Carrington's Letters


Book Description

Carrington's beguiling letters take us beyond the Bloomsbury group to discuss sexual mores, how to be an artist, and what it is to be truly oneself. Known only by her surname, Dora Carrington was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was friends with some of the greatest minds of her day, including Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann and Maynard Keynes. For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and - stricken without him- killed herself when he died in 1932. Though she never achieved the fame her early career promised, in her determination to live life according to her own nature – especially in relation to her work and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality – she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today. Now, through her passionate, playful and honest letters, we can encounter the maverick artist and compelling personality afresh and in her own words.




The Hearing Trumpet


Book Description

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”










The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington


Book Description

“Complete Stories, a collection of Carrington’s published and unpublished short stories—many newly translated from their original French and Spanish—is a terrific introduction to her bizarre, dreamlike worlds.” —Carmen Maria Machado, NPR Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life. Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), The Complete Stories captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.




The Lincoln Letter


Book Description

Peter Fallon and Evangeline Carrington head to Washington, D.C., to compete against dangerous adversaries in a hunt for Abraham Lincoln's Civil War diary, a record that contains information that could change history and influence key elections.







Soldier from the Wars Returning


Book Description

Soldier from the Wars Returning is one of the truest, most profound and readable personal accounts of the Great War. The author waited nearly fifty years before writing it, and the perspective of history enhances its value. He writes only of the battles in which he participated (including the Somme and Passchendaele), though his comments on affairs beyond his knowledge at the time, through later study and reflection, are pungent and stimulating. Among other topics, he describes the politicians, the generals, Kitchener's Army, Hore-Belisha, German gas attacks, Picardy, dug-outs, tanks, the sex-life of the soldier, scrounging. trench kits and the censoring of letters. The author saw the First World War from below, as a fighting soldier in a line regiment. In the Second World War he served as a staff officer liaising between the Army and the RAF; serving two tours at RAF Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe. This equipped him to draw forthright comparisons between the conduct of the two wars.




The Unsolicited Chronicler


Book Description




A Catalogue of the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana


Book Description

The Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana consists of some 10,000 books, manuscripts, maps, pamphlets, broadsides, broadsheets, and photographs, of which about half are described in the present catalogue. The Graff Collection displays the remarkable breadth of interest, knowledge, and taste of a great bibliophile and student of Western American history. From this rich collection, now in The Newberry Library, Chicago, its former Curator, Colton Storm, has compiled a discriminating and representative Catalogue of the rarer and more unusual materials. Collectors, bibliographers, librarians, historians, and book dealers specializing in Americana will find the Graff Catalogue an interesting and essential tool. Detailed collations and binding descriptions are cited, and many of the more important works have been annotated by Mr. Graff and Mr. Storm. An extensive index of persons and subjects makes the book useful to the scholar as well as to the collector and dealer. The book is not a bibliography but rather a guide to rare or unique source materials now enriching The Newberry Library's outstanding holdings in American history.