Mark Helprin

The Pacific and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen stories that display the remarkable scope, incomparable wit, and deft prose that have come to be Mark Helprin's signature. A British paratrooper jumps into occupied territory; the 1958 New York Yankees gain an unexpected teammate in a puny, teenage Hasidic Jew: a September 11th widow receives an astonishing gift from the contractor working on her new apartment - these and other stories exhibit the constantly changing variety of the ocean itself., the peaks and troughs of life. Lighthearted, glittering fables are met with starker tales that sound the depths of sacrifice and duty. The Pacific And Other Stories is a resplendent, powerful collection of lasting substance and emotional import.

Although her kingdom has lived in peace for many years, the queen has always feared the day the Usurper would return to plunge her city into darkness. Even as she rejoices the birth of her first child, she sees signs of impending danger. Her husband and his army have vanished in the wilderness. With only a short time left to reinforce the kingdom's defense, her faithful general masterminds a strategy to keep the city safe, against great odds. But even when the Usurper's victory may seem to be complete, the mysterious veil of snows hides a symbol of undying hope. The Veil of Snows is a moving and powerful tale about the light of the human spirit, a light that can never be wholly extinguished. Now out of print, Mark Helprin's three novellas -- Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows -- are now available in a single volume, A Kingdom Far and Clear: The Complete Swan Lake Trilogy.

An old American who lives in Brazil is writing his memoirs. An English teacher at the navel academy, he is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter and has a little son whom he loves. He sits in a mountain garden in Niteroi, overlooking the ocean, and carries with him a Walther P-88. As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, we learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice; an investment banker who met with popes and presidents; a multimillionaire; and a man who was never not in love. He was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. In his adolescence he spent years in an insane asylum in Switzerland. And all his life, he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world's most insidious enslaver: coffee. Mark Helprin's astounding prose combines adventure, satire, flights of transcendence, and high comedy with vivid and poignant memories of a Hudson Valley and New York City that no longer exist.

The hero is Marshall Pearl born in a sea battle in an illegal immigrant ship of the coast of Palestine in 1947. Adopted into America by the wealthy and childless Livingstons, he grows up on a Hudson Valley estate, taught by his adventures on the river riding ice floes, jumping freights, climbing precipices and shaped by the imperatives of his own personality and destiny – his peculiar sensitivity to light, his astonishing seizures and visions, his battle with an eagle. Always restless, always attracted by forces and affinities just beyond his grasp, he begins to move outward in childhood for an idyllic summer in the Rockies; as an adolescent to the tropical forests of Jamaica and the Rastaferian Rebellion; as a young man to the graceful traditions of Harvard, to the Great Plains, to New Orleans and Charleston, to the Alps, and finally to Israel. En route we see him in trouble and in triumph, in and out of scrapes, now broke and hungry, now surrounded by riches, now on the bottom and out of control, now on top and in command. And he is always in love: with sunburn (always perfect) Lydia, or with the lithe and (almost) unattainable Dash, or with gentle Alexa, or with the strong wild and beautiful Nancy May Baker...until one becomes central to this life.

A Roman student is torn from his carefree life when World War I breaks out, and fifty years later, recounts the triumphs and tragedies of his existence to an illiterate factory worker.

394 pages ; 24 cm

10th grade

World-renowned novelist Mark Helprin offers a ringing Jeffersonian defense of private property in the age of digital culture, with its degradation of thought and language, and collectivist bias against the rights of individual creators.Mark Helprin anticipated that his 2007 New York Times op-ed piece about the extension of the term of copyright would be received quietly, if not altogether overlooked. Within a week, the article had accumulated 750,000 angry comments. He was shocked by the breathtaking sense of entitlement demonstrated by the commenters, and appalled by the breadth, speed, and illogic of their responses. Helprin realized how drastically different this generation is from those before it. The Creative Commons movement and the copyright abolitionists, like the rest of their generation, were educated with a modern bias toward collaboration, which has led them to denigrate individual efforts and in turn fueled their sense of entitlement to the fruits of other people's labors. More important, their selfish desire to 'stick it' to the greedy corporate interests who control the production and distribution of intellectual property undermines not just the possibility of an independent literary culture but threatens the future of civilization itself.