Product Description
Exiled in Paris provides a compelling look at the personalities who fueled the literary and philosophical dramas of postwar Paris: James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Boris Vian, Maurice Girodias, and many others. James Campbell provides a fresh look at Samuel Beckett's early career; reveals the facts behind the publication of the scandalous best-seller The Story of O; and tells the poignant story of Richard Wright's years in exile. He captures the sense of deliverance that Wright, so accustomed to daily humiliations in his own country, experienced during his sojourn on the Left Bank, where, for the first time in his life, he was treated as a great man of letters. Here, too, are all the circumstances surrounding Wright's mysterious death, which many close to him regarded as suspicious. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Porn in Paris
I purchased this book expecting to learn more about famous ex-pat authors living in post WW2 Paris. Indeed, the first part of the book, which concentrated on Richard Wright and James Baldwin, fully met my expectations. However after that the book details in minute detail the development of pornographic literature (heterosexual and homosexual)in Paris - authors and publishers. At some point I had enough and abandoned ship. It was just too boring.

Fascinating reading
After the end of the Second World War, a number of African Americans,including many of our most talented intellectuals, decided that America wasjust not a sufficiently hospitable home.Those who could left for Europe. Many, landed in Paris, which provided a far more civilizedsociety.

Literary giants like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and otherintellectuals found a place where their worth was determined by things moresignificant than skin color.This is the story of theirexperiences.

Another book worth searching for. ... Read more

Product Description
Presents a brief biography of the sister of Orville and Wilbur Wright. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Loved it
Loved this book. Katharine Wright inspired me to want to name my daughter (if I have one)Katharine. But I wish people would spell Katharine Wright's name RIGHT in reviews. AR, not ER in the Katharine.

The Wright Sister
Katherine was a woman of her times, although she graduated from college, which was rare at that time, and the first in her family to go to college. The book reflected those times.The relationships in the book were sensitively portrayed, and quite accurate.Katherine was an inteligent, warm woman, and was support for her brothers, and was sometimes called the third Wright Brother.She was charming and outgong, which helped the reticent Orville after Wilbur died.Through her eyes, you could find a relationship with her brothers.I recommend the book because it puts a face on the era, the place (Dayton, Ohio and Kittyhawk, NC) and the efforts and success of the brothers Wright.

Great Story of little known Wright Sister
This is a book with many stories- the Wright brother's efforts to fly and consequent fame, life at the turn of the century and what was expected from women. Not many women today could relate to this book about Katherine Wright's dedication to her family. Even though she was an educated woman, she gave up her life to take care of her family and almost missed out on a chance for love late in life. Although aimed at older children I think adults would enjoy reading the book and browsing the photos. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

uneven but comprehensive
I purchased this book as a required text in a gruduate level class.While I find the book to be a comprehensive, easy to read, and well illustrated text, its utter lack of scientific objectivity, reflexivity, and occaisional inaccuracies detract from its usefulness in my opinion.The author strongly espouses stewardship, green values, and the like - all of which I certainly agree with - but without any acknowledgement of cultural or personal bias in his viewpoint, or suggesting that there are various perspectives as to what will lead to the most sustainable future.In short, he assumes that everyone, everywhere should see, think and feel as he does, to the point of not only exhibiting an urban western perspective, but also a very biased anti - republican position.While there is much to criticise in the Bush admisitrations environmental policy, there were some occasional steps forward tha the author absolutely refuses to mention.Bush bashing is such a sport with the author that he even devotes several paragraphs to why he thinks social security reform (something Bush lobbied for) is unnecessary.The fact that social security has nothing to do with environmental science seems to be beside the point.Further,as an archaeologist I noticed numerous misrepresentation of fact when the author discuses history.For example, he claims Iceland was colonized twice (it was not) and the second colonization resulted rapid deforestization.In truth, most of the trees were cut within the first two hundered years of colonization and the remaining forests have been carefully managed since the early middle ages.This is but one example of the fast and loose play with history and politics the author plays.Although I assume (or hope) that the majority of the book dealing with Environmental Science issues is more accurate, I suspect there must be better books on the subject than this one. ... Read more

Product Description
A young woman is brutally murdered at a seaside town in Devon. She had been in the car with her older, married lover, Fielding. She stepped outside just for a minute and now she is dead, victim of a mindless attack, and Fielding must pick up the pieces. How can he face everyone, his wife and family, his lover's family, the media? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Adultery of a literary kind
Richard B. Wright is a fine writer. Sadly, this is not a good book.

Quite possibly, "Adultery" could have been written in such a way that the reader might side with its protagonist, might feel that Daniel Fielding is being unfairly maligned and misunderstood by his family, colleagues, and the media. Instead, the author apparently seeks to convince his readers that extramarital affairs simply happen to the best of us, and that after a given amount of time, one's spouse and loved ones ought to come around, to forgive and forget. Feed me another porky-pie! Throughout this book, I kept wondering, where is the Giller Prize winning author who wrote "Clara Callan"? Is this the same Richard B. Wright? Unfortunately, it is.

Not content to be at the top of his career and his industry, Daniel Fielding one day decides to escort a junior colleague - a bit of a young floozy at that - to a romantic beachside resort in England. Not just any resort, but the one he happens to visit on special occasions with his doting wife. He and his mistress have dirty backseat sex, and then she is brutally murdered while he enjoys hours of carefree slumber. Fortunately the killer - an appropriately angry-faced and long-haired parolee - is quickly apprehended before the story can enjoy any benefit of a whodunit element. This allows for a much less interesting tale to lumber agonizingly through the pages that follow.

