Böcker utgivna av W. W. Norton & Company

As a thrilling, magnificent story of the backgrounds of our country, of those rough pioneers who build that we might live, of the struggle to preserve our unity and our happiness, and of those modern circumstances that shape our present lives this chronicle is unequaled.

H. G. Wells's "My First Aeroplane" hilariously evokes the days when a flying machine was a proper toy for a gentleman. "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall" by Edgar Allan Poe is a weird fantasy-part Baron Munchhausen and part Rip Van Winkle. W. E. Johns's "Spads and Spandaus" recounts an American flier's baptism by fire at the hands of the famed Baron Richthofen. H. E. Bates, "Flying Officer X," contributes "How Sleep the Brave," the adventures of a bomber crew shot down over the North Sea and their struggle to survive in a pitching dinghy. Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, is represented by "Cat," in which a strange Persian cat keeps watch over the comings and goings of a USAF squadron. In "They Will Never Grow Old," Roald Dahl takes us into the tight circle of a British air squadron in the Middle East in World War II and spins the haunting story of a pilot who is given up for lost and returns, under the most mysterious circumstances, to describe a flight beyond this world. Rounding out the collection are tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Len Deighton, J. G. Ballard, F. Britten Austin, and John Buchan. In the words of Frederick Forsyth's stirring introduction, "The last of the lonely places is the sky, a trackless void where nothing lives or grows, and above it, space itself. Man may have been destined to walk upon ice or sand, or climb the mountains or take a craft upon the sea. But surely he was never meant to fly? But he does, and finding out how to do it was his last great adventure."

"I begged, and often my brother obliged. In the dark of night, when I couldn't sleep, Ivan told me fairy tales in a whisper. All the stories began, in the traditional Hungarian manner, `Once there was / where there wasn't / there was once a Castle / that twirled on the foot of a duck.'"There are few female figures in literature as riveting as the precocious nine-year-old Magda Denes who narrates this story. Her stubborn self-command and irrepressible awareness of the absurd make her, in her mother's eyes, "impossibly sarcastic, bigmouthed, insolent, and far too smart" for her own good. When her family goes into hiding from the fascist Arrow-Cross, she is torn from the "castle" of intimacies shared with her adored and adoring older brother and plunged into a world of incomprehensible deprivation, separation, and loss. Her rage, and her ability to feel devastating sorrow and still insist on life, will reach every reader at the core.

In a corner of the Big Cypress Swamp, to the north of the Florida Everglades, lives Charlie Jumper, and eighty-six-year-old Seminole man. Unlike the younger American Indians who have adopted white civilization, Charlie and his wife cling to the old ways, hunting and fishing in the great swamp and farming a tiny plot of higher ground. Charlie has been diligently teaching his grandson, Timmy, about the swamp and its creatures.But their simple existence is suddenly threatened when a large tract of swamp is bought by a corporation, and Charlie is told that he will have to leave. From his youth, Charlie remembers the slaughter of egrets and alligators by the white man and the logging of the giant cypress. Rather than surrender the land that is his life to this final indignity, Charlie decides to fight back.It is an uneven contest. First come the great machines that silt up the streams; then the workmen inadvertently poison the marsh; and, attempting to sabotage the construction equipment, Charlie's best friend is killed. Realizing that there can be no compromise with the white man who destroys all he touches, Charlie leaves his family and feels into the swamp, seeking the lost island known in the Seminole legends as Forever Island.

After serving as a Naval Japanese language officer in the twenties and as a practicing attorney in Kobe for nearly ten years, Sebald returned to Japan after the war as a member of the staff of the U.S. Political Advisor. In 1947 he was appointed Acting U.S. Political Advisor to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Forces.In this book, Ambassador Sebald explains the major problems and policy shifts with clarity and a fresh approach. For the first time we are told the complete story of his efforts as Chairman of the Allied Council for Japan to repatriate the 650,000 Japanese POW's held by the Soviets. The Korean War, as seen from Tokyo, also takes on a new dimension. Sebald examines the failures on all sides which led to MacArthur's quarrel with Truman. In a highly dramatic scene, Ambassador Sebald records his interview with the General on the day he was dismissed by the President.This is the story of the incredibly busy years of one of America's new-style diplomats. It is a contribution of lasting importance to history, thoroughly documented and eminently readable.Mr. Sebald's co-author, Russell Brines, served in Tokyo and Manila as a correspondent prior to the war and was interned in Manila by the Japanese. He was Chief of the AP's Tokyo Bureau during most of the Occupation.

