Literary Collections

This new translation of Montaigne's immortal Essays received great acclaim when it was first published in The Complete Works of Montaigne in the 1957 edition. The New York Times said, "It is a matter for rejoicing that we now have available a new translation that offers definite advantages over even the best of its predecessors," and The New Republic stated that this edition gives "a more adequate idea of Montaigne's manner, his straight and unpretentious style, than any of the half-dozen previous English translations."

In his Essays Montaigne warns us from the outset that he has set himself "no goal but a domestic and private one"; yet he is one author whose modernity and universality have been acclaimed by each age since he wrote. Probing into his emotions, attitudes, and behavior, Montaigne reveals to us much about ourselves.

As new editions of the Essays were published during his lifetime, Montaigne interpolated many new passages—often of considerable length. This volume indicates the strata of composition, so that the reader may follow the development of Montaigne's thought over the years. The detailed index provides a convenient means of locating the many famous passages that occur throughout the work.

This new translation of Montaigne's immortal Essays received great acclaim when it was first published in The Complete Works of Montaigne in the 1957 edition. The New York Times said, "It is a matter for rejoicing that we now have available a new translation that offers definite advantages over even the best of its predecessors," and The New Republic stated that this edition gives "a more adequate idea of Montaigne's manner, his straight and unpretentious style, than any of the half-dozen previous English translations."

In his Essays Montaigne warns us from the outset that he has set himself "no goal but a domestic and private one"; yet he is one author whose modernity and universality have been acclaimed by each age since he wrote. Probing into his emotions, attitudes, and behavior, Montaigne reveals to us much about ourselves.

As new editions of the Essays were published during his lifetime, Montaigne interpolated many new passages—often of considerable length. This volume indicates the strata of composition, so that the reader may follow the development of Montaigne's thought over the years. The detailed index provides a convenient means of locating the many famous passages that occur throughout the work.

Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs—including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body.

Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here—in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies.

However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the imminence of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.

This volume brings together in convenient form a rich selection of Japanese prose dating from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, a period during which the preeminent cultural and aesthetic values were those of the Heian court. It contains 22 works representing all the major indigenous literary forms, either complete or in generous excerpts, and is particularly rich in writing by women and in autobiographical writings.

This anthology contains longer selections than the only other available anthology, which was published in the 1950s, and each selection is preceded by an introduction reflecting the most recent scholarship. With three exceptions, all the translations are by the compilers, and almost all of them are published here for the first time.

Because of space limitations, the compiler has omitted the two long masterpieces of the age, The Tale of Genji and The Tale of Heike, which deserve to be read in their entirety, and which are available in paperback English translations. The book contains an extensive general introduction, thirteen illustrations, five maps, a glossary, and a selected bibliography of works in English translation.

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, in chronological order beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory.

Among the subjects Freud engages are Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth, Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Michelangelo's Moses, E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sand Man," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales, the effect of and the meaning of beauty, mythology, and the games of aestheticization. All texts are drawn from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. The volume includes the notes prepared for that edition by the editor.

In addition to the writings on Jensen's Gradiva and Medusa, the essays are: "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales," "The Theme of the Three Caskets," "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work," "On Transience," "A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession," "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit," "The Uncanny," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "The Goethe Prize."

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

This volume presents the complete correspondence between two of the most important and influential American poets of the postwar period. The almost 500 letters range widely over the poetry scene and the issues that made the period so lively and productive. But what gives the exchange its special personal and literary resonance is the sense of spiritual affinity and shared conviction about the power of the visionary imagination. Duncan and Levertov explore these matters in rich detail until, under the stress of dealing with the Vietnam War in poetry, they discover deep-seated differences in the religious and ethical convictions underlying their politics and poetic stance. The issues that drew them together and those that drove them apart create a powerful personal drama with far-reaching historical and cultural significance. The editors have provided a critical Introduction, full notes, a chronology, and a glossary of names.

This volume presents the complete correspondence between two of the most important and influential American poets of the postwar period. The almost 500 letters range widely over the poetry scene and the issues that made the period so lively and productive. But what gives the exchange its special personal and literary resonance is the sense of spiritual affinity and shared conviction about the power of the visionary imagination. Duncan and Levertov explore these matters in rich detail until, under the stress of dealing with the Vietnam War in poetry, they discover deep-seated differences in the religious and ethical convictions underlying their politics and poetic stance. The issues that drew them together and those that drove them apart create a powerful personal drama with far-reaching historical and cultural significance. The editors have provided a critical Introduction, full notes, a chronology, and a glossary of names.

Jack London has long been recognized as one of the most colorful figures in American literature. From his birth in San Francisco in 1876 until his death in 1916, he lived a life rich with experiences and emotional intensity. Factory worker at 14; able-bodied seaman at 17; hobo and convict at 18; "Boy Socialist" of Oakland at 19; Klondike argonaut at 21; the "American Kipling" at 24; renowned author, social crusader, journalist, and war correspondent at 28; world traveler and adventurer at 31; prize-winning stockbreeder and scienfitic farmer at 35; self-made millionaire by the time of his death at 40: the facts became a legend in London's own lifetime.

