The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum

 By Rebecca Loncraine

This diligently researched, gracefully written biography provides a comprehensive account of Baum (1856-1919), who created what Loncraine (independent scholar) calls the US's modern fairy tale. Providing an exquisite portrait of the period from the mid-1800s to the second decade of the 20th century, the author describes how Baum's first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), reflected his experience in New York State's Finger Lakes region, the Great Plains, and other parts of the Midwest. According to Loncraine, when Baum completed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he knew that he had done his best work. The book seemed more like a discovery than an invention, Loncraine observes, and because it took on a life of its own Baum found himself in the thrall of an audience that demanded more stories from Oz (he wrote 13 sequels). Loncraine does not stint in her evocation of Baum's later years, when he tried to replicate the success of his book in Hollywood films, all of which flopped. A concluding chapter describes the period between Baum's death and the appearance in 1939 of the Technicolor transformation that turned The Wizard of Oz into a national epic.

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Walker Evans: American Photographs

Walker Evans' American Photographs is arguably the most important photobook ever published. Originally conceived as a catalogue to accompany Evan's one-man show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1938, it has been out of print for many long stretches of time. Books on Books 2 presents the original 1938 edition with the 87 legendary black-and-white photographs that defined the documentary-style aesthetic. This volume also reproduces Lincoln Kirstein's great original essay as well as a contemporary piece by John T. Hill, the author of many books on Evans, including Lyric Documentary, published in 2006. (DAP)

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Portraits

By Jean-Paul Sartre (Translated by Chris Turner)

Six years before his death in 1980, Sartre opined to Simone Beauvoir that of all his writings, Situations (1947-76) would most likely survive the test of time. The ten-volume work contained "articles related to my philosophy, but written in a very simple style and speaking of things that everybody knows." Unfortunately, few today know what Sartre considered commonplace, and no complete English translation exists of the multivolume work he saw as his most enduring. Turner is doing a remarkable job of remedying that situation. Having just translated Situations III (The Aftermath of War, 2008), he now gives Anglophone readers Situations IV in its entirety, as originally published in 1964. This new translation (Benita Eisler's dates from 1965) is must reading for anyone interested in the artistic and intellectual history of 20th-century France. It embraces an extraordinary range of essays: Sartre's caustic "Reply to Albert Camus," which sealed the two philosophers' famous breakup; homages to Camus, Andre Gide, Paul Nizan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; studies of Tintoretto, Alberto Giacometti, and Andre Masson; and personal recollections of favorite Italian cities. These fascinating, timeless meditations resurrect the great minds of a bygone era. Art, philosophy, literature, and travel blend to form a work of immense interest. 


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The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays

Selected Essays by Durs Grunbein, edited by Michael Eskin

Arguably the best-known and best contemporary poet and author to have emerged from the former East Germany, Grünbein received many major awards, including the 1995 Georg Büchner Preis, the most prestigious honor for a German-language author. Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Grünbein, through his various writings, has been an active participant in the debates that aim at facilitating Germany's attempts at reshaping and redefining itself in the post-Cold War era. The essays collected here, covering two decades, represent a wide-ranging and representative cross section of the work of this poet, essayist, and great thinker. They are grouped into six sections that intersect thematically, with each of the sections in turn clustered around major recurring topics: autobiographical pieces; exploration of the author's major interests in art, literature, aesthetics and science; exploration of literary and philosophical tradition; and the living presence of classical antiquity. (The latter is echoed in the title of the book, referring to the sandbars of the Mediterranean and the extinct city of Atlantis.) This first book-length collection of Grünbein's essays is available in English for the first time (Ashes for Breakfast was his first poetry volume in translation).

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Langford's Basic Photography: The Guide for Serious Photographers

This 9th edition reflects the same comprehensive mix of scholarly and practical information while covering every aspect of photography from capture through output. This new edition has been fully updated to reflect dynamic changes in the industry, and new elements include an expansion and overhaul of the information on digital cameras and digital printing, a wider range of photography from around the world, and a fully edited and updated photography timeline.
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Talking About Detective Fiction

By P. D. James

One of the most widely read and respected writers of detective fiction, James (The Private Patient) explores the genre's origins (focusing primarily on Britain) and its lasting appeal. James cites Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, published in 1868, as the first detective novel and its hero, Sergeant Cuff, as one of the first literary examples of the professional detective (modeled after a real-life Scotland Yard inspector). As for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, James argues that their staying power has as much to do with the gloomy London atmosphere, "the enveloping miasma of mystery and terror," as with the iconic sleuth. Devoting much of her time to writers in the Golden Age of British detective fiction (essentially between the two world wars), James dissects the work of four heavyweights: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Though she's more appreciative of Marsh and Allingham (declaring them "novelists, not merely fabricators of ingenious puzzles"), James acknowledges not only the undeniable boost these women gave to the genre but their continuing appeal. For crime fiction fans, this master class from one of the leading practitioners of the art will be a real treat.

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Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

By James L. Haley

"I have drifted all my life,curiosity, that burning desire to know." In the intensely curious drifter who penned these words, Haley recognizes one of the most unlikely yet compelling novelists of the twentieth century. Lacing his biographical narrative with acute insights, Haley recounts how the flame of curiosity was first kindled in the son of an impoverished spiritualist medium, particularly chronicling the young Jack London's voracious boyhood reading of Melville, Kipling, and Flaubert. But only after his restless curiosity has schooled him in the harsh world outside of books, the world of panhandling, oyster-pirating, and prospecting, does London find his vocation in distilling the brutalities of life into the epiphanies of art. Careful research illuminates the creative process through which London forged such powerful works as Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Game. But alongside London's curiosity-driven imaginative artistry, Haley traces a parallel strain of conviction-fired social activism, evident in works such as War of the Classes. Not all readers will share Haley's admiration for an idealist intent on revolutionizing society, while himself keeping a valet and habitually mistreating his wife. But any reader who shares even a spark of London's incandescent curiosity will relish this vivid portrait.

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