A Harvest book

Silver Rights is a true story of clear-eyed determination, down-home grit, and sweet triumph. It's the story of the Carter family of Sunflower County, Mississippi, African-American sharecroppers on a cotton plantation who, in 1965, sent seven of their thirteen children to desegregate an all-white school system. Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter had a dream for their children: to get them out of the cotton fields. And they knew of only one way to make it come true: to get them the best available education. So, when white school and county officials cynically met the letter (but not the spirit) of the new civil rights laws with a "Freedom of Choice" policy, the Carters bravely took them up on it and chose the best local schools - the white ones. They were the only Sunflower County blacks who dared. Before long, the Carters' shack was riddled with bullets in the middle of the night. The plantation owner canceled their credit at his store and threw them off the plantation. At school, the Carter children were tormented by white students - and by some of the teachers. For three terrible years, they were all alone in "the lion's den.". The story of the Carter children's long, difficult road to high school, college, and a way out of the Delta, comes to life in Constance Curry's firsthand account. And Mae Bertha Carter's letters to the author resonate with this family's fierce determination to win those shining, tantalizing rights that novelist Alice Walker has called "silver."

"From 1948 (when he first wrote to Evelyn Waugh, who was editing The Seven Storey Mountain for publication in England) until his death in 1968, Thomas Merton corresponded with writers around the world, developing an ever-widening circle of friends in Europe, the Soviet Union, South and North America. Merton wrote, and heard from, many prominent writers of the stature of Waugh, Jacques Maritain, Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Walker Percy, Henry Miller, and Victoria Ocampo. He also corresponded with and encouraged newer writers in Latin America, like Ernesto Cardenal." "Merton sensed in these writers a hope for the future of humanity and believed that the courage for truth was their special gift. Writing to Jose Coronel Urtecho, Merton asserted that poets "remain almost the only ones who have anything to say . . . They have the courage to disbelieve what is shouted with the greatest amount of noise from every loudspeaker."" "Courage rooted in true freedom is evident in Merton's own life. He shared with his literary friends his concerns about war, violence and repression, racism and injustice, and all forms of human aggression. Forbidden to publish on the subject of war by his superiors, he obeyed but continued to circulate his famous "Cold War Letters." He did not hesitate to criticize his church when he saw there was more concern for the institutional structure than there was for people. Merton especially admired those who had the courage to write under oppression, like Pasternak, Milosz, and Cardenal."--BOOK JACKET.

In this book, each second is an age, every cell a universe. Through a series of stories, the author illustrates the paradoxes of space and time. Estranged lovers forever travelling parallel highways, the hunter and lion trapped at each others throats and victims linked in mutual pursuit.

In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day. During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He doesn't know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the baby someday might. Raj Kamal Jha's ethereal, poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition. (Description from Goodreads)

This is the memoir of one man's faith. The renowned social and political commentator, William F. Buckley Jr., turns to a highly personal subject - his faith. And he tells us the story of his life as a Catholic Christian. Nearer, My God is the most reflective, poignant, and searching of Bill Buckley's many books. In the opening chapters he relives his childhood, a loving, funny, nostalgic glimpse into pre-World War II America and England. He speaks about his religious experiences to a world that has changed dramatically. He is unafraid of revealing the most personal side of his faith. He describes, in his distinctive style, the intimacy of a trip to Lourdes, the impact on him of the searing account by Maria Valtorta of the Crucifixion, the ordination of his nephew into the priesthood, and gives a moving account of his mother's death. And there is humor, as Buckley gives a unique, hilarious view of a visit to the Vatican with Malcolm Muggeridge, Charlton Heston, Grace Kelly, and David Niven. Personal though this book is, Buckley has gone to others to examine new perspectives, putting together his own distinguished "Forum" and leaning on the great literature of the past to illustrate his thinking on contemporary Catholic and Christian issues.

Years in insurance and marriage to the joyless Hilda have been no more than death in life to George Bowling. This and fear of another war take his mind back to the peace of his childhood in a small country town. But his return journey to Lower Binfield brings complete disillusionment.

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town. Maigret has been exiled from Paris to a remote province, having offended his superiors. Out of his element, he is bored until a murder case arrives. He discovers that a community's loyalties hide unpleasant truths.

