Everyman’s Library was founded on February 15, 1906 with the publication by Joseph Dent (1849-1926) of fifty titles. Dent, a master London bookbinder turned publisher, was a classic Victorian autodidact. The tenth child of a Darlington housepainter, he had left school at thirteen, and arrived in London with half-a-crown in his pocket.
Dent promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’, so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him with a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life.’ It is now published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Random House UK abroad. It brings this reader great memories to see these titles and to remember reading some of them in their older editions. My copy of Heinrich Heine's Prose and Poems has long ago lost it's green dust jacket and shows tears along the binding from one of my dogs gnawing her way into the tasty, congealed glue inside. Worn and battered, It's one of my favorite treasures. Below is a list of reprints they currently market as The 100 Essential Titles. One might carp that the list is decidedly British, or that it omits many great titles, but their publication list is peppered with some of the world's greatest works as well.
The Aeneid by Virgil The Analects by Confucius Animal Farm by George Orwell Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon Beloved by Toni Morrison The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Carried Away by Alice Munro The Castle by Franz Kafka Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler Collected Stories by Roald Dahl Collected Stories by Franz Kafka Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Dubliners by James Joyce Essays by George Orwell The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad The Histories by Herodotus A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende The Human Factor by Graham Greene The Iliad by Homer Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot Moby-Dick by Herman Melville Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf My Ántonia by Willa Cather The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell The Odyssey by Homer Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov A Passage to India by E. M. Forster The Periodic Table by Primo Levi The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth The Republic by Plato Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov The Stranger by Albert Camus Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, TheEnglish Teacher by R. K. Narayan Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith The Trial by Franz Kafka The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Ulysses by James Joyce Walden by Henry David Thoreau We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo
** Another interesting reprint series I discovered recently is published by the New York Review of Books (NYRB). I believe that they're all 20th century authors, but a tasty grouping of novels, stories and essays it is. Lots of authors I've never read. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/ (Drat and fuck, my link thingy doesn't work, you'll have to drag and drop it).
“Fred forgot three things in a row before he reached the front door on his way to work.Then he remembered that he had wanted to take the paper with him.Dorothy didn’t bother to say that she hadn’t finished with it yet herself.She just went back and brought it to him.He dithered for a few more minutes, patting his pockets and wondering whether he ought to take an umbrella.She told him the answers to all his questions and slipped in several more of her own:would he need the umbrella if he had the car, did he really think it felt like rain?If his car had that funny noise, couldn’t he take the bus instead, and had he found the other umbrella yet?It must be at the office somewhere; it was a nice telescoping one and she suggested that someone else had walked off with it.”—Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls
"It was a death that began it all and another death that led us on.The first was of the man called Brendan and I saw the moment of it.I saw them gather round and crouch over him in the bitter cold, then start back to give the soul passage.It was as if they played his death for me and this was a strange thing, as they did not know I watched, and I did not then know what they were.
Strange too that I should have been led to them, whether by angels or demons, at a time when my folly had brought me to such great need.I will not hide my sins, or what is the worth of absolution?That very day hunger had brought me to adultery and through adultery I had lost my cloak.”—Morality Play, Barry Unsworth
“I was in trouble.An English poet (now dead) had sued me over a novel I had written because it was based in part on an episode from his life.Worse, my publishers in the United States and England had capitulated to this poet, pulling the novel out of bookstores and pulping several thousand copies.
Why should I have been surprised?My publishers were once Salman Rushdie’s publishers too.”--The Term Paper Artist, David Leavitt
“Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt.”—Persuassion, Jane Austen
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, a three, on the teeth.Lo.Lee.Ta.
She was lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten inone sock.She was Lola in slacks.She was Dolly at school.She was Dolores on the dotted line.But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor?She did, indeed she did.In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita a all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.In a princedom by the sea.Oh when?About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.Look at this tangle of thorns.”—Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
"He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square. It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o'clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him any more--you took the best, so why not take the rest?--but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the endless stairs into the street. He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realized too late, as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he had nowhere to go."--Another Country, James Baldwin
“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.”—Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parblly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn’t ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”—Ridley Walker, Russell Hoban
“The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from its mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.”—Life and Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
“There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was traveling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the a-periodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapour in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.”—The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
He lies naked on a bed with his wrists bound, legs splayed, ankles secured to the corners. Striped sheet, tangled blanket. In the first shot his long, straight black hair's fallen over his face, covering everything but a greasy chin, which guts through the strands. He seems thirteen, fourteen. he genitals look like a weirdly shaped stone. His necktie is made out of a long piece of rope."--Frisk, Dennis Cooper
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."--The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”—Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
“They sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Another night. Another drag of a night in the Greeks, a beatup all night diner near the Brooklyn Armybase. Once in a while a doggie or seaman came in for a hamburger and played the jukebox. But they usually played some goddam hillbilly record. They tried to get the Greek to take those records off, but hed tell them no. They come in and spend money. You sit all night and buy nothing. Are yakiddin me Alex? Ya could retire on the money we spend in here. Scatah. You don’t pay my carfare . . .”—Last Exit To Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.
