New Releases by Edmund Wilson

A quarter century of intimate and intellectual correspondence between Nabokov and critic Edmund Wilson, prior to their notorious feud.

Edmund Wilson an American critic deals with the literatures of French and English Canada. Among the authors discussed are Morley Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, John Buell, E. J. Pratt, Anne Hebert, Marie-Claire Blais, Roger Lemelin and Andre Laugevin.

During a twelve-month period in 1930 and 1931, Edmund Wilson wrote a series of lengthy articles which he then collected in a book called American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. The resulting chronicle was hailed by the New York Times as "the best reporting that the period of depression has brought forth in the United States," and forms the heart of the present volume. In prose that is by turns dramatic and naturalistic, inflammatory and evocative, satirical and droll, Wilson painted an unforgettable portrait of a time when "the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces." The American Earthquake bookends this chronicle with a collection of Wilson''s non-literary articles-including criticism, reportage, and some fiction-from the years of "The Follies," 1923-1928, and the dawn of the New Deal, 1932-1934. During this period, Wilson had grown from a little-known journalist to one of the most important American literary and social critics of the century. The American Earthquake amply conveys the astonishing breadth of Wilson''s talent, provides an unparalleled vision of one of the most troubling periods in American history, and, perhaps inadvertently, offers a self-portrait comparable to The Education of Henry Adams.

Recounts the adventures of a nine-year-old Jewish girl and her family in the early 1930''s as they travel from Germany to England.