London dominated the literary marketplace during the first decade of the twentieth century; scarcely a month passed without his writing appearing in the nation's leading magazines. In less than 20 years, he produced some 500 nonfiction pieces, 200 short stories, and 19 novels (over 50 books in all), on such varied subjects as agronomy, alcoholism, astral projection, big business, ecology, economics, gold-hunting, penal reform, political corruption, prizefighting, seafaring, socialism, war, and wildlife.

Of those books, at least three (The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf) have become world classics. London is America's most widely translated author (into more than 80 langauges), and although his works have been neglected until recently by academic critics, he is finally winning recognition as a major figure in American literary history. Comprising 1,557 carefully annotated letters, this three-volume works is the first full-scale, comprehensive collection of London's correspondence, more than doubling the number of his letters previously in print. It illuminates nearly every facet of london's complex genius and meteoric career, from the early years of his literary apprenticeship, through his rise to success and fame, and, finally to the legal entanglements and failing health of his last years.

The image that emerges from London's letters is of an unpretentious, often sensitive human being, extraordinarily open and sometimes brutally candid. He was capable of writing deeply moving, poetic love letters, but he was also capable, when writing to or about those he considered enemies, of a dark bitterness and vicious invective. Like much ofhis published work, many of his letters are simply good reading, written with his characteristic verve and blunt wit.

This edition is lavishly illustrated, including 112 photoraphs, most of them from the London family albums and many published for the first time, facsimiles of letters and autograph inscriptions in books, cartoons and drawings, and three maps.

This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature—namely, the postal system—determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium.

The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethe’s turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering.

The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing.

In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafka’s letters to his typist-fiancée, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafka’s correspondence is deciphered as a “war of nerves” waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.

This remarkable volume introduces to the large English-speaking audience what is probably the most coherent segment of twentieth-century American literature not written in English. The range of American Yiddish Poetry runs the gamut from individualistic verse of alienation in the modern metropolis, responses to Western culture and ideologies, and experiments with poetic form and the resources of the Yiddish language, to the vitriolic associative chains of a politically engaged anarchist existentialist; from hymns to urban architecture and landscapes and the plight of African Americans to confrontations with the experiences of Jewish history and the loss of the Yiddish language. The bilingual facing-page format, the notes and the biographies of poets, the selections from Yiddish theory and criticism, and a comprehensive introduction to the cultural background and concerns of the poetry enhance the poems themselves.

Worlding America explores the circulation of short narratives in the early Americas through a combination of neglected primary materials and scholarly commentary. Building on recent reconsiderations of American literature in light of transnational and hemispheric approaches, it follows the migration of stories from various backgrounds and demonstrates how forms and themes developed in a new literary market that spanned the Atlantic world.

While short narratives prior to 1800 have been largely excluded from critical discussions as well as anthologies, they give insight into the conditions of publishing and writing as well as the demand for brief, entertaining pieces that was met by a wide variety of sources, including sermons, letters, diaries, travelogues, and, eventually, magazines and newspapers. Breaking with traditional concepts of period, authorship, and genre, Worlding America groups the different types of narratives it anthologizes according to key subject areas such as "Life Writing," "Female Agency," or the "Cultures of Print." Each section is introduced by a headnote that explains relevant historical and literary developments, situating each narrative in its cultural context and providing its publication history. Suggestions for further reading will also be appreciated by scholars and students wishing to pursue research in these underrepresented forms.

The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic.

Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.

Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin was one of the most original and innovative writers of his generation. Although Levin is familiar within the Israeli cultural context—and despite the steadily growing stream of literary and theatrical research of his oeuvre—there are few resources on his work available outside of Israel. The present volume, containing a selection of ten of his plays, is the first comprehensive effort to present this unique playwright and director to a broad readership.

Levin's artistic credo was based on a constant urge to criticize Israeli society and its mainstream ideology while simultaneously confronting the basic human and existential issues of life and death. A whole generation of Israeli theater audiences has grown up on Levin's performances with all their paradoxical complexities. At this point, just a few years after his death from cancer in 1999 at the age of 56, it may not be possible to evaluate the full impact of his work. But this volume will contribute significantly to scholarship in this direction and to the appreciation of Levin's unique style.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.

Blanchot early developed a distinctive, limpid firm of essay writing, and, apart from his fiction, his main work has appeared as collections of essays. His essays, in form and substance, unmistakably left their imprint on the work of the most inluential of French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot, and, indeed, all three have generously paid tribute to him.

Published in French in 1949, The Work of Fire is a collection of 22 essays originally issued as review essays in literary journals. Certain themes return again and again: the relation of literature and language to death; the sigificance of repetition; the historical, personal, and social function of literature; and perhaps most important, simply the question, What is at stake in the fact that something such as art or literature exists?

