Background
West, Paul Noden was born on February 23, 1930 in Eckington, Derbyshire, England. Son of Alfred Massick and Mildred (Noden) W. came to the United States, 1961, naturalized, 1971.
(Fiction. Reprint. Paul West is one of the English languag...)
Fiction. Reprint. Paul West is one of the English language's finest novelists. Considered by many to be among his greatest and most rewarding books THE PACE IN FLOWERS WHERE POLLEN RESTS recounts an odyssey from Arizona's Hopi mesas to the California motels where sex films get made, from Vietnam's battle zones to the very stars. First published in 1988, this edition contains a new introduction by David W. Madden, and two provocative essays by West on contemporary fiction. "West's astonishing novel...reveals a Joycean genius in its exuberant play of language, and its epic and mythic resonances..."--Paul West.
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( This volume brings together two of Paul West's best boo...)
This volume brings together two of Paul West's best books: his critically acclaimed "Words for a Deaf Daughter" (1970), a nonfiction account of West's deaf and brain-damaged daughter Mandy at age eight, and "Gala" (1976), a novel about a writer named Wight Deulius who brings his handicapped teenage daughter Michaela from England to America for a visit. While Words is an account of Mandy's diagnosis and treatment, Gala is "the scenario of a wish-fulfillment" (as West writes in the preface), a continuation of the father and daughter's joyful investigation of the richness of life and its amazing possibilities. Ranging across natural history and astronomy in his effort to understand his daughter's handicap, West finds in Mandy/Michaela an irrepressible and unpredictable guide to the mysteries of the universe. Brought together in the same volume, the books also allow a unique look at how nonfiction and fiction techniques can be used to the same ends in the hands of a master of prose.
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(Scarce copy in Excellent condition. Inscribed by by Autho...)
Scarce copy in Excellent condition. Inscribed by by Author "Best regards to david rigby. Paul West 12 April 1965" Light rubbing to back cover. Near Fine DJ in Mylar cover.
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(Paul West's nearly universal literary interests continue ...)
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.
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(A novel about Doc Holliday and the notorious Earps that r...)
A novel about Doc Holliday and the notorious Earps that recreates in detail the famous shoot-out at the OK Corral and turns about long-cherished assumptions about who these men really were.
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( “A long-awaited departure from one of the best prose st...)
“A long-awaited departure from one of the best prose stylists of our day, Tea with Osiris masterfully stirs together myth, trauma, and magic with fiery exuberance. A real treat for the brain cells.”—Diane Ackerman Osiris, the Egyptian god-king struck down by his brother Seth, sliced into pieces, and cast into the Nile only to be retrieved and reassembled by his sister Isis to become the god of the dead, serves Paul West as the informing spirit for this book of sonnets that observes his experience of a traumatic stroke and distills a multi-toned harmony: If our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts, sez Osiris, Then our saddest songs are those that tell of sweetest thoughts. The first book of poems by West in many years, Tea with Osiris will astonish readers with its formal control—the sonnet’s 14 lines corresponding to the sectioning of the god—its exuberant grotesqueries of hospital life, its reinvention of myth, its wit and humor, and, ultimately, its poetic celebration of a devastating visitation. For finally, in the world of Osiris, “Our nightmares are what sustain us.” Back in the hospital a child of twelve is screaming, felled by loss: Where is she? They hold her close, then down. Osiris added her to his own. And the foam from her squandered lip will take its place among famed vapors from cuckoo to Lear, aimed at school children out on a trip, from Emily Brontë’s poisoned menses to Eva Braun’s best pensées. All grist for the Osiris mill, which says, whatever you will, You shall please me till I kill.
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(In Sheer Fiction, Volume Two, Paul West examines the subt...)
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.
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(Doubleday, 1986, Very good., Light wear. Text clean. 188 ...)
Doubleday, 1986, Very good., Light wear. Text clean. 188 pages. Sociology, Family Out-of-print and antiquarian booksellers since 1933. We pack and ship with care.
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(Slums of the American city of New Babylon provide an all-...)
