The names of James Joyce and Ezra Pound ring out in the annals of literary modernism, but few recognize the name of Samuel Roth. A brash, business-savvy entrepreneur, Roth made a name--and a profit--for himself as the founding editor and owner of magazines that published selections from foreign writings--especially the risque parts--without permission. When he reprinted segments of James Joyce's epochal novel Ulysses, the author took him to court. Without Copyrights tells the story of how ...

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleExploring critical legal issues and cases of the period-from Oscar Wilde's prosecution for gross indecency to legal bans on such publications as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and James Joyce's Ulysses-Modernism and the Law is the first book to survey the legal contexts of transatlantic Anglo-American modernist culture. Written by one of the leading...

A major new biography that reveals how politics profoundly shaped Joyce’s life, thought and writingsThe young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile, acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly more politically conscious...

These two long stories by modernist master H.D. paint the wreckage of post-World War I Europe—both human and civilizational—in bright, vivid detail.Written by H. D. in 1930 and only published in a 100-copy edition for friends in 1934, Kora and Ka marked a new level of intensity in the poet's experiments with prose fiction. The two long stories contained in this volume, Kora and Ka and Mira-Mare, are at once profoundly autobiographical yet, through H. D.'s unusual b...

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health. Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman (Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has...

Through a series of journal entries, a woman records her thoughts and feelings over the course of a summer, shortly after giving birth to her child. Confined to her bedroom on the advice of her husband, a physician, “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles the woman’s increasing instability, as she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper covering the walls of her room.“The Yellow Wallpaper” is considered one of the earliest American feminist works of fiction and is unique for author Ch...

John T. Unger makes a fair number of friends at boarding school, but Percy Washington is by far the strangest boy he has met. Percy invites John to stay at his house for the summer, and when John accepts, Percy boasts about his family’s wealth, claiming that his father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz Carlton Hotel. But Percy’s strange behaviour and outlandish claims are just the first in a mysterious chain of events, the start of which dates back all the way to the days of George Washin...

Collages is Anaïs Nin's last work of fiction, and is, as the title suggests, a collection of interwoven stories, opening and closing with the passage: "Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the top of the highest towers, lay down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone."The central character, Renate, is a sort of "master of ceremoni...

Just as the clock strikes midnight and Halloween transitions into All Hallow's Day, a man enjoying the post-Halloween quiet in solitude on his front step beholds a most curious sight: a shrouded skeleton dragging a coffin down the street. The dead, the forgotten, have risen with the demand that something be done about the decrepit state of their neglected graveyard.Memento Mori: A Curious Nightmare is a moral tale dedicated to Mark Twain. An homage to the dark humour "A Cu...

Simon Templar never goes anywhere with the intention of getting into trouble, but trouble seems to like following him. In seven adventures round Europe, he discovers dead bodies, missing jewels, kidnappers and swindlers galore. He was meant to be on holiday - but when push comes to shove, he'll make sure that justice is done.'The character of Simon Templar forms the perfect literary bridge between John Buchan's Richard Hannay and Ian Fleming's James Bond.' Mike Ripley

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...