The reader is left to focus - to hope, presumably - that Fielding will win back the tattered hearts of his dear wife, his teenaged daughter, and even the family of the murdered girl. Please! One expects literary fiction to focus more on character development than on plot, but this book fails miserably in attempting to redeem a man who seems overwhelmingly undeserving of redemption, despite his many tedious yet inadequate acts of remorse. Fielding is a good man, Wright wants us to believe. So why the affair? Fielding's problem is not, as the jacket copy suggests, anything at all like having a child stolen away in a brief moment of inattentiveness or losing all to a chance house fire. A weekend of illicit sex doesn't merely occur when one is not watching. The only sympathy I was able to feel at any point was for those harmed by Fielding's actions. Too bad this does not appear to be the book's objective. I am an American, but having lived in Toronto for five years in the late seventies, I still enjoy good Canadian fiction - which this in most certainly not. Hopefully Wright has gotten something off his chest, and can return to writing great books.

Adultery and Murderhoo hum
"Adultery" is readable, but fails to captivate or possess even a fraction of the beauty of "Clara Callen".While Wright'sstudies of small town Canadians are wonderful, the main character is stilted and Wright fails to capture the essence of a man shamed or even saddened by his actions. It's as though he is sleepwalking through the sparse happenings in this book.

I couldn't help but speculate what a masterpiece John Updike could have created with essentially the same material.

Highly Readable
Although by the end of the book I felt a bit unsatisfied, it was an entertaining read and I'm glad I picked it up. Although the title is "Adultery", the subject of death is given equal weight. An interesting combination of themes that I found intriguing. But repetition and a two-dimensional protagonist really bring this story down. With a bit more time and care this could have been a great book. Despite all that I still enjoyed it.

Starts off well but....
Well, I'm not sure what the point is here.That it's sad when someone dies?That adultery is bad? That's it's really inconvenient when your lover is murdered and you then have to deal with your family and the media?I would have guessed all this without having to wade through 200+ pages of mostly prosaic writing.Would recommend reading Clara Callan, instead.

This is a disappointment
I don't see what all the fuss is about.I was not entertained by this book.The story line was uninspired, the characters not memorable, and the writing seemed to lack any particular merit.(...) ... Read more

Product Description
A fine selection of Baroque compositions, excellently compiled and edited by the team at EGTA UK. Selected by the Examination Board of the Royal Schools of Music. ... Read more

Product Description
Richard Wright, the Mississippi-born black writer, saw himself as "an outsider between two cultures," a man searching.

In these twelve essays written over the last two decades Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer, follows Wright's search in an investigation of the novelist's life and career. Although the essays were not originally intended as a collection, their organization her underscores Wright's literary and intellectual development.

The essays range in time from a bibliographical study of Wright's first scanty personal library to his interest at the end of his life in Negritude and African writing. Other essays probe his first use of the Gothic and his subsequent first efforts at "naturalistic" fiction, in which he moved away from the ideology of the American Communist Party, to which he belonged for some ten years after 1933, to more personal modes of self-expression. Also explored within these pieces are Wright's use of the psychological approach, his interest in the link between sexand racism, and his obsessive exploration of the unconscious determinants in so-called criminal behavior. One essay examines Wright's poetry from the days when he wrote ideological poems published in New Masses and other radical magazines, to his later composition of blues, to his final mastery of the Japanese poetic form of haiku.

Included is an interview with Simone De Beauvoir, who discusses her friendship with Wright, and in an essay never before published, Fabre explores the relationship of Wright--"as much as soon of Mississippi as is William Faulkner"--not only to the South but to his illiterate sharecropper father and Wright's use of both as negative metaphors in his work. Fabre also delves into Wright's view of his past and his use of it in an ideological construction that asserts, in the best Afro-American literary tradition, the development of a Promethean will towards education and literacy.

The final essays address Wright's career and intellectual development during the last sixteen years of his life, spent as an American expatriate in Paris. A final essay focuses on Wright's turn at the end of his life to nofiction and his introduction of African readers to the complexities of the racial situation in the United States and the aims of the Civil Rights Movement then taking place in the U.S. ... Read more

Product Description
Born in rural Mississippi, the grandson of slaves, Richard Wright overcame every social obstacle, including poverty, racism, and limited education to achieve literary recognition as the creator of some of America's most powerful Black literature. Written with unprecedented candor, Wright's works changed the cultural landscape by challenging old stereotypes and myths about race. Wright scholar Robert Felgar has written a critical volume to help students appreciate the literary significance of such groundbreaking works as Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy. This study serves students of both literature and social history as it explores the themes of racism and all types of institutionalized oppression that Wright exposed in his provocative writing. Felgar approaches each of Wright's major works in chronological order, offering insightful literary analysis of Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider, as well as Wright's two works published posthumously, Eight Men, a collection of stories, and Lawd Today! The original, censored works are discussed and compared with the more recently republished unexpurgated versions. ... Read more

Product Description
Brings together critical race theory and psychoanalysis to examine African American and other diasporic African cultural texts. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description

Deep in his cultural roots Richard Wright sensed a natural creative force.He saw it as a manifestation in his grandmother's religiosity and in the lyrics of the blues and in black folk expressions.