Henry Miller - Böcker

Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller's first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey EminTropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality.'At last an unprintable book that is fit to read' Ezra Pound 'A momentous event in the history of modern writing' Samuel Beckett 'The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written' Erica Jong

'New York is an aquarium ... where there are nothing but hellbenders and lungfish and slimy, snag-toothed groupers and sharks'In 1935 Henry Miller set off from his adopted home, Paris, to revisit his native land, America. Aller Retour New York, his exuberant, humorous missive to his friend Alfred Perlès describing the trip and his return journey on a Dutch steamer, is filled with vivid reflections on his hellraising antics, showing Miller at the height of his powers. This edition also includes Via Dieppe-Newhaven, his entertaining account of a failed attempt to visit England. 'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan

Nexus is the third volume of the scandalous trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller's major life workThe exhilarating final volume of Henry Miller's semi-autobiographical trilogy, Nexus follows his last months in New York. Trapped in a bizarre ménage-à-trois with his fiery wife Mona and her lover Stasia, he finds his life descending into chaos. Finally, betrayed and exhausted, he decides to leave America and sail for Paris, to discover his true vocation as a writer.

Sexus is the first volume of the scandalous trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller's major life workHenry Miller called the end of his life in America and the start of a new, bohemian existence in 1930s Paris his 'rosy crucifixion'. His searing fictionalized autobiography of this time of liberation was banned for nearly twenty years. Sexus, the first volume in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, looks back to his early sexual escapades in Brooklyn, and his growing infatuation with the playful, teasing dance hall hostess who will become the great obsession of his life.

Plexus is the second volume of the scandalous trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller's major life workExploring one man's desperate desire for freedom, Plexus is the central volume of Henry Miller's scandalous semi-autobiographical trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion. It finds him in the midst of his stormy marriage to the volatile, duplicitous Mona, and joyfully quitting his dreary job for a hand-to-mouth existence in Brooklyn, as he takes his first steps towards becoming a writer.

A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is as daring, frank and influential as Henry Miller first novel, Tropic of Cancer -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey EminA story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers when it was published in 1939. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of Henry V. Miller who works for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company in New York in the 1920s and tries to write the most important work of literature that was ever published. Tropic of Capricorn paints a dazzling picture of the life of the writer and of New York City between the wars: the skyscrapers and the sewers, the lust and the dejection, the smells and the sounds of a city that is perpetually in motion, threatening to swallow everyone and everything.'Literature begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done' Lawrence Durrell 'The only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past' George Orwell 'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan Henry Miller (1891-1980) is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. His best-known novels include Tropic of Cancer (1934), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, 1949, Plexus, 1953, and Nexus, 1959), all published in France and banned in the US and the UK until 1964. He is widely recognised as an irreverent, risk-taking writer who redefined the novel and made the link between the European avant-garde and the American Beat generation.

In The World of Sex, Henry Miller, one of the most scandalous writers of the 20th century explains his literary project Henry Miller's bold, explicit novels scandalized readers and remade the literature of his day. In this uncompromising literary manifesto he argues that sex is at the heart of his writing because it is at the heart of life - a vital force as essential as bread, money, work or play. Drawing on his own experiences and on the writing of his famously banned novels in Paris, he shows sex as a mysterious realm that must be explored if we are to be truly free.

'Here, even if I had a thousand dollar in my pocket, I know of no sight which could arouse in me the feeling of ecstasy'Looking back to Henry Miller's bohemian life in 1930s Paris, when he was an obscure, penniless writer, Quiet Days in Clichy is a love letter to a city. As he describes nocturnal wanderings through shabby Montmartre streets, cafés and bars, sexual liaisons and volatile love affairs, Miller brilliantly evokes a period that would shape his entire life and oeuvre. 'His writing is flamboyant, torrential, chaotic, treacherous, and dangerous' Anaïs Nin

'Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light'Enraptured by a young woman's account of the landscapes of Greece, Henry Miller set off to explore the Grecian countryside with his friend Lawrence Durrell in 1939. In The Colossus of Maroussi he describes drinking from sacred springs, nearly being trampled to death by sheep and encountering the flamboyant Greek poet Katsumbalis, who 'could galvanize the dead with his talk'. This lyrical classic of travel writing represented an epiphany in Miller's life, and is the book he would later cite as his favourite. 'One of the five greatest travel books of all time' Pico Iyer

Throughout history, across very different types of state and society, petitions and petitioning have been ubiquitous practices and the interaction between petitioners and authority has been a crucial dynamic in exercising and contesting power. Consolidating and advancing a rapidly expanding field of research across history, law, and the social sciences, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America is the first study of these venerable practices from their development in the late medieval period to the emergence of e-petitions in the twenty-first century. With a broad focus on Europe and North America, this ambitious volume breaks new ground by examining the concept, history, and practice of petitions and petitioning across chronological and geographical boundaries, opening up this important topic using an interdisciplinary approach across the humanities and social sciences.

