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Ingrid Caven:
A Novel
by Jean-Jacques Schuhl
Translated from the French by Michael Pye
Available August 2004
ISBN 0-87286-427-8
Paperback original, 250 pp
$13.95
$9.77
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Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2000
Forthcoming interview with Jean-Jacques Schuhl in Bookforum's Summer Issue
Excerpted in the Brooklyn Rail's March Issue
1943: Christmas Eve on the shore of the North Sea: a little girl, four years old, sings Silent Night for Hitler’s troops. A half-century later, now a singer and a famous film actress, Ingrid Caven gives a recital at an official reception in Jerusalem’s Citadel of David. In performance, she always had "the cool of a bullfighter, the concentration of a Buddhist monk and the brilliant fancy of a whorehouse queen."
This novel is based on the life of the extraordinary German cabaret singer and film actress who was once director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s star and wife, muse to Yves Saint Laurent, and a protégé of Pierre Bergé. Consisting of memories, real, and invented, people and events, Ingrid Caven reveals the cold heart of the European counterculture of the 1970s, an era of celebrity glitz, cocaine-fueled excesses, gay bathhouses, and young idealists-turned-terrorists.
" Adolf Hitler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yves Saint Laurent – German-born cabaret singer Ingrid Caven's life flowed around these icons of 20th century European counterculture.... a collage of that strange postwar period in Europe of high artifice, drugs, terrorism, leather jackets and cinema." – Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The novel... could be read as an intimate, literary dialogue between France and Germany. (Caven is German and Schuhl is French and Jewish.) That such a dialogue can be embodied in a single female character as seen through the eyes of her lover is a testament to Schuhl's originality and narrative imagination." – Speakeasy
"... a semifictional 2000 Prix Goncourt winner about the vagaries of 1970s European counterculture. . . . Schuhl's staccato yet contemplative prose (transl from the French by Michael Pye) illuminates celebrity excesses against a decadent and violent world backdrop." – Publishers Weekly
"Something between a love letter and a discarded Polaroid you happen on by chance, slightly yellowed, not even a date. Reading Ingrid Caven may be the most intelligent way to bid the century adieu." — Éric Neuhoff, Madame Figaro
"[Ingrid Caven in]… her many metamorphoses: a bohemian Madame Bovary, a redheaded noir vamp, an aristocrat in a boa, a singing sleepwalker." —Frédéric Bonnaud, Les Inrockuptibles
"Magnificent and violent, strange and disquieting. Provocative and harshly moving." —Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde Livres
Jean-Jacques Schuhl is a Parisian dandy who lives with Ingrid Caven and who had not published a book for twenty years until this one. Ingrid Caven was an immediate bestseller in France where it sold over 235,000 copies in its first year of publication. It has been translated into seventeen languages.
Michael Pye is a British novelist, journalist, historian and broadcaster. He has published eleven books including: The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, Maximum City: The Biography of New York, Taking Lives (for movie release in March 2004 starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke and others), and, most recently, The Pieces from Berlin.
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Superpatriotism
by Michael Parenti
Available September 2004
ISBN 0-87286-433-2
Paperback original, 120 pp
$11.95
$8.37
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How hype, fear, and mindless flag-waving are supplanting informed debate, commitment to democracy, and real patriotism
Superpatriots, writes Michael Parenti, are those people who place national pride and American supremacy above every other public consideration, those who follow leaders uncritically, especially in their war policies abroad. Superpatriotism is the nationalistic hype propagated by officialdom, the media, and various flag-waving groups.
Parenti demonstrates how superpatriotism attaches itself to religion, sports, the military, the schools, and big business. He questions whether its top politico-economic propagators are themselves really patriotic, given how they evade taxes, export our jobs, pollute our land, and plunder the public treasury.
With incisive probing, fine style, and humorous touch, Parenti treats such urgent questions as: What does it mean to love one’s country? Why is it so important to be Number One? What determines America’s “greatness?” He examines how US leaders and the corporate media fan the flames of fear to win support for huge arms budgets, global aggrandizement, and the suppression of political dissent at home and abroad.
Finally, he poses an alternative to superpatriotism, arguing that the real patriots are those who care enough to educate themselves about our country’s history and its present plight. He reminds us that it is not “anti-American” to criticize unjust social conditions at home or oppose global policies pursued by our rulers. Rather it is our democratic right and patriotic duty to do so.
Michael Parenti is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. An internationally known writer and speaker, he is the author of seventeen books, including Democracy for the Few (7th ed.) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome. He has also published over 250 articles in scholarly journals, political periodicals, popular magazines, and nationally known newspapers.
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Free Enterprise
A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant
by Michelle Cliff
Available September 2004
ISBN 0-87286-437-5
Paperback, 224 pp
$14.95
$10.47
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A mix of myth, legend, and history evokes the vivid life of a frontier legend and abolitionist.
