A man searches two continents for a beautiful woman he caught a glimpse of in Spain. As Lucas, a New York journalist pursues the object of his obsession, he runs into one misadventure after another, all the way to Death Row. A black comedy.

When Lucas, a down at heel New Yorker, catches a glimpse of a woman in a small Spanish town, his life takes a radical turn. His only link to her is the man who was with her at the time. He is a financier involved in a plot to get hold of all the great art of Europe and replace it by copies.The story becomes an intricate puzzle in which Lucas trails the man and winds up arrested for his murder. He is on death row in a US prison when the woman finds him and saves him."Intense passion," "artistic elegance", are two ways the reviewers have characterized it in many enthusiastic reviews.

During the plague year of 1358, Heron, a French student, decides to walk to the sea and then to seek passage to England. His journey symbolizes freedom, as he turns his back on both the ruling oligarchy and the peasant armies forming all over Europe. He travels through a chaotic wasteland, where armies clash for unknown reasons, where the barren countryside is plagued by robbers and warlords. He meets death, destruction, and famine before finally finding Claudia, the daughter of a medieval lord. Heron’s quest, stemming from a desire to create an ideal world out of a violently cruel one, leads him through despair and danger, before delivering him to love. Originally published in 1961, A Walk with Love and Death was the third novel by Hans Koning (Koningsberger) and was directed as a film by John Huston in 1969.

This is the first in a continuing series of reminders that the past informs the present as it infuses the future. As Benj DeMott notes, the aim of First of the Year is to define "the democratic imperatives and demotic tones that make our ongoing politics of culture matter." This annual publication is grounded in the needs of "dissed" people: disenfranchised, disadvantaged, disinherited, discomfited, and dismissed. But the concept has been sharpened to acknowledge that though the underdog is owed sympathy, the mad dog is owed a bullet. In short, First of the Year is very much an effort of the twenty-first century.The publication aims to be more than a launching pad for writers. It attempts to bridge the gap between radical perspectives without losing focus on the centrality of African-American culture to the national conversation. The coming together of figures like Armond White, Kate Millett, Lorenzo Thomas, Russell Jacoby, Adolph Reed, and Amiri Baraka is quite unlike what can be found in standard literary and social publications. They treat the African-American condition as a policy issue or an executive summary report--not as a touchstone for the state of the nation as a whole.The initial volume also deals extensively and seriously with the issue of humanism and terror, the nature of social movements, electoral and urban politics, and the musical trends of our time. It does so with a sense of urgency often denied in mainstream literary reviews. Issues of "standards" are addressed from the angle of African-American cultural traditions, and the mind-body problem as a matter of race not just of metaphysics. In a nutshell, this volume intends to open a new chapter in the Harlem Renaissance; or better, an American renaissance with a Harlem lilt. First of the Year is an attempt to make political arguments breathe through cultural voices. Contributors include Sheldon Wolin, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Berman, Cha