“Passport to Paris is one of the great neglected memoirs of the 20th-century arts. The cosmopolitan composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, succeeded not only in living a mesmerizing life but also in telling his story with incomparable novelistic flair. A sampling of Duke’s California poetry augments the allure of an essential republication.”—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism“P...

When his friend George Gershwin persuaded Vladimir Dukelsky to change his name to Vernon Duke, what the music world already knew became apparent to the public at large—the man had two musical personas—one as a composer, the other as a tunesmith. One wrote highbrow music, the other lowbrow. Yet the two sides complemented each other. Neither could function without the other.Born and classically trained in imperial Russia, Vladimir Dukelsky (1903–1969) fled the Bolshevik Revolution wi...

The demons listed in The Lesser Key of Solomon are waiting to answer your questions and obtain your requests. The oldest known example of The Lesser Key, preserved in the British Museum, dates from the 16th century and almost certainly has no real connection with the King of Israel. When you desire to invoke demons, you need only to call them by their Names, and they will come to you.Each has his own special interests and field of influence including: punishment of the wicked; pride...

In this deft analysis, Vernon Shetley shows how writers and readers of poetry, operating under very different conventions and expectations, have drifted apart, stranding the once-vital poetic enterprise on the distant margins of contemporary culture. Along with a clear understanding of where American poetry stands and how it got there, After the Death of Poetry offers a compelling set of prescriptions for its future, prescriptions that might enable the art to regain its lost statu...

In Bad Colonists Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves provide a window into the fantasies and realities of colonial life by presenting separate sets of letters by two late-nineteenth-century British colonists of the South Pacific: Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke. Thomas and Eves frame the letters—addressed mostly to the colonists’ mothers—with commentary that explores colonial degeneration in the South Pacific. Using critical anthropology and theories of history-making to view the l...