"This bilingual edition of recent verse by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (award-winning director of such films as Close-Up and Taste of Cherry) includes English translations of more than two hundred crystalline, haiku-like poems, together with their Persian originals. The translators, noted Persian literature scholars Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Beard, contribute an illuminating introduction to Kiarostami's poetic enterprise, examining its relationship to his unique cinematic corpus and to the traditions of classic and contemporary Persian poetry. Of interest to enthusiasts of cinema and literature alike, Walking with the Wind - the second volume in Harvard Film Archives series "Voices and Visions in Film" - sheds light on a contemporary master who transforms simple fragments of reality into evocative narrative landscapes."--BOOK JACKET.

Nine stories dealing with U.S.-Mexico relations. In the title story, a Mexican window washer meets an American executive, Girlfriends is about a Mexican maid and her racist Anglo employer, and Rio Grande, Rio Bravo is on border crossings. Description: 266 p. ; 22 cm. Contents: A capital girl -- Pain -- Spoils -- The line of oblivion -- Malintzin of the maquilas -- Las amigas -- The crystal frontier -- The bet -- Río Grande, Río Bravo. Other Titles: Capital girl. Line of oblivion. Amigas. Crystal frontier. Bet. Frontera de cristal. Responsibility: Carlos Fuentes ; translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam. Abstract: The nine stories comprising this novel all concern people who in one way or another have had something to do with, or still are part of, the family of a powerful oligarch of northern Mexico with manifold connections to the United States. Each story concerns a Mexican-American encounter--sometimes hilarious, often tragic, frequently ambivalent, inevitably poignant--and each unique drama in its own way epitomizes some striking contrast along the invisible, reflective, dangerous frontier that divides the American-Mexican world. Beyond the emblematic power of Mr. Fuentes's exuberant fiction to make us think about the political and cultural themes which affect and distort that double world, there is the sheer human diversity of life on "crystal frontier." These stories pulse with vivid experience--of love in its many guises, of loneliness, of youth and age, of heartbreak and redemption.--From publisher description.

Charles Callahan is reading the Sunday paper when an alluring and oddly familiar photo catches his eye: it is Sian Richards, his first love, a face he has not seen for more than three decades. He is entranced by her image, flooded by memories of their teenage summer together, and utterly conpelled to make contact with her again. Charles sends Sian a letter, knowing all the while that "from the very first sentence of the very first note there was nothing innocent about it." Sian writes back - she is now a poet living with her husband and small child on an onion farm in Pennsylvania. She is intrigued that Charles has sought her out after so many years but wary of where their correspondence might lead. For Charles, troubled by financial woes, on the verge of losing his home, and concerned about the security of his family, the letters become a secret obsession and another source of instability in his already complicated life. Despite their reservations, the power of Charles and Sian's attraction leads them to meet again . . . and again. As Charles understands it, "for the two of them, eros is linked with time. It is the very urgency of time he dreads, the sense that their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted." Anita Shreve takes the classic theme of "Romeo and Juliet" and gives it an unusual twist: two lovers struggle against formidable odds, reaching across a lifetime to reclaim what they once lost. In doing so, they set in motion a tumultuous series of events that moves inexorably to a shocking conclusion.

Simon Camish, an embittered, diffident lawyer in a loveless marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Yet at one time she had been notorious-her name constantly in the news. Now, separated from her Greek husband, she lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from her slum house in a decaying neighborhood to which she has become attached. Gradually, Simon becomes aware that Rose is a woman of remarkable integrity and courage. He is drawn into her affairs when her husband takes legal action to reopen the question of custody of the children-a scheme for getting his wife back. And, while the precise nature of their ties eludes him, Simon comes to realize that Rose and her Greek ex-husband are forever and inextricably bound to each other. --Amazon.com.

"In The Theatre of Illusion you'll find buffoonery, chicanery, adultery, murder, flights of fancy, and flights of love. A picaresque hero, Clindor, secretly woos the lovely Isabelle away from his master, Matamore. Isabelle suspects that Clindor seeks the charms of another. And Lyse, the indispensable maid, helps to make it all somehow come right. Pierre Corneille described this dazzling play as an "extravagant trifle" and it is, indeed, filled with an abundance of twists and turns and surprises." "Now this baroque masterpiece has been translated by one of America's finest poets and translators of French, Richard Wilbur."--Jacket.

