Bøger udgivet af W W Norton & Co Ltd

Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking--but not Henry Miller. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller's favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere--authors such as Dostoeyvsky, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Lao-Tse. To them he brings fresh and penetrating insights. But many are lesser-known figures: Krishnamurti, the prophet-sage; the French contemporaries Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono; Richard Jeffries, who wrote The Story of My Heart; the Welshman John Cowper Powys; and scores of others. The Books in My Life contains some fine autobiographical chapters, too. Miller describes his boyhood in Brooklyn, when he devoured the historical stories of G. A. Henty and the romances of Rider Haggard. He tells of the men and women whom he regards as "living books": Lou Jacobs, W. E. B. DuBois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others. He offers his reminiscences of the New York Theatre in the early 1900's--including plays such as Alias Jimmy Valentine and Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model. And finally, in Miller's best vein of humor, he provides a satiric chapter on bathroom reading. In an appendix, Miller lists the hundred books that have influenced him most.

The delights of his prose are many, not the least of which is Miller's comic irony, which as The London Times noted, can be "as stringent and urgent as Swift's." Frederick Turner has organized the whole to highlight the autobiographical chronology of Miller's life, and along the way places the author squarely where he belongs--in the great tradition of American radical individualism, as a child of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Miller, who joyously declared "I am interested--like God--only in the individual," would have been pleased. The keynotes here are self-liberation and the pleasures of Miller's "knotty, cross-grained" genius, as Turner describes it--"defying classification, ultimately unamenable to any vision, any program not [his] own." Or, as Henry Miller himself put it: "I am the hero and the book is myself."

Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is one day assigned to write a routine German lesson on the "The Joys of Duty." Overfamiliar with these "joys," Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, constable of the northernmost police station in Germany, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist, their neighbor, from painting and to seize all his "degenerate" work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. Against the great brooding northern landscape. Siggi recounts the clash of father and son, of duty and personal loyalty, in wartime Germany. "I was trying to find out," Lenz says, "where the joys of duty could lead a people"

On facing pages in Latin and English, most of the poems in this anthology were written between the first century A.D. and the thirteenth century. They were chosen by the translator during the dark days of World War II, and many reflect ageless themes, affirming the values of civilization, values that have endured through war and tumult in centuries past. Each poet's work is prefaced by an editorial note, followed by a passage from Helen Waddell's own published writings.

Richards here offers anew the 1935 edition of his work (then entitled Science and Poetry) with commentary that reveals not only the development of his own criticism but also the ways in which the relationship between the two disciplines has evolved. He has also written a new essay entitled "Re-Orientation" and has included, as another kind of commentary on the basic text, his essay "How Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished?"

This book was written to stimulate, perhaps to provoke critical thought about Germany's past, present, and future-in Germany. This is a professional sociologist's study of the country to which he belongs not merely because it is written in his passport.

"Definitive. . . . Deeply researched and pondered." "A literary biography of the same caliber as Richard Ellmann's James Joyce." These words of praise from Edmund Morris in the New York Times and Michael Dirda in the Washington Post are but some of the acclaim that greeted Martin Stannard's Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939. This eagerly awaited second volume, spanning the years from World War II to Waugh's death in 1966, completes the portrait of one of the foremost writers of the century. This was the period of some of Waugh's greatest work, including Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Finding Dr. Livingston was only one of many exploits in the remarkable life of the great African explorer Henry M. Stanley. In a narrative that reads like a novel, Byron Farwell tells the story of this complex man who made a major contribution o the world's knowledge. He describes his bitter childhood, his coming to America where he found a friend and a name, his service in the American Civil War, his African adventures, and his late but happy marriage.

In a novel set in middle-class Chinese society on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, Fang-Hung-chien obtains a teaching position, using a degree from a fake American university, in a Chinese university--where the pseudo-intellectuals become the butt of the author's satire.

The education Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (formerly the Science Teaching Center) was established to study the process of instruction, aids thereto, and the learning process itself, with special reference to science teaching at the university level. Generous support from the National Science Foundation and from the Kettering, Shell, Victoria, W. T. Grant, and Bing Foundations provided the means for assembling and maintaining an experienced staff to cooperate with members of the Institute's Physics Department in the examination, improvement, and development of physics curriculum materials for students planning a career in the sciences.After careful analysis of objectives and the problems involved, preliminary versions of textbooks were prepared, tested through classroom use at M.I.T. and other institutions, re-evaluated, rewritten, and tried again. Only then were the final manuscripts undertaken.In general the books in the series will be brief. Most may be covered in a single term or less. Each will be available in either cloth or paper binding. Their brevity and structure (as well as their reasonable price) will make it possible for teachers to select topics and organize courses according to individual needs and preferences.

