New Releases by Isak Dinesen

Carnival is an animated collection of works from every stage of Isak Dinesen''s career. Many were written during her most creative years but set aside; others she wrote "just for entertainment." The collection includes "Second Meeting," her last work, and the title story, the first written under her now-famous pen name. None of these stories has previously appeared in book form in English. Three of them were translated especially for this collection by P. M. Mitchell and W. D. Paden. "The editors have included only material that will stand easily with her more familiar work and satisfy her large following. . . . The rough drafts and variant treatments have been set aside for scholars."—Joseph McLellan, Washington Post "The wit, the imagination, the elevated philosophical dialogue mark most of the stories in this volume as vintage Dinesen . . . of special interest to Dinesen fans."—Robert Langbaum, New York Times Book Review

"Isak Dinesen . . . had an original approach to life that permeated all her work. She loved storytelling, with the result that most of her essays are quasi-narratives, which proceed not from major to minor premise but from one anecdote to another as the way of making concrete whatever idea she is considering. Her work is a delight and at times a marvel."—The New Yorker "Through these daguerreotypes we begin to understand other periods, the renunciations of World War I, the purpose of houses and mansions, of ritual ceremonials, such as tatooing. We are given a fresh and vivid view of the women''s movement . . . which urges that what our ''small society'' needs beyond human beings who have demonstrated what they can do, is people who are. ''Indeed, our own time,'' she wrote in 1953, ''can be said to need a revision from doing to being.'' She demonstrated it in her own work and craft, with courage and with dignity. This collection is as real as a gallery of old daguerreotypes, moving and unfaded. The work, as Hannah Arendt says, of a wise woman."—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times "These essays . . . have the flavor of good conversation: humorous, easy, personal but not oppressive, the distillation of reading, thought, and experience. Their subjects are of surprisingly current interest. We need make no concessions to the past, need not set our watches back to ''historical.'' Isak Dinesen was not a faddish thinker. . . . ''In history it is always the human element that has a chance for eternal life,'' Dinesen remarks, and she gives these essays their chance."—Penelope Mesic, Chicago

Early in the 19th century, a couple stay in seclusion to hide the woman''s pregnancy caused by premarital indiscretion.

Memoirs of life on a Kenya coffee plantation twenty-five years ago, written in the form of four tales, which endow dramatic experience with wondrous insight.