B. Traven’s last novel, first published in 1960 but never before released in English, features a larger-than-life heroine: Ms. Aslan Norval, an American millionairess with Hollywood roots and political schemes up her sleeve Though Aslan Norval is wealthy beyond measure and contentedly married to an aging businessman, she finds herself tormented with the desire to do something epic, something no man has dared to do: she decides to build a canal across the continental United States. With the help of an uncouth Korean War veteran—whom she appoints as her right-hand man and unlikely lover—she forms a public corporation. A congressional committee of investigators, prodded by lobbyists, tries to stop the venture; but the ensuing publicity arouses the civic-minded public, and “democratic process” insists that the canal be realized as a federal undertaking. Not only will the project relieve chronic unemployment and demobilize the armed forces, but it will also benefit the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, aid world shipping, and relieve the Cold War! Rediscovered after B. Traven’s death in 1969, Aslan Norval is a hidden gem now unearthed—the final novel from the brilliant and beloved mind behind the cult classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—shedding new light on the life and work of a mysterious literary giant.

One of the most mysterious of authors, B. Traven spent his early life in Germany as an actor and anarchist publisher using the name of Ret Marut, then emerged in Mexico as B. Traven, a literary champion of the proletariat. This work examines his career through the production of his 16 books (twelve novels, two novellas, a work of nonfiction, and a collection of short stories), to the production of the movie The Treasures of the Sierra Madre, where he emerged this time as Hal Croves. The bibliography, with 140 illustrations and 1200 entries, provides information on the publication of over a thousand editions of Traven's books. For the first time, information on the states and issues of many editions, including first editions published in Germany between 1926 and 1960, is provided. Includes an illustrated descriptive bibliography of all of the American and British first editions. An essential tool for collectors, book dealers, and librarians.

In this book, Roy Pateman provides the most reader-friendly, up to date biography of B. Traven, an enigmatic writer whose readership spread across broader class, race, and language divides more than anyone else writing during the twentieth century. This unconventional biography discusses Traven's alternative histories, followed by an attempt to find out the major influences of this elusive man. Pateman addresses Traven's politics, his life of humanist anarchism, and discusses all of his works (in English and German), emphasizing The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the "Jungle Sextet." Also included is a chronology of Traven's life, which is fuller than that found in any other study. The book ends with a modest solution to the intractable problem of who Traven really was and where he was born and raised.

This book addresses contemporary discourses on a wide variety of topics related to the ideological and epistemological changes of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and the ways in which they have shaped the Spanish language and cultural manifestations in both Spain and Hispanic America. The majority of the chapters are concerned with ‘otherness’ in its various dimensions; the alien Other – foreign, immigrant, ethnically different, disempowered, female or minor – as well as the Other of different sexual orientation and/or ideology. Following Octavio Paz, otherness is expressed as the attempt to find the lost object of desire, the frustrating endeavour of the androgynous Plato wishing to embrace the other half of Zeus, who in his wrath, tore off from him. Otherness compels human beings to search for the complement from which they were severed. Thus a male joins a female, his other half, the only half that not only fills him but which allows him to return to the unity and reconciliation which is restored in its own perfection, formerly altered by divine will. As a result of this transformation, one can annul the distance that keeps us away from that which, not being our own, turns into a source of anguish. The clashing diversity of all things requires the human predisposition to accept that which is different. Such a predisposition is an expression of epistemological, ethical and political aperture. The disposition to co-exist with the different is imagined in the de-anthropocentricization of the bonds with all living realms. And otherness is, in some way, the reflection of sameness (mismidad). The other is closely related to the self, because the vision of the other implies a reflection about the self; it implies, consciously or not, a relationship with the self. These topics are addressed in this book from an interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing arts, humanities and social sciences.

In this fascinating collection of essays Harvard Emeritus Professor Karl S. Guthke examines the ways in which, for European scholars and writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, world-wide geographical exploration led to an exploration of the self. Guthke explains how in the age of Enlightenment and beyond intellectual developments were fuelled by excitement about what Ulrich Im Hof called "the grand opening-up of the wide world”, especially of the interior of the non-European continents. This outward turn was complemented by a fascination with "the world within” as anthropology and ethnology focused on the humanity of the indigenous populations of far-away lands – an interest in human nature that suggested a way for Europeans to understand themselves, encapsulated in Gauguin’s Tahitian rumination "What are we?” The essays in the first half of the book discuss first- or second-hand, physical or mental encounters with the exotic lands and populations beyond the supposed cradle of civilisation. The works of literature and documents of cultural life featured in these essays bear testimony to the crossing not only of geographical, ethnological, and cultural borders but also of borders of a variety of intellectual activities and interests. The second section examines the growing interest in astronomy and the engagement with imagined worlds in the universe, again with a view to understanding homo sapiens, as compared now to the extra-terrestrials that were confidently assumed to exist. The final group of essays focuses on the exploration of the landscape of what was called "the universe within”; featuring, among a variety of other texts, Schiller’s plays The Maid of Orleans and William Tell, these essays observe and analyse what Erich Heller termed "The Artist’s Journey into the Interior.” This collection, which travels from the interior of continents to the interior of the mind, is itself a set of explorations that revel in the discovery of what was half-hidden in language. Written by a scholar of international repute, it is eye-opening reading for all those with an interest in the literary and cultural history of (and since) the Enlightenment.

“Traven’s philosophical anarchism . . . his love of individual liberty and the primitive past could . . . command as much reverence . . . as . . . Henry David Thoreau.” ―William Weber Johnson, Los Angeles Times A cult masterpiece—the adventure novel that inspired John Huston’s Academy-award winning film, by the elusive author who was a model for the hero of Roberto Bolano's 2666. Little is known for certain about B. Traven. Evidence suggests that he was born Otto Feige in Schlewsig-Holstein and that he escaped a death sentence for his involvement with the anarchist underground in Bavaria. Traven spent most of his adult life in Mexico, where, under various names, he wrote several bestsellers and was an outspoken defender of the rights of Mexico's indigenous people. First published in 1935, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Traven's most famous and enduring work, the dark, savagely ironic, and riveting story of three down-and-out Americans hunting for gold in Sonora. “He tells his story better than the best storytellers; delves deeper into characters than most so-called psychological writers. All the virility, terseness and tension that Hemingway worked so hard for . . . seem to be Traven's by birthright.” ―Hugo award-winning author John Anthony West, Books and Bookmen