The Algonquin Round Table was a celebrated group of New York City writers, critics, actors and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of The Vicious Circle, as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929.
Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric.
The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia's best and best-known novel - The Woman of Rome. It's the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property.
Haywire is a history of people who acted with overwhelming emotional extravagance, extreme self-centeredness, and great carelessness. The daughter of successful Hollywood agent and Broadway producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, Brooke Hayward recalls the glamour, wealth, and talent that marked the lives of members of her extraordinary family and reveals the events that led to destroyed marriages, mental breakdown, and suicide.
After founding the Dada journal Sic, which printed his poems and those of more famous writers, Albert-Birot invented his joyously erotic hero, Grabinoulor, whose earliest exploits appeared in Sic in 1921. The irrepressible Grabinoulor performs his fantastic epic feats in an onrush of perpetual motion, which this slim book presents in rivers of unpunctuated prose. When Grabinoulor moves a statue in his apartment, trying to restore the parallels and perpendiculars of the furniture, he topples the earth. With his unconventional poetry, he squashes a grammarian. When unleashing his sexual fantasies, he produces poems shaped like bellies, breasts and phalluses. For some of these verses, the French text is included to reveal plays on words. Albert-Birot celebrated the erotic as a means of freeing the artistic imagination from bourgeois constraints. For him, sexuality represented poetic creation.
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church. The final (20th) edition appeared in 1948, and it was formally abolished on 14 June 1966 by Pope Paul VI.
Insel Verlag is a German publishing house.
Eline Vere is a novel by Louis Couperus, widely considered one of the greatest Dutch novelists. He gained prominence in 1889 with this psychological novel inspired Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy. Eline, withdrawn and subject to depression, accepts the marriage proposal of a family friend, only to break off the engagement, convinced that her sickly but charismatic cousin Vincent is in love with her. Vincent drifts in other directions. She travels, dreams, and deteriorates. Moving back to the Hague, she lives alone in a hotel, where, during a nervous crisis, she takes what may or may not be an accidental overdose.
In Julien Gracq's Chateau d'Argol, the gothic setting of a lonely castle in the middle of thick, dense woods contrasts with the contemporaneity of the characters who inhabit it: a dissolute, rich and aimless young man who invites his best friend to stay in his newly-acquired chateau. The friend arrives not alone, but with a beautiful woman whose detached amorality disturbs both men.
Though set against the backdrop of the fading Hapsburg Empire, Schnitzler's stories are startlingly contemporary in their outlook, and this collection of new translations is sure to win the Austrian author, who died in 1931, new admirers. In nine short stories and novellas, life's universal themes the craving for erotic fulfillment, the fragility of love, the yearning for wealth and the abruptness of death are psychologically probed in dreams, inner monologues and revealing plots.