New Releases by Richard Howard

The status of so-called personality disorders as reflecting inner pathology is currently questioned – they are viewed, even by some psychiatrists, as stigmatizing and not properly falling within the remit of psychiatry. Yet personality disorders remain obstinately present world-wide and are associated with aberrant behaviors that sometimes lead those afflicted to fall into the net of the criminal justice system. This book interrogates the nature of personality disorders and will appeal to anyone for whom the varieties of human personality hold a fascination. It starts from the premise that to understand what a disordered personality is, we first need to understand what normal personality is and what it does. The author re-frames personality disorders as aberrant variations of normal personality that arise when normal human development is derailed by a series of insults and injuries occurring between birth and adulthood. The author emphasizes the importance of considering the social and cultural environment in which aberrant personality emerges.

A review of the epidemiological, interpersonal, developmental and neurobiological underpinnings of antisocial personality and its treatment.

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.

“Something in that magical atmosphere had subtly changed as if the previous stillness had been merely a portent to some mysterious event... He tilted his head to catch whatever sound it was that suddenly made him feel that someone, or something, was watching him.” Tales of the Lost is a book of short stories for adults, ranging from realms of fantasy to modern-day settings. Richard Howard’s stories are born out of a lifelong love of ghost stories and ‘curious tales’, which he read as a child. Some are ghost stories, others are simply scary, and most have a twist in the tail. In each story, there is a character who, one way or another, feels lost. One story, Flora’s Return, takes its main character from Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, which was filmed in 1960 as The Innocents. Richard takes this story, which he believes is one of the finest ghost stories ever written, and continues it with an exciting new twist. Richard’s stories are based on his experiences of growing up in a house with its own ghosts during his childhood. Ghosts created by the author M.R.James, the many aspects of horror and disquiet by William Hope Hodgson, the dark humour of Saki and the relationship between man and the forces of nature in Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood have all inspired the author to contribute to the short story genre. From science fiction to fairy tales, stories have been written that allow us to enjoy feeling scared in a safe environment. This collection will not disappoint.

Publisher description

Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. Here is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets like Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix. Also included are considerations of modern sculpture and of the photography of the human body. Howard's intense familiarity with modern poetry is seen to excellent effect in essays on the "poetry of forgetting," on the causes and effects of experimental poetry, and on the first books of poets whose work he helped introduce--among them, J. D. McClatchy, Frank Bidart, and Cynthia MacDonald. Of course, Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar and Gracq. Hilton Kramer once wrote that Richard Howard "performs the essential critical service. He shows us the extent of the terrain. He points out its essential features. And he gives us a very vivid sense of its ethos as well as of its esthetics." Howard, now in his seventy-fifth year, continues his adroit, inventive commentary, which enriches us all.

In a recent conversation with Priscilla Becker published by the Poetry Society of America, Richard Howard commented that, |I don't like direct self-expression...I am more interested in the dialogue of others than in merely the dialogue with another...the dialogue of the others who are not me.| Among the speakers in The Silent Treatment are Hannah Arendt, George Eliot, Cosima Wagner and a boy in a photograph by Arkansas photographer, Mike Disfarmer.

Howard's title for his new collection is the old name for psychoanalysis, and alludes to the therapeutic powers of speech under controlled circumstances.

The 1999 Lambda Literary Award winner in poetry. Glowing full page NYT review.

A collection of monologues, elegies and satires on subjects ranging from Mozart to graffiti. One is a letter to the New York Times, praising "Man Who Beat Up Homosexuals Reported to Have AIDS Virus." The author won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1970.

This book represents a complete revision of the authors' previous authoritative work. It incorporates all the significant changes to bird taxonomy that have occurred over the past six years and remains the only single-volume work to list subspecies. Ornithologists are constantly reviewing and revising the scientific and common names of the world's birds--combining and dividing established species and genera. Despite the fact that opinions will continue to vary on the details of avian classification, lists such as this provide a baseline reference to scientific and English names, taxonomy, and distribution for both the professional and amateur ornithologist and taxonomist. In the next decade, new studies using advanced groupings may establish new systematic groupings. The current list, by adding to and amending the classic listing of Peters and his successors, may well be the last and most finely developed list in the traditional mold and, therefore, a prime reference for years to come. Key Features * The most up to date list of the world's birds * Covers their distribution using traditional taxonomy * The only single-volume reference to include subspecies * Lists approximately 9,200 species and their subspecies * Thoroughly revised and updated

"Richard Howard's first new book of poems in five years features two long narrative poems plus an extraordinary group of dramatic meditations on a fascinating variety of subjects: Proust searching for his novel's title; Rodin evading the perverse importunities of his admirers; Loie Fuller trying to wheedle radium from Madame Curie; Fuseli, Wordsworth and Kafka obliquely evoked; Virginia Woolf plotting a novel about Byron--while other poems are lyric instances or evidences of less notorious voices."-- Back cover.

Drafts of poems both handwritten and in typescript for the volume, Welcome Eumenides (61 l.); miscellaneous fragments and drafts of poems (9 l., 4 fragments); correspondence (ca. 1970-1972) with Richard Howard who wrote the "Note" for Welcome Eumenides, editors and publishers (8 items).

Essays on the development of domestic and foreign policy by a Labor Party member of the British Parliament, stressing the theory and practice of individual freedom.