“Obedient to the social law that makes the moot guest the early bird at a tea party, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia. The past cannot be discarded in a single gesture, and Joe, in real life a diabetic business man from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to et more out of it than anybody else. This determination was purely spiritual. Translated from his factory and his garden to this heavenly mountain-top, he intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists. He meant no evil by this; he called it leadership.”—The Oasis, Mary McCarthy
“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”—At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
“What makes Iago Evil? some people ask. I never ask."—Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
“In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jaimie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.”—Angels, Denis Johnson
“My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance of a man named Norton who was working in a shipyard at the time. Norton, whose real name was Morelli or something like that, had been discharged from the peacetime Army for forging a pay check, and was classified 4-F for reasons of bad character. He looked like George Raft, but was taller. Norton was trying to improve his English and achieve a smooth, affable manner. Affability, however, did not come natural to him. In repose, his expression was sullen and mean, and you knew he always had that mean look when you turned your back.”—Junky, William S. Burroughs
“It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.
Odd to be so governed by an appetite,
It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.”—The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
“Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.
Remember Pershing Square and the apathetic palmtrees. Central Park and the frantic shadows. Movie theaters in the angry morning-hours. And wounded Chicago streets . . . Horrormovie courtyards in the French Quarter—tawdry Mardi Gras floats with clowns tossing out glass beads, passing dumbly like life itself . . . Remember rock-n-roll sexmusic blasting from jukeboxes leering obscenely, blinking manycolored along the streets of America strung like a cheap necklace from 42nd Street to Market Street, San Francisco . . .”—City of Night, John Rechy
"It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark, as they handed neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter at Whiteley's and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, and business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like caravans perpetually marching,--so it seemed to those who had any reason to pause, say, to post a letter, or at a club window in Piccadilly."--The Years, Virginia Woolf
"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he'd forgotten he had one."--The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
“I’m born in the late autumn or winter of 1827.
Troy, New York.
My childhood is happy, and my parents allow me to do whatever I please as long as I, by my actions, don’t infringe on their high social standing. My father is a great and wealthy man, a tall man, whom I look up to. As a child, among my dolls, I feel safe. I will never die. No one can hurt me. My mother, my father, my two older sisters, my younger sister, and my brother often ignore me, or promise to love me, give me a present, then don’t; and I cry. My name at this time is Charlotte Wood.”—Portrait of an Eye, Kathy Acker
“This is the record of a box man.
I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it on over my head.
That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me. A box man, in his box, is recording the chronicle of a box man.”—The Box Man, Kobo Abe (trans. E. Dale Saunders)
"Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution, and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley.From there, one day in the early spring, walking with a tree limb as a cane, came Balamir, walking with a shadow and with a step that was not free, to fall under the eye and hand of Madame Snow.All of Balamir’s demented brothers, in like manner, had been turned out to wander far from the gravel paths, to seek anyone who would provide a tin plate or a coveted drink.Madame Snow made room for him, setting him at work digging in the basement, in the bunker, and the black air closed in about the piles of debris and he was homesick.”—The Cannibal, John Hawkes
* I intend to add a further grouping of Foreign Language "Novel Beginnings" at some point in my wastrelly future. I'm no Ezra Pound to learn languages in order to catch each nuance of an original work, therefore, as a common reader I'm gratefully indebted to those translators who do.
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream- ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau- tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
--James Tate
###############
The Cobweb
A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck of the house. From there I could see and hear the water, and everything that's happened to me all these years. It was hot and still. The tide was out. No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing a cobweb touched my forehead. it caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned and went inside. There was no wind. The sea was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade. Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath touches it. A fine thread. Intricate. Before long, before anyone realizes, I'll be gone from here.
