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Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia print by Stephen Alcorn, 1984.


Recommended Books: Z (author sort)

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Zafar, Rafia, editor (2011). Harlem Renaissance Novels. New York, NY, Library of America.
In little more than a decade during the 1920s and 30s, a new generation of African American writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals based mostly in upper Manhattan burst through aesthetic conventions with unprecedented openness and daring. Perhaps no one was more central to the creative upheaval that became known as the Harlem Renaissance than a group of novelists who were determined to describe their own lives and their own world frankly and without compromise.

Now, for the first time in this definitive two-volume set, their greatest works are presented in a collector's edition featuring authoritative texts and a chronology, biographies, and notes reflecting the latest scholarship:

   Cane, Jean Toomer
   Home to Harlem, Claude McKay
   Quicksand, Nella Larsen
   Plum Bun, Jessie Redmon Fauset
   The Blacker the Berry, Wallace Thurman
   Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes
   Black No More, George Schuyler
   The Conjure-Man Dies, Rudolph Fisher
   Black Thunder, Arna Bontemps

Zimmer, Heinrich Robert and Joseph Campbell (1969). Philosophies of India
. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
Indian philosophy was at the heart of Zimmer's interest in oriental studies, and this volume represents his major contribution to our understanding of Asia. It is both the most complete and most intelligent account of this extraordinarily rich and complex philosophical tradition yet written.

Zimring, Franklin E. (2003). The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment
. New York, Oxford University Press.
Why does the United States continue to employ the death penalty when fifty other developed democracies have abolished it? Why does capital punishment become more problematic each year? How can the death penalty conflict be resolved? In The Contradictions of Capital Punishment in America, Frank Zimring reveals that the seemingly insoluble turmoil surrounding the death penalty reflects a deep and long-standing division in American values, a division that he predicts will soon bring about the end of capital punishment in our country. On the one hand, execution would seem to violate our nation's highest legal principles of fairness and due process. It sets us increasingly apart from our allies and indeed is regarded by European nations as a barbaric and particularly egregious form of American exceptionalism. On the other hand, the death penalty represents a deeply held American belief in violent social justice that sees the hangman as an agent of local control and safeguard of community values. Zimring uncovers the most troubling symptom of this attraction to vigilante justice in the lynch mob. He shows that the great majority of executions in recent decades have occurred in precisely those Southern states where lynchings were most common a hundred years ago. It is this legacy, Zimring suggests, that constitutes both the distinctive appeal of the death penalty in the United States and one of the most compelling reasons for abolishing it. Impeccably researched and engagingly written, The Contradictions of Capital Punishment in America casts a clear new light on America's long and troubled embrace of the death penalty.

Zinn, Howard (1999). Marx in Soho: A Play on History
. Cambridge, Mass., South End Press.
Taking his inspiration from Karl Marx's stay in London's Soho district after his exile from the Continent, Zinn's (A People's History of the United States) one-man play reads like a first-person memoir narrated by a distinctive voice. Laid out on the page as seamless monologue, it envisions Marx in the Soho district of New York in the present, where his mind reels at the same capitalist injustices that boggled him 150 years ago. The wizened and ailing Marx discourses on the economic state of the modern-day U.S., heatedly decrying the vast disparity between rich and poor and the corrupt, systematic funneling of the wealth that workers earn into the hands of capitalists. Through cascading recollections, we learn of Marx's devoted marriage, his love for his children and his stormy debates with Mikhail Bakunin, a fellow radical whose concept of a revolution of the spleen rather than the intellect makes Marx seem cold by comparison. These nuggets of personal information yield warmth and mettle where the dialectical prose gets heavy-handed. Often, the doctrines espoused threaten to overwhelm Zinn's expressed mission to expose Marx's human side. Zinn is, after all, reissuing Marx's socialist critique to apply to modern America and, along the way, revising Marxist doctrine by imagining the theorist himself rethinking some of his more off-the-mark notions. Most often it is Marx's critical wife, Jenny, and brilliant daughter Eleanor who take him to task when he fumbles. With Zinn's hefty prologue and scholarly but pointed reading list, the text is a cleverly imagined call to reconsider socialist theory as a valid philosophy in these times. Zinn's point is well made; his passion for history melds with his political vigor to make this a memorable effort and a lucid primer for readers desiring a succinct, dramatized review of Marxism.

Zinn, Howard (2002). The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace
. Boston, Mass., Beacon Press.
A stirring anthology of writings about peace and nonviolence from Buddha to Arundhati Roy. As you read this, America is at war. President Bush declared a "war on terrorism" and 90 percent of the American people believed he was doing the right thing. But is there another way? From Buddha in the pre-Christian era to the most recent declaration of peace principles by Nobel laureates, nonviolence has always been an alternative. With an introduction by Howard Zinn about September 11 and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks, The Power of Nonviolence presents the most salient and persuasive arguments for peace in the last 2,500 years of human history. Included are some of the most original thinkers and writings about peace and nonviolence - Buddha, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," Jane Addams, William Penn on "the end of war," Dorothy Day's position on "Pacifism," Erich Fromm, and Rajendra Prasad. Supplementing the classic voices are more recent advocates' arguments for peace: Albert Camus' "Neither Victims Nor Executioners," A. J. Muste's impressive "Getting Rid of War," Martin Luther King's influential "Declaration of Independence from the War in Viet Nam," and Arundhati Roy's "War Is Peace," plus many others. Arranged chronologically, covering the major conflagrations of the world in the last hundred years, including the war in Afghanistan, The Power of Nonviolence is a compelling step forward in the study of pacifism, a timely anthology that fills a void for people looking for responses to crisis that are not based on guns or bombs.

