Böcker i New Directions Revived Modern-serien

In both her art and her life, Kay Boyle has exemplified that quality she values most in other artists--the bold articulation of a passionately held belief. An American expatriate in Europe from 1923-1941, Boyle was part of that pioneering group of modernists forging the "revolution of the word." Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are collected in Life Being the Best & Other Stories, are masterful in their complex, innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgment of the subversive realities of life. From the quivering expectancy of the three sisters awaiting "The First Lover" to the dashed hopes of the architect's daughter in "The Meeting of the Stones" to the desperate remedy a small boy finds for life's dissatisfactions in the title story, Boyle provides a catalog of the ways in which love can fail. The missed (or nearly missed) chances for human connection as each individual mounts his or her solitary quest for identity provide Boyle's characters with moments of personal intensity and her readers with an ache of recognition. Boyle strove (as she once said of Harry Crosby) to write "with an alertness sharp as a blade and as relentless." She succeeded.

Born in 1908, Niccolò Tucci is the author of six books (three in Italian; three, English). He first became known in America for his articles and stories published in various leading periodicals-among them Partisan Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. The Rain Came Last is the first collection of Tucci's English-language stories to be published.Mary McCarthy remarks in her introduction that the material Tucci delineates lies "somewhere between excruciated memory and 'happy' invention." He writes of his childhood and adolescence in the remote Tuscany countryside where his family lived, dislocated from its grand and opulent past. Later, in a different dislocation, Tucci's stories spring from his urbane and bohemian adult years in Manhattan, to which he emigrated in the 1930s. Very few other writers for whom English was not a native language have adopted and adapted it in so masterly and personal a fashion-Conrad and Nabokov among the rare exceptions. "He is," comments Mary McCarthy, "an international man, a very unusual thing, and it is that perhaps that has put and kept him in a class by himself."

The arresting beauty of Shusaku Endo's fiction is best known in the West through his highly acclaimed novels The Samurai and Silence. His consummately wrought short stories, with their worlds of deep shadows and achieved clarity, are less familiar. The dozen stories of Stained Glass Elegies, selected by the author together with his translator, display the full range of Endo's talents in short fiction.

Italian passion--"the passion that seeks its own satisfaction, and not to give one's neighbor an enhanced idea of oneself"--is the life-blood of Stendhal's Three Italian Chronicles. Gathered here are three long-out-of-print stories animated by life-and-death romances and sensational crimes. "The Cenci" and "The Abbess of Castro," set in a brazen Renaissance, are the author's versions of two antique chronicles he discovered in Italian libraries: "Vanina Vanini" is a Roman tale of the 1820s. All three give full rein to that special egoism of unswerving, passionate purpose Stendhal so adored in Napoleon and celebrated in all his heroes and heroines. Fused to that passion is his style, which imperturbably stage-manages urgent speech and violent intrigue. On this gemlike scale, his style as it charms and stings seems particularly vivid: for admirers of his novels, each of these stories gleams like an enameled miniature executed by a great master.

She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw--young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent--reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all--her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief enchantment of She Was a Queen is the storytelling style of Maurice Collis. A book by him, Eudora Welty noted, "is as strategically put together and as fantastically simple as a fairy tale; and it affects us, quite aside from the scholarship of Mr. Collis, with that true belief we gave fairy tales when children."

Gathered in The Man with the Heart in the Highlands are sixteen stories from William Saroyan's most celebrated literary period, culled from several long out-of-print collections from the 1930s and '40s, While achieving meteoric success with The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life, the young Saroyan set the pace with characters as fresh and compassionate as himself. His voice here is exhilarating, luminous, and completely distinctive--ready to let go with a lusty brash laugh on every page. These stories amply bear out Elizabeth Bowen's opinion that "probably since O. Henry nobody has done more to endear and stabilize the short story."

Efraim's Book is the sophisticated, offbeat novel about the peculiar society of post-World-II Berlin. Its hero George Efraim is a Jewish reporter who has fought for the British on the Italian front and lost both parents to Auschwitz. He returns home to Berlin in 1962 for the first time since the war to investigate the wartime disappearance of his editor's daughter, only to begin writing a novel, which helps him "to embark on a certain arrangement of signs with the help of which I hope to chart my position." Like the great German novels of Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, Alfred Andersch's Efraim's Book grapples with the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust in all its horror and sad humanity. A troubling yet often humorous book, it offers a poignant account of the traumatized German state.