Within each essay, Blanchot raises anew these central themes in the context of a particular work or a particular author. He has read, it appears, practically everything, and an essay on a given writer or work will bristle with apposite references to other authors and works. Among the authors discussed in The Work of Fire are Kafka, Mallarme, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Gide, Pascal, Valery, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and such lesser figures as Benjamin Constant and Jean Paulhan. The essays demonstrate Blanchot's ability to pose the most lucid questions about the essence of literature while saying something new and probing about the author or work in question.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.

Blanchot early developed a distinctive, limpid firm of essay writing, and, apart from his fiction, his main work has appeared as collections of essays. His essays, in form and substance, unmistakably left their imprint on the work of the most inluential of French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot, and, indeed, all three have generously paid tribute to him.

Published in French in 1949, The Work of Fire is a collection of 22 essays originally issued as review essays in literary journals. Certain themes return again and again: the relation of literature and language to death; the sigificance of repetition; the historical, personal, and social function of literature; and perhaps most important, simply the question, What is at stake in the fact that something such as art or literature exists?

Within each essay, Blanchot raises anew these central themes in the context of a particular work or a particular author. He has read, it appears, practically everything, and an essay on a given writer or work will bristle with apposite references to other authors and works. Among the authors discussed in The Work of Fire are Kafka, Mallarme, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Gide, Pascal, Valery, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and such lesser figures as Benjamin Constant and Jean Paulhan. The essays demonstrate Blanchot's ability to pose the most lucid questions about the essence of literature while saying something new and probing about the author or work in question.

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, in chronological order beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory.

Among the subjects Freud engages are Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth, Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Michelangelo's Moses, E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sand Man," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales, the effect of and the meaning of beauty, mythology, and the games of aestheticization. All texts are drawn from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. The volume includes the notes prepared for that edition by the editor.

In addition to the writings on Jensen's Gradiva and Medusa, the essays are: "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales," "The Theme of the Three Caskets," "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work," "On Transience," "A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession," "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit," "The Uncanny," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "The Goethe Prize."

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

The Gem-Glistening Cup is the first volume of Edwin Cranston's monumental Waka Anthology which carries the story of waka, the classical tradition of Japanese poetry, from its beginnings in ancient song to the sixteenth century. The present volume, which contains almost 1,600 songs and poems, covers the period from the earliest times to 784, and includes many of the finest works in the literatures as well as providing evocative glimpses of the spirit and folkways of early Japanese civilization.

The texts drawn upon for the poems are the ancient chronicles Kojiki, Nihonshoki, and Shoku Nihongi; the fudoki, a set of eighth-century local gazetteers; Man'yoshu, the massive eighth-century compendium of early poetry (about one fourth of that work is included); and the Bussokuseki poems carved on a stone tablet at a temple in Nara. All poems are presented in facing romanization and translation.

Jack London, one of the most read and recognized figures in American literature, produced an immense body of work, including 22 novels, 200 short stories, memoirs, newspaper articles, book reviews, essays, and poems. A significant and revealing feature of London's literary life lies in his introspective observations on the craft of writing, brought together in this collection of essays, reviews, letters, and autobiographical writings. London's public role as a daring, carefree man of action has obscured the shrewd, disciplined, and methodical writer whose practical reflections and meditations on his profession provide a vivid portrait of the literary industry in turn-of-the-century America. For this edition, a significant amount of new material has been added.

Reviews of the First Edition

"Dale Walker has rendered a valuable service in his painstaking collection of London's writings about writers. He has included 43 selections, 20 of which are previously uncollected: 13 essays, and excerpts from London's two autobiographical works. The result is a remarkably comprehensive view of London 'the writer's writer.'"

—American Literary Realism

"An absorbing account of how hard the writer worked to learn his craft. . . . We find a master prose stylist concerned with problems of selectivity and concrete issues of tone, form, atmosphere, and point of view."

—Modern Philology

"A remarkable collection. . . . This is a firsthand look at a writer's honest and forthright opinions on his craft."

—Los Angeles Times

Jack London, one of the most read and recognized figures in American literature, produced an immense body of work, including 22 novels, 200 short stories, memoirs, newspaper articles, book reviews, essays, and poems. A significant and revealing feature of London's literary life lies in his introspective observations on the craft of writing, brought together in this collection of essays, reviews, letters, and autobiographical writings. London's public role as a daring, carefree man of action has obscured the shrewd, disciplined, and methodical writer whose practical reflections and meditations on his profession provide a vivid portrait of the literary industry in turn-of-the-century America. For this edition, a significant amount of new material has been added.

Reviews of the First Edition

"Dale Walker has rendered a valuable service in his painstaking collection of London's writings about writers. He has included 43 selections, 20 of which are previously uncollected: 13 essays, and excerpts from London's two autobiographical works. The result is a remarkably comprehensive view of London 'the writer's writer.'"

—American Literary Realism

"An absorbing account of how hard the writer worked to learn his craft. . . . We find a master prose stylist concerned with problems of selectivity and concrete issues of tone, form, atmosphere, and point of view."

—Modern Philology

"A remarkable collection. . . . This is a firsthand look at a writer's honest and forthright opinions on his craft."

—Los Angeles Times