Few topics have inspired as much international furor and misinformation as the development and distribution of genetically altered foods. For thousands of years, farmers have bred crops for their resistance to disease, productivity, and nutritional value; and over the past century, scientists have used increasingly more sophisticated methods for modifying them at the genetic level. But only since the 1970s have advances in biotechnology (or gene-splicing to be more precise) upped the ante, with the promise of dramatically improved agricultural products—and public resistance far out of synch with the potential risks.In this provocative and meticulously researched book, Henry Miller and Gregory Conko trace the origins of gene-splicing, its applications, and the backlash from consumer groups and government agencies against so-called Frankenfoods—from America to Zimbabwe. They explain how a happy conspiracy of anti-technology activism, bureaucratic over-reach, and business lobbying has resulted in a regulatory framework in which there is an inverse relationship between the degree of product risk and degree of regulatory scrutiny. The net result, they argue, is a combination of public confusion, political manipulation, ill-conceived regulation (from such agencies as the USDA, EPA, and FDA), and ultimately, the obstruction of one of the safest and most promising technologies ever developed—with profoundly negative consequences for the environment and starving people around the world. The authors go on to suggest a way to emerge from this morass, proposing a variety of business and policy reforms that can unlock the potential of this cutting-edge science, while ensuring appropriate safeguards and moving environmentally friendly products into the hands of farmers and consumers. This book is guaranteed to fuel the ongoing debate over the future of biotech and its cultural, economic, and political implications.

Ever mercurial in temperament, an idealist who struggled financially to meet his material needs, Henry Miller for decades relied on his publisher James Laughlin's generosity and expert editorial advice. Although Miller's letters decried the conservatism of American book publishing and were often suspicious in tone, Miller nevertheless admired and trusted Laughlin with intimate details about his work and his personal life. The resulting correspondence, spanning from 1935 to 1979, shortly before Miller's death on June 7, 1980, is a remarkable, uncensored record of the ideas and intentions behind many of the author's most provocative literary endeavors.

The remarkable popularity of political likenesses in the Victorian period is the central theme of this book, which explores how politicians and publishers exploited new visual technology to appeal to a broad public. The first study of the role of commercial imagery in nineteenth-century politics, Politics personified shows how visual images projected a favourable public image of politics and politicians. Drawing on a vast and diverse range of sources, this book highlights how and why politics was visualised. Beginning with an examination of the visual culture of reform, the book goes on to study how Liberals, Conservatives and Radicals used portraiture to connect with supporters, the role of group portraiture, and representations of Victorian MPs. The final part of the book examines how major politicians, including Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, interacted with mass commercial imagery. The book will appeal to a broad range of scholars and students across political, social and cultural history, art history and visual studies, cultural and media studies and literature.

In 1939, after ten years as an expatriate, Henry Miller returned to the United States with a keen desire to see what his native land was really like—to get to the roots of the American nature and experience. He set out on a journey that was to last three years, visiting many sections of the country and making friends of all descriptions. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is the result of that odyssey.

In his great triptych “The Millennium,” Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller’s title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller’s life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for fifteen years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place—one of the most colorful in the United States—and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable, like Conrad Moricand, the “Devil in Paradise” who is one of Miller’s greatest character studies. Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book—the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and clichés of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking––but not Henry Miller. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller’s favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere––authors such as Dostoeyvsky, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Lao-Tse. To them he brings fresh and penetrating insights. But many are lesser-known figures: Krishnamurti, the prophet-sage; the French contemporaries Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono; Richard Jeffries, who wrote The Story of My Heart; the Welshman John Cowper Powys; and scores of others. The Books in My Life contains some fine autobiographical chapters, too. Miller describes his boyhood in Brooklyn, when he devoured the historical stories of G. A. Henty and the romances of Rider Haggard. He tells of the men and women whom he regards as "living books": Lou Jacobs, W. E. B. DuBois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others. He offers his reminiscences of the New York Theatre in the early 1900’s––including plays such as Alias Jimmy Valentine and Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model. And finally, in Miller’s best vein of humor, he provides a satiric chapter on bathroom reading. In an appendix, Miller lists the hundred books that have influenced him most.

