Thursday, April 14, 2011

A revised and amended Truth and Lies in Literature in Kindle.

I haven't been in my blog for ages - you either write your books or blog. But to those of you who are interested, there is a new edition of "Truth and Lies in Literature" published as a Kindle book.I discarded some of the original pieces which did not seem to meet the test of time. This Kindle edition includes most of the pieces in the previous printed editions, but none of them are simple reprints. All the pieces underwent some alterations. Every time they were translated for a foreign journal or for a foreign edition, I looked them over to see whether they could be improved and whether anything new that I had learned about the subject should be added. As I have said all too often, I am not so much a writer as a re-writer; I don’t revere my old mistakes, my old ignorance, or my incomplete thoughts.


To the revised versions of the pieces which were printed in the original 1983 and 1985 and the 1990 printed editions, I added "The Anatomy of Serious Rubbish or the Bay of Pigs of the American Literary Establishment" - and several essays whichappear here in English for the first time. Among these are “The Power Of Literary Criticism” and my foreword to the French edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, arguing that Mark Twain’s later works far surpass his celebrated boyhood novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I demonstrate, I hope, why Mark Twain remains the most important American writer to this day, a giant of world literature. My Stendhal essay includes now 30 years of constant study.