Reprint, Autumn 1994

The Letters of Edith Wharton edited by R.W.B.Lewis, Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, and Nancy Lewis is a selection of 400 from the more than 4000 letters of the American novelist that have survived. They range from one written when Wharton was 12 to a letter penned just a few days before her death. Called a “memorable visit with a woman with formidable talent and singular gallantry” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Letters of Edith Wharton is available in a paper edition recently published by Collier Books [$16.00]. Michael Wallis’ Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd is an account of the life of a criminal sometimes called “the legendary Robin Hood of the Great Depression.” In telling Floyd’s story, Wallis recreates the vanished, impoverished world of Dustbowl America. A paper edition of Walks’ work has been published by St. Martin’s [$14.95]. Norton has issued a paper edition of Joseph J. Ellis’ Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, a study of America’s second president in retirement [$11.95]. Social scientist Peter F.Drucker was born in Vienna in November 1909, spent his early youth in Europe, and then came to America, where he has been a prolific author and eminent scholar. He set forth his memoirs in Adventures of a Bystander. Transaction Books recently reprinted Drucker’s memoirs with a new introduction by the author [$21.95 paper]. Chicago is offering two volumes of memoirs by the noted dancer Katherine Dunham, the first being A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood [$12.95 paper] and the second is Island Possessed, Ms. Dunham’s account of her love affair with Haiti [$11.95 paper]. A recent Kentucky reprint is Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters From Black Soldiers in World War II edited by Phillip McGuire with forewords by Benjamin Quarles and Bernard Nalty [$35.00 cloth, $19.00 paper]. Pittsburgh is offering a paper edition of Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, one of the great early jazz musicians [$22.50]. A recent edition to the HarperPerennial paperback series is Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, a poet who lived and worked in New York during the middle decades of this century [$15.00]. The Vintage Civil War Library series has reprinted biographies of two of that conflict’s most famous generals. The first is John F. Marszalek’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order which the Atlanta JournalConstitution deemed “the best treatment of the colorful general’s life” [$15.00]. The second is Jack Hurst’s Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography, which the Chicago Tribune lauded as “the most complete and complex portrait yet of the Civil War Jekyll and Hyde” [$15.00]. Vintage also has editions of Tim Cahill’s Pecked to Death by Ducks, an account of the author’s adventures from the wastes of Antarctica to the oil fields of Kuwait [$12.00], and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, an account of two years on a ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital [$10. 00]. Nebraska has a new edition of Richard Whelan’s Robert Capa: A Biography, an account of the life and times of a legendary war photographer who survived the Spanish Civil War and World War II before being killed in Vietnam in 1954 [$14.00 paper].

Norton has published a paper edition of Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties; Translations and Considerations of Rainer Maria Rilke by John J.L.Mood, a minianthology of poetry and prose for both aficionados and those discovering the poet for the first time [$8.95]. Broken Moon Press is offering William Everson’s The Blood of the Poet: Selected Poems by a poet who has been compared to Whitman [$14.95]. Johns Hopkins has recently published a reprint of a poetry collection by Robert Phillips entitled Break Down Lane [$30.00 cloth, S12.95 paper]. Also available from Hopkins is a new edition of Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan edited by Aris Fioretos [$65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper]. In Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems, poet Rodney Jones travels through the landscapes of middle America visiting haunted malls, dilapidated restaurants, and tumbledown farms. He put his poetic interpretation of what he saw into Apocalyptic Narrative, a collection recently reprinted by Houghton Miffflin [$12.95 paper].

Originally published in 1935, The Last Puritan was the only novel by the philosopher, George Santayana, and it was a bestseller. Essentially a novel of ideas, it tells the story of the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden. A new edition of The Last Puritan has been published by MIT Press as Volume Four in a new critical edition of the Works of George Santayana. The editors are Henry J.Saatkamp, Jr.; William G.Holzberger, Textual Editor; and with an introduction by Irving Singer [$50.00 cloth]. Scribner’s has come out with a cloth edition of Edith Wharton’s novel The Glimpses of the Moon which was published in 1922 and details the romantic misadventures of Nick Lansing and Suzy Branch, a couple with the right connections but not much in the way of funds [$25.00].The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories edited by Vincent O’Sullivan offers an introduction to New Zealand short fiction, including such writers as Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, and Maurice Duggan [$16.95 paper]. Originally published in 1917, The Job was Sinclair Lewis’ first controversial novel. It involved a “working girl in New York City caught in the dilemmas of marriage or career, husband or office, birth control or motherhood.” Bison Books has published a new edition of The Job with an introduction by Maureen Honey, a member of the English faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln [$13.00 paper]. Bison Books is also offering new editions of Mildred Walker’s The Curlew’s Cry, a story of three decades in the life of a woman in a Montana town [$10.95 paper] and Fireweed, a novel about the lumber industry [$9.95 paper]. A recent St. Martin’s paperback is Betty Palmer Nelson’s Pursuit of Bliss, one of a series of novels involving the lives and loves of Tennessee frontier women [$10.95]. New England has reprinted Lawrence Millman’s Herojesse which first appeared in 1982 and was one of the first novels to deal with the emotional aftermath of the Vietnam war. Millman’s novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction [$13.95 paper]. Touchstone Books is offering a paper edition of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, a novel set in Newfoundland which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1993 National Book Award for Fiction [$12.00]. Washington Square Press has paperback reprints of Susan Minot’s Folly, a novel set in Boston [$10.00] and Michael Malone’s Dingley Falls, a story about the people of a New England village [$10. 00]. Georgia has reprinted Peter Meinke’s collection The Piano Tuner, winner of the 1986 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction [$11.95 paper]. Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel Feather Crowns was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, one of Publishers Weekly’s best novels of the year and a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It is now available as a HarperPerennial paperback [$13.00]. Three editions to the Vintage Crime series are novels by Jim Thompson, the novels being respectively Heed the Thunder [$9.00], The Transgressors [$8.00], and New and On Earth [$9.00]. Recent Vintage books include William Faulkner’s Big Woods: The Hunting Stories [$9.00]; Martin Amis’ Other People [$10.00]; Ernest J.Games’ Of Love and Dust [$11.00] and A Lesson Before Dying [$11.00]; and Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers [$12.00]. Soho Books has a paper edition of M.A.Harper’s For the Love of Robert E.Lee which Confederate historian Emory Thomas has called “The best portrait of Lee as a human being I have ever seen in American fiction” [$13.00]. A recent New Direction’s paperbook is Alfred Andersch’s Efraim’s Book, a novel about the peculiar society of post-World-War-II Berlin [$11.95].

Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707—1837 won the 1992 Wolfson History Prize given by The Wolfson Foundation in London for historical writings of high quality which are accessible to the general reader.Forging the Nation has been reissued in paperback by Yale [$14.00, also available in cloth $37.50]. Two other recent Yale reprints are Eva Cantarella’s Bisexuality in the Ancient World [$37.50 cloth, $14.00 paper] and Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Idea of the University: A Reexamination [$30.00 cloth, $10.00 paper].