The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 64
Release: 1958
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811205566

Henry Miller called The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder his "most singular story."

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 64
Release: 1974-01-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811224384

Henry Miller called The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder his “most singular story.” First published in 1959, this touching fable tells of Auguste, a famous clown who could make people laugh but who sought to impart to his audiences a lasting joy. Originally inspired by a series of circus and clown drawings by the cubist painter Femand Léger, Miller eventually used his own decorations to accompany the text in their stead. “Undoubtedly," he says in his explanatory epilogue, °‘it is the strangest story I have yet written. . . . No, more even than all the stories which I based on fact and experience is this one the truth. My whole aim in writing has been to tell the truth, as I know it. Heretofore all my characters have been real, taken from life, my own life. Auguste is unique in that he came from the blue. But what is this blue which surrounds and envelopes us if not reality itself? . . . We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is."

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1957-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0811219704

In his great triptych "The Millennium," Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. In his great triptych “The Millennium,” Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller’s title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller’s life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for fifteen years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place—one of the most colorful in the United States—and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable, like Conrad Moricand, the “Devil in Paradise” who is one of Miller’s greatest character studies. Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book—the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and clichés of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1962
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811203227

One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays. Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which have gone out of print. Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way"--a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he "ever thought about money." His deep concern for the role of the artist in society appears in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel is My Watermark" he writes of his own passionate love affair with painting. "The Immorality of Morality" is an eloquent discussion of censorship. Some of the stories, such as "First Love," are autobiographical, and there are portraits of friends, such as "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light," and essays on other writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Ionesco. Taken together, these highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature with Tropic of Cancer and other great books.

The Henry Miller Reader

The Henry Miller Reader
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1969
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811201117

A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence Durrell.

Aller Retour New York

Aller Retour New York
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 100
Release: 1993
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811212267

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.

Henry Miller

Henry Miller
Author: Lawrence J. Shifreen
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 1979
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780810811713

No descriptive material is available for this title.

The Angle

The Angle
Author: Shane Sardi
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2010-06-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453500065

The Angle is about a man who does not exist. Yet while dealing with his anonymity, finds himself in a love story on its way to an awakening through a path of literature. The Angle itself happens to be an affliction inside the mind of our anti-hero, rendering, or rather exuding its three conditions that plague him. His mission, aided by his brother, poetic smoke, messages in the mail, and a cast of literary characters rounds out his plight. Through his mute assistant teana, he discovers enlightenment and realization for the first time in his life.

Henry Miller

Henry Miller
Author: Esta Lou Riley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 1961
Genre: Bibliography
ISBN: