Mrs. Hawkins, a buxom young war widow, spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming-house. At work and at home Mrs. Hawkins soon uncovers evil-- shady literary doings and a deadly enemy, anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide. Mrs. Hawkins confidently sets about putting things to order, little imagining the mayhem which would ensue. Now decades...

Beautifully illustrated in full color, this book informs and entertains as it demonstrates how the power of the written word has shaped, changed, and even revolutionized the world. Prize-winning author Scott Christianson brings together an exceptional collection of groundbreaking works that have changed the tide of history. Included are scriptures that founded religions, manifestos that sparked revolutions, scientific treatises that challenged ingrained...

"The never-before-told story of how the makers of The First Folio created Shakespeare as we know him today"--

"A biography--thoughtful and playful--of the man who founded New Directions and transformed American publishing James Laughlin--a poet, publisher, world-class skier--was the man behind some of the most daring, revolutionary works in verse and prose of the twentieth century. As the founder of New Directions, he published Ezra Pound's The Cantos and William Carlos Williams's Paterson; he brought Herman Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges to an American audience....

"Flannery O'Connor may now be acknowledged as the "Great American Catholic Author," but this was not always the case. With Creating Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Moran explains how O'Connor attained that status, and how she felt about it, by examining the development of her literary reputation from the perspectives of critics, publishers, agents, adapters for other media, and contemporary readers. Moran tells the story of O'Connor's evolving career and...

In the early fall of 1958, the notorious Olympia Press in Paris published a novel entitled Candy, an erotic, Rabelaisian satire loosely based on Voltaire's Candide by one Maxwell Kenton, pseudonym of its coauthors, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. The novel drew the attention of the French censors, was banned, reissued by Olympia's intrepid publisher under the title Lollipop, rebanned, then again reissued. Within years it became one of the most...

"Edgar Allan Poe has long been viewed as an artist who was hopelessly out of step with his time. But as Terence Whalen shows, America's most celebrated romantic outcast was in many ways the nation's most representative commercial writer. Whalen explores the antebellum literary environment in which Poe worked, an environment marked by economic conflict, political strife, and widespread foreboding over the rise of a mass audience. The book shows that...

Publishing houses are nearly invisible in modernist studies. Looking beyond little magazines and other periodicals, this collection highlights the importance of book publishers in the diffusion of modernism. It also participates in the transnational turn in modernist studies, demonstrating that book publishers created new markets for modernist texts in the United States, Europe and the rest of the world.