Slums of the American city of New Babylon provide an all-too-real setting for Paul West’s premier fiction, Tenement of Clay, the prescient novel that launched his marvelous and tenebrous career more than a quarter century ago. Amazingly, this major work has not been published in the United States until now. At surface level, this narrative fugue discovers a self-righteous man attempting to provide temporal salvation to a hodgepodge of homeless, most notably Pee Wee Lazarus (midget wrestler and part-time narrator) and John Lacland (an insensate semi-adult foundling). But lying just beneath Papa Nick’s altruistic intent are complex motives, depths of human conflict which call up the great themes of Melville, and reveal the treacherous tenor of our times.
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(Fiction. "In Paul West's 23rd book of fiction, The Immens...)
Fiction. "In Paul West's 23rd book of fiction, The Immensity of the Here and Now, the aftereffects of 9.11 gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination...the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine"--Ed Park, The Village Voice. "Risky, raucous, filled with moments of audacious beauty, Immensity proves that West, our foremost word wizard, won't play it safe, unlike so many American artists."--Bill Marx, WBUR radio (Boston NPR).
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(INCLUDES INDEX TO VOLUMES 1-4 This fourth and final insta...)
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.
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(Perhaps no one has reclaimed the indispensible value of c...)
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.
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( A suspenseful and uniquely literary look into Guy Fawke...)
A suspenseful and uniquely literary look into Guy Fawkes and the English Gunpowder Plot of 1605, by one of America's most celebrated writers. In A Fifth of November, Paul West describes the events surrounding the English Gunpowder Plot (1605). Instigated by thirteen Catholic conspirators, most famously Guy Fawkes, the Plot was a failed attempt to blow up the English Parliament and King James I. At the heart of West's novel are the trials of Father Henry Garnet, superior of the English Jesuits, who is hidden from the king's henchmen behind the walls of English mansions. Shielding him from harm is the melancholy noblewoman Anne Vaux, a Catholic sympathizer. A Fifth of November tells the tale of Garnet: it begins when he first hears of the plot the conspirators have confessed their plan to him, what is his responsibility?--to his imprisonment in the Tower of London. All along, the figures who partake of this historical moment are brightly, often horrifically, drawn. In A Fifth of November, West tackles through his rhapsodic language, brilliant characterizations, and historical precision that inevitable topic: human evil.
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(The special ethos of Oxford University continues to take ...)
The special ethos of Oxford University continues to take hold on award-winning author Paul West. Now a world-renowned writer and acclaimed literary stylist, West illuminates the reader regarding one of the oldest and most venerable universities in the world. Writing with an affectionate smile, West takes you beyond the classroom with vignettes and memories that made his Oxford experience unforgettable. His vivid descriptions and rhapsodic language are enhanced by the personality on show. Recreating the ambiance with infinite care-from the ancient scent of colleges to witty interpretations of the Oxford accent-Oxford Days is a literary treasure not only for Oxford alumni but also those who appreciate literature.
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( From the introduction by Diane Ackerman: Paul West rec...)
From the introduction by Diane Ackerman: Paul West recalls the early days after his stroke, exploring some of the all-too-real tricks the mind plays to save itself from the tomb of lost words. Paul had a massive stroke, tailored to his own private hell. The author of over fifty stylishly written books, a master of English prose with one of the largest working vocabularies, a man whose life revolves around words, he had suffered brain damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Global aphasia, it’s called, the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt. He understood little of what people said, and all he could utter was the syllable “mem.” His prognosis was grim. The brain cells were dead in Broca’s and some of Wernicke’s area, he could no longer swallow food without choking, and it was a left-hemisphere stroke. After three weeks in the rehab unit, he was able to say proudly: “I can talk good coffee.” Still, it was a complete sentence. “You know, dear,” I said about two months later, when he was feeling mighty low, “maybe you want to write the first aphasic memoir.” He smiled: “Good idea! Mem, mem, mem.” And so he began dictating, sometimes with mountain-moving effort, and others sailing along at a good clip, an account of what the mental world of aphasia felt and looked like. Writing the book was the best speech therapy anyone could have prescribed.
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(For celebrated novelist Paul West, any challenge is a cha...)
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.
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(Paul West creates a glorious, powerful Sun King of Egypt,...)
