Reprint, Spring 1984

When Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was first published in 1959, it was greeted by such accolades as these: “The greatest literary biography of the century” (novelist Anthony Burgess); “A superlatively good biography of Joyce” (critic Frank Kermode); and “This masterly book” (Newsweek). Now Ellman has made his first revision of the 1959 classic, and it has been published in paperback by Oxford as a Galaxy Book [$14.95]. Also receiving critical acclaim at the time of its initial publication in 1982 was Ted Morgan’s Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874—1915 (“A marvel of historical reportage,” said Chicago Sun-Times reviewer James R. Mellow), and it was recently reprinted by Touchstone Books [$10.95]. Another Touchstone Book is Roger Wilkins’ A Man’s Life: An Autobiography, a black journalist’s account of his struggle to fulfill great expectations which The New York Times called “an important, ground-breaking work” [$7.95]. Northeastern is offering a new cloth edition of historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s nostalgic look back to One Boy’s Boston, 1887-1901, Morison’s “memories and impressions of childhood and boyhood” in the Back Bay city, with an introduction by former Atlantic editor Edward Weeks [$10.00]. North Point Press has a paperback edition of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, translated and with an introduction by Donald M. Frame, which describes the famed Frenchman’s 17-month trip to Rome by way of Austria and Switzerland beginning in September 1580 [$11.50]. New Directions Paperbook recently reprinted Federico García Lorca: Selected Letters, edited and translated by David Gershator, an intimate autobiographical record of the Spanish poet from age 20 to a month before his death at the hands of Franco’s forces in 1936 [$6.95]. Harper Colophon Books includes Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, a coming-of-age story set in an immigrant neighborhood after World War I, among its latest offerings [$4.95], as well as Nancy Milford’s Zelda, a biography of Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald [$8.95].

Among the remarkable literary achievements of the remarkable Winston Churchill was his four-volume A History of the English Speaking Peoples, originally published during the 1950’s. The colorful history by one of England’s most colorful— and courageous—captains of state is available once again—this time in paperback— thanks to Dodd, Mead, which published the initial edition. The new edition is being offered both in a boxed set [$35. 00] and as individual volumes [$8.95 per volume], the volumes being, respectively, The Birth of Britain, The New World, The Age of Revolution, and The Great Democracies. California has republished Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz’ The History of Polish Literature, which first appeared in 1969 [$32.50 cloth, $10.95 paper].

New England has brought out a paperback edition of the first modern English prose translation of the popular 13th-century French dream-allegory, The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, translated by Charles Dahlberg. The latest edition has a new preface and bibliographical supplement [$15.00]. As the latest additions to its Biblioteca Italiana, a series conceived as a library of bilingual editions chosen for their importance to Italian literature, California has reprinted Tasso’s Dialogues, translated with introduction and notes by Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton [$18.50 cloth, $7.95 paper], as well as Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues, translated with introduction and notes by Giovanni Cecchetti [$28.00 cloth, $9.50 paper]. Harper Colophon Books is offering reprints of works by two of The New Yorker’s most popular writers, E.B. White and James Thurber, with the White offering being One Man’s Meat [$7.95] and the Thurber offerings being Credos and Curios [$4.95] and Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated [$3.95], Also available as a Harper Colophon Book is Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction [$4.95]. Touchstone Books has reprinted Leslie Fiedler’s What Was Literature?: Class Culture and Mass Society [$6.95]. Atheneum has brought out paperback editions, respectively, of Osip Mandelstam’s Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin [$6.95] and Richard Howard’s Untitled Subjects, a collection which won the Pulitzer Prize [$6.95]. As a part of its Unwin Critical Library series, Allen & Unwin has a new edition of Grover Smith’s The Waste Land, a critical discussion of T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem [$25.00 cloth, $8.95 paper]. Another giant of 20th-century poetry has a selection available in a recent Dodd, Mead Quality Paperback, the poet being Robert Frost and the selection being North of Boston [$5.95]. Sheep Meadow Press has published a new edition of French poet Paul Verlaine’s Women/Men, a clandestine collection of erotic verse, translated by Alistair Elliot [$13.95 cloth, $7.95 paper], A new addition to the Penguin Classics series is Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays, the plays being Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus, as translated by Robert Fagles [$2.95].

The latest additions to California’s Mark Twain Library are The Prince and the Pauper [$13.95 cloth], edited by Victor Fischer and Michael B. Frank, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, edited by Bernard L. Stein [also $13.95 cloth]. Viking has reprinted the definitive text from the Cambridge edition of D.H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser, first published in May 1912 [$20.00 cloth]. Two recent Bantam Classics are Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent [$2.50] and Purgatorio from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, translated with an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum [$3.50], Vintage Books has a new edition of Thomas Mann’s The Beloved Returns: Lotte in Weimar, first published in English in 1940 [$7.95]. Touchstone Books has reprinted Nikos Kazantzakis’ Freedom or Death, a novel by the author of Zorba the Greek about the Greek rebellion against Turkey [$8.95]. For $2.95 each, Harper & Row has brought out a shelf full of paperback mystery and suspense novels as part of its Perennial Library series. They include Frank Parrish’s Fire in the Barley, Sting of the Honeybee, and Snare in the Dark; Douglas Clark’s Poacher’s Bag. Roast Eggs, Sick to Death, and Shelf Life; Andrew Bergman’s Hollywood and LeVine and The Big Kiss-Off of 1944, and S.B. Hough’s Sweet Sister Seduced and Dear Daughter Dead.

MIT Press has published a paperback edition of Joseph Rykwert’s The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, a cultural history of European architecture between 1660 and 1780 that Art History acclaimed as “a product of rare scholarship” [$17.50]. The 18th century is also featured in John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730—1840, a new addition to the Cambridge Paperback Library [$14.95]. Barnes & Noble has a paperback edition of J.P.V.D. Balsdon’s study of Roman Women: Their History and Habits [$6.95]. Pantheon is offering paperback editions of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Between Existentialism and Marxism [$6.95] and R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper’s Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950—1960, which the French existentialist called “a very clear, very faithful account of my thought” [$5.95]. Pantheon has also reprinted Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers, a collection of essays edited by Dale Spender [$19.95 cloth, $10.95 paper]. Simon & Schuster has a 1984 edition of the world’s best-selling guide to wine, Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine [$8.95].