The Angel Max is a truly original novel, written in a prose that is at once detached and cool, intelligent and compassionate, sensitive and perceptive. Much of the power of the novel comes from the tone of this prose, but the story itself is powerful as well. It's one of the best novels I've read in recent years.

Besides being an engrossing historical novel, The Angel Max features some of the most finely crafted prose you'll find anywhere, as well as a narrator (Max himself) whose internal conflicts provide a fascinating and singular point of view, a combination the Times review calls "airless", but which I found gave the novel the extra quality that makes it far more than the usual historical novel. This one's also for people looking for great literature.

The Angel Max is a wonderfully written novel about an immigrant from Russia (Lithuania) who arrives in New York in the 1880's. What unfolds in this book is a solidly researched history of immigration, anarchism in America, and the City of New York. The way the story folds factual material into the fictional lives of Max and Fanny Kraft is interesting and fun to read and ponder. There is gentle humor, along with anxiety and sadness in this family, as there is in life for all of us. The book concludes in 1919, an important "threshold" year in American history. This is a great read---go get it today! Peter Glassgold is one terrific writer!

Emma Goldman's magazine Mother Earth was one of the best and liveliest anarchist publications at the beginning of the 20th Century, but until this book was published almost everything which ever appeared in Mother Earth was nearly impossible to find. Peter Glassgold has done a fine job of culling some of the best works from the 5,000 or so pages of Mother Earth into this generous and fascinating collection.

The book is separated into six sections: Anarchism, The Woman Question, Literature, Civil Liberties, The Social War, and War and Peace. Within these sections are articles by classic anarchist writers such as Alexander Berkman, Ben Reitman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Peter Kropotkin, and Goldman herself. There are also a number of works by writers you might not expect to appear in such a book: Eugene O'Neill (what is suspected to be his first publication), Ben Hecht, Louise Bryant, Margaret Sanger, and Maxim Gorky. Peter Glassgold provides an informative and readable introduction, and there is a comprehensive index as well as a section of photographs, mostly of the covers of issues of Mother Earth (some by Man Ray).

Everyone interested in the history of anarchism, radical politics, and 20th-century thought should own this book.

This book is pure unaduterated wisdom and spiritual insight. A must read.

The passage of nearly 40 years, has shown the test of time for the following poets featured in New Directions 18: Gregory Corso, Russell Edson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Thomas Merton. They and many others prove this collection to be worthy of any collector studying the early work of these famous writers.

Editor James Laughlin provides an "exhibition gallery in book form" for experimental and unconventional writing including a previously unpublished film scenario by Lorca, seven poems and a translation by the late Denise Levertov plus five zany parables from a young Russell Edson. This is fine reading with a historical look back into the early Sixties.