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Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin"I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only." When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin's brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything-Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer's last chance to speak at length about his life and work.The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin's career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin's life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin's fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

A vicious and brilliant satire of human vanity from the author of the classic bestseller The GroupLong out of print, Mary McCarthy's second novel is a bitingly funny satire set in the early years of the Cold War about a group of writers, editors, and intellectuals who retreat to rural New England to found a hilltop utopia. With this group loosely divided into two factions-purists, led by the libertarian editor Macdougal Macdermott, and the realists, skeptics led by the smug Will Taub-the situation is ripe not only for disaster but for comedy, as reality clashes with their dreams of a perfect society.Though written as a roman à clef, McCarthy barely disguised her characters, including using her former lover Philip Rahv, founder of Partisan Review, as the model for Will Taub. As a result, the novel caused an absolute explosion of outrage among the literary elite of the day, who clearly recognized themselves among her all-too-accurate portraits. Rahv threatened a lawsuit to stop publication. Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling's wife, called McCarthy a "thug." McCarthy's friend Dwight McDonald (Macdougal Macdermott) called it "vicious, malicious, and nasty."Never one to shy away from controversy, McCarthy's portrait of her generation had indeed drawn blood. But the brilliance of the novel has outlasted its first detonation and can now be enjoyed for its aphoritic, fearless dissection of the vanities of human endeavor.In an added bonus, the renowned essayist Vivian Gornick details in a moving introduction the importance of McCarthy's intellectual and artistic bravery, and how she influenced a generation of young writers and thinkers.

In our chaotic world of co-opted imagery, does art still have power?A fog of images and information permeates the world nowadays: from advertising, television, radio, and film to the glut produced by the new economy and the rise of social media . . . where even our friends suddenly seem to be selling us the ultimate product: themselves. Here, Nato Thompson-one of the country's most celebrated young curators and critics-investigates what this deluge means for those dedicated to socially engaged art and activism. How can anyone find a voice and make change in a world flooded with such pseudo-art? How are we supposed to discern what's true in the product emanating from the ceaseless machine of consumer capitalism, a machine that appropriates from art history, and now from the methods of grassroots political organizing and even social networking? Thompson's invigorating answers to those questions highlights the work of some of the most innovative and interesting artists and activists working today, as well as institutions that empower their communities to see power and reimagine it. From cooperative housing to anarchist infoshops to alternative art venues, Seeing Power reveals ways that art today can and does inspire innovation and dramatic transformation . . . perhaps as never before.

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.Condemned as "sordid" and "immoral" on its publication in 1899, this story of a woman trapped in her marriage effectively ended Chopin's career but was revived as a proto-feminist classic in the 1970s. What Newsweek calls Chopin's "prophetic psychology" insures its timeliness today. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world-even those daunted by Moby-Dick-Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine-to, sadly, critical disdain.The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.