Few figures have influenced 20th-century music as much as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Their letters, one of the most important sources of information about the background to their music, are here published for the first time. The editors have transcribed, translated and annotated more than 800 letters and from this vast body of material have selected 370 that reflect the lives and times of these two great composers. The letters reveal much about the relationship between Berg and Schoenberg: first as pupil and teacher, then as friends and finally, after the premier of Wozzeck, as colleagues and peers. They also shed light on the reasons for Schoenberg's move to Berlin in 1911, the intrigue behind the early demise of the Society for Private Musical Performance, and Schoenberg's feigned indifference to the success of Wozzeck. Schoenberg describes his first years in America and the correspondence ends with Berg's death in 1935. The letters are fully annotated and supplemented with appendices, facsimiles and many photographs.

Macramé is a modern, simplified derivation of an old and far more varied craft. This book rescues and instructs in that nearly lost art. All through the age of sail, men who could neither read nor write whiled away the off-watch hours developing decorative skills from their knowledge of knots, splices, plaits, sennits, and of the twine and cordage of their day.They modified the severely practical techniques used in working and maintaining their ships' gear into countless variations with which they decorated nearly everything in their lives--knives, telescopes, needle cases, work baskets, sea chests, and hundred of other items.Creative Ropecraft presents first all the standard, practical knots and splices in easy-to-follow drawings and then proceeds to give step-by-step instructions in the variations that are to decorative ropecraft what the individual stitches are to needlecraft. Finally, it offers details of various specific projects, including mats, belts, rope-edged trays, lanyards, hammocks netting for planters, and others.This is a unique reference and guide for the sailor and the home craftsman.

The story begins with his parents' life of poverty in rural Texas. When Wheelis was a small boy, his father contracted tuberculosis. He spent several years dying, exercising a tyrannical control over his family. In one searing scene, Wheelis is made to cut the lawn with a razor, a task that occupies every day of his summer. Timidity, insecurity and a cloyingly close connection to his mother mark Wheelis' efforts to establish himself in the adult world. When trying to write a novel as a young man, he falls mysteriously ill. Eventually he realizes that he has "made" himself ill so that his failure to write can be excused. This perception leads him to the study of medicine and eventually psychiatry. As Wheelis turns his explanatory lens on the dark corners of his own life, we come to understand how a gift for analysis--like a gift for prophecy--brings little comfort to its possessor and no guarantee of happiness.

The troubled days in Russia during World War I, from the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 to Russia's final departure from the war after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918, are the setting of this absorbing historical narrative by one of the most distinguished diplomats and historians of our time.

Life in Lesu is a vivid account of life in the late Stone-Age Melanesian society, by the first anthropologist and first white person to live there. Hortense Powdermaker, author of the widely praised Stranger and Friend, provides here both a mine of ethnological information and an absorbing personal view of daily life in a primitive community.Dr. Powdermaker lived for ten and a half months in Lesu, as a close observer and participant in the events of the village. She describes the individual and social life of the Lesu native from infancy to death: how society and family are organized; pregnancy and birth rites; the care and instruction of children; initiation ceremonies, marriage, and sexual life; knowledge, magic, and religion. Her tact inspired the confidence of the people, and they invited her to all their ceremonies, talked of their customs, taboos, and beliefs, and shared with her their rituals and tales.This edition includes Dr. Powdermaker's essay "Further Reflections on Lesu and Malinowski's Diary," in which she assesses the influence her Lesu experience has on her later, varied fieldwork and talks about the controversy over Malinowski's Diary in the light of her own association with him as a student.

