Reprint, Winter 1981

Two recent additions to Cornell’s handsome “Landmarks in Art History” paperback series are, respectively, a revised edition of Jakob Rosenberg’s Rembrandt: Life and Work [$14.95] and The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington [$12.95]. A recent Harvest/HBJ Book is The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three, 1923—1928, edited by Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann [$5.95]. New Illinois paperbacks include Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, with a foreword by novelist Alice Walker [$8.95], and Four Women Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba compiled by the late Oscar Lewis, his wife Ruth, and Susan M. Rigdon [$10.00]. Among the new McGraw-Hill paperbacks are Dennis McNally’s Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America [$6.95] and Frederic V. Grunfeld’s Prophets Without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World [$5.95]. Randy Roberts’ Jack Dempsey, an illustrated biography of the legendary “Manassa Mauler” whose gloves made boxing history in the 1920’s, is available as a Grove Press paperback [$6.95]. C. David Heymann’s Ezra Pound: The Last Rower—A Political Profile, considered by Time magazine to be “the most harshly realistic portrait of the poet so far produced,” has been reproduced as a Seaver Books paperback [$6.95], Louisiana has published a paperback edition of Per Seyersted’s Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography of a Missouri author whose 1899 novel, The Awakening, shocked the American reading public and was in many respects an American Madame Bovary [$5.95]. Norman Friedman’s e.e. cummings: The Growth of a Writer was recently reissued as a Southern Illinois paperback [$5.95],

When Charles S. Singleton’s translation of and commentary on Dante’s Inferno was published in 1970, Renaissance Quarterly called it “the most comprehensive annotated edition of the Inferno available in English.” The first volume of The Divine Comedy is now available in the Princeton/ Bollingen Paperbacks series [$12.50]. Another acclaimed translation is A.E. Watts’ English version of The Metamorphoses of Ovid, a recent North Point Press paperback which includes etchings by Pablo Picasso [$9.50]. Rosemary Woolf’s The English Mystery Plays, esteemed as “an excellent introduction to English medieval drama” by Library Journal, has been republished in paperback by California [$6.95]. New Chicago paperbacks include Gerald Graff’s Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, with a new preface [$7.00], and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James [$6.00]. The Genius of John Ruskin is brought out in a paperback selection of his writings prepared and introduced by John D. Rosenberg and published in paperback by Routledge and Kegan Paul [$12.50]. Illinois has reissued Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel in paperback [$5.95] as well as a second edition of Jerome Klinkowitz’s Literary Disruptions: The Making of Post-Contemporary American Fiction [$15.95 cloth, $6.50 paper]. MIT Press is offering a paperback edition of Adrian Akmajian and Frank W. Heny’s An Introduction to the Principles of Transformational Syntax [$10.00]. Oxford has a hardback edition of Albert H. Marckwardt’s American English revised by J.L. Dillard [$12.95]. A recent Cornell paperback is a selection of Michel Foucault’s essays and interviews entitled Language, Counter-Memory, Practice edited, with an introduction, by Donald F. Bouchard [$5.95].

Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County created something of a sensation when it was published in 1946, indeed so much so that it was declared “an obscene book” by the New York Court of Appeals on Nov. 13, 1947 and soon withdrawn, all of which must seem passing strange to a generation nurtured on Deep Throat and The Joy of Sex. Yet Wilson’s “favorite” among his many books remains, as John Updike notes in the afterword to a new Nonpariel Books paperback edition, “a work of exemplary merit” [$7.95]. The exploits of Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, are the subject of The Amazing Mycroft Mysteries, originally written by H.F. Heard and now reprinted in hardback by Vanguard [$15.95]. A recent Pantheon paperback is John Berber’s G., a novel about a modern Don Juan in pre-WorldWar I Europe [$5.95]. Godine is offering a paperback edition of H.G. Wells’ The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, first published in New York in 1911 and out of print for many years [$5.95]. Two additions to the paperback Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library are, respectively, Katherine Briggs’ British Folktales [$5.95] and Moss Roberts’ translation of Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies [$4.95]. Vintage Books has reprinted both John Updike’s Bech: A Book and Wilfrid Sheed’s The Hack [$2.95 each]. Robin Jenkins’ Fergus Lamont, described by Publishers Weekly as “the engrossing and moving story of a twentieth-century Scot whose illegitimate birth and Glasgow slum childhood shape his years to come,” is out in paperback as a Pivot Book [$3.95]. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has a paperback edition of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel [$7.95] and a new hardback edition of Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond [$14.95]. Two recent paperback additions to Holt, Rinehart & Winston’s Owl Book series are Rhoda Lerman’s Eleanor, a novel about Mrs. FDR [$4.95] and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, acclaimed by Newsweek critic Walt demons as “one of the best novels of this century” [$7.95]. Chicago has brought out a paperback edition of Indian novelist R.K. Narayan’s much-lauded trilogy—Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, and The English Teacher [$3.95 each]. Dover has a paperback edition of Wilkie Collins’ Basil, the story of a young gentleman’s infatuation with a shopkeeper’s daughter [$4.50].