Readers will get a gift at the beginning of the New Year. Two new Ayn Rand books, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and The Ayn Rand Reader, will be released on December 28 and January 11 respectively.
     Return of the Primitive (Meridian/Plume) is edited by Peter Schwartz, chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), and contains new essays by him about feminism, environmentalism and multiculturalism.
     Return of the Primitive updates and expands Ayn Rand's 1971 book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and presents her identifications of the intellectual roots and goals of the New Left, a '60s ideology opposed to industrial society. In his essays, Peter Schwartz explains how that same philosophy -- in a different guise -- permeates our culture today.
     The Ayn Rand Reader (Penguin/Plume) is jointly edited by Gary Hull, a philosophy professor, and Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's close colleague for 30 years and the foremost authority on her philosophy of Objectivism. The Ayn Rand Reader combines, for the first time in one volume, extensive excerpts from all of Ayn Rand's novels (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living and Anthem) and from her non-fiction work. The fiction excerpts present her dramatic, man-glorifying universe. The nonfiction excerpts explain Objectivism's fundamental ideas, such as reason, rational selfishness and laissez-faire capitalism. For example, Ayn Rand's essay "Man's Rights" is used to explain the foundations of individual rights and capitalism.
     The Ayn Rand Reader is recommended both to readers new to Ayn Rand and to those already familiar with her work.
     Ayn Rand's books continue to sell more than 300,000 copies every year. A film about her life, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, was nominated for a 1997 Academy Award as best feature-length documentary.