Spider Eaters

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Ivan Bunin

On July 30, 1925, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, the wife of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin (who was soon to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), wrote in her diary: "Ian [her name for her husband] has torn up and burned all his diary manuscripts. I am very angry. 'I don't want to be seen in my underwear,' he told me." Seeing Vera so upset, Bunin confided to her: "I have another diary in the form of a notebook...". This is the diary that Bunin published in 1936 with the title Cursed Days. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, it is a scathing account of the Bolshevik takeover and of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland. Banned during the years of Soviet power, Cursed Days is now translated into English for the first time, with an introduction and notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Bunin's foremost interpreter in the West. Cursed Days, Thomas Marullo observes in his introduction, foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Pasternak.

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Robert B. Kebric

Greek People, Second Edition, is an insightful introduction to the world of ancient Greece from Homer to the Hellenistic Age. Extracts from original sources such as Hesiod, the lyric poets, Herodotus, and records from the Athenian law courts profile a wide variety of Greek people - some famous, many little known but well worth singling out. The second edition includes an improved and expanded illustration program, an extensive updated bibliography, additional and redrawn maps, and new material on Alexander and Philip, married life, women, Greek humor, and views on old age in ancient Greek society.

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Scott O'Grady, with Michael French

U.S. Air Force pilot Scott O'Grady tells how he evaded capture and stayed alive with little water and no food in enemy territory after the F-16 he was flying on a peace-keeping mission in Bosnia was shot down.

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Patricia Sullivan

"Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, D.C., she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. In her struggle to understand the South and battle isolation, she wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp, and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black, and C. Vann Woodward." "Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a window onto a society in turmoil, chronicling the events that transformed the South and the nation. Her writing adds a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history."--Jacket.