Critical introduction by Irban Habib, then all documents with extensive notes. major publication

The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future — of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.

The nonfiction work Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958, is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including the threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to the Gallup Poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world's imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled by large segments of the American public, ranging from liberal intellectuals to conservative activists. Kissinger explores the relationship between this complex man's personality and the foreign policy he pursued. Drawing on extensive interviews with Kissinger as well as 150 other sources, including U.S. presidents and his business clients, this first full-length biography makes use of many of Kissinger's private papers and classified memos to tell his uniquely American story. The result is an intimate narrative, filled with surprising revelations, that takes this grandly colorful statesman from his childhood as a persecuted Jew in Nazi Germany, through his tortured relationship with Richard Nixon, to his later years as a globe-trotting business consultant.

By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk — a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate — became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

At times pious, at times profane but always unashamedly honest, The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood provide an inside look at the life and times of one of the most celebrated writers of the century. Chronicling Isherwood's life from 1939, when he emigrated to the United States, until 1960, these entries cover some of the most turbulent years of his career and give readers unprecedented insight into the major turning points in his life. Here, Isherwood relates the spiritual crisis he went through as World War II began, his discipleship (along with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard) with the Hindu monk Swami Prabhavananda and his decision to become a pacifist. Here also are his accounts of his intense social life in Hollywood, his career as a screenwriter and his many sexual affairs. Readers will be particularly fascinated by his revealing anecdotes and gossip about the literary greats (such as W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, and Tennessee Williams) and movie stars (such as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Laurence Olivier) of the time.

Fiction

The classic novel on the golden era of film, now back in print!

Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter-the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.

"Prater Violet, in my view, is one of the best short novels in English written in this century." Stanley Kauffmann

"Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time. . . . a novel about movie writers, which is yet a novel about the life of every serious artist." Diana Trilling

"A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles the episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence." Edmund Wilson

A major figure in both twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is also the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, The Memorial, The World in the Evening, and A Meeting by the River, all available in paperback editions from the University of Minnesota Press.

Fiction

The author's favorite of his own novels, now back in print!

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.

"A testimony to Isherwood's undiminished brilliance as a novelist." Anthony Burgess

"An absolutely devastating, unnerving, brilliant book." Stephen Spender

"Just as his Prater Violet is the best novel I know about the movies, Isherwood's A Single Man, published in 1964, is one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement." Edmund White

Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.

A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World.

This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.

Co-author of the groundbreaking Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt examines the Declaration of Independence and other texts by Jefferson, arguing that his powerful concept of democracy provides a biting critique of the current American administration.

The Declaration of Independence was the explosive manifesto for the American Revolution. Introducing this collection of Jefferson's writings, Michael Hardt, co-author of the modern classics Empire and Multitude, makes a powerful case for re-examining the foundational writings of this American revolutionary in order to reignite the dialogue that first conceived of a "land of the free."

Trials of the Diaspora is a ground-breaking book that reveals the full history of anti-Semitism in England. Anthony Julius focuses on four distinct versions of English anti-Semitism. He begins with the medieval persecution of Jews, which included defamation, expropriation, and murder, and which culminated in 1290 when King Edward I expelled all the Jews from England. Turning to literary anti-Semitism, Julius shows that negative portrayals of Jews have been continuously present in English literature from the anonymous medieval ballad "Sir Hugh, or the Jew's Daughter," through Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, to T. S. Eliot and beyond. The book then moves to a depiction of modern anti-Semitism—a pervasive but contained prejudice of insult and exclusion that was experienced by Jews during their "readmission" to England in the mid-17th century through the late 20th century. The final chapters detail the contemporary anti-Semitism that emerged in the late 1960s and the 1970s and continues to be present today. It treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises, and, in Julius's opinion, now constitutes the greatest threat to Anglo-Jewish security and morale. A penetrating and original work, Trials of the Diaspora is sure to provoke much comment and debate.

The untold life story of a novelist whose greatest fictional creation was his own identity.

In a 1998 article in New York magazine, Dean King offered readers a small sampling of the secret history of Patrick O'Brian, the creator of the bestselling series of Aubrey-Maturin novels. O'Brian has always guarded the secrets of his personal history with a zealousness that has bordered on the obsessive. And for years his fanatical readers have speculated on the true story and spun myths about his past based on the lives of his characters.

Dean King at last unveils the story of Richard Patrick Russ, a writer and intellectual who emerged from the Second World War as Patrick O'Brian, a persona created in his own imagination and later refined by decades of rumor and speculation. What motivated this radical change of identity? Was it connected to O'Brian's service during the war, or the messy divorce from his first wife? Or was it the inexplicable act of an eccentric genius?King has crisscrossed Europe to speak to long-lost relatives, friends, and colleagues of his famously reclusive subject and has fashioned this wealth of information into a dramatic narrative that will appeal to an audience far wider than O'Brian's already dedicated fans.

Master biographer Robert Lacey tells the fascinating, authoritative account of the ambitious men and glamorous women behind the world's largest family-controlled business empire. From Henry Ford — the original in every sense of the word — whose revolutionary standards created a new way of life for America and the world, to Henry Ford II, old Henry's grandson, who rose from a frivolous playboy to become an industrial giant in his own right, to the tragic figure of Edsel Ford, old Henry's son and young Henry's father, smothered by the one and overshadowed by the other, to brash Lee Iacocca, whose visionary plans for the company would put him in conflict with Henry Ford II.
"Richly anecdotal and wonderfully readable . . . irresistable." The Washington Post Book World