Virginia Woolf

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Raymond Leslie Williams

Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and on those elsewhere in the world. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them the Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater. In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex, major novel Terra Nostra. He opens with a biography of Fuentes that links his works to his intellectual life, a life that has been centrally concerned with finding and defining the source and character of Latin American culture. The heart of the study is Williams' extensive reading of the novel Terra Nostra, in which Fuentes explores the presence of Spanish culture and history in Latin America. Williams concludes with a look at how Fuentes' other fiction relates to Terra Nostra, including Fuentes' own division of his work into fourteen cycles that he calls "La Edad del Tiempo," and with an interview in which Fuentes discusses his concept of this cyclical division. . Williams' analysis maps a terrain often left unexplored - the "Spanishness" of Latin American culture - and offers the most in-depth study currently available on Latin America's most prolific living novelist. It will be vital reading for all students of Latin American literature.

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Annette Insdorf

Long considered the definitive study of this director's genius, Francois Truffaut returns to print in a revised and updated edition. With fresh insights and an extensive section on the director's last five films - Love on the Run, The Green Room, The Last Metro, The Woman Next Door, and Confidentially YoursAnnette Insdorf captures the essence and totality of his work. She discusses his contributions to the French New Wave, his relations with his mentors Hitchcock and Renoir, and the dominant themes of his cinema - women, love, children, language - and she explores his life in relation to his films, from The Four Hundred Blows to The Man Who Loved Women. As warmly human as its subject, Francois Truffaut immortalizes one of the cinema's most popular, prolific, and profound artists.

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Betty Friedan

First published in 1976, "It Changed My Life" is a collection of reports from the front, back in the days less than a generation ago when women were routinely shut out of the professions and higher education, underpaid, condescended to, and harassed without consequences to the harassers. The book describes the political campaigns for equal pay and job opportunities, for the outlawing of sex discrimination, for the Equal Rights Amendment, and for legalized abortion, the creation of NOW, NARAL, and the National Women's Political Caucus, and analyzes the antifaminist backlashes. Encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Indira Gandhi are juxtaposed with moving and vivid personal struggles of many ordinary women. Among those women was Friedan herself, who frankly recorded her astonishment, gratification, and anger as the movement she helped create grew beyond all her hopes, and then raced beyond her control into a sexual politics she found disturbing.

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Julian Preece

"Gunter Grass is the most influential German writer since the Second World War. His books have always challenged conventional attitudes and outraged readers. From The Tin Drum (1959), where he broke down the wall of silence which surrounded ordinary people's involvement in the Third Reich, to Too Far Afield (1995), which upset the reigning consensus on the success of German reunification, he has attracted controversy. He is also an undisputed master of the German language, whose style has inspired novelists in the English-speaking world, from Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift to John Irving." "This book shows how Grass's experiences as a teenager in Hitler's Germany shaped his thinking, both in his literary writing and in his role as campaigner and critic. Julian Preece draws on unpublished correspondence, the memoirs of contemporaries and the most recent research, to present a rounded portrait of the most important German writer since Thomas Mann."--BOOK JACKET.