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Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution Review

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(More customer reviews)The previous customer review refers haughtily to the "hauteur" of Ivan Bunin, a "right-wing, upper class novelist." Say what? Bunin, a master of Russian prose, was understandably aghast as he watched the sudden, violent and senseless destruction of the glorious Russian culture. The reviewer sneers that "the folk, in Bunin's opinion, were ignorant, gullible, violent, dirty, and totally unfit to take a hand in government." Well, it sounds like Bunin got it just about right! Just look what the left-wing thugs ruling in the name of "the folk" did to Russia for the next 70 years.
Strangely, Soviet leaders decided that "Cursed Days" was unsuitable for consumption by "the folk." Hmmm... Talk about hauteur! Only in recent years was the publication of this amazing diary permitted in Bunin's homeland, and now - thanks to Thomas Gaiton Marullo's splendid translation - English-speaking readers can finally see that there were some people who weren't fooled in 1917. I just hope that modern readers will read Bunin's prophetic diary of those cursed days... and remember.
Neal McCabe

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Here is Ivan Bunin's great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Cursed Days is a chilling account of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland-a work banned during the years of Soviet power. Bunin recreates the time of revolution and civil war with graphic and gripping immediacy. Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigrés, with their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin's uncompromising truths are jolting. His pain and suffering in witnessing the takeover of his country by 'thugs" and the chaos of civil war, and his fears for the devastation of 'patriarchal" Russian culture, were with him daily and received vivid expression in his diary. Cursed Days foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgenia Ginsberg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Paternak. Thomas Marullo's superb translation and annotations reveal Bunin not only as a master of prose (he was the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) but as a perceptive social critic engaged in a wrenching struggle to make sense of his shattered world.

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Sunstroke: Selected Stories Review

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(More customer reviews)American and English readers don't generally know the the works of Ivan Bunin, although educated Russians know and love his poetry and short stories, and often can quote them by heart. These stories, unobtrusively translated anew by Graham Hettlinger, vary in length from a couple of pages ('Summer Day', which neatly limns the cruelty arising from boredom) to the seventeen pages of Bunin's best known story, 'The Gentleman from San Francisco.' Most of them, some appearing in English for the first time, are really little more than sharply-etched vignettes which adroitly catch humanity in its variety; sometimes you'll catch your breath with the shock of recognition. If you respond to Chekhov's stories, you'll like these.

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Nabokov: Novels, 1969-1974 (Library of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a good collection of some of Nabokov's most diverse work. Ada is a beautiful discourse on philosophy and incest that rivals the classic Lolita. Transparent Things is a short but extremely dense book, written in an amazing narrative; a personal favorite. Look At The Harlequins is a fascinating autobiography told theough the perspective of an author with a parallel life. A very worthy buy!

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Anton Chekhov Later Short Stories, 1888-1903 (Modern Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)I studied Russian literature for years and would ultimately rank the prose biggies as follows: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev. I frankly prefer Chekhov, however, to the megalomaniac Tolstoy. Reading Chekhov is truly uncanny. He utterly refutes our common cliche'd notions about "Russianness." His is really the most modern voice of nineteenth century literature, without the "modernism" of our century that has so easily dated. I fell in love with Chekhov partly because his Russian is the simplest and most prosaic of any Russian writer and I was consequently able to read him without mediation. I would have included certain stories in an anthology in lieu of others, namely: "In the Ravine" (V ovragie) "Murder" (Ubiijstvo) "An Attack of Nerves" (Pripadok) "The Peasants" (Muzhiki) "Gusev" (Gusev) ...and many others....

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Complete Shorter Fiction (Everyman's Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)The seller of this book was very nice and he seemed to care a lot about the customer satisfaction. It's hard to say more than this, because this is the best I can expect when I purchase a book. Ciao. Dav

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Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography) Review

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(More customer reviews)I can't believe no one else has reviewed this book yet, but perhaps it reveals something about the way Katherine Anne Porter has been devalued in modern US literary society, all the odder since I can remember a time when she was the toast of the literary world, even when her novel SHIP OF FOOLS had been dismissed people still said, but her short stories and short novels are of the highest quality.
Darlene Harbour Unrue had her work cut out for her, but she had an incomparable advantage, she knew Porter slightly and so was able to make out what sort of person she basically was, so hard to discern from the long view. She was very beautiful in an odd sort of way, with prematurely white hair, great velvety eyes that looked purple in the right light, and a low speaking voice like Cleopatra's that made a lot of man (and Carson McCullers) fall in love with her the minute she parted her lips. Even Goering had a thing for her, if Porter is to be believed.
"If Porter is to be believed"--aye, there's the crunch, isn't it? She was nearly as famous for her lies as Anais Nin, and scholars and journalists early on believed very little she told them. Unrue reveals much about rhe five marriages Porter wanted to downplay, but more importantly she helps us understand just why some subjects were painful for her to revisit, so we come to empathize with a woman whose first marriage was nine years of real physical abuse, broken bones and hatred, a life that might well have driven her insane. Instead she picked herself up, shook herself off, and went completely independent. I have rarely read the life of a person so little connected with others, besides her acolytes like Eudora Welty. She seems to have played up her great beauty and her liberty, and she played games of use with each of her publishers, signing contracts she couldn't fulfill, running out on them despite her promises, and yet whining like all authors about their meanness.
She lied about her age, and her 4th husband didn't know he was a full 25 years younger than she was. In 1953 or 1954, she outdid herself by having a sexual affair with a man of 28 when she was 63. She could have given tips to Cher and, with her constantly propinquity, she probably did. I didn't know the extent of Porter's Hollywood connections, how she spent a year at Paramount trying to re-write MADAME SANS-GENE for Betty Hutton! Wish that baby got made! All in all, THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST is one of the very finest biographies I've recently read. Unrue backs off from making the highest claims for Porter's importance as a fiction writer, but in the interstices of her discretion a hunger for her work grows among us. She makes us want to read Porter anew, through the refracting surfaces of her insight.