They are taken from the Paris books Black Spring (1936) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and were for the most part, written at about the satire time as Tropic of Capricorn—the period of Miller’s and Durrell’s life in the famous Villa Seurat in Paris.As is usual with Miller, these pieces cannot be tagged with the label of any given literary category. The unforgettable portrait of Max, the Paris drifter, and the probably-autobiographical Tailor Shop, are basically short stories, but even here the irrepressible vitality of Miller’s personality keeps breaking into the narrative. And in the critical and philosophical essays, the prose poems and surrealist fantasies, the travel sketches and scenarios, Miller’s passion for fiction, for telling the endless story of his extraordinary life, cannot be held down. Life, as no other modern author has lived it or can write it, bursts from these pages—the life of the mind and the body; of people, places and things; of ideas and the imagination.

Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.

This collection of stories and essays takes its title from a long prose reverie in which Henry Miller, after his return to the United States, thinks back to the happy years of middle life which he spent in France. The qualities that make the French unique have seldom been so movingly expressed. The America he had rediscovered does not come off very well by contrast—particularly the Hollywood state of mind, which gets a thoroughly Milleresque going over in the burlesque "Astrological Fricassee."What Miller likes on the American scene are the individuals who have broken through the pattern of conformity, the rare and often isolated creative personalities who are resisting the dehumanization of our so-called “civilization.” He gives us vivid portraits of the painters Abe Rattner, Jean Varda and Beauford Delaney; the sculptor Bufano; and Jasper Deeter, director of the hedgerow Theatre.Two of Henry Miller’s greatest essays are also in this volume: "Murder the Murderer" (on war), a declaration which ranks with Randolph Bourne’s War and the Intellectuals, and, with particular relevance to the censorship codes which kept his Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn out of this country for so long, "Obscenity and the Law of Reflection."

One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays. Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which have gone out of print. Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way"—a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he "ever thought about money." His deep concern for the role of the artist in society appears in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel is My Watermark" he writes of his own passionate love affair with painting. "The Immorality of Morality" is an eloquent discussion of censorship. Some of the stories, such as "First Love," are autobiographical, and there are portraits of friends, such as "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light," and essays on other writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Ionesco.Taken together, these highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature with Tropic of Cancer and other great books.

First published in 1959, this touching fable tells of Auguste, a famous clown who could make people laugh but who sought to impart to his audiences a lasting joy. Originally inspired by a series of circus and clown drawings by the cubist painter Femand Léger, Miller eventually used his own decorations to accompany the text in their stead. “Undoubtedly," he says in his explanatory epilogue, °‘it is the strangest story I have yet written. . . . No, more even than all the stories which I based on fact and experience is this one the truth. My whole aim in writing has been to tell the truth, as I know it. Heretofore all my characters have been real, taken from life, my own life. Auguste is unique in that he came from the blue. But what is this blue which surrounds and envelopes us if not reality itself? . . . We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is."

A “melo-melo in seven scenes,” Just Wild About Harry is Henry Miller’s only excursion into playwriting. Harry is pure Miller, welling up from the same abundant love of life and freedom from convention that made its author the dean of writers dedicated to human liberation. Admittedly inspired by lonesco and the Theatre of the Absurd, Miller’s tragicomic slapstick is nevertheless as American as the Marx Brothers and the blues––the simple story of a heartless Harry (the one the ladies are wild about) who learns a bittersweet lesson about life, death, and love. Begun in Europe in 1960, Just Wild About Harry was first published by New Directions in 1963.

Prepared by Henry Miller for publication in 1938, Letters to Emil––correspondence from 1921 through 1934 with his boyhood friend and successful artist Emil Schnellock––remained unpublished until 1989. A chance encounter by the two men, out of touch since childhood, led to Miller’s decision to become a writer. Throughout the ’20s and into the ’30s, Schnellock acted as his chief mentor, to whom he voiced his exuberant, sometimes cranky views of life and anxiously discussed his dying marriage to June Mansfield and his growing involvement with Anaïs Nin. Miller’s letters are a compelling record of the writer in the making, beginning with his first efforts in 1922, tracing his ten-year struggle to find his own voice, and reaching a climax with the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1934. Indeed, it was in his actual letters to Emil that Henry Miller developed his vigorously earthy yet philosophical style.