A young boy in modern-day Jerusalem trades away one possession after another, only to find something much more wonderful--his first love.

In 1907 Storyville Louisiana someone is killing red-light district prostitutes. As Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr tries to solve the murder he encounters a cast of historical characters.

"A presidential hopeful has taken a beautiful, vulnerable woman as his mistress, though both are married to others. His rival for the presidency of the United States has even more sensational secrets to guard about his own past. An ambitious journalist unearths the stories of the private lives of both, and he hefts in his hand what he calls "the hammer of truth".". "The time is the end of the eighteenth century. The political figures whose intimate lives are about to be revealed are Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. The journalist out to shape the course of the young nation's history is "that scurrilous scoundrel Callender," the fugitive from Scottish sedition law who pioneered the public exposure of men in power. The women he makes famous are the mysterious Maria Reynolds and the slave Sally Hemings.". "William Safire brings these real characters in our history to life. He recounts the dramatic clash of the Founders and the first journalists - drawn from actual events of the nation's beginnings - that has special relevance for our time.". "Much of the dialogue of Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe is drawn from their letters. The accounts of libel and sedition trials to suppress the opinions of Callender and his bombastic newspaper antagonist, "Peter Porcupine," are accurate. Hamilton's passionate and ironic defense of freedom of the press is true (although the notes of his speech were fleshed out by Safire, a former White House speechwriter). In a unique "Underbook," the author scrupulously sets forth his scholarly sources, separating fiction from dramatized history - and in so leveling with the reader, truly re-creates the passionate controversies of an era that presages our times."--BOOK JACKET.

The police knew him as "Sad Freddie." The newspapers tagged him "the burglar on a bike." Once he had worked for a safe-manufacturing firm. Now he was In business for himself, cracking the safes he had once installed. Tuesday night's job was to be his last. Then he and his wife would buy a place in the country. It was to have been a routine job, but on his way to the safe in a house in Neuilly. Freddie stumbled across something that was altogether out of his line: a dead woman, her chest covered with blood, holding a telephone in her hand. When Maigret is called in, he finds that the house belongs to an overweight dentist and his elegant, ancient mother. After an exhaustive search, a psychological duel, a marathon interrogation. and innumerable glasses of Pernod, wine, cold beer, and brandy — a sure sign that this is no easy case — the famous French sleuth triumphs.

The contemporary writer discusses elements in fairy tales and science fiction, often overlooked by critics and presents three selections from his own works. Bibliogs.

The 5th and last volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries and letters record the Lindbergh's lives during the years of World War II.

A titanic struggle is taking place - not just among corporate titans, but among entire industries across the globe. At stake is control of the world's fastest-growing industry: communications. The contestants are the huge Hollywood studios, the television networks, and telephone, publishing, and computer companies. The prize is not only vast wealth, but a virtual lock on the dissemination of information worldwide. The Highwaymen is a riveting and compelling look behind the scenes at the vanities and visions of such chief players as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, and Microsoft. An astounding tale of greed, enterprise, and corporate achievement, The Highwaymen is an account of the explosive landscape of telecommunications, and as such provides an indispensable guide to today's world.

For six months Cécile had been pestering Chief Superintendent Maigret, pitching camp in the waiting room, endlessly patient, to report to him that the furniture in the apartment she shared with her aunt had mysteriously shifted position during the night. So much trouble for so self-effacing a woman to create! Clearly she was a spinster, and this was just the sort of fanciful notion spinsters cling to, to plague chief superintendents who have full case rosters. His colleagues teased him about his "girlfriend"; her unassuming stubbornness got on his nerves; her very lack of any style or attraction was an offense. It was understandable that he should put off seeing her as long as possible on one of the busiest days of his career.... It was an oversight he came to regret....

Includes material on John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpoint Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William H. Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E.H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Jay Cooke, Daniel Drew, Henry C. Frick, James J. Hill, Charles M. Schwab, Henry Villard, Standard Oil Company, trusts.

Cavafy, the foremost modern Greek poet, is a master at presenting a scene, an intense feeling, or an idea in direct, unornamented verse. Many of the poems are openly homosexual. Sixty-three newly translated poems have been added to the widely praised edition which includes the classic poem "Ithaca." Introduction by W.H. Auden. Translated by Rae Dalven.

