Plunkett Lake Press: 163 books

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovály (68,000 words and 8 photographs) "A story of the human spirit as its most indomitable... one of the outstanding autobiographies of the century." San Francisco Chronicle "Once in a rare while we read...

The Question by Henri Alleg (with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre; translated from the French by John Calder; with an afterword by the author, a foreword by Ellen Ray and an introduction by James D. Le Sueur; 27,000 words) Henri Alleg’s candid account of how the French Army brutally...

Lucie Aubrac (1912-2007), born Bernard into a Catholic family of winegrowers, was teaching history in a Lyon high school and newly married to Raymond Samuel, a Jewish engineer, when World War II broke out and divided France. The couple, living in the Vichy zone, soon joined the Resistance movement...

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman (107,000 words) The late poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "I am enchanted. This book is graceful and profound." Since its publication in 1989, many other readers across the world have been enchanted by Lost in Translation:...

Meyer Schapiro: Portrait of an Art Historian by Helen Epstein (19,700 words) This is the only profile available of art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996). A polymath, revered for his extraordinary scholarship and teaching, he championed medieval studies, modern masters like Matisse and Picasso...

Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner (translated from the German by Oliver Pretzel; 78,000 words and 15 photographs) Defying Hitler was written in 1939 and focuses on the year 1933, when, as Hitler assumed power, its author was a 25-year-old German law student, in training to join the German...

The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi (with a new introduction by the author and a preface by Albert Camus; translated from the French by Edouard Roditi; 114,000 words) When The Pillar of Salt was first published in 1953, it caused a scandal in Tunis. Acclaimed sociologist Albert Memmi, the son...

The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Howard Greenfeld; introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre; 39,000 words) Written in 1956 when Morocco and Tunisia gained independence from France and soon after the Algerian war had started, this book describes the inescapable...

Shmuel Katz’s detailed and comprehensive biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) is an unabashedly partisan defense of one of the most complex Zionists of the early 20th century. Jabotinsky was a Russian poet, playwright, journalist, and novelist as well as the founder of Revisionist Zionism...

The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones, edited and abridged in one volume by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (244,000 words, 31 illustrations) Ernest Jones’s three-volume The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud was first published in the mid-1950s. This edited and abridged volume...

A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney by Susan Quinn (165,000 words, 35 photos) Karen Horney (1885-1952) is one of the great figures in psychoanalysis, an independent thinker who dared to take issue with Freud's views on women. One of the first female medical students in Germany, and...

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig (translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul, with a chronology of Stefan Zweig's life and a bibliography of works by and about Stefan Zweig in English by Randolph Klawiter; 186,000 words, 14 illustrations) Originally...

Music Talks: the lives of classical musicians by Helen Epstein (92,000 words) A collection of profiles of some of the world's most fascinating musicians, including the late Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Dorothy DeLay and the very lively James Galway and Yo-Yo Ma. Passed from hand...

Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898 and emigrated to New York with his family in 1906. Trained as a lithographer, Shahn created social realist paintings of controversial subjects such as Sacco and Vanzetti. He worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, and...