New Releases by Paul West

One of America''s most beloved prose stylists gives readers and writers their own personal seminar on the art of great fiction.

"Presents Hitler''s ''memoir'' of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One."--Jacket.

Resounding with all the excitement and romance of the Wild West, this thrilling historical novel about Doc Holliday and the notorious Earps recreates--in heart-stopping detail--the famous shoot-out at the OK Corral.

Word-lovers rejoice! This fascinating book reveals the amazing and bizarre histories of language''s building blocks. "A sorcerer of language".--"Publishers Weekly".

A loosely fictional account of author Paul West''s early days in the 1970s with his wife, bestselling writer, poet, and naturalist Diane Ackerman.

Booth and Clegg, American spy-plane pilots, find themselves in a different world when they are shot down over Saharan Africa.

In My Mother''s Music, acclaimed stylist Paul West has taken on a monumental labor of love in portraying his mother, an English butcher''s daughter and concert pianist manque whose magnum opus was her children''s lives. Mildred Noden West orchestrated the education of her son and daughter like a grand concerto, shaping, cajoling, haranguing them into capitalizing on their gifts whether they liked it or not. As West puts it with characteristic bravura and humor, "she vented and honed a fearsome amount of nervous energy otherwise channeled into hurling blue bags of sugar at my father''s head (she always missed)." She was never boring.

The young John Milton "is a Cambridge student, a virgin, intoxicated by the power of words and the stories of myth--and especially the myth of Amaryllis, the shepherdess in Virgil." And then he meets a fantastic creature on the streets of London.

In December 1937 the city of Nanking, China, falls to brutal Japanese invaders. Thus begins a compelling drama wherein the teenaged daughter of an eminent scholar is forced to work as a prostitute. Short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, "The Tent of Orange Mist" illuminates the plight of intellectuals and artists during profound social and cultural upheaval.

West examines his symptoms as he suffers from heart disease, diabetes, migraines, and muses over hospital minutiae, existentialism, and the enigma of his biological clock.

Words is an account of West''s deaf and brain-damaged daughter at age eight.

The Rat Man, Etienne Poulsifer, is the survivor of an unthinkable childhood event-- the burning of his village and his family by the Nazis. When Poulsifer hears that a Nazi war criminal is in a Paris jail, he evolves a kind of street theater piece as a political protest in which he tricks himself up in Nazi regalia and wheels around a fox fur in a baby carriage. His obsessive and ill-considered, yet to him logical and necessary act careens out of control, and the startling outcome represents both loss and redemption.

Lord Byron''s Doctor is one Polidori, the travelling companion, confidante and unwilling chronicler of George Gordon, Lord Byron. It is the year 1816 and Byron, driven out of England by scandalous allegations of incest with his sister, undertakes a debauched European Grande Tour to meet up with the Percy and Mary Shelly in Geneva. From austere Dutch towns to the mountains of Switzerland, the poet''s most obsessive thoughts are faithfully recorderd by the awed and repulsed Polidori. Paul West''s literary and historical invention of the obscure Italian doctor produces a carnal, extravangant story of Gothic depravity, of poetic genius and the sometimes diabolical personality behind it.

Delectable ravishments of his lascivious nurse, Sister Binche? Will Harry ever stop giving passionate lectures on military protocol to his son, Clive? How, in short, does this crippled yet committed couple survive the grave disillusionments of life and love? Clive narrates his parents'' lives, taking us behind the curtain of Georgian propriety, conjuring up the pathos of youthful romance, the humor and insularity of small-town life, and the terrible price of war. Love''s.

In this deeply beguiling novel that is both sensational and serious, West fills in the missing details to offer an explanation of the people and the motive behind the savage murders of five East End prostitutes in 1888. Disturbing and graphic, this novel summons up fresh for us the genuine horror in heinous deeds.

Que s''est-il passé à la villa Diodati sur les bords du lac Leman pendant l''été 1816 ? Byron et Shelley, mais aussi Mary Shelley et sa demi-sœur Claire Clairmont s''y étaient installés. Mary Shelley devait y trouver l''inspiration de son Frankestein. Un témoin obscur entreprend d''observer les frasques de cet entourage romantique. Polidori, le jeune médecin écossais, et compagnon de voyage de Byron, avait en effet reçu une avance de l''éditeur anglais de Byron pour tenir un journal sur les aventures du poète romantique en Europe. A la mort de Polidori, ce journal fut en grande partie censuré et détruit par la sœur du jeune médecin. C''est ce journal que Paul West a imaginé d''écrire. " ... un roman extravagant, rocailleux, lyrique, foisonnant, d''une effroyable méchanceté et d''une irréprochable érudition, un roman tragique, paillard, inconfortable et toujours inspiré, consacré aux aléas de la création, aux petitesses du génie et surtout, surtout, à la poignante, à l''intolérable jalousie du médiocre qui voudrait se fondre à son modèle, à son idole. " Frédéric Vitoux, Le Nouvel Observateur

Accompanied by drawings and arranged chronologically, these Portable People are artists, inventors, politicians, athletes, stars and murderers. The sketches are improvisatory, nostalgic, exuberant, and depraved, and throughout one is reminded that "West is a literary gem whose luster gleams even brighter with each new effort".--The New York Times Book Review.

Called one of the most original talents in American fiction by The New York Times Book Review, Paul West is a continuously surprising and satisfying writer, whose oeuvre stands as one of the most important in American literature in recent decades. With these reissues, Overlook and Tusk continue its program of publishing the brilliantly lyrical fiction of Paul West.In The Universe, and Other Fictions, Paul West embraces galaxies and molecular events, creating singular fiction as combustible and astonishing as Creation itself. In The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, West weaves a brilliant tapestry of fact and imagination about the ill-fated attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the dark literary thriller, The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, West brilliantly recasts the Jack the Ripper story, drawing on up-to-date research and his own dazzling imagination to plumb the lower depths of Victorian England.

In this second volume of collected essays and reviews--Sheer Fiction, Volume Two-- Paul West examines the subtleties of Djuna Barnes'' almost devilish wit, the Aeschylean tones of Broadway''s Les Miserables, and the ideas binding Dickens and Dostoevesky to Faulkner. On the briefer side, West reviews some 50 novels by such diverse authors as Turgunev, J.R.R. Tolkein, Cortazar, Amado, Marie-Claire Blais, Janet Frame, Anthony Burgess, Anita Desai, Katherine Dunn, George Garrett, Kurt Vonnegut, J.R. Salamanca, Stanley Elkin, and more. Many of the books reviewed are currently available in paperbacks, and more attention is given in this volume to American and other English-language authors than in Volume One. His writing style is supple, invigorating, intelligent, generous by intention, and clearly the result of nothing less than complete engagement with his subject, whether it is the latest European novels or the clinical implications of heart attack or the true nature of atrocity. He is as unstinting in his praise of what he admires as he is devastating in his criticism of pretense and ineptitude.

Called "one of the most original talents in American fiction" by The New York Times Book Review, Paul West is a continuously surprising and satisfying writer, whose oeuvre stands as one of the most important in American literature in recent decades. With these reissues, Overlook and Tusk continue its program of publishing the brilliantly lyrical fiction of Paul West. In The Universe, and Other Fictions, Paul West embraces galaxies and molecular events, creating singular fiction as combustible and astonishing as Creation itself. In The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, West weaves a brilliant tapestry of fact and imagination about the ill-fated attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the dark literary thriller, The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, West brilliantly recasts the Jack the Ripper story, drawing on up-to-date research and his own dazzling imagination to plumb the lower depths of Victorian England.