by Louis Zara (1935)
Blessed Is the Man by Louis Zara is an acclaimed literary masterpiece celebrating major critical honors and timeless storytelling.
Harold L. Davis
H. L. Davis' earthy and humerous look at a young man learning self-reliance in the Oregon wilderness after family complications and problems from a jailhouse delivery push him out on his own among horse traders, jail breakers, fortune hunters, suspected murderers, and wide-eyed innocents. His tale of regional history is the story of our American culture.
George Santayana
"Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel and it became an instant best seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self-discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden. Oliver escapes puritanical self-destruction, the inability to celebrate life, through a form of self-knowledge that Santayana endorses throughout his moral philosophy." "The Last Puritan is volume four in a new critical edition of The Works of George Santayana that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information. Books in this series - the first complete publication of Santayana's works - include an editorial apparatus with notes to the text (identifying persons, places, and ideas), textual commentary (including a description of the composition and publication history, along with a discussion of editorial methods and decisions), lists of variants and emendations, and line-end hyphenations." "This edition of The Last Puritan was originally based on the typescript for the first part of the novel. The exciting discovery of the second half of the typescript in the fall of 1992 has resulted in a consistent copy-text throughout, making its text more firmly based on Santayana's intentions." "Irving Singer's introduction highlights Santayana's philosophical and artistic concerns and addresses issues of homosexuality raised by the depiction of the novel's two protagonists, Oliver and Mario, and of the relationship between Oliver and the rogue character Jim Darnley. Finding the term "homosexual novel" too reductionist and imprecise, Singer brings to light the author's festive celebration of reality, including ideal friendship, and his success in illuminating the pervasive moral dilemmas that people face throughout their existence." "The Santayana Edition was initiated by members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Comite Conjunto Hispano - Norteamericano para la Cooperacion Cultural y Educativa. This volume has been awarded the "Approved Edition" emblem of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions. Editors of The Works of George Santayana include: Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., General Editor, Department of Philosophy and Humanites at Texas A&M University; William G. Holzberger, Textual Editor, Department of English at Bucknell University; and Donna Hanna-Calvert, Associate Editor at Texas A&M University. Irving Singer is Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Meaning in Life: The Creation of Value."--BOOK JACKET.
Lisa McInerney
One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Principal of small town school is involved in a love affair and a township election.