Best Selling Books by HENRY MILLER

“A brilliant selection . . . it is in short a voyage of discovery, an adventure and this the log of that voyage in the life of a probing and powerful writer.” —Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller''s books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.

This collection, first published by New Directions in 1939, contains a number of Henry Miller''s most important shorter prose writings. They are taken from the Paris books Black Spring (1936) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and were for the most part, written at about the satire time as Tropic of Capricorn—the period of Miller’s and Durrell’s life in the famous Villa Seurat in Paris. As is usual with Miller, these pieces cannot be tagged with the label of any given literary category. The unforgettable portrait of Max, the Paris drifter, and the probably-autobiographical Tailor Shop, are basically short stories, but even here the irrepressible vitality of Miller’s personality keeps breaking into the narrative. And in the critical and philosophical essays, the prose poems and surrealist fantasies, the travel sketches and scenarios, Miller’s passion for fiction, for telling the endless story of his extraordinary life, cannot be held down. Life, as no other modern author has lived it or can write it, bursts from these pages—the life of the mind and the body; of people, places and things; of ideas and the imagination.

Nothing But The Marvelous (Expanded) Wisdoms of Henry Miller Henry Miller and Blair Fielding (editor) A gathering of Henry Miller''s insights-memorable and revealing, profound and profane, angry and joyous, poetic and philosophical-covering a multitude of subjects, from "Aging" to "Universal Law." Drawn from the full scope of Miller''s writings-the early, notorious "Tropic of Cancer, to "Book of Friends and "The Hamlet Letters.

An essential collection of writings, bursting with Henry Miller’s exhilarating candor and wisdom In this selection of stories and essays, Henry Miller elucidates, revels, and soars, showing his command over a wide range of moods, styles, and subject matters. Writing “from the heart,” always with a refreshing lack of reticence, Miller involves the reader directly in his thoughts and feelings. “His real aim,” Karl Shapiro has written, “is to find the living core of our world whenever it survives and in whatever manifestation, in art, in literature, in human behavior itself. It is then that he sings, praises, and shouts at the top of his lungs with the uncontainable hilarity he is famous for.” Here are some of Henry Miller’s best-known writings: an essay on the photographer Brassai; “Reflections on Writing,” in which Miller examines his own position as a writer; “Seraphita” and “Balzac and His Double,” on the works of other writers; and “The Alcoholic Veteran,” “Creative Death,” “The Enormous Womb,” and “The Philosopher Who Philosophizes.”

A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence Durrell.

Henry Miller called The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder his "most singular story."

Miller’s groundbreaking first novel, banned in Britain for almost thirty years.

The first novel of Miller''s frank, autobiographical trilogy uses dream, fantasy, and burlesque to portray the life of a struggling writer in preWorld War I New York.

Henry Miller’s landmark travel book, now reissued in a new edition, is ready to be stuffed into any vagabond’s backpack. Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman’s seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the “colossus” of Miller’s book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village’s single stove, and they stay in hotels that “have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past.”

A handsome, slip-cased, two-volume edition is printed in commemoration of thereigning achievements of this singular American writer.

Henry Miller''s letters to Emil contain a compelling record of this writer in the making, beginning with his first efforts in 1922, tracing his ten-year struggle to find his own voice, and reaching a climax with the publication of ''Tropic of Cancer'' in 1934. This one-sided correspondence was often quarried for publication, and has never appeared in print until now.

Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perlès is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best--an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, "Printed for Private Circulation Only," was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.

Presents the best of Miller''s contributions to Stroker magazine, which included prose, letters, and drawings ranging in subject matter from his daily activities to Isaac Bashevis Singer''s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

In celebration of the centennial of his birth, Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred gathers a captivating selection of writings from ten of his books. The delights of his prose are many, not the least of which is Miller''s comic irony, which as The London Times noted, can be "as stringent and urgent as Swift''s." Frederick Turner has organized the whole to highlight the autobiographical chronology of Miller''s life, and along the way places the author squarely where he belongs––in the great tradition of American radical individualism, as a child of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Miller, who joyously declared "I am interested––like God––only in the individual," would have been pleased. The keynotes here are self-liberation and the pleasures of Miller''s "knotty, cross-grained" genius, as Turner describes it––"defying classification, ultimately unamenable to any vision, any program not [his] own." Or, as Henry Miller himself put it: "I am the hero and the book is myself."

Norman Mailer, without a doubt the most important literary figure of his generation, here celebrates the genius of "the greatest living American writer" from an earlier generation in an extended essay of unequalled brilliance as well as in a generous selection from Miller''s work to point the way to "the center of the power of his writing." --from front flap.

The controversial, erotic and hilarious companion to the legendary Tropic of Cancer, in a smart new Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition.

The “uproariously funny” second book in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, “may be Miller’s masterpiece” (Choice). “Plexus is the core volume in The Rosy Crucifixion: the volume which has the most complete description of Henry Miller’s basic values, beliefs, opinions, judgments, both at the time of his ‘Crucifixion’ and at the later time when the trilogy was written. Plexus is simply the most marvelous volume of emotion and ideas and visions and nightmares about man and society in the twentieth century—with art as the link perhaps, or as the soul’s refuge—that I have read in many a long year. There is absolutely no subject in the world that Henry Miller does not seem to know about, want to talk about, and to evaluate with the deep authority of wisdom. He is probably the most learned of all our American writers, the most open to ideas and feelings, and yes, the most worshipful of all the aspects of life, as well as the most critical literary spokesman of our time.” —Maxwell Geismar

Book is largely a commentary by Henry Miller on Bob Nash''s work.

In this unique work, Henry Miller gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years. Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking––but not Henry Miller. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller’s favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere––authors such as Dostoeyvsky, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Lao-Tse. To them he brings fresh and penetrating insights. But many are lesser-known figures: Krishnamurti, the prophet-sage; the French contemporaries Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono; Richard Jeffries, who wrote The Story of My Heart; the Welshman John Cowper Powys; and scores of others. The Books in My Life contains some fine autobiographical chapters, too. Miller describes his boyhood in Brooklyn, when he devoured the historical stories of G. A. Henty and the romances of Rider Haggard. He tells of the men and women whom he regards as "living books": Lou Jacobs, W. E. B. DuBois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others. He offers his reminiscences of the New York Theatre in the early 1900’s––including plays such as Alias Jimmy Valentine and Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model. And finally, in Miller’s best vein of humor, he provides a satiric chapter on bathroom reading. In an appendix, Miller lists the hundred books that have influenced him most.

"I always carry over 40,000 gold francs about with me in my belt. They weight about 40 pounds, and I am beginning to get dysentery from the load." A collection of stories and excerpts from longer works.

Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the United States. Its publication in 1961 in the U.S. led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene. It is widely regarded as an important masterpiece of 20th century literature.