--Raymond Carver
###############
The Wife
My husband sucks her tits. He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive. Toward that outer love. I wait in the hotel until four. I lurch from the bed talking to myself, watch my face in the mirror. I change my eyes, making them darker. Take it easy, I say. It is a long time to wait in, this order of reality. My presence stings. I grow specific without consequence.
--Linda Gregg
###############
Like They Say
Underneath the tree on some soft grass I sat, I
watched two happy woodpeckers be dis-
turbed by my presence. And why not, I thought to
myself, why not.
--Robert Creeley
###############
23rd Street Runs Into Heaven
You stand near the window as lights wink On along the street. Somewhere a trolley, taking Shopgirls and clerks home, clatters through This before-supper Sabbath. An alley cat cries To find the garbage cans sealed; newsboys Begin their murder-into-pennies round.
We are shut in, secure for a little, safe until Tomorrow. You slip your dress off, roll down Your stockings, careful against runs. Naked now, With soft light on soft flesh, you pause For a moment; turn and face me-- Smile in a way that only women know Who have lain long with their lover And are made more virginal.
Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful.
--Kenneth Patchen ###############
Ember Days
Dear Maker, I've failed. Lost my tongue. Put words back in my mouth again, or blackberries maybe, and concepts back in my head. Lead me down into your backyard which never ceases, with its apricots and onyx, its green breath and feces, being Eden. --Amy Gerstler
###############
In The Suburbs
There's no way out. You were born to waste your life. You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you Were born to walk in procession To the temple, singing.
--Louis Simpson ###############
May 4, Thursday
Since you began loving me the dogs no longer bark at me only a little bird spattered me with its droppings
--Christa Reinig
###############
Passengers
The world will burst like an intestine in the sun, the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name, but there will always be somebody riding the bus through these intersections strewn with broken glass among speechless women beating their little ones, always a slow alphabet of rain speaking of drifting and perishing to the air, always these definite jails of light in the sky at the wedding of this clarity and this storm and a woman's turning--her languid flight of hair traveling through frame after frame of memory where the past turns, its face sparking like emery, to open its grace and incredible harm over my life, and I will never die.
--Denis Johnson
################
Harvest
A few rats are gnawing along the floor of the silo, but what are a few rats against this tower of food? It takes 75,000 crocus blossoms to make a pound of saffron,
And after today out there in the heat, nobody dreams of food. In our dream, Mary Slater swings higher and higher on the vine over the Haskins' creek, and disappears.
Funny how the youth's assessment of social ills in the 1960's has become part of the world's modern myth. Of course that was before all those members of S.D.S. or the Communist Party became parents in the suburbs with professional jobs, kids in expensive private schools, German luxury cars, and politics that reflect their parents more than they reflect Marxism or even reform.
So, I often want to shrink into a ball when someone cites the 1960's as a milestone in their life. You know, Woodstock; Herbert Marcuse; Huey Newton; Hal Ashby movies; the Baader-Meinhoff gang; the French Strike in 1968; Bergman's psychological quagmires; re-reading Genet, Brecht, Beckett, De Beauvoir, Camus, Angela Davis; because none of it ever, ever, ever equated to giving power to the common people. It was all pornography to excite, but at the end of the day when cum had hardened atop the sheets of global youth, nothing was accomplished. We had merely created a new generation of consumers and cheerleaders on the wrong side of class war.
But I must admit, at one time change seemed palpable. Recently, I've been reading about the Japanese New Wave in Film which stretched roughly from the late 1950's to the early 1970's. Japan during that period experienced a turbulent epoch. America, both as victor and occupier, had enforced its post-WWII governmental strictures and built American military bases across Japan for future incursions into Asia: digging in for the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the suppression of Japan's intellectual community which was largely anti-American, anti-Military, pro-confrontation.
