ISSUE: Summer 1979
Bell Irvin Wiley’s two-volume history of the common soldier in the Civil War has been hailed as a “landmark” by The American Historical Review and “an impressive achievement” by historian David Donald; and both volumes have recently been reprinted in paperback editions by LSU Press, their titles respectively being The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank [$7.50 each]. LSU Press has also republished Alexander DeConde’s account of the events that led to the Louisiana Purchase, This Affair of Louisiana [$6.95]. Harvard has published a fourth edition of John Fairbank’s The United States and China, a book described by the London Times Literary Supplement as “a model summary of what China means and how the West must understand it” [$16.50 hardback, $5.95 paper]. Jack C. Piano and Milton Greenberg’s The American Political Dictionary has come out in a fifth hardback edition from Holt, Rinehart & Winston [$15.95].
The Poetry of Robert Frost, a paperback edition of the New Englander’s “collected poems, complete and unabridged,” and edited by Edward Connery Lathem, has been published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston [$6.95]. Cambridge has put out a paperback edition of Edward Lockspeiser’s two-volume account of Debussy: His Life and Mind, with Volume I covering the years 1862—1902 [$7.95] and Volume II the years 1902—1918 [$9.95]. Also available as Cambridge paperbacks are the final two volumes of E. M. Butler’s wide-ranging three-volume study of the Faust legend and its attendant mythologies, the books respectively being Ritual Magic [$7.95] and The Fortunes of Faust [$8.95]. Other recent Cambridge paperback reprints include these: Maurice B. Benn’s The Drama of Revolt: A Critical Study of Georg Büchner [$9.95], Dorothy Gabe Coleman’s Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction [$7.95], C. B. Morris’s two works on two facets of literary life in pre-civil war Spain, Surrealism and Spain, 1920—1936 [$8.95] and A Generation of Spanish Poets, 19201936 [$8.95], a second edition of George Rowell’s The Victorian Theatre, 1792—1914 [$8.50], and William Tydeman’s The Theatre in the Middle Ages [$9.95]. Princeton is offering a paperback edition of Harley Granville-Barker’s two-volume Prefaces to Shakespeare, the work of an influential and innovative director of Shakespearean drama [Vol. I, $5.95; Vol. II, $5.45]. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has launched publication of a uniform edition of the works of Lionel Trilling by issuing a new hardback edition of The Liberal Imagination [$10.00]. A new California paperback is Robert Alter’s Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre [$3.95]. C. H. Peake’s James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist is available as a Stanford paperback [$6.95]. Ambrose Bierce’s masterpiece of satiric art, The Devil’s Dictionary, first published in 1908, has been reprinted by Thomas Y. Crowell [$12.95 hardback, $5.95 paper].
Oxford has published the second hardback volume of The Tales of Henry James, 1870—1874, edited by Maqbool Aziz [$15.00]. Of This Time, Of That Place and Other Stories by Lionel Trilling is a new Harcourt Brace Jovanovich hardback reprint [$7.95]. Canadian novelist Robertson Davies’s A Mixture of Frailties is being offered in a new hardback edition by Everest House [$12.50]. Ellen Glasgow’s The Sheltered Life has been reprinted in a paperback by Hill and Wang [$5.95]. The Wind, a tale of Texas in the twenties by Dorothy Scarborough, is being offered by Texas in a new edition [$10.95 hardback, $7.95 paper]. Among the new Pocket Books: Alice Adams’s Listening to Billie [$1.95], Louis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair [$2.95], John (The World According to Garp) Irving’s Setting Free the Bears [$2.50], Evan H. Rhodes’s An Army of Children, the army being the medieval Children’s Crusade [$2.50], and Jill Robinson’s Perdido, a sexy saga of bygone Hollywood [$2.75]. Among the recent Bantam Books: Beryl Bainbridge’s Injury Time [$2.25], two Robert Coover novels, The Origin of the Brunists [$2.95] and The Public Burning [$2.95], E. L. (Ragtime) Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel [$2.50], two Dorothy B. Hughes mysteries, In A Lonely Place [$1.95] and Ride the Pink Horse [$1.95], Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant [$2.75], Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar [$2.50], Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire [$2.50], and Silvia Tennenbaum’s Rachel, The Rabbi’s Wife [$2.50]. Christopher Isherwoqd’s first novel, All the Conspirators, published in 1926, has been reprinted as a New Directions Paperbook [$3.95]. Crime Times Three is the title of a hardback trilogy of mysteries by P. D. James, touted as Agatha Christie’s successor, the three being Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, and Shroud for a Nightingale [$12.95].
Oxford has published a paperback edition of Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis [$8.95]. Martin A. Miller’s Kropotkin, a highly praised biography of the Russian anarchist theoretician, is available as a Chicago paperback [$5.95]. A new Wallaby Book is William L. Shirer’s 20th Century Journey, an account of the early years of a former CBS correspondent and newspaperman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published the first paperback edition of John McPhee’s The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield [$4.95]. The prolific Anthony Trollope is represented by a California paperback, An Autobiography [$3.95].