Paul West creates a glorious, powerful Sun King of Egypt, bent on a death worthy of his great pyramid at Giza. Known for wrapping readers in his historical web, Paul West, in his marvelous, new novel, turns his attention to the 4th Dynasty (approx. 2680 BC) of ancient Egypt. Here, we find the pharaoh Cheops, building the great pyramids at Giza, surrounded by workers and solar boats. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, "a hundred thousand men were made to toil constantly for him," and, as Herodotus claimed, Egypt was "plunged into all manner of wickedness." In Cheops, West delightfully has Herodotus transported back in time, to meet the great pharaoh, face to face. Nearing death, getting ready for his final "transportation to the stars," the blind Cheops is obsessed with preparing for his end. All the while, the intrigues of his daughters, sons, wives, and courtiers are revealed, uncovering murder, incest, and rebellion. Most intriguing is the overarching narration told by Osiris, god of the Nile, who comments on this swarm of events with hilarious and humane authority. Profound and entertaining, Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun is perhaps Paul West's greatest novel yet.
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(The Dry Danube, Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a unique...)
The Dry Danube, Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a uniquely daring, dazzling, bravura performance by an acknowledged master. The Dry Danube, presents Hitler's "memoir" of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One. Each of the book's four parts is a solid raving block of barbaric flourishes, free of paragraphing in its headlong rush of disgorged spleen. "I wanted to get at H. before the violence sets in," West remarked: "But most of all I wanted to get the motion of his mind, as seen by another." Hitler spews his rage over his blighted career and his desperate wooing of Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, "proud famous painters both." These "two men so important in my young life, yet so aloof from me," he tries to befriend, though "I would have had more success groveling before a statue of Frederick the Great or Charlemagne." ("These men do not so much control Art, they are Art. It makes you sick to think of it.") A risky venture, The Dry Danube stands a triumph -- baroque, chilling ("This was not the last the world would hear of me"), and scathingly humorous at the same instant.
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West, Paul Noden was born on February 23, 1930 in Eckington, Derbyshire, England. Son of Alfred Massick and Mildred (Noden) W. came to the United States, 1961, naturalized, 1971.
Student, University of Oxford, 1950-1953; Master of Arts, Columbia University, 1953.
Assistant professor English Memorial University Newfoundland, Canada, 1957-1958, associate professor Canada, 1958-1960. Faculty Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, 1962-1995, professor English and comparative literature, 1968-1995. Professor emeritus, since 1995.
Crawshaw professor Colgate University, 1972. Melvin Hill distinguished visiting professor Hobart and William Smith College, 1973. Visiting English professor Cornell University, 1986.
Distinguished writer in residence Wichita State University, 1982. Visiting professor English Brown University, 1992. Fiction judge Creative Artists Public Service Program, New York City, 1974, 81.
Writer-in-residence University Arizona, 1984. Judge Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Fiction, 1984, Artists Foundation. Served Royal Air Force, 1954-1957.
(Paul West's nearly universal literary interests continue ...)
( This volume brings together two of Paul West's best boo...)
(INCLUDES INDEX TO VOLUMES 1-4 This fourth and final insta...)
(Slums of the American city of New Babylon provide an all-...)
(Perhaps no one has reclaimed the indispensible value of c...)
(In Sheer Fiction, Volume Two, Paul West examines the subt...)
( From the introduction by Diane Ackerman: Paul West rec...)
(A novel about Doc Holliday and the notorious Earps that r...)
(Slums of the American city of New Babylon provide an all-...)
( “A long-awaited departure from one of the best prose st...)
( A suspenseful and uniquely literary look into Guy Fawke...)
(The Dry Danube, Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a unique...)
(Paul West creates a glorious, powerful Sun King of Egypt,...)
(The special ethos of Oxford University continues to take ...)
(For celebrated novelist Paul West, any challenge is a cha...)
(A PORTRAIT OF A CHILD'S PRIVATE WORLD)
(Scarce copy in Excellent condition. Inscribed by by Autho...)
(Doubleday, 1986, Very good., Light wear. Text clean. 188 ...)
(Book by West, Paul)
(Book by West, Paul)
(Book by Cherie A. Plant)
(F First Edition)
(Fiction. Reprint. Paul West is one of the English languag...)
(Fiction. "In Paul West's 23rd book of fiction, The Immens...)
Served with Royal Air Force, 1954-1957. Member Authors Guild.