A collection of short stories from R.K. Narayan, spanning five decades. Characters include a storyteller whose magical source of tales dries up, and a love-stricken husband who is told by astrologers that he must sleep with a prostitute to save his dying wife.

Richard Hubert ("Hubie") Ward is a wily young actor from the Easternmost world of prep schools and summers on the Cape. By the time he is twenty-five, he has lied, cheated, and seduced his way to the big-time on the Coast. Hollywood prizes Hubie for his air of respectability: "He was not a Latin or a Jew...he was not a booze artist...he was not actorish, he was not pugnacious...he was of the theater, he had been given good notices in an Art picture, he was not confused by an oyster fork, he stood up when ladies entered the room..". But Hubie's blind ambition quickly strips away the guise. He blackmails the man who gave him his first acting job, then spends an amorous afternoon with the wife of a studio head who happens to be his boss. Nothing, it seems, can stop the self-destructive philandering that dogs this shooting star.

American Noise is a rapturous exploration of American culture and landscape. With compassionate wit and insight, Campbell McGrath transports us on a journey through contemporary society, transforming the commonplace into scenes of profound revelation. From late-night bars to early-morning diners, suburban malls to the Mojave Desert, McGrath's meticulously detailed vision defines singular moments of joy and melancholy.

The Barracks Thief is the story of three young paratroopers waiting to be shipped out to Vietnam. Brought together one sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from being alarmed by this discovery, they are exhilarated by it; they emerge from their common danger full of confidence in their own manhood and in the bond of friendship they have formed.This confidence is shaken when a series of thefts occur. The author embraces the perspectives of both the betrayer and the betrayed, forcing us to participate in lives that we might otherwise condemn, and to recognize the kinship of those lives to our own.

In "An incident at Krechetovka Station", a Red Army lieutenant is confronted by a disturbing straggler soldier and must decide what to do with him. "Matryona's House" is the tale of an old peasant woman and her tenacious struggle against cold, hunger and greedy relatives.

Paterson is both a place-the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of teh Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

Based on events that took place in Oyo, Nigeria in 1946, Wole Soyinka's play intertwines the lives of Elesin Oba, the king's chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer.

It's World War II, and young Wendall Oler has been sent to stay with his father's family in rural Stebbinsville, Vermont. Using this opportunity to act out his resentment for the death of his mother and his father's leaving to fight in the war he does all he can to tyrannize his new family.

This book brings together in a matching format the plays of one of America's most influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes.

"Human sexuality is inherently traumatic". Thus begins this fascinating psychoanalytic study. As Joyce McDougall convincingly demonstrates, the psychic conflicts arising from the tensions between the inner world of primitive instinctual drives and the constraining and denying forces of the external world begin in earliest infancy and have ramifications throughout life. Consequently, psychoanalysis has a specific contribution to make to the study of aberrations in core gender, as well as to the understanding of psychic conflict concerning sexual identity and the quest for love.

Martin Heidegger is perhaps the most influential, yet least readily understood, philosopher of the last century. Mark Wrathall unpacks Heidegger's dense prose and guides the reader through Heidegger's early concern with the nature of human existence, to his later preoccupation with the threat that technology poses to our ability to live worthwhile lives.Wrathall pays particular attention to Heidegger's revolutionary analysis of human existence as inextricably shaped by a shared world. This leads to an exploration of Heidegger's views on the banality of public life and the possibility of authentic anticipation of death as a response to that banality. Wrathall reviews Heidegger's scandalous involvement with National Socialism, situating it in the context of Heidegger's views about the movement of world history. He also explains Heidegger's important accounts of truth, art, and language.Extracts are taken from Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, as well as a variety of his best-known essays and lectures.

A nameless narrator, abandoned on an island, tells the story of his life and exile from England. His interest is beetles - a passion shared with an old school-friend, Charles Darwin. Is this the diary of a madman? Or the story of why Darwin published the book that destroyed his belief in God?