Books published by publisher Farrar, Strauss andamp

This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment. The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother's prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice. Similarly, ''The Comforts of Home'' is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot. The other stories are ''A View of the Woods,'' ''Parker's Back,'' ''The Enduring Chill,'' ''Greenleaf,'' ''The Lame Shall Enter First,'' ''Revelation,'' and ''Judgment Day.'' Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

The Possum That Didn't: Story and Illustrations by Frank Tashlin, author of The bear That Wasn't, Published by John Murray, Albemarle London, First Edition, 1951. Mr. Tashlin's previous delightful satirical fable The Bear That Wasn't is the best recommendation for his new book. In some fifty drawings with text he depicts the adventures of the most charmingly bewildered Possum that ever had entertainment thrust on him or was forced to leave his primitive woods for the benefits of the "happy" organised world of humans. The sting of Mr. Tashlin's satire is in its simplicity - in this case in the fact that a happy smile seen upside down appears to be an unhappy grimace and vice versa. It is this that inspires the inference of as fearful a quartet of determined, well-meaning busy bodies as could be imagined.

Charles Walker (illustrator). Published in connection with Jewish Publication Society. From dust jacket flap: Haham Isaac Aboab de Fonseca's family had suffered for three generations from the Inquisition. Aboab himself grew up in Amsterdam: the Netherlands government tolerated Jews, but in Europe the threat seemed always near. In 1641 the Dutch moved into Recife, a colony in Brazil which they had taken from the Portuguese, and the Jews of Amsterdam decided to send Aboab with a group if pioneers to head the first New World synagogue. In Brazil the rabbi and his followers found Dutch and Portuguese settlers operating under difficult conditions. Cannibal Indians and Portuguese guerrillas lurked in the forest, and the colony was full of spies conspiring to throw out the Dutch. ; Covenant Books; Vol. 8; 180 pages.

THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa-a fictional Juárez-on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.