Böcker i Revived Modern Classic-serien

When Death of a Man was first published in 1936, the anonymous reviewer in Time described the novel as a "Nazi idyll." Nothing could be further from the truth. Boyle, who lived in the town of Kitzbühel in the Tirolean Alps during the mid 30s, recalls that "In 1934, mothers, fathers, children-all barefoot-stood in the ankle-deep snow on the sidewalks of Vienna, their hands out-stretched for help .... Nazism as to them mutely accepted as the one hope for the economy." The subtlety and precision honed by Boyle in her acclaimed short stories are used in Death of a Man to describe the tragedy of a society pushed to the edge by circumstance but as yet unaware of the dangers, the incipient evil, of the course it is choosing. In this setting, the passionate relationship between the appealing and vigorous but pro-Nazi Dr. Prochaska and the pampered, neurotic American young woman Pendennis, is a paradigm of the difficulty of individual love in a disordered world.

When the poet Kenneth Rexroth died in 1982, he left behind a sequel to An Autobiographical Novel (1966). His published memoir--all 365 pages of it--stopped at 1927, when the twenty-two-year-old writer and his first wife, Andrée, were about to settle in California. Now revised and expanded, An Autobiographical Novel includes reminiscences that cover another twenty years of literary life and two more marriages. Linda Hamalian, author of A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (W. W. Norton, 1991), sifted through more than 300 pages of raw tape transcriptions. Weighing fact against fictions (Rexroth loved a tall tale and relished gossip), Hamalian has prepared a valuable index that identifies obscure allusions and the real people who figured in Rexroth's emotionally tumultuous life. "It adds up to a very good read," she says. "I am willing to bet a nice chunk of money that readers will wish Rexroth had been able to go on and on loosening his talk-tapes."

Kay Boyle's Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience. Now in her ninetieth year, Kay Boyle dares us, in this most comprehensive collection of her stories, to explore the themes that have preoccupied her for a lifetime: "the inviolate integrity of the human soul, the impact of external events on the most intimate of feelings, our fractured experience of love versus duty, self-respect versus hubris, social convention versus personal ethic...She is still unquestionably modern" (Ann Hornaday, The New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed novelist Louise Erdrich has provided a very personal appreciation of Boyle's power and grace. As she comments in the Introduction: "Kay is a citizen whose life and art are intertwined, one morally dependent on the other, both inexhaustible."

The six long stories of A Party for the Girls present H.E. Bates at his finest. A crack shot at understated tragedy, Bates is perhaps at his best with comedy and character--consider the opening line of the title story: "Miss Tompkins, who was seventy-six, bright pink-looking in a bath-salts sort of way and full of an alert but dithering energy, looked out the drawing-room window for the twentieth time since breakfast and found herself growing increasingly excited." Though virtually unknown here, as Publishers Weekly put it in their review of Bates's A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987), his nearly perfect stories...should set his readers clamoring for more... He is as adept at the seductive rise and fall of his narrative voice as he is cunning with naturalistic dialogue. Comparisons to Joyce, Chekhov, and Mansfield are inevitable.

More Classics Revisited is the second volume of the late poet and polymath Kenneth Rexroth's brilliant, succinct analyses of some of the key documents in literary history. It presents East and West: from the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu to the works of Karl Marx, Charles Baudelaire, and William Carlos Williams. Supplementing the sixty short essays originally published as Classics Revisited in 1969 are forty-one pieces from With Eye and Ear (1970) and The Elastic Retort (1973), both long out of print, as well as various previously uncollected or unpublished essays. Taken together, these hundred and one critiques stand, writes editor Bradford Morrow, "as a primer, or Baedeker, to a whole terrain of thought, to one man's study of imagination and its field of conjuries." The New Directions edition of Classics Revisited was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, attesting to the wide appeal of Rexroth's learning and humanity.