Zinn, Howard (2003). A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
. New York, HarperCollins.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. Revised, updated, and featuring a new afterword by the author, this is "a brilliant and moving history of the American people".

Zinn, Howard (2004). The People Speak: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known: Dramatic Readings Celebrating the Enduring Spirit of Dissent
. New York, Perennial.
To celebrate the millionth copy sold of Howard Zinn's great People's History of the United States, Zinn drew on the words of Americans -- some famous, some little known -- across the range of American history. These words were read by a remarkable cast at an event held at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City that included James Earl Jones, Alice Walker, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfre Woodard, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, Myla Pitt, Harris Yulin, and Andre Gregory.

From that celebration, this book was born. Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent.

Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays' Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.

Zirin, Dave (2008). A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play
. New York, New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co.
In this long-awaited book from the rising superstar of sportswriting, whose blog The Edge of Sports is read each week by thousands of people across the country, Dave Zirin offers a riotously entertaining chronicle of larger-than-life sporting characters and dramatic contests and what amounts to an alternative history of the United States as seen through the games its people played.

Zirin, Dave (2005). What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States
. Chicago, Haymarket Books.
Here Edgeofsports.com sportswriter Dave Zirin shows how sports express the worst, as well as the most creative and exciting, features of American society. Zirin explores how Janet Jackson's Super Bowl flash-time show exposed more than a breast, why the labor movement has everything to learn from sports unions and why a new generation of athletes is no longer content to 'play one game at a time' and is starting to get political. What's My Name, Fool! draws on original interviews with former heavyweight champ George Foreman, Olympian and black power saluter John Carlos, NBA basketball player and anti-death penalty activist Etan Thomas, antiwar women's college hoopster Toni Smith, Olympic Project for Human Rights leader Lee Evans and many others.

Žižek, Slavoj (2008). Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
. New York, Picador.
Violence, Žižek states, takes three forms-subjective (crime, terror), objective (racism, hate-speech, discrimination), and systemic (the catastrophic effects of economic and political systems)-and often one form of violence blunts our ability to see the others, raising complicated questions.

Does the advent of capitalism and, indeed, civilization cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of 'the neighbour'? And could the appropriate form of action against violence today simply be to contemplate, to think?

Beginning with these and other equally contemplative questions, Žižek discusses the inherent violence of globalization, capitalism, fundamentalism, and language, in a work that will confirms his standing as one of our most erudite and incendiary modern thinkers.

Zola, Emile (2000). L'assommoir (The Dram Shop)
. London; New York, Penguin Books.
Not realism, but filth; not crudity, but pornography, is how one contemporary critic described L'Assommoir. The seventh novel in Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, it is Zola's monumental natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. The story of a good-hearted, but weak-willed and vulnerable laundress, L'Assommoir is widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece and was an immediate sensation, selling 50,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1877. This edition includes Zola's response to critics who denounced his work as immoral.

Written in gritty street language and unflinchingly portraying the darker side of French culture and society, L'Assommoir transcends Zola's stated intention to expose the powerful effects of heredity and environment on the human condition and, as Robin Buss writes in his Introduction, is marvelous, warm and human with a tragic heroine who is among the most touching and credible creations in all the literature of the nineteenth century.

Zola, Emile (1972). Nana
. [Harmondsworth, Eng., Baltimore], Penguin Books.
Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was a perfect target for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-si'ecle moral corruption. In this new translation, the fate of Nana--the Helen of Troy of the second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir--is now rendered in racy, stylish English.

Zola, Emile (1977). La Bête Humaine
. Harmondsworth, Eng.; New York, Penguin Books.
La Bete Humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Marcquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the Introduction and detailed Notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.

Zola, Emile; Alain Pagès, et al. (1996). The Dreyfus Affair: "J'accuse" and Other Writings
. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press.
Written in defense of the court-martialed French soldier Alfred Dreyfus, Zola's essay "J'accuse!" is one of the most famous pieces of rhetorical journalism ever published. This volume collects, for the first time in English, all of Zola's writings on the Dreyfus Affair. Zola's many essays and open letters balance a seething fury at injustice with unrelenting, fiercely logical assaults on Dreyfus's accusers. Balancing these polemics are Zola's poignant, sadly domestic letters home during the year he spent exiled in England after his 1898 libel conviction. Levieux's readable translation lets Zola's forceful, somewhat bombastic tone shine through. The volume is not really a history of the affair, and the notes by Pages (editor of the French edition of Zola's letters) are sparse. (A more comprehensive treatment is available in Jean-Denis Bredin's The Affair, Braziller, 1986.) Instead, the Yale volume is documentation of one man's extraordinary public efforts to clear another's name. Recommended for academic collections. - Robert Persing, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., Philadelphia

Zola, Emile and Roger Pearson (1993). The Masterpiece
. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist who has come from the provinces to conquer Paris but is conquered instead by the flaws of his own genius. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It provides a unique insight into Zola's career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.

Zola, Emile and Roger Pearson (2004). Germinal
. London, England; New York, N.Y., Penguin Books.
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!"

While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power in this new translation. The thirteenth book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

Zucman, Gabriel (2015). The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Zucman, a young French economist now at the London School of Economics and the University of California at Berkeley, has written a masterful survey of the origins, importance, and dangers of tax havens. The Hidden Wealth of Nations is a tremendously important contribution to the current discussion of how to adjust the world's income-tax systems, which are over a century old, to the realities of the 21st century.

Zweig, Stefan (2008). The Post-Office Girl
. New York, New York Review Books.
The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined.

But Christine's aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine's and Ferdinand's lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either their salvation or their doom.

Never before published in English, this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the masters of the psychological novel.

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