The story of twin brothers and their families whose lives are inexorably intertwined, filled with guilty secrets.

Southern short stories.

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The People of Paper is an exploratory novel, depicting the painful struggles of life and writing through a fantastical world built with paper and imagination.

Celebrated paleontologist Jack Horner examines the enormous impact dinosaurs have on our own lives, from block buster films like Jurassic Park and The Lost World (for which Horner was technical adviser) to his cutting-edge research on how dinosaurs evolved, which throws light on how all species - humans included - arise and die out. Dinosaur Lives also explores the deep emotional effects of the search for knowledge. Horner takes us with him into the field as he braves the elements (and an occasional flock of attacking pelicans) to uncover vast fossil beds that reveal the communal lives and deaths of dinosaurs. He shares the thrill of discovery, the subtler delight that comes with intellectual achievement, and the sadness that attends the death of his best friend and partner in countless digs. Horner then transports us from the timeless realm of fieldwork to the laboratory, where recent technological innovations - many pioneered by Horner - have transformed our understanding of how dinosaurs grew up, raised their young, socialized with their kin, survived environmental disasters, and evolved over the course of millions of years. Here he offers new evidence and arguments regarding the major dinosaur controversies of the day: Were they hot-blooded or cold-blooded? Did they give rise to modern birds? Were they decimated by a gigantic meteor 65 million years ago? Ultimately, he offers a provocative new way to think about life on Earth, including our own condition and fate.

A killer stalking the streets of Montmartre has murdered five women and Maigret is making no head-way in the case. After consulting the distinguished psychiatrist, Professor Tissot, he decides to use psycho-logical means to trap the killer. Firstly, he fakes an arrest, hoping that the murderer, in a fit of jealousy at someone stealing his thunder, will strike again. And he provides him with scores of suit-able potential victims in the shape of policewomen, proficient in the art of judo. The trap has been set.

The story of Anna Severell's struggle at the age of 17 to evolve her own personality in the shadow of her father, Henry Severell, a famous English novelist.

Warhol offers his observations of love, beauty, fame, work, and art and discusses the continuous play and display of his many fetishes.

Lilian Una Singer starts life as the daughter of a prosperous middle-class family. She ends it as a cheerfully eccentric bag-lady living on the streets, quoting Shakespeare for a living. How did she come to take this journey, and why did she make the choices she did? The world presents Lilian with many obstacles, not least the fact that she is a woman. But in spite of everything, she triumphantly makes her life her own, savouring every momen with the reminder that 'everything matter'. Lilian's Story is a wonderful, life-affirming novel from one of our most gifted writers.

After enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans' hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Laurie's schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Laurie's life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience. Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature.

A fantasy novel, presented as a discovered a manuscript, set in the nineteenth century. Frankenstein-like tale. Whitbread Novel Award, 1992.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist argues that initiatives put on ballots by millionaires and special-interest groups are destroying the United States Constitution's system of checks and balances. Examines California's Proposition 13 and Oregon's assisted suicide laws, among other examples.

How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo - minimal diaries - after the magazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parody.". These essays, written in the late eighties and early nineties, are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal taxi drivers, express mail, 33-function watches, fax machines and cellular phones, pornography, soccer fans, academia, and - last but definitely not least - the author's own self. How to Travel with a Salmon gives us Umberto Eco's acute vision of the absurdities of modern life.

Review

Maigret had only a faint idea of what it was all about when he arrived one May afternoon in Delfzijl, a small town squatting on the low coast in the extreme northeast of the Netherlands.

Analysis of the American economic system.

A road trip through a post-apocalyptic America where the dreams of some can change reality, the pecking order is according to how lucky you are, and dog meat has become gourmet food. The protagonist, a youth named Chaos, makes the trip with a fur-covered girlfriend to find their past which they cannot remember.