“The axe is laid at the foot of the tree. When the first blow is struck there will be more money to help.—M.E.P.” This message was found on John Brown’s body following his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. History books do not record the contribution of his mysterious collaborator, “M.E.P.,” but in Free Enterprise, acclaimed novelist Michelle Cliff tells the remarkable story of frontier legend Mary Ellen Pleasant and other extraordinary individuals silenced by the “official record.” A potent and lyrical novel, Free Enterprise brings to life the passionate struggle for liberation which began in America not long after the first slaves landed on its shores.
In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that cater to wealthy whites and secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown’s doomed enterprise, and barely escape with their lives.
Mary Ellen remains undaunted, but Annie retreats to a shack on a Mississippi riverbank where her only neighbors are the inmates of a nearby leper colony, whose memories of a world before the white man live on in their own tales of conquest and struggle. With mesmerizing skill, Cliff weaves a multitude of voices into a gripping and poignant story that forever alters our perspective on familiar events from Harpers Ferry to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
Praise for Free Enterprise:
“…Cliff’s extraordinary novel loosely based on the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant and a Jamaican woman named Annie Christmas….The tale of Mary Ellen and Annie is told obliquely, through lyrical fragments, letters, and associative incidents, all part of Cliff’s effort to ‘adjust the lens’ in her fiction, as she calls it, to ‘bring the background into relief, blurring the more familiar foreground.’”— Village Voice Literary Supplement
“Free Enterprise is an angry, gaudy, multicultural storm of a historical novel…. At the heart of this story are two African-American women, comrades of abolitionist John Brown….Michelle Cliff brings together a fabulous cast of outsiders…to retell New World history from the women warriors’ point of view.” — Elle
“An articulate writer with an alluring prose style, Cliff offers and absorbing tale of friendship, survival and courage….Cliff skillfully weaves oral testaments, letters, poems, and colorful narrative to tell stories of French, English and Spanish enslavers, and the African, Chinese, Indian and Hawaiian people they persecuted. With prismatic prose, she limns the portraits of her two protagonists—each with her own joys and troubles, who are bound by a common love for their people.” — Publishers Weekly
“Written with lyrical power, Free Enterprise is a novel whose beauty opens out from every level of its existence. Confident and visionary, its urgent social agenda—as relevant today as in the time of the setting—speaks with courage to the human struggle for justice and freedom. Bravo! For Michelle Cliff.” — Clarence Major, author of Such Was the Season
“There are sections of this book so searing that they can only be compare to fire. Free Enterprise burns its images of slavery into your eyes and makes the world seem to shimmer with heat lightning. Free Enterprise, which has as its ambition the rescuing of the past from oblivion, succeeds and more than succeeds.” — Susan Fromberg Schaffer, author of The Madness of a Seduced Woman
“Michelle Cliff thickly wraps legend, fantasy and imagination around the bones of history in this gracefully written account of two spirited Black women whose lives and letters cross from their beginnings as supporters of John Brown's insurrection at Harper’s Ferry through the end of the 19th century and a return to a small island off the coast of Massachusetts. There is way in which Michelle Cliff captures the air and heat of a place and brings it fully to life. Whether it's an August dinner party in post Civil War Boston or evening tales recounted at a Louisiana leper colony, or sailing on the Caribbean sea, Cliff makes us want to explore the tales of story tellers and the truths of her intriguing characters.” — devorah major, author of Brown Glass Windows
Michelle Cliff is the author of No Telephone to Heaven, among other books of fiction, and a forthcoming essay collection, Apocalypso.
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Vivid and poignant evocation of a daughter’s relationship with her enigmatic, inspiring, and deeply troubled father
With a seamless weave of letters, reminiscences, poems, photographs and journal entries, Sikelianos creates a loving portrait—and an unblinking indictment—of her father. Jon: a talented musician, a high school dropout, an autodidact descendent of Greek nobility, a man whose genius and depth drew people to him, a product of the American ‘50s and ‘60s, and, for most of his life, a drug addict. An eccentric visionary, he emerges as a charming, brilliant, irresponsible, frustrating, and ultimately tragic figure. In 2001, after three years of homelessness on the streets of Albuquerque, he died in a motel room from an overdose.
This is a saga of the rise and fall of family lines—an American tale, a story of eccentrics and survivors. The nature of addiction, and what it does to families, the strength of vision some individuals possess, and how it can drive them—how we survive and thrive through such events as a family can propose—these are some of the questions explored in The Book of Jon. An exquisitely rendered exploration of the harrowing and motivating forces of family, history, and individual choices.
