Table of Contents, November 8, 1979 - The New York Review of Books

Vasko Popa: Collected Poems 1943-1976 translated by Anne Pennington, with an introduction by Ted Hughes. The Persea Series of Poetry in Translation, general editor Daniel Weissbort

P.B. Medawar, Does Mind Matter?

The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism by Karl R. Popper, by John C. Eccles

Michael Wood, Harking and Barking

On Not Being Good Enough: Writings of a Working Critic by Roger Sale

Celebrations and Attacks: Thirty Years of Literary and Cultural Commentary by Irving Howe

The Good Word and Other Words by Wilfrid Sheed

Elaine H. Pagels, The Threat of the Gnostics

David P. Calleo, Felix Gilbert, The German Problem: An Exchange

Mary McCarthy, For Jim Farrell's Funeral

Letters

Harrison E. Salisbury, On Voznesensky
William Jay Smith, On Voznesensky
S. Frederick Starr, On Voznesensky
Ilya Levin, Clive James, On Voznesensky
S.L. Washburn, Marshall Sahlins, Montezuma's Zoo
Justus George Lawler, Geography
Graham Greene, You're Welcome
Barry Bingham, James MacGregor Byrne, et al. Fitting Lippmann Memorial

Contributors

John Ashbery is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

John Bayley has written two books about his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, Elegy for Iris and Iris and Her Friends. (July 2004)

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In 1916 his family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy. He died in 1997. For more information, see the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.

John Gregory Dunne's new novel, Nothing Lost, will be published in May. (January 2004)

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, essayist, and critic. Her political and social commentary, literary essays, and drama criticism appeared in magazines such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books, and were collected in On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy's Theatre Chronicles 1937-1962 (1963), The Writing on the Wall (1970), Ideas and the Novel (1980), and Occasional Prose (1985). Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942), The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), A Charmed Life (1955), The Group (1963), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1971). She was the author of three works of autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1987), and the unfinished Intellectual Memoirs (1992), and two travel books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). Her essays on the Vietnam War were collected in The Seventeenth Degree (1974); her essays on Watergate were collected in The Mask of State (1974).

Michael Wood is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. (April 2008)