WRITERS IN REVOLT

An introduction (psychoanalytically) orients the reader to this protest group and their assault on ""assumed""- or established- values and the substitution of n ""adherence... to deeply personal impulse"" which, for the most part, not only hafes at strictures but discards disciplines. Individually each selection is introduced, either by the editors, or in some cases by their peer group: Sartre on audelaire and Genet, or Durrell on Miller. From the past, they have chosen Sade, Saudelaire's Journals, Dostoevski's Notes and Hesse's Steppenwolf. For the most art, here are today's archangels of profligacy and excess, of agony and exaltation, hallucinatory, perverse, profane, exalted: notably Genet, Henry surroughs, Ionesco and Beckett in some of their most representative works; less known, certainly, Chapman Mortimer, Edward Dahlberg, Hubert Selby, Charles Foster... These interested in having a prospectus of this literature of despair and search, without taking the grand tour of its murkier reaches, will find this valuable. However, it seems overpriced.