather at the corner of his mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. It will be another twelve years, and a second, and much longer time spent in India, before A Passage to India , E.M. Forster's most beloved work of literature, is completed. During these years, Morgan will come to a recognition of his homosexuality and of the infinite subtleties and complexities of human nature. Arctic Summer is an intimate portrait of the man who became one of Britain's finest novelists, his struggle to find a way of living and being, and a stunningly vivid evocation of the mysterious alchemy of the creative process. Galgut animates the literary times in which Forster lived with encounters with some of the writers of the day, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf and D.H. Lawrence . Galgut also brilliantly and poignantly describes Forster's two closest relationships, enduring and sadly unfulfilled. Arctic Summer is a literary masterpiece, by one of the finest writers of his generation."

"In her nonfiction books (Letters from a War Zone) and her first novel Ice and Fire) Dworkin established a reputation as a provocative writer of feminist literature. She gives her own name to the protagonist/narrator of this powerful, almost frenzied, admittedly autobiographical novel that chronicles her life and sexual victimization. "Andrea" gets her first taste of sex at age nine when she is molested in a movie theater. A rebellious teenager, she hangs out in Greenwich Village, idolizes Allen Ginsberg and is swept up into the peace movement. Penniless, streetwise but not street-smart, Andrea is continually and brutally raped by lovers, acquaintances, strangers. The novel's unparagraphed prose--like Andrea, intense, jumpy, impassioned--brilliantly captures the narrator's mental and physical degradation. As her life disintegrates, she repeats three facts--her name, her place of birth and the poet Walt Whitman's address in Camden, N.J., on a street where she was born--as a mantra anchoring her to reality. The most sexually graphic and horrifying scenes involve her marriage to a European revolutionary who abuses and burns her as she desperately tries to be a good bourgeois housewife. It is no wonder that the novel's ending finds Andrea committed to the women's movement. While Andrea's high-pitched voice is at first hard to take, its vehemence and candor build to a convincing indictment of a society that tolerates violence against women."--Publisher'sWeekly via amazon.com.

...the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man. The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragic-comic end. It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia Woolf for her Hogarth Press. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

In Menachem's Seed , Carl Djerassi , world-renowned scientist and inventor of the birth-control pill, brings us a new novel that explores the human--and passionate--side of science. Melanie Laidlaw and Menachem Dvir meet at a series of international conferences where jet-setting scientists come together to discuss the global implications of their discoveries. Melanie runs a foundation that awards grants for innovations in reproductive technology; Menachem is an infertile nuclear engineer and a married man. Naturally, they fall in love. What follows is a story of sexual steam, stolen seed, and religious conversion--a very modern romance that hinges on a cutting-edge scientific breakthrough. As Melanie and Menachem discover, what science makes possible, only two hearts can make right.

FIRST EDITION The world's most distinguished author of the literature of the fantastic presents his most extraordinary stories of worlds lost and dreams fulfilled... In his illustrious forty-five year career as a novelist and author of short fiction, Robert Silverberg has belonged in the company of the best writers of the 20th century. His writing has been compared to Conrad, Huxley, and Orwell. In this definitive collection Silverberg presents the novellas that have won him multiple Hugo and Nebula Award nominations, including his Nebula Award winning achievement, "Sailing To Byzantium." Here are the virtuoso performances of the third phase of Silverberg's astounding the Nebula Award nominee "Homefaring"; the Hugo Award nominee "The Secret Sharer"; "Thomas The Proclaimer" and "We Are For The Dark." If you are a lover of Silverberg's work or are simply looking for a place to begin a relationship with the literature of science fiction and fantasy, this is the place to start.

A remarkable collection, Robots through the Ages includes stories from some of the best writers of science fiction, both old and new. This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad--in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus "with minds and wisdoms"--humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce's tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are--and who creates them--can be drastically different. This book collects a broad selection of short stories from celebrated authors such as Philip K. Dick, Seanan McGuire, Roger Zelazny, Connie Willis, and many more. Robots through the Ages not only celebrates the history of robots and the genre of science fiction, but the dauntless nature of human ingenuity.

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him - how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

Many of the pieces are frank in celebrating the transformative force of sex, lust, desire, and the recognition that one is desired. Zaftig women, described variously as full-figured and pleasingly plump, have long been a source of fetish and humor in erotic literature. Now the publisher of Best Women's Erotica turns the tables with surprising, steamy stories showcasing the sex lives of women of size and their admirers. Not only is Blank's work infused with humor and mischievous irony, her delight in her own body and her sexuality is fabulously contagious: she makes you feel good about yourself in every way, shape, and form.

"...this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people's history"--Publisher's info.

The immense service that Langer's careful, thoughtful, immensely intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims. Many of his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp universe. The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be remarked with amazement. " The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us, readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing is shocking or unreal." -Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review "A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the Holocaust.... Langer's examination of possible stylistic approaches to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the graphic bestiality of Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in each case detailed and subtle." - The New Republic

Fowler's End is a bustling, ram-shackle community where bathtubs are considered effete. Daniel Laverock comes to the neighbourhood in search of employment. Thanks to his horrifying countenance, he wins a job as manager of a movie house owned by the vicious tyrant Sam Yudenow.

Elisa - orphaned as a child, raised by a 'fallen woman', fed by fairy tales - has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family's tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself. First published in 1948, Elsa Morante's debut novel won the Viareggio Prize and earned her the lasting admiration of generations of writers from Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante. Translated by Jenny McPhee

From a small, bogside cabin in rural New England, 38-year-old Aimee Slater unravels the story of her life, attempting to make sense of the tangled thread that leads from her mother's house-a short, unbridgeable distance away-to the world she now inhabits. It is soon after the Civil War; Aimee lives alone, but is graced with visits from two friends, a crippled man and a troubled eleven-year-old girl. She is perpetually caught between the sensual world she so desires and the divine retribution passed down to her by her mother's scorn. How Aimee ultimately creates a life for herself and bridges that distance makes for a moving story of love and loss. Told in a voice of spare New England lyricism, Unravelling is a remarkably haunting account of the power of redemption.