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From the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote.
In Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Darlene Harbour Unrue finds that Porter's deceptions were a screen for deep personal turmoil. With unprecedented access to archival and personal papers, Unrue brings much new information to light. Porter's maternal grandmother was institutionalized; Porter had more marriages than she acknowledged; she lost babies to miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth, and she grieved over her failed motherhood. Ever present were her fears of exile and insanity.
Despite these constant fears, Porter (1890-1980) lived an extraordinary life that vaulted her from poverty and obscurity to wealth and the fame of being a best-selling author. She experienced or observed many of the major events of the twentieth century. So often on the move, she lived in Greenwich Village during its heyday as a hotbed of radical politics and experimental art, in Mexico during the cultural revolution of the 1920s, in Europe during the rise of Nazism, and in America during the Cold War. Thirteen years old when she first rode in an automobile and saw an airplane, she was invited in her last decade to observe and write about the launching of the final Apollo space ship. Asked to summarize her own life, Porter was fond of quoting Madame Du Barry: "My life has been incredible. I don't believe a word of it!"
Darlene Harbour Unrue is a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has written several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Understanding Katherine Anne Porter and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction.

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The Elagin Affair: And Other Stories Review

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(More customer reviews)I loved this book. Bunin's lush stories reveal a Russia that even the great geniuses of Russian literature have never quite depicted. His descriptions of physical experience are almost intoxicating, and his careful attention to the vivid details of Russian culture and customs reveal a new side of that country to English langauge readers. I have read Bunin in other translations, but they, by comparison to this one, were awkward and stiff. Here Bunin's sentences move with true elegance.

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Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings (Library of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)Like H.P. Lovecraft, Paul Bowles was an early admirer of Edgar Allen Poe's work. His collected short works (67 stories and essays, and one stunning short novel) is a treasurehouse of polished gems of a most peculiar variety. Bowles' specialty is in leaving the reader disconcerted, uncomfortable--even annoyed and sometimes horrified. His prose is lapidary--effortless, clear, and dangerous in the extreme. His psychological realism focuses on the darker sides of humanity--the ignorant, the misguided, the superstitious, the incomprehending, and the insane. His stories often seem to end without resolution. However, "seem" is the key word: Bowles clearly revels in the creation of states of ill ease in his readers. One might deem him H.P. Lovecraft on Prozak: restrained, controlled, but nevertheless a master of horror. Bowles' horror is all the more powerful for being so eloquent and dispassionate.
By far the best work of this volume, and probably of Bowles' entire corpus, is the concluding short novel UP ABOVE THE WORLD. It's devastating. Nightmarish, even fiendish in its narrative technique, I'm surprised that Hollywood never has attempted a version. Its vision has been called, not inappropriately, nihilistic: the bad guys here quite clearly win. Nevertheless, it bears witness to a darkness that sincerely pervades our modern world, doubtlessly more than we would care to acknowledge.
Bowles specializes in exploring the minds of characters who don't comprehend their environments, whether social or physical. As readers, we ourselves beccome trapped by the limitations of these often pathetic, sometimes horrendous denizens of the global village. He's especially good at entering the minds of non-Western characters. I should think our forces in Iraq would do well to be intimate with Bowles' astute psychological voyages.
Bowles never will be for everyone. He's too intelligent, too polished, and too dark. I view him as a kind of vaccine against complacency in these current times of overwhelming anomie.

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Tales of the Jazz Age (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald) Review

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(More customer reviews)Tales Of The Jazz Age is an anthology of classic short stories by the renowned 20th Century American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is best known for his enduring classic "The Great Gatsby". Satirizing the selfishness of the wealthy, depicting revelry that escalates into a destructive mob, while offering a sharp look at the flaws of society, and enhanced with introductions to each story by the author, Tales Of The Jazz Age is highly recommended, and this Pine Street Books edition would make a perfect choice for school and community libraries needing to replace worn copies of previous editions.

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Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories : Jonah's Gourd Vine / Their Eyes Were Watching God / Moses, Man of the Mountain / Seraph on the Suwanee / Selected Stories (Library of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)If Ms Hurston finally gets the readers she deserves, she will take her place among America's finest writers of the 20th Century. She is a joy to read and repays second and third perusals. The oral narrative quality of her writing places her squarely in the company of the best of her Southern contemporaries. She shares their great gifts. By all means, don't deny yourself the pleasure of reading her work.

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