Unfortunately, many of the Japanese movies from the early New Wave directors are difficult to find today, though some have found their way into cinematheques or University archives. Criterion's collection of re-issues on dvd includes some of the New Wave titles; and foreign bootlegs, though often of poor quality, are also a source. Their rediscovered popularity in the West seems to stem solely from the surface narratives, kitsch factor, and violence. I say that because very few Westerners know anything about Japanese politics and cultural complications during the time these films were produced, which is usually the heart of each film's substance. I'm not an exception to the large group of Americans that know virtually nothing about Japan during the post war economic boom days. It's partially why I find these films so intriguing. At the time of their release many of these films were unpopular with the studios and the public. This new generation of directors had superseded the entrenched post-war Humanists personified by Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kinoshita. They were a technically proficient group of former assistants who had attended Japan's best universities during a time of angry demands from the organized student population. Anti-governmental demonstrations, anti-American demonstrations and riots defined the era. Youth, violence, sex and politics became the thematic building blocks for these fresh directors who became known as Japan's New Wave.
Here's a list of some of the major films from the group I've mentioned. Some of these directors continued to make good films long after the era of the New Wave had ended, even into the new millennium, but their revolutionary spirit and subject matter had reached an end. Japan had changed, the world had changed, the directors and writers had changed and certainly the movie-going public had grown new interests. But the films are well worth digging out and watching. Netflix may offer some, perhaps good libraries and video stores make some of them available. Here goes:
1956 Children Who Draw-- Susumu Hani Punishment Room--Kon Ichikawa Crazed Fruit--Ko Nakahira Suzaki Paradise--Kawashima Yuzo
1957 Kisses--Yasuzo Masumura Warm Current--Yasuzo Masumura The Sun's Legend--Kawashima Yuzo
1959 The Diary of Sueko (My Second Brother)--Shohei Imamura The Assignation--Ko Nakahira A Town of Love and Hope--Nagisa Oshima
1960 Bad Boys--Susumu Hani Crazy Season--Koreyoshi Kurahara Cruel Story of Youth--Nagisa Oshima The Sun's Burial--Nagisa Oshima Night and Fog in Japan--Nagisa Oshima Naked Island--Kaneto Shindo One Way Ticket for Love--Masahiro Shinoda Youth in Fury (Dry Lake) --Masahiro Shinoda Volunteering for Villainy--Tsutomu Tamura Only She Knows--Osamu Takahashi Marriage with the Dead--Osamu Takahashi Good-for-Nothing--Yoshishinge Yoshida Blood is Dry--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1961 Pigs and Battleships--Shohei Imamura The Catch--Nagisa Oshima My Red Face in the Sunset--Masahiro Shinoda Shamisen and Motorcycle--Masahiro Shinoda
1962 A Full Life--Susumu Hani The Revolutionary--Nagisa Oshima Tears on the Lion's Mane--Masahiro Shinoda Our Marriage--Masahiro Shinoda Pitfall--Hiroshi Teshigahara Bitter End of a Sweet Night--Yoshishinge Yoshida Akitsu Springs--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1963 She and He--Susumu Hani The Insect Woman--Shohei Imamura Pale Flower--Masahiro Shinoda Kanto Wanderer--Seijun Suzuki Woman In The Dunes--Hiroshi Teshigahara 18 Roughs (18 Who Stir Up a Storm)--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1964 Intentions of Murder--Shohei Imamura Assassination--Masahiro Shinoda Gate of Flesh--Seijun Suzuki Tattooed Life--Seijun Suzuki Escape From Japan--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1965 The Song of Bwana Toshi--Susumu Hani Diary of Yunbogi Boy--Nagisa Oshima Pleasures of the Flesh--Nagisa Oshima With Beauty and Sorrow--Masahiro Shinoda Joy Girls--Seijun Suzuki Secret Act Inside Walls--Koji Wakamatsu A Story Written with Water--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1966 Bride of the Andes--Susumu Hani The Pornographers--Shohei Imamura Tattoo--Yasuzo Masumura Red Angel--Yasuzo Masumura Sea of Youth--Shinsuke Ogawa Violence at Noon--Nagisa Oshima Onibaba--Kaneto Shindo Honno (Lost