José Rizal has a good claim to being the first Asian nationalist. An extremely talented Malay born a hundred years ago in a small town near Manila, educated partly in the Philippines and partly in Europe, Rizal inspired the Filipinos by his writing and example to make the first nationalist revolution in Asia in 1896. Today the Philippines revere Rizal as their national hero, and they regard his two books, The Lost Eden (Noli Me Tangere) and The Subversive (El Filibusterismo) as the gospel of their nationalism.The Subversive, first published in 1891, is strikingly timely today. New nations emerging in Africa and Asia are once again in conflict with their former colonial masters, as were the Filipinos with their Spanish rulers in Rizal's day. The Subversive poses questions about colonialism which are still being asked today: does a "civilizing mission" justify subjection of a people? Should a colony aim at assimilation or independence? If independence, should it be by peaceful evolution or force of arms?Despite the seriousness of its theme, however, The Subversive is more than a political novel. It is a romantic, witty, satirical portrait of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, written in the tradition of the great adventure romances. The translation by Leon Ma. Guerrero, Philippine ambassador to the Court of St. James, conveys the immediacy of the original, and makes this important work available to a new generation of readers. His translation of The Lost Eden is also available in the Norton Library.

Beginning with an extermination of the legal aspects of war in antiquity--the rules of warfare, rights of conquest, and peace treaties--Professor Yvon Garlan goes on to consider military manpower, dealing with such topics as military aristocracies, the soldier-citizen, mercenaries, slaves and barbarians in the army and the navy. A third section describes military organization, including pay, methods of recruitment and training, the quartermaster system, and military command. In the final section, Professor Garlan discusses war and politics.Although the book is concerned with both the Greeks and the Romans over a vast period of time, from Homeric society to the later Roman Empire, it is neither strictly chronological no purely abstract. The author has selected key points for detailed study that, with the aid of contemporary accounts, illuminate the subject as a whole.This book will be of interest not only to classicists and historians, but also to all those interested in the part played by war in the evolution of society.

Sterling Hayden was at the peak of his earning power as a star when he suddenly quit. He walked out on Hollywood, walked out of a shattered marriage, defied the courts, and, broke and an outlaw, set sail with his four children in the schooner Wanderer--bound for the South Seas.Long before he was an actor, Hayden was a seaman. He had sailed before the mast and as mate and captain in sailing ships. He had been a Grand Banks fisherman. Then Hollywood offered him a screen test. Pushed to stardom, he became the leading man to one of the screen's most beautiful women, and the money began to flow. With money and fame, however, came a gnawing dissatisfaction with his life.His attempt to escape launches this autobiography. It is the candid, sometimes painfully revealing confession of a man who scrutinizes his every self-defeat and self-betrayal in the unblinking light of conscience. It is also the triumph of a complex and contradictory man, still a rebel and a seeker, undefeated by his failure to find himself in love, adventure, drink, or escape to the South Seas.It is, as Eugene Burdick said of it, "utterly fascinating, written by a man who has been able to achieve an honesty about himself which is almost unique."

The book spans three centuries-opening with Angelus Silesius, Klopstock, Claudius, Goethe, and Schiller, and ending with Brecht and Böll-but it has considerable continuity. The prefaces for each of the twenty-five poets integrate the selections into a story, and often poems by different writers invite comparison. For example, almost all of the poets express an attitude toward death. Not only would many discussions of death be better if the authors had some inkling of the great variety of attitudes illustrated here, but one can also gain a better understanding of a poet's experience of life by comparing his attitude toward death with that of some other poets. The book should contribute to a better understanding of some of these twenty-five poets, of German literature, of intellectual history, and of some of the themes with which these poets deal.The sequence of the poets, and the poems of each poet, is roughly chronological. Walter Kaufmann has made all the translations and have endeavored to capture the distinctive tone of each of the poets. The original German texts are printed on facing pages.

The climax of the first act of this extraordinary play provides the sort of thrill that comes no oftener than once in a theatrical season. A strange company of ship-mates, mystified by a vaguely oppressive feeling of unreality and uncertainty, suddenly discovers that every last one of them is dead. Their ship, unmanned and without lights, is gliding noiselessly across the River Styx, and when one of the characters in terror asks the sole attendant whether they are bound for Heaven or Hell, the answer is "Both!...It's the same place, you see!"