This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are
not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch
with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of
Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the
best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory
standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays
creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest or
charm will be eligible for inclusion. Nor will the attempt be made to
select books that merely confirm American standards of taste or
morals, since the series is intended to serve as a mirror of European
culture and not as a glass through which it may be seen darkly.
Fiction will predominate, but belles lettres, poetry, philosophy,
social and economic discussion, history, biography, and other fields
will be represented.
"The first organized effort to bring into English a series
of the really significant figures in contemporary European
literature.... An undertaking as creditable and as ambitious
as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic."--_New
York Evening Post._
THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By J. WASSERMANN. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn.
Two volumes. (Second printing.)
One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about
the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age
yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper
classes of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the
Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty
and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world.
"A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to
hear."--H. W. Boynton, in the _Weekly Review_.
PEOPLE. By PIERRE HAMP. Translated by James Whitall. With an
Introduction by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a
working man, who in these stories of the French underworld expresses
the new self-consciousness of the worker's outlook.
THE NEW SOCIETY. By WALTER RATHENAU. Translated by Arthur Windham.
One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents
his vision of the new society emerging out of the War.
DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By REMY DE
GOURMONT. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley.
The first authorized version of the critical work of one of the great
aesthetic thinkers of France.