Books published by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

Illich suggests radical reforms for the education system to stop its headlong rush towards frustrated expectations and inequalities.

An essential, highly illustrated guide to cookery, entertaining, and home table design.

Rhidian Brook and family travel through devastated 'AIDS-lands' including India, Africa, and the Far East.

"An imaginary memoir" - with jazz-great Jelly Roll chattily reviewing his life and career one night in 1940, after-hours at Washington's Jungle Inn, shortly before his Los Angeles death. In understated, reasonably authentic language (slang, repetitions, digressions), the Creole pianist recalls his childhood in racially tense 1890s New Orleans, his attraction to all-black honky-tonks (where "you didn't have to act like no damned nigger"), his early keyboard triumphs in Florida, his pride and ambition: "I was always looking for someplace that was big enough for me and I'm still looking today." He tells anecdotes about rival piano-players, about a trip to color-blind Mexico, about his many girls and life on the road. (Contrary to rumor, however, he never pimped: "I never took nothing of what they made.") He touches on career-highlights - recordings, songwriting, brief appearances in N.Y., longer stints in L.A. and Chicago. And he occasionally goes into a little musical detail, distinguishing himself from other, more celebrated jazz giants - while proclaiming himself "the man who knew more about how jazz music was supposed to be played than anybody else in the world." Finally, however, though Charters is a veteran jazz-writer, this chronological monologue offers no clear projection of the musical history involved. Nor, on the other hand, despite the bits of romance and comedy, does the mock-testimony provide any novelistic shape or drama. Despite the conscientious, affectionate crafting here, then: a flat, unfocused slice of bio-fiction - marginally informative, mildly colorful. (Kirkus Reviews)

Jake Horsley seems to arrive from out of nowhere, yet here he is--an almost fully developed and only slightly stoned sensibility. . . He's a marvellous critic.--Pauline Kael

The 14th novel from a veteran writers' writer, now in her 86th year, who has for almost a half-century been lavishly praised for her verbal ingenuity and peevishly damned for her baroque fiction's frequent obscurity. The eponymous protagonist (and partial narrator) here is a 40ish nomad, on her own in New York City 20 years after being imprisoned for her complicity in a lethal bombing incident engineered by student revolutionaries. She has spent the ensuing years in and out of drug therapy and psychiatric hospitals. Almost immediately, Calisher ups the rhetorical ante, mingling first-person and omniscient narration and juxtaposing Carol's conversations with the exhausted "SW" (social worker) who visits her cold-water flat against verbal sparring with her street-person comrade Alphonse, an indigent actor. Her escape to a condemned storefront populated by homeless dropouts suits Carol's need to belong somewhere. Beyond this (early) point, little happens. Memories of her student days and of her childhood in Dedham, Massachusetts (raised by two aunts - one of whom, she guesses, was her mother), jostle against her infatuation, friendship, and disillusionment with a handsome South African actor who has his own demons to confront, off in a far different world. This inconclusive, almost inchoate novel lacks both development and tension, but is worth reading nonetheless for its knowledgeability (Calisher brilliantly describes the staging of a pompous piece of theatrical agitprop), really rather remarkable empathy with the city's festering downside, and the assured cadences of its precise, witty prose ("The virtue of the street is that you do not expect") One expects more from Calisher, but is grateful for even this otherwise flawed display of her unique, often haunting mastery of language. (Kirkus Reviews)