Working deliberately against the grain of assumptions dominant in the contemporary literary academy, Boyers examines novels by Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and others, arguing that it is necessary to speak of character, ethics, and philosophic purpose if one is to understand these works. A penetrating study, Atrocity and Amnesia illuminates some of the major fiction of our time and makes an important contribution to contemporary political thought.

The psychologist Leslie Farber, who died in 1981, has been revered as one of the most astute observers of the human condition and a writer of penetrating wisdom. His essays, on topics as diverse as the pornographic anguish of jealousy and the despair of psychotherapy, were collected in 1966 (The Ways of the Will) and 1976 (Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs, and the Good Life) and have been out of print for nearly twenty years. Based partly on his experiences as a therapist, but more importantly on his special insight, Dr. Farber's observations provide us with a unique...

Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to the common reader. He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children s games, war-time Britain, Hitler s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal...

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society.

Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them....

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society.
Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them....