Richard Howard Books

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further adventures. Letter to a Hostage, which contains certain themes that were to appear in The Little Prince, is Saint-Exupery's optimistic and humane open letter to a Jewish intellectual hiding in occupied France in 1943.

A lauded American poet's tributes to Walt Whitman and Henry James, now collected for the first time. Richard Howard has long been recognized as one of America’s finest poets, celebrated as an author for his keen engagement with other authors, and especially for his sparkling and trenchant dramatic monologues and two-part inventions. Through the years, Howard has, in this way, given voice to all sorts of historical and literary figures, but two of his favorite subjects are two of his favorite writers—Walt Whitman and Henry James—and this book gathers an array of poems in which he responds to these great gay forebears, as well as to two other beloved Americans, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. Here Whitman the good gray poet opens his door to Bram Stoker and to Oscar Wilde; Henry James struggles to take stock of Los Angeles, where he is to have lunch with L. Frank Baum; Edith Wharton reminisces about her fraught friendship with the Master; poor Pansy from The Portrait of a Lady broods on her dreadful father; and late in life Wallace Stevens visits Paris—as Stevens never did. Howard’s wonderful inventions are as expansive and celebratory and human as Whitman, as deeply and subtly inquiring as James, as sumptuously meditative as Stevens, and as arresting and delightful as Richard Howard himself.

A parallel-text edition of the poems of Baudelaire with a new translation which restores once banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and variety of the collection.

These late essays of Roland Barthes's are concerned with the visible and the audible, and here the preoccupations are particularly intense and rewarding, in part because Barthes was himself, by predilection, an artist and a musician, and in part because he was of two minds about the very possibility of attaching to art and to music a written text, a criticism.

Adventures in fishing, falconry, and yoga intertwine with humor and poignant reflections in this exploration of the Northwest. Richard Howard, a native of Idaho, shares personal insights through "green tea revelations," capturing the essence of life’s highs and lows. Readers are invited to experience the beauty of the region while contemplating themes of courage, nature, and self-discovery. This book promises to inspire a fresh perspective on the great outdoors.

Examining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, these 'reflections on photography' begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind.

Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is then turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin.Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.

In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine―the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion―Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for the luxuriant prose of the fashion "Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation."

When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's self-portrait of the artist as a young man, written between 1951 and 1955, was also a mirror of the times, depicting the now vanished milieu of Cocteau, Eluard, Gide, Landowska, Boulez, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, and others whose paths crossed with Rorem's in such settings as Paris, Morocco, and Italy. The New York Diary , published the following year, pictured the period between 1956 and 1960, when Rorem had returned to America. The diaries marked the beginnings of Gay Liberation, not because Rorem made a special issue of his sexuality, but because he did not; rather, he wrote of his affairs frankly and unashamedly. A casualness informs each sensual entry, and the overall tone is at once bratty and brilliant, insecure and vain, loving and cultured, but, above all, honest and entertaining.

Examining the intersection of literature and context, this book analyzes the contributions of Belfast authors Bob Shaw and James White to the science fiction genre from the 1950s to the 1990s. It situates their work within the socio-political landscape of Belfast, employing frameworks from both Irish Studies and Science Fiction Studies to provide deeper insights into their narratives and themes.