Neverland

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C. T. Watts

Joseph Conrad's friendship with R. B. Cunninghame Graham was stimulating and in many ways paradoxical. Cunninghame Graham was a remarkable figure - a Scottish aristocrat who lived variously as a South American cowboy, a fencing master, a socialist Member of Parliament and a highly respected writer of travel, histories and short stories. His political beliefs, to which he was deeply and passionately committed, contrasted sharply with Conrad's pessimistic conservatism. They became friends in 1897, when Cunninghame Graham first wrote a letter of admiration to Conrad, and they remained friends until Conrad's death in 1924. The letters to Cunninghame Graham are the most illuminating sequence of letters from Conrad to any of his correspondents. He struggles to define his philosophical and political beliefs in relation to Graham's radical and provocative opinions. The letters also provide comments on Conrad's work, notably The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent, and show how Graham became a central figure in Conrad's life and helped to sustain him in some of his most strenuous literary struggles.

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Anna Suvorova

"This book studies the veneration practices and rituals of the Muslim saints. It outlines the principle trends of the main Sufi orders in India, the profiles and teachings of the famous and less well-known saints, and the development of pilgrimage to their tombs in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A detailed discussion of the interaction of the Hindu mystic tradition and Sufism shows the polarity between the rigidity of the orthodox and the flexibility of the popular Islam in South Asia. Treating the cult of saints as a universal and all pervading phenomenon embracing the life of the region in all its aspects, the analysis includes politics, social and family life, interpersonal relations, gender problems and national psyche. The author uses a multidimensional approach to the subject: a historical, religious and literary analysis of sources is combined with an anthropological study of the rites and rituals of the veneration of the shrines and the description of the architecture of the tombs." --Book Jacket.

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Richard Elman

"These are Richard Elman's candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist - among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman's teachers and, occasionally, adversaries."--BOOK JACKET.

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Joe McGinniss

"In The Last Brother, Joe McGinniss brings to startling and disturbing life the childhood, the brief triumph, and the long downward slide of the last Kennedy brother ... and exposes, as never before, the chilling reality behind the glittering facade of America's First Dysfunctional Family, as well as the terrible cost of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's dark ambitions for his children - even the last and least of them." "His book focuses in particular on the extraordinary sixties, a decade that began in glory for the family with Jack's ascension to the presidency, and ended - after the murders of Jack and Bobby, the tragedy at Chappaquidick, and their father's death - with Teddy, the last brother, standing alone in the rubble of Camelot." "While The Last Brother is both shocking and newsworthy, Teddy Kennedy emerges as a curiously tragic figure, the victim of his own family, forever "the fat, awkward little boy" who was ignored by his siblings, his father and his mother, then propelled, unwilling and unprepared, into the public limelight." "Searing, yet strangely moving and even sympathetic, The Last Brother presents a detailed, tragic portrait of a man at war with himself, doomed to live in the giant shadow of his brothers, trapped in the glorious but hollow Kennedy myth, longing - but unable - to escape."--Jacket.