The Lime Twig

But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949.

The Lime Twig (1961), set in postwar London, is the story of a young man who, unwittingly involved with the underworld, comes face to face with the violence and decay of contemporary society. Second Skin (1964) is a tale of suicide and new life on two mythical islands - one demonic, the other idyllic - and is a comic, magical evocation of The Tempest.

An exceptionally brilliant novel from “our most interesting writer” (Flannery O’Connor) Travesty is John Hawkes’s most extreme vision of eroticism and comic terror. In the south of France, an elegant sports car is speeding through the night, bearing a man, his daughter, and his best friend toward a fatal crash. As he drives, the “privileged man” justifies, in a sustained monologue, his firm opinion that willed destruction is the ultimate act of the poetic imagination. “What I have in mind is an ‘accident’ so perfectly contrived that it will be unique, spectacular and instantaneous, a physical counterpart to that vision in which it was in fact conceived.” Concerned with sex, myth, the imagination, and the absurd, Travesty is one of the most cruelly and vibrantly ironic works to be found in twentieth-century literature.

Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise.

A 59-year-old American acquires a new family on a tropical island, while looking back on his "naked history" with his old family and its talent for death.

An English horse race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington, provides the background for John Hawkes' exciting novel, The Lime Twig, which tells of an ingenious plot to steal and race a horse under a false name. But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit exerts a unique influence on contemporary philosophy. Major figures from Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray to Jean-Paul Sartre and Judith Butler were shaped in large part through their engagement with Hegel’s challenging masterwork. It unfolds a grand narrative of the ways of thinking and acting that comprise human experience. Along the way, Hegel seeks to incorporate all the fundamental structures of human life—from political community to consciousness to selfhood—into a whole that encompasses the total movement of human knowledge and culture. Mary C. Rawlinson offers a critical reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit that exposes three crucial elisions: Hegel’s effacements of sexual difference, human mortality, and literary style. In attempting to arrive at an “absolute knowing” that would transcend all differences, Hegel discounts specificity in each of these areas in favor of a generic subject. Rawlinson turns Hegel’s critique of abstraction against him, showing how his own phenomenological analysis undermines his attempt to master difference. Rawlinson’s critique reveals Hegel’s attempt to erase the difference of his own style, highlighting his images, tropes, and rhetorical strategies. Demonstrating how the power of Hegel’s phenomenological method goes beyond even Hegel’s own project of a pure logic, The Betrayal of Substance is a magisterial rereading of the Phenomenology of Spirit that encompasses crucially overlooked sites of complexity and difference.