'The Red Hot Vacuum' is a constantly provocative assessment of the leading writers ofthe Nineteen Sixties, a decade when the literary giants of the past faded from the scene and in their wake, notes the author in his preface to these 37 essays, the literary consensus broke apart, like the social and political one, and the market for serious writing "soon became a kind of howling forum where all manner of ideas, styles, and standards contended for attention." Theodore Solotaroff's critical writings bring a notable lucidity and perspective to "the red hot vacuum" at the core of this chaotic creative age-a time of "the shrinkage of extremes between hard thought and easy attitudinizing, between originality and novelty, relevance and chic, distinction and celebrity." Editor-in-chief of the pioneering New American Review (and before that Associate Editor of Commentary and Editor of the New York Herald Tribune's literary supplement, Book Week), Solotaroff focuses his stringent yet sympathetic intellect on authors whose works came to full flower in the Sixties-Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and James Purdy among them-as well as on the new work of established but newly relevant figures such as Sartre, Camus, Irving Howe, Richard Wright and Paul Goodman.

The red hot vacuum & other pieces on the writing of the sixties

Solotaroff, Ted

Nonpareil Books

Folded Leaf

The restless and often painful years of early manhood are the novelist's focus in this novel about two boys in a Middle Western college.

Literature & Fiction

Maxwell,William

Literary

The Irish playwright recounts the time he spent as a young man in prison for working on behalf of the IRA, and how it affected his outlook

Borstal Boy

Biographies & Memoirs

BEHAN, Brendan

Arts & Literature

When it was first published in 1950 The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody was on the New York Times best-seller list for four months. An hysterically funny (yet historically accurate) romp through world history by a great American humourist and raconteur.

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

WILL CUPPY

Historical

Originally published in 1960 selling half a million copies at the time and first reissued as a Nonpareil paperback in 1991, this immensely popular work of fiction has attracted, informed, and been embraced by a whole new generation of readers.

Distant Trumpet (Nonpareil Books, 65)

HORGAN, Paul

United States

In the early 1980s, on assignment from the American Museum of Natural History, Raymond Sokolov crisscrossed America in search of traditional regional cuisines. He traveled from Maine to California, returning with a cornucopia of recipes that few at the time seemed anxious to maintain- recipes such as boudin blanc, persimmon fudge, and, for the truly adventurous, roast bear paws. The resulting essays, here collected, were intended to describe and preserve these vanishing, quintessential American foods. Since its first publication, however, Fading Feast has proven to be not a farewell, but the forerunner of renewed interest in these regional treasures. Written with panache and passion - and featuring a dozen essays not included in the original version this new edition is as timely and entertaining now as when Sokolov first set out to record our native culinary customs.

Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods (Nonpareil Book)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

SOKOLOV, Raymond

Cooking Education & Reference

"I love John Aubrey's writing more than is seemly - it's a marvelous, gossipy, informal, brilliant stew of information, rumour, history, and anecdote." - Neil GaimanThe whole ferment of the Elizabethan age and the vigor of the century that followed come alive in these "brief portraits" that have been looted by scholars for centuries. Here are Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, and countless others, who in these pages become not abstract names from a history book, but flesh and blood characters. Brief Lives was written by John Aubrey (1626-1697), the greatest gossip columnist of the seventeenth century. A hanger-on among the rich and famous, he left posterity a sprawling collection of notes, anecdotes, and morsels of gossip that the editor has cleverly sutured together into a series of unforgettable portraits. These men-flawed, vain, ambitious, vulnerable-are more alive and kicking in these pages, miraculously edited by Oliver Dick, than in any formal history. As Edmund Wilson writes in his introduction, "I have never read anything else that makes me feel in quite the same way what it must have been like to live then."
 Foreword by Edmund Wilson. Part of the Nonpareil Books collection.

Aubrey's Brief Lives

AUBREY, JOHN

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty-six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non-fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from "English Cooking" to "Literature and Totalitarianism," are memorable, and his books reviews (Hitler's Mein Kampf, Mumford's Herman Melville, Miller's Black Spring, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield to name just a few) are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to l945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled "As I Please." His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti-American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances. A Nonpareil Book from David R. Godine.

The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell

ORWELL, GEORGE

The prophet Amos, a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees, had a parallel, and more challenging, calling as a shepherd of human souls. So too does Garret Keizer, an Episcopalian minister to the community of Island Pond in Vermont's Northeast Kindgdom. This profoundly contemporary book displays not only keizer's knowledge of life's small practicalities (winding the church clock, shopping for groceries), but also his insights about faith and the mysterious ways of God. With an eye attuned to both the pleasures and foibles that make life on earth so rich, he presents a refreshing and often hilarious account of the hands-on work needed to maintain a parish and sustain its spirit. He is a man who believes that God's intentions, if seldom apparent, are inevitably compassionate and compelling. A Nonpareil Book from David R. Godine.

A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry (Nonpareil Book, 95)

Keizer, Garret

Leaders & Notable People

The Orchard: A Memoir (Nonpareil Books, 9)

Robertson, Adele Crockett

Community & Culture

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