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NEW WORLD WRITING by Smith & Richardson-Eds.

NEW WORLD WRITING

By

Pub Date: April 20th, 1960
Publisher: Lippincott

This collection of short stories, non-fiction and poetry is the sixteenth in the New World Writing series and the first issue to be published by Lippincott. Previous issues were published by New American Library. All of the selections are originals and manifest, at least in the fiction, an unusual degree of intensity which, to some tastes, may seem emotionally overwrought. There is the grotesquery of perverse obligation in The Gredence Table, by Jack Richardson, in which a young mill hand loses his will to a sinister master; in The Listener, by John Berry, music becomes an affirmation of greatness in the human spirit; two laboratory assistants are finally overcome by the gruesomeness of their work in You Have to Draw a Line Somewhere, by Judson Jerome; a sense of terrible desolation overwhelms a successful young man at his brother's senseless death in A Penny for the Ferryman, by John F. Gilgun; and Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen, is a desperate story of an old woman's dying, worn out by life and isolated from her family. Kingsley Amis has an essay -- You that Love England in which he makes the point that the return of the Conservation Party to office merely confirms, if it will not hasten, England's decline. Lolita Lepidoptera by Diana Butler is a relentless probing of that notorious specimen in which the author equates its manifestations of illicit passion with Nabokov's own passion for butterflies. The market is obviously special.