The third book of the Alley Jaggers Trilogy.

Bela Lugosi's White Christmas

Literature & Fiction

Paul West

Contemporary

Harper&Row

For celebrated novelist Paul West, any challenge is a chance for self-exploration. A modern-day Job, beseiged over the last few years by a multitude of illnesses, West orchestrates his constellation of illnesses into a kind of opera of the body and mystery of health in the voluptuous prose, shot with humor, that has earned him his reputation.

A Stroke of Genius

History & Criticism

Viking Penguin, Inc.

A young American art historian is left holding two priceless works of art when his Italian lover dies, and in trying to bring them to auction, he gets embroiled in a the murder case of a famous artist. Reprint. PW.

Master Class

St.Martins

Paul West, author of the highly-praised, uproarious "Alley Jaggers" has done it again in this human comedy of a memorable, indomitable woman - a Molly Bloom of the 1970s - and her determination to survive.

I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon

Ballantine

Rat Man of Paris

Paladin

Perhaps no one has reclaimed the indispensible value of creative fiction with greater verve, style and intellect than Paul West in this first of four collections which review a panoply of works written from around the world. These six essays and fifty reviews consider the works of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Herman Hesse, Hermann Broch, Christa Wolf and Blaise Cendrars. An essential book for lovers of the twentieth-century novel.

Sheer Fiction, Volume One

McPherson

In Sheer Fiction, Volume Two, Paul West examines the subtleties of Djuna Barnes' almost devilish wit, the Aeschylean tones of Broadway's Les Miserables, and the ideas binding Dickens and Dostoevesky to Faulkner. On the briefer side, West reviews some 50 novels by such diverse authors as Turgunev, J.R.R. Tolkein, Cortazar, Amado, Marie-Claire Blais, Janet Frame, Anthony Burgess, Anita Desai, Katherine Dunn, George Garrett, Kurt Vonnegut, J.R. Salamanca, Stanley Elkin, and more. Many of the books reviewed are currently available in paperbacks, and more attention is given in this volume to American and other English-language authors than in Volume One. His writing style is supple, invigorating, intelligent, generous by intention, and clearly the result of nothing less than complete engagement with his subject, whether it is the latest European novels or the clinical implications of heart attack or the true nature of atrocity. He is as unstinting in his praise of what he admires as he is devastating in his criticism of pretense and ineptitude.

Sheer Fiction, Vol. 2

Paul West's nearly universal literary interests continue to be represented in this third gathering of the series: a baker's dozen of essays -- with such intriguing titles as "Remembrance of Things Proust," "Middle River Stump Jump," "A Vision of Bright Cannon-Fodder," "Tan Salaam and the Aga Khan," and "Thomas Mann, Englishman" -- along with an ample section of quick takes on Abish, Barth, Vollmann, Alvarez, Genet, Beckett, Lessing, Ghose, and some twenty more. As with his earlier volumes of Sheer Fiction, half the pleasure of reading West's belles lettres is the discovery of several writers' works you've never read, and which you're thereafter compelled to plunge into with abandon. The other half, of course, is the pleasure of reading a master stylist with language and wit at his complete command.

Sheer Fiction, Vol. 3

Essays & Correspondence

Eight years ago acclaimed novelist Paul West presented a warmly received memoir of his mother, My Mother's Music. Revisiting the scene now, Paul West delivers in his 40th book an equally remarkable memoir of his father, a half-blinded, shell-shocked veteran of three years of trench warfare during 'The War to End All Wars.' But the time recounted mostly occupies 1939 to 1945, while ten-year-old Paul grows to fifteen. Together, father and son play war games, guarding the English coast from foxholes under the kitchen table, or watching as real Nazi bombers on moonlit nights pass overhead. The father, meanwhile, is forever instructing the son in the details of his own experience. The two have much in common, though distantly, and the boy Paul slowly learns to understand and even second-guess his father, though the compulsions that possess the war veteran remain a mystery that separates their generations—a conundrum of what the son wishes his still-damaged father could be, and those expectations no father can ever quite live up to. In this engaging memoir, Paul West recreates his own youth, and gives us in twenty-five chiseled chapters a view of two lives evoking the deep effects of war, and conveying the distance between those who survive its devastations, and those who must bear its consequence.

My Father's War: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

INCLUDES INDEX TO VOLUMES 1-4 This fourth and final installment of Paul West's collected literary essays begins with two paeans for departed friends, the novelist John Hawkes and the astronomer Carl Sagan, and a review of a book about famous literary suicides. Then West immediately launches into a cross-examination of Nobel Prize novelist J. M. Coetzee's curious employment of West himself as a character in the novel Elizabeth Costello. That alone is worth the ticket. But the sixteen essays which follow record the distances between mimetic projection of fictive personae and the "visionary plunge into what cannot be kept out of the mind" --dalliance, in other words, versus necessity. Here, predictably, West is at his best. Subjects range from an epic poem of the Titanic to the teaching of Samuel Beckett, and from a meeting with Borges to the complexities of Faulkner. West considers the future of the novel, conducts inquiries of the works of William Gass and Bradford Morrow, and offers asides about his own working methods and how he came to write certain of his books. Fittingly, Sheer Fiction IV includes an extensive index to all four volumes of Sheer Fiction published over the past eighteen years, making this volume indispensable to West's triumphant oeuvre.

Sheer Fiction, Volume Four

McPherson & Company

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Books by Paul West