Aller Retour New York

Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perlès is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best--an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, "Printed for Private Circulation Only," was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.

Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perles is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best—an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, “Printed for Private Circulation Only,” was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.

From Old New York to the Harlem Renaissance, the Algonquin Round Table to the New York Intellectuals, the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York offers a sweeping new view of New York's place in the American literary imagination. James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Hijuelos, Langston Hughes, Washington Irving, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, and Tom Wolfe are among the many writers whose literary legacies are brought to life.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER America was flying high in the Roaring Twenties. Then, almost overnight, the Great Depression brought it crashing down. When the dust settled, people were primed for a star who could distract them from reality. Enter Gypsy Rose Lee, a strutting, bawdy, erudite stripper who possessed a gift for delivering exactly what America needed. With her superb narrative skills and eye for detail, Karen Abbott brings to life an era of ambition, glamour, struggle, and survival. Using exclusive interviews and never-before-published material, she vividly delves into Gypsy’s world, including her intense triangle relationship with her sister, actress June Havoc, and their formidable mother, Rose, a petite but ferocious woman who literally killed to get her daughters on the stage. Weaving in the compelling saga of the Minskys—four scrappy brothers from New York City who would pave the way for Gypsy Rose Lee’s brand of burlesque and transform the entertainment landscape—Karen Abbott creates a rich account of a legend whose sensational tale of tragedy and triumph embodies the American Dream.

Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature, yet he remains misunderstood. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of his career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned “Paris” books—beginning with Tropic of Cancer—were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. The Unknown Henry Miller recounts Miller’s career from its beginnings in Paris in the 1930s but focuses on his years living in Big Sur, California, from 1944 to 1961, during which he wrote many of his most important books, including The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, married and divorced twice, raised two children, painted watercolors, and tried to live out a credo of self-realization. Written with the cooperation of the Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin estates, The Unknown Henry Miller draws on material previously unavailable to biographers, including interviews with Lepska Warren, Miller’s third wife. Behind the “bad boy” image, Arthur Hoyle finds a man whose challenge of literary sexual taboos was part of a broader assault on the dehumanization of man and commercialization during the postwar years, and he makes the case for restoring this groundbreaking writer to his rightful place in the American literary canon. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Regarded by many as one of America's finest-living writers, Cormac McCarthy has produced some of the most compelling novels of the last 40 years. Through the increasing number of cinematic adaptations of his work, including the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, McCarthy is entering the mainstream of cultural consciousness, both in the United States and abroad. In Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy, Peter Josyph considers, at length, the author's two masterworks Blood Meridian and Suttree, as well as the novel and film of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's play The Stonemason, and his film The Gardener's Son. The book also includes extended conversations with critic Harold Bloom about Blood Meridian; novelist and poet Robert Morgan about The Gardener's Son; critic Rick Wallach about Blood Meridian; and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally about his film adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. Drawing on multiple resources of an unconventional nature, this book examines McCarthy's work from original and sometimes provocative perspectives. Proposing a new notion of criticism, Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy will become a useful tool for critics, students, and general readers about one of the great literary talents of the day.

"In 1934 the city of Paris saw the birth of a book, published in English, which achieved instantaneous notoriety. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer unfolded the adventures of a loquacious, free-wheeling, appallingly uninhibited American expatriate. But the rollicking eloquence, determined gusto, and explosive imagery of this modern Rabelais barely concealed the figure of a lonely American writer, thoroughly immersed in a legendary American situation."—from the Introduction Baxter examines Miller's relationship with his native land and with Europe through his writings and in the comments of his critics and friends, navigating through the inconsistencies and the evolution of his opinions as his experiences changed. Her insights offer a complex, nuanced evaluation of Miller as writer and as expatriate.

For almost three decades, Cormac McCarthy solidified his reputation as an American "writer's writer" with remarkable novels such as his Appalachian Tales, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and his terrifying Western masterpiece, Blood Meridian. Then, with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, the first work of his celebrated Border Trilogy in 1992, McCarthy's popularity exploded on to a world stage. As his reputation burgeoned with the publications of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, the critical response to McCarthy has grown apace.