Praise for The Book of Jon:
"A wonderful memoir, held together by string, rumour, glimpses of a father – and there is nothing like this father in literature – evoked toughly and with great love and above all art and craft. Both subject and author are unforgettable. We see a life approached informally from all sides and we read an obituary to die for." — Michael Ondaatje
"Like the heroin high he describes, the Book of Jon is a cinematic memoir in which a ravaged and rackabones father 'beams, flashes and fluctuates' – and squanders a family's Book of Hours. An artist of searching and restless intelligence, Eleni Sikelianos evokes road trips, pipe dreams, chemically induced disorder, thwarted tenderness and vanishing acts with charged particles of light. This is her most stunning achievement thus far." — Rikki Ducornet, author of The Word Desire
“The pure products of America go crazy” William Carlos Williams laments and one sees the starry-eyed mongrel male youth (the poet’s “Dear Father Dear Jon Dear Pop”) caught in a maelstrom of damning proclivity – seductive inebriants, vicissitudes of visionary hippiedom gone awry, botched talent. It’s a difficult America to ride. One wants the old invisible one of hobos and dreamers and moonshine. Given a personal drama which includes a fractured yet prodigious family and its impressive Greco-American lineage of creative men and women, what might the modus operandi for transformation and survival consist of? What is the greater gnosis here? Eleni Sikelianos’s Book of Jon is a bittersweet offering of imagination and love, as much about herself, the miraculous poet, as it is about the beloved , tragic father and their relationship. Anecdote, dreams, lore, lush description of landscapes transcend the grit and horror of this personal tale. This is one of the most affecting and revelatory memoirs I have ever read. “I will go out and walk all night in the goddamned moonlight...” says Jon. — Anne Waldman
Eleni Sikelianos’ previous books include Earliest Worlds and the National Poetry Series winner The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls.
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Kill the Indian, Save the Man
The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools
by Ward Churchill
Available March 2004
ISBN 0-87286-434-0
Paperback, 142 pp
$14.95
$10.47
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The devastating results of a 100-year program to eradicate Native North American culture
For five consecutive generations, from roughly 1880–1980, Native American children in the United States and Canada were forcibly taken from their families and relocated to residential schools. The stated goal of this government program was to “kill the Indian to save the man.” Half of the children did not survive the experience, and those who did were left permanently scarred. The resulting alcoholism, suicide, and the transmission of trauma to their own children has led to a social disintegration with results that can only be described as genocidal.
Praise for Ward Churchill:
“One of the most outspoken of Native American activists, Churchill…is an amazingly consistent and perceptive writer.” — Publishers Weekly
A Little Matter of Genocide:
“This is an angry, passionately felt, and, in places, brilliantly argued book that should be pondered by scholars and others concerned with the terrible fate of the native peoples of the New World.” — Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies
“Ward Churchill opens the X-Files of American history to examine the phenomenon of genocide….Churchill has prowled disparate literatures—human rights, American frontier history, Native American history, history of the Nazi holocaust—to bring back the information relevant to American history and build it into a single comparative discussion set in a single analytic landscape.” — Great Plains Quarterly
Fantasies of the Master Race:
“This book is cultural turpentine, good for peeling all the whitwash off the history you learned in school. It takes a razor-sharp look at American colonialism and genocide through the years, covering not only the United States but Canada and the Central/ South American countries as well.” — Paganet News
Ward Churchill is the author of A Little Matter of Genocide, Struggle for the Land, and Indians R Us, among other books. He is currently a Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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Queen Cocaine
A Novel
by Nuria Amat
Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush
Available March 2004
ISBN 0-87286-435-9
Paperback, 250 pp
$13.95
$9.77
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2002 winner of the city of Barcelona Prize for best novel of the year
Following the footsteps of a writer and journalist persecuted because of his ideas and tortured by his own frustrations, a young Catalan woman, Rat, embarks on an adventure in the jungles of the Colombian Pacific, an adventure where her familiar world shatters and from which nothing emerges unharmed.
Confronted by solitude in a region where it rains incessantly, Rat gradually discovers, first in her man, then in the people around her, the alarming signs of a devastating war in which she is already immersed. Then she meets brutality and violence. In a gentle prose that swings between intimacy and horror, Rat bears witness to a hell in which she leaves almost everything, except that language she has had to reinvent, as the only safety plank, to speak of the thousand new faces death has shown her.
Queen Cocaine takes place in a distant region of the Colombian Pacific coast; an area ravaged by the drug trade and guerrilla warfare; marked both by the most terrible social inequality and the mystery of an ancient culture.
“A happy combination of intelligence and critical insight.” –Juan Goytisolo, Times Literary Supplement
“An extraordinary novel in contemporary Spanish fiction.”—El Mundo
Nuria Amat was born in Barcelona, where she now lives.
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