Time Waits for Winthrop

In an afterword to this story when it was reprinted over a decade ago in his three volume complete works, Phillip Klass (who used the pseudonym "William Tenn" for his science fiction) noted that he had been paid originally $790 for this 23,000 word novella which was, before he sold BERNIE THE FAUST for $5000 to Playboy a few years later, the largest amount he had ever received for a single work. Such was the science fiction market in the 50's (and so for the most part is the science fiction market today). TIME WAITS FOR WINTHROP, published in 1957, was the longest of Tenn's contributions to GALAXY and among his last (a short story, THE DISCOVERY OF MORNIEL MATHAWAY was to follow in 1958 and then THE MEN IN THE WALLS, the first third of his one novel, in 1963). It may be the most carefully worked and precise of his many contributions to the magazine. Superficially dealing with the tension overwhelming a group of corporately-displaced time travelers when one of them, the...
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Tales

"We owe profound thanks to Akashic Books for reissuing this important collection of Amiri Baraka's short stories. Baraka was, without question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the most important theorist of that movement's expression of the 'Black Aesthetic,' which took hold of the African American cultural imagination in earnest in the late sixties. While known primarily for his plays, poems, and criticism of black music, Baraka was also a master of the short story form, as this collection attests. Tales first appeared in 1967 and is an impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic collection of short fiction, showcasing Amiri Baraka's great impact on African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka's oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr."A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with...
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Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

Two of Tennessee Williams's most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time.Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, "lewd vagrant" Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a "short morality play," has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes...
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The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USAReviewUnquestionably one of the wittiest and funniest plays Albee has ever written . . . truly fascinating . . . enthralling. -- Clive Barnes, New York Post**About the AuthorEdward Albee, the American dramatist, was born in 1928. He has written and directed some of the best plays in contemporary American theatre and three of his plays: A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women have received Pulitzer Prizes. His most famous play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. His other plays include The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, Tiny Alice, All Over, Listening, The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Finding the Sun, Fragments, Marriage Play and The Lorca Play.
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The Sickness

First published in Infinity Science Fiction magazine in 1955.
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The Tenants

The building does not have thirteenth floor: fourteenth immediately follows twelfth. But three very strange-looking gentlemen want to rent it nevertheless.
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Generation of Noah

First published under the title The Quick and the Bomb .
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The System of Dante's Hell

"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age...the special agony of the American Negro."—New York Times Book Review"A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno....Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka's language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest."—Kirkus ReviewsWith a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet's skill Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town,...
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The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

The complete autobiography of a literary legend.Amazon.com ReviewFirst published in 1984, this is a revised edition of The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, which includes the original text (restored by the author) as well as a new introduction. Born Leroi Jones in 1934--he became Amiri Baraka in the mid-1960s---he is one of the seminal figures of contemporary black writing, a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and political activist. Even more than those labels indicate, however, Baraka has been at the heart of literary and ideological ferment since the 1950s. Early in his career, he was strongly influenced by the Beats. During the cultural upheaval of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, he moved uptown to Harlem, changed his name, and embraced a religion that was a hybrid of Islam and traditional African principles. And then, in the 1970s, Baraka turned his back on Black Nationalism and embraced Marxist Leninism. The autobiography, written in Baraka's inimitable style, one that we might call word-jazz, ends there. From Library JournalAlthough this edition of Baraka's autobiography restores substantial cuts made to the original Freundlich Books publication (LJ 1/84), the basic structure of the work remains unchanged: it covers Baraka's youth in Newark, stint in the air force, Beat years in Greenwich Village, role in the Black Arts movement, and conversion from black nationalism to communism around 1974. It is puzzling that this edition continues to disguise key people and publications. For instance, Baraka refers to his ex-wife, Hettie Cohen, as Nellie Kohn; poet Diane DiPrima as Lucia DiBella; and the Partisan Review as the Sectarian Review. What purpose can this obfuscation serve when How I Became Hettie Jones (LJ 2/15/90) has already named names? It will be interesting to see how DiPrima's forthcoming autobiography deals with the same scene. Recommended for libraries lacking the earlier edition.?William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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A View from the Bridge

Set on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, A View from the Bridge follows the cataclysmic downfall of Eddie Carbone, who spends his days as a hardworking longshoreman and his nights at home with his wife, Beatrice, and niece, Catherine. But the routine of his life is interrupted when Beatrice's cousins, illegal immigrants from Italy, arrive in New York. As one of them embarks on a romance with Catherine, Eddie's envy and delusion plays out with devastating consequences.
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The Haunted Woman

Engaged to a decent but unexceptional man, Isbel Loment, leads an empty life, moving with her aunt from hotel to hotel. She is perverse and prickly with untapped resources of character and sensibility. They explore by chance a strange house and there Isbel meets Judge, its owner; a profoundly disturbing relationship develops and it is from this that the drama unfolds.
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