Stirling Silliphant

In Pearl, Lynn Crosbie examines the often unsettling regions of loss and despair, in haunting and compelling terms. Crosbie's language is seductive, elliptical, and unnerving. Experiencing Pearl is to give yourself over to Crosbie's world, at the risk of not returning.

"I want a son," Don Felipe said That was the first indication Jan Presley had that the paper she'd signed was not a normal contract for secretarial employment. What had she let herself in for? Don Felipe de Rimados made it clear that Jan's intrusion into his ordered life was for one reason only. He didn't want the shackles of matrimony, and when her purpose was fulfilled, she'd be discarded without a second thought. "Love is an overrated emotion at best," he told Jan firmly. Her feelings didn't seem to matter at all ....

"This important new life of Mussolini by a talented new biographer draws on a vast range of fresh material to challenge the standard version of Italy's fascist dictator as either grotesque buffoon, hell bent on war in Europe (the liberal version), or tool of the bourgeoisie in its war with the working class (the Marxist version)." "To get power and hold it by and large bloodlessly through two decades, as Mussolini did until his disastrous alliance with Hitler, required much more than that. Such was the magnetism of the man Churchill called 'the Roman genius' and Pope Pius XI 'sent by Providence', and so strong the appeal of fascism, that the only honest verdict is that he ruled by popular demand." "Mussolini was as popular with women as men. Behind every great man, it is said, there is a woman. Behind this great dictator, who had 169 lovers according to one estimate, stood a nation of women. It was his politics they found most attractive. He did away with democracy but he did not use mass murder to stay in power. There was no need. To the bitter end, there was little resistance to him by Italians because support for him remained so strong." "His fatal error was his alliance with Hitler whom he despised. But this alliance was far from inevitable, the result more of Anglo-French incompetence and his fear of Hitler than a wild desire for war or world domination, let alone the extermination of the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust had begun he and his Fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives." "This new biography also forces us to wonder whether Mussolini - a revolutionary Socialist who founded Fascism as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement - had better vision than Marx. For whereas Communism appears terminally ill, Fascism's Third Way between Capitalism and Communism lives on, championed by standard bearers of the modern left such as New Labour." "To assume that Fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme right is to miss the point: Mussolini despised the bourgeois way of life - la vita comoda - above all else and he remained at heart a Socialist to his dying day."--BOOK JACKET.

Lord Byron Jones is a black businessman who owns a successful undertaking business, and is married to the very young and desirable Emma. His ability to cooperate with the white community is clearly an asset in the genteel town of Somerset, Tennessee. When Emma has an affair with a white policeman, divorce ensues and the stage is set for high drama.

"Revealing and entertaining ... a virtual how-to-do-it handbook for would-be Hollywood producers." -BATON ROUGE SUNDAY ADVOCATE "Absorbing... the process of transferring a story into script and into film is interestingly presented in this collaboration." —BIRMINGHAM NEWS "An interesting and different book... may well be the most unified and useful contribution which the movie A WALK IN THE SPRING RAIN will make to the history of the cinema." -KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL FICTION INTO FILM is a unique study of the making of a major motion picture—from original story to screenplay to finished film. It consists of (1) a short novel, A WALK IN THE SPRING RAIN; (2) the screenplay adapted from it; and (3) a commentary which discusses in detail the actual making of the film, from inception to completed product. Although the book describes production terms and such technical details as scoring, editing and looping, it is primarily concerned with the problems and techniques of transforming a work from one medium into another, of adapting a literary property into a cinematic one.

Red Adair-type former Navy Frogman Vic Scott is on vacation in Venezuela when a huge oil fire at a well of his rich friend erupts. While romancing a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a colleague locates him and persuades him to help put out the blaze, just as theirs is starting up. More romance than adventure for the first two-thirds of the book, Maracaibo ultimately settles down to dramatic scenes of underwater work to extinguish the fire before a huge storm arrives. Even so, the action is interrupted from time to time to explore the romantic angle, including scenes between the prostitute and the firefighter, who were lovers only a few years prior - though she is now engaged to the rich oil baron. Will her past be revealed? Will the New York author get her man? Will Vic Scott put out the fire near Maracaibo before it reaches the city, then finally settle down?