The plays of Oscar Wilde

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Lee Hill

"He was the hipster's hipster, the perfect icon of cool. A small-town Texan who disdained his "good ol' boy" roots, he bopped with the Beats, hobnobbed with Sartre and Camus, and called William Faulkner friend. He was considered one of the most creative and original players in the Paris Review Quality Lit Game, yet his greatest literary success was a semipornographic pulp novel. For decades, the crowd he ran with was composed of the most famous creative artists of the day. He wrote Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick, Easy Rider with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and worked on Saturday Night Live with a younger, louder breed of sacred cow torpedoers. He's a face in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the guy in the sunglasses). Wherever the cultural action was, he was there, the life of every party - Paris in the '50s, London in the swinging '60s, Greenwich Village, and Big Bad Hollywood. Brilliant, dynamic, irrepressible, he enjoyed remarkable success and then squandered it with almost superhuman excess. There was, and ever will be, only one Terry Southern.". "In a biography as vibrant and colorful as the life it celebrates, Lee Hill masterfully explores the high and low times of the unique, incomparable Terry Southern, one of the most genuine talents of this or any other age. Illuminating, exhilarating, and sobering, it is an intimate portrait of an unequaled satirist and satirist whose appetite for life was enormous - and whose aim was sure and true as he took shots at consumerism, America's repressive political culture, upper-class amorality, and middle-class banality.". "But more than simply the story of one man, here is a wide-screen, Technicolor view of a century in the throes of profound cultural change - from the first chilly blasts of the Cold War and McCarthyism to the Vietnam era and the Reagan years; from Miles and Kerouac to the Beatles, the Stones, and beyond. And always at the center of the whirlwind was Terry Southern - outrageous, unpredictable, charming, erudite, and eternally cool; a brazen innovator and unappreciated genius; and most of all, A Grand Guy."--BOOK JACKET.

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Frank Kermode

Frank Kermode has been known for decades as one of the great critics of English literature. Now his subtly nuanced attention turns to a different kind of text: the experiences of his own life. Throughout his luminous, witty memoir, Kermode touches on deeper, lighter, ineffable issues of autobiography, and he does so with his characteristic grace and precision. In Not Entitled, the miraculous connections between life and literature, between the world and the word, are transformed and ennobled.

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Serena Vitale

Pushkin's Button is a narrative about the four months of Pushkin's life leading up to the fatal duel in the snow on January 27, 1837, when a young French officer in the Russian Army shot and killed Russia's greatest living artist. Ever since, Russian leaders, critics, and poets have advanced theories about the terrible deed, none of them wholly satisfactory. Serena Vitale has opened the archives and studied the case more closely, and more imaginatively, than anyone before her; her account of the Pushkin "dilemma" is also a wonderfully astute, original assessment of the poet's literary and national importance. Vitale has unearthed family secrets, diaries, courtroom records, and a cache of letters found in a Paris attic ten years ago; she shows us how a pawnbroker's slip and even a button missing from Pushkin's Kamerjunker uniform are significant details in the story. Her close examination of the record sparkles with Pushkin's own genial wit and brings to life the international yet very Russian world of St. Petersburg in the 1830s, with its imperial halls, its political and literary gossip, and its beautiful women - notable among them Natalya Pushkin, the poet's wife. Vitale adds another level to the narrative with her absorbing references to her own archival detection work, work that enabled her to accomplish this double feat of literary interpretation and superb history.

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William Empson and David Pirie

Introduces the life of author Samuel Taylor Coleridge and presents a sample of his poetry, including complete works and excerpts, with a brief, explanatory introduction to each.