At first it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just focus our eyes and take in whatever is before us. This ability seems detached, efficient, and rational - as if the eyes are competent machines telling us everything about the world without distorting it in any way. But those ideas are just illusions, Elkins argues, and he suggests that seeing is undependable, inconsistent, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Blindness is not the opposite of vision, but its constant companion, and even the foundation of seeing itself. Elkins asks about objects that are too violent, too sexually charged, or too beautiful to look at directly. When we see a naked body, we either stare lasciviously or look away in embarrassment: in those moments our eyes are not ours to command. Bodies, Elkins says, are among the fundamental things that the eye seeks in every scene: when we are presented with something new, we first try to find a body, or the echoes of a body, and if we fail, our seeing becomes restless and nomadic. The same is true of things that are dead or inert. The world is full of objects that catch our eye, and that seem to have eyes of their own. The sun is an eye, perhaps the most powerful of all. It sees us as much as we see it, and when we stare at it, the sun stares back. . Using drawings, paintings, diagrams, and photographs to illustrate his points, Elkins raises intriguing questions and offers astonishing perceptions about the nature of vision. Ultimately, he concludes, "Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer" - as this remarkable book will transform the viewpoints of all who read it.

When John Calvin Marshall graduated from Harvard in 1956, he was prepared for a life of teaching and relative tranquility. But history had another plan for him: here, a veteran author re-envisions the Martin Luther King Jr. story in fearful, exciting, and violent terms. Political and provocative, And All Our Wounds Forgiven is both a compelling political fable and a striking and tender love story about one of this century’s most charismatic black leaders and the two women he loved.

Meet the mongrel. Timoleon Vieta. A deeply loyal, undemanding and loving companion . . . with the most beautiful eyes. He's living an idyllic existence in the Italian countryside with Cockroft, a composer in exile. Until, that is, the mysterious and malevolent 'Bosnian' comes to stay. How will the stranger affect the bond between dog and master? Timoleon Vieta Come Home is a free-wheelin' take on the Lassie legend, deeply moving and hysterically funny.

Tells the story of Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and the CEO of Dandy-de-odor-o Inc., in a novel composed entirely of footnotes.

Irving Howe was a major intellectual presence: winner of the National Book Award for his best-selling history, World of Our Fathers; editor of Dissent, an influential left-wing magazine of opinion; professor of English at Brandeis University, Stanford University, and the City University of New York. When he died in 1993, he left behind a collection of essays on fiction which he had been working on in the last of his life. Assembled by his son, Nicholas Howe, who also provides an introduction, these accessible, idiosyncratic essays, - which Irving Howe called his shtiklach (Yiddish for "little pieces" or "morsels") - explore such enduring literary concepts as character, style, tone, genre. Many address both literature and politics; but all originate from a passion, a moral striving, and an abiding faith in the common reader.

A look into the medical field with regards to heart transplants and general heart defects. We have come a long way and it shows.

HDTV - digital, high-definition television - is an invention so far-reaching that most people cannot yet grasp its full significance. But the new sets are arriving in stores, and we are in the midst of a revolution in television. In Defining Vision, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joel Brinkley takes us inside the creation of HDTV, into a titanic competition between some of the world's most important high-tech corporations battling for a prize worth billions of dollars. Brinkley tells the story from deep inside the laboratories and boardrooms where the race was run. There, scheming contestants employed duplicity, extortion, and, occasionally, creative genius. At the same time, government leaders manipulated the race to their own ends, promoting it one moment and betraying it the next.

The novel takes place during the course of a single evening in an outdoor Lahore cafe.

"Nearly forty years have passed since Ruth Hyde Paine, a Quaker housewife in suburban Dallas, offered shelter and assistance to a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. For nine months in 1963, Mrs. Paine was so deeply involved in the Oswald's lives that she eventually became one of the Warren Commission's most important witnesses.". "Mrs. Paine's Garage is the tragic story of a well-intentioned woman who found Oswald the job that put him six floors above Dealey Plaza - into which, on November 22, he fired a rifle he'd kept hidden inside Mrs. Paine's house. But this is also a tale of survival and resiliency: the story of a devout, open-hearted woman who weathered a whirlwind of investigation, suspicion, and betrayal, and who refused to allow her enmeshment in the calamity of that November to crush her own life.". "Thomas Mallon gives us a disturbing account of generosity and secrets of suppressed memories and tragic might-have-beens, of coincidences more eerie than conspiracy theory. His book is unlike any other work that has been published on the murder of President Kennedy."--BOOK JACKET.

Reveals the autobiographical impulse behind much of Mary McCarthy's most popular work ; chronicles the beginnings of her literary career, just as she is becoming not only a writer but a literary personality.

viii, 338 p. ; 21 cm