Reprint, Spring 1996

One Art is a collection of more than 500 letters of the poet Elizabeth Bishop written over 50 years—from 1928 when she was 17 to the day of her death in Boston in 1979—selected by Robert Giroux, her lifelong friend and editor. Noonday Press recently published a paper edition of One Art [$16], Noonday is also offering a paper edition of Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox, 1740—1832, the story of the Lennox sisters and their lives during the 18th and 19th centuries [$16]. Norton has published a paper edition of William S. McFeely’s Frederick Douglass, a biography of the towering 19th century black leader [$12.95]. When Johns Hopkins published Fred Hobson’s Mencken: A Life in 1994, the biography was acclaimed by historian C. Vann Woodward as “A heroic undertaking . . .done in the best narrative tradition of biography.” Hopkins now has a paperback edition of the Mencken biography [$17.95]. Paula Blanchard’s Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work, a biography of a 19th-century American novelist is now available in paperback from Addison-Wesley [$15]. Riverhead Books has republished A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints, edited by Paul Elie with an introduction by Robert Coles [$12 paper]. Stephen J. Pyne’s Fire on the Rim: A Firefighter’s Season at the Grand Canyon has been reprinted by Washington in a paper edition [$14.95]. Recent Bison Books include F. B. Carpenter’s The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House [$14]; David Homer Bates’s Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps During the Civil War [$14.95]; and Ernest G. Heppner’s Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto [$10]. Louisiana has issued a new edition of David M. Potter’s Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis with a new introduction by Daniel W. Crofts [$16.95 paper]. Another recent Louisiana paper reprint is Stephen Z. Starr’s Colonel Grenfell’s Wars: The Life of a Soldier of Fortune, a British soldier who served with the Confederacy [$14.95]. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux has a paper edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s autobiography A year of the Hunter, translated by Madeline G. Levine [$12].

American poet James Schuyler has been acclaimed by poet John Ashbery as “simply the best we have.” Schuyler’s Collected Poems is available in a paper edition from Noonday Press [$14]. Noonday has also republished Paul Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile, winner of the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry [$10 paper]. St. Martin’s has new editions respectively of selected poems of Emily Bronte and Christina Rossetti [$9.95 each cloth]. Norton has published a paper edition of Adrienne Rich’s Collected Early Poems, 1950—1970 [$15], In its Penguin Poets series, Penguin is offering Irish poet Paul Durcan’s A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems [$14.95]. A recent Penguin Classic is Henry Vaughan’s The Complete Poems [$14.95]. Another in the Penguin Poets series is Three Poems by Michael McClure with an introduction by Robert Hunter, the poems being respectively “Dolphin Skull, Rare Angel, and Dark Brown” [$14.95].

Mark Mazower’s Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941—44 is a prize-winning account of wartime Greece and the impact of the Nazi Occupation upon the lives and values of ordinary Greeks. Yale recently published a paper edition of Inside Hitler’s Greece [$32.50 cloth, $18 paper]. Cornell is offering a paper edition of Eve Levin’s Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slaves, 900—1700 [$16.95]. Harvard has reprinted Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees’s The Making of Urban Europe, 1000—1994 with a new preface and a new chapter [18.95 paper]. Norton has reprinted Sir Michael Howard’s Strategic Deception in the Second World War, an account of how the British duped the German high Command in W.W.II [$13.95 paper]. Richard A. Goldwaite’s Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300—1600 is available as a Johns Hopkins paperback [$15.95]. Princeton has a paper edition of Raphael Patai’s The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book, winner of the 1994 National Jewish Honor Book in Scholarship [$65 cloth, $24.95 paper].

Yale has reprinted Peter Brook’s The Melo-dramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess in which Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature [$15 paper]. Nebraska has a new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Emerson’s Literary Criticism, edited with a new introduction by Eric W. Carlson [$10 paper]. As part of its Harvest Book series, Harcourt Brace has republished Alice K. Turner’s The History of Hell which the New fork Times Book Review called “a hell of a bargain” [$17 paper]. Ivan R. Dee has republished Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society with a new preface by the author [$12.95 paper].

Thomas Mann’s place in the front ranks of the world’s great novelists was established with the publication of his novel The Magic Mountain, a book that ultimately led to his winning the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Knopf recently published a new edition of The Magic Mountain in a new translation by the award-winning translator, John E. Woods whose 1993 rendering of Mann’s Buddenbrooks was much lauded [$35 cloth]. Knopf also has a new edition in its Everyman’s Library series of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude [$20 cloth] and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 [$20 cloth]. Kentucky is offering a new edition of Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories with a foreword by George Ella Lyon [$18 cloth]. In its Washington Square Press series, Pocketbooks has a reprint of Cathie Pelletier’s A Marriage Made at Woodstock [$12 paper]. B.M. Bower’s Chip of the Flying U has been reissued in Nebraska’s Bison Books series with illustrations by Charles M. Russell and an introduction by Mary Clearman Blew [$8.95]. Recent editions to Louisiana’s “Voices of the South” series include these novels: Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House [$12.95]; Madison Jones’s A Cry of Absence [$11.95]; Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants [$10.95]; and Elizabeth Spencer’s The Salt Line [$12.95].