Sex)--Kaneto Shindo Punishment Island--Masahiro Shinoda Fighting Elegy--Seijun Suzuki Tokyo Drifter--Seijun Suzuki The Face of Another--Hiroshi Teshigahara The Embryo Hunts in Secret--Koji Wakamatsu Woman of the Lake--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1967 A Man Vanishes--Shoehei Imamura Japanese Summer: Double Suicide--Nagisa Oshima A Treatise on a Japanese Bawdy Song--Nagisa Oshima Clouds at Sunset--Masahiro Shinoda Branded to Kill--Seijun Suzuki Violated Women in White--Koji Wakamatsu Flame of Feeling--Yoshishinge Yoshida Flame and Women--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1968 Sexual Play--Masao Adachi Inferno of First Love--Susumu Hani The Profound Desire of the Gods--Shohei Imamura Death by Hanging--Nagisa Oshima Three Resurrected Drunkards--Nagisa Oshima Kukoneko--Kaneto Shindo The Ruined Map--Hiroshi Teshigahara Affair in the Snow--Yoshishinge Yoshida Farewell to the Summer Light--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1969 Aido--Susumu Hani Funeral Parade of Roses--Toshio Matsumoto Diary of a Shinjuku Thief--Nagisa Oshima Boy--Nagisa Oshima Double Suicide--Masahiro Shinoda Eros Plus Massacre--Yoshishige Yoshida Go, Go Second Time Virgin--Koji Wakamatsu
1970 History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess--Shohei Imamura The Man Who Left His Will on Film--Nagisa Oshima Buraikan--Shuji Terayama Angelic Orgasm--Koji Wakamatsu
1971 Red Army--Adachi Masao Pandemonium--Toshio Masumoto The Ceremony--Nagisa Oshima Silence--Masahiro Shinoda Emperor Tomato Ketchup--Shuji Terayama Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go Into the Streets--Shuji Terayama Summer Soldiers--Hiroshi Teshigahara Heroic Purgatory--Yoshishinge Yoshida Confessions Among Actresses--Yoshishinge Yoshida
1972 Dear Summer Sister--Nagisa Oshima
1973 The Making of a Prostitute--Shohei Imamura Coup d'Etat--Yoshishige Yoshida
30 Films in which superior actresses embodied tortured characters whose effects resonate long after viewing. Many were recipients of awards or critical praise. A few have been overlooked in this country due to our provincial bias against "foreign films." I recommend them all. There is no discernible order. At one time or another, I've had a crush on most of these actresses.
01. Eva Mattes—GERMANY , PALE MOTHER (Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1980) 02.Gena Rowlands—WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (John Cassavetes, 1974) 03.Charlize Theron—MONSTER (Patty Jenkins, 2003) 04.Anne Bancroft—THE PUMPKIN EATER (Jack Clayton, 1964) 05.Emily Watson—BREAKING THE WAVES (Lars von Trier,1996) 06.Maggie Smith—LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE (Jack Clayton, 1987) 07.Harriet Andersson—THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (Ingmar Bergman, 1961) 08.Oksana Akinshina--LILYA 4-EVER (Lukas Moodysson, 2002)
09.Jessica Lange—BLUE SKY (Tony Richardson, 1994) 10.Angela Winkler—THE LOST HONOR OF KATARINA BLUM (Volker Schlondorff & Margarethe von Trotta, 1975)
11.Joanne Woodward—W.U.S.A. (Stuart Rosenberg, 1970) 12.Dame Edith Evans—THE WHISPERERS (Bryan Forbes, 1967) 13.Amanda Plummer—BUTTERFLY KISS (Michael Winterbottom, 1995) 14.Kinuyo Tanaka—LIFE OF OHARU (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952) 15.Bjork—DANCER IN THE DARK (Lars von Trier, 2000) 16.Myrian Mezieres—A FLAME IN MY HEART (Alain Tanner, 1987) 17.Catherine Deneuve—REPULSION (Roman Polanski, 1965) 18.Elizabeth Taylor—WHOSE AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (Mike Nichols, 1966) 19.Isabelle Huppert—THE PIANO TEACHER (Michael Haneke, 2001) 20.Lisbeth Movin--DAY OF WRATH (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943)
21.Eihi Shiina—AUDITION (Takashi Miiki, 1999) 22.Anna Magnani—L’AMORE (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) 23.Olivia de Havilland—THE SNAKE PIT (Anatole Litvak, 1948) 24.Ingrid Bergman—GASLIGHT (George Cukor, 1944) 25.Patty Duke—THE MIRACLE WORKER (Arthur Penn, 1966) 26.Tuesday Weld—PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (Frank Perry, 1972) 27.Yael Abecassis--KADOSH (Amos Gitai. 1999)
28.Kitty Winn—PANIC IN NEEDLEPARK (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971) 29.Mari Torocsik—ELECTRA, MY LOVE (Miklos Jancso, 1974) 30.Piper Laurie--THE HUSTLER (Robert Rossen, 1961)
