books tagged “1970s”

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  • American Pastoral
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 0375701427 (0-375-70142-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Philip Roth's 22nd book takes a life-long view of the American experience in this thoughtful investigation of the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the '60s. Returning again to the voice of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth is at the top of his form. His prose is carefully controlled yet always fresh and intellectually subtle as he reconstructs the halcyon days, circa World War II, of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a high school sports hero and all-around Great Guy who wants nothing more than to live in tranquillity. But as the Swede grows older and America crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence. [via]

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  • The Andromeda Strain
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0345378482 (0-345-37848-2)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Some biologists speculate that if we ever make contact with extraterrestrials, those life forms are likely to be--like most life on earth--one-celled or smaller creatures, more comparable to bacteria than little green men. And even though such organisms would not likely be able to harm humans, the possibility exists that first contact might be our last.

    That's the scientific supposition that Michael Crichton formulates and follows out to its conclusion in his excellent debut novel, The Andromeda Strain.

    A Nobel-Prize-winning bacteriologist, Jeremy Stone, urges the president to approve an extraterrestrial decontamination facility to sterilize returning astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft that might carry an "unknown biologic agent." The government agrees, almost too quickly, to build the top-secret Wildfire Lab in the desert of Nevada. Shortly thereafter, unbeknownst to Stone, the U.S. Army initiates the "Scoop" satellite program, an attempt to actively collect space pathogens for use in biological warfare. When Scoop VII crashes a couple years later in the isolated Arizona town of Piedmont, the Army ends up getting more than it asked for.

    The Andromeda Strain follows Stone and rest of the scientific team mobilized to react to the Scoop crash as they scramble to understand and contain a strange and deadly outbreak. Crichton's first book may well be his best; it has an earnestness that is missing from his later, more calculated thrillers. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    by Alex Haley, Malcolm X, M. S. Handler
    ISBN 0345376714 (0-345-37671-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there's the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture--try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston's Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can't help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.'s during the civil rights struggle of the '60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. --Wendy Smith [via]

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  • Bilgewater
    by Jane Gardam
    ISBN 0349114021 (0-349-11402-1)
    Softcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited

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    Marigold Green calls herself 'hideous, quaint and barmy'. Other people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter. Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence [via]

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  • Birthday Letters
    by Ted Hughes
    ISBN 0374525811 (0-374-52581-1)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters--88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind--emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years--undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.

    In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."

    Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:

    Already past the kittenish
    But the eyes still small,
    Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
    As if with weeping. Bereft
    Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
    The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
    Of the constellations
    Out of which Mother had always returned.
    Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers," including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers," which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes's mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--" This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery," seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus, and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one paradoxical pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge--but for better or worse, we possess it. [via]

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  • The Blind Assassin
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0375430857 (0-375-43085-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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    The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be:

    What had she been thinking of as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly, for that one instant of held breath before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain.
    Meanwhile, Atwood immediately launches into an excerpt from Laura Chase's novel, The Blind Assassin, posthumously published in 1947. In this double-decker concoction, a wealthy woman dabbles in blue-collar passion, even as her lover regales her with a series of science-fictional parables. Complicated? You bet. But the author puts all this variegation to good use, taking expert measure of our capacity for self-delusion and complicity, not to mention desolation. Almost everybody in her sprawling narrative manages to--or prefers to--overlook what's in plain sight. And memory isn't much of a salve either, as Iris points out: "Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them." Yet Atwood never succumbs to postmodern cynicism, or modish contempt for her characters. On the contrary, she's capable of great tenderness, and as we immerse ourselves in Iris's spliced-in memoir, it's clear that this buttoned-up socialite has been anything but blind to the chaos surrounding her. --Darya Silver [via]

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  • Terry, Wallace: Bloods
    Bloods
    by Wallace Terry
    ISBN 0345376668 (0-345-37666-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0375411550 (0-375-41155-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

    Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

    You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
    There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

    This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]

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  • Chester Cricket's New Home
    by George Selden, Garth Williams
    ISBN 0374312400 (0-374-31240-0)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    "Readers of this favorite series will delight in the chance to share another experience with Chester and the inhabitants of the Old Meadow." --Booklist

    "Selden's new story, graced again by Williams's lovely pictures, won't sit on any shelves long." --Publishers Weekly
    [via]

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  • The Cloud Atlas
    by David Mitchell
    ISBN 0375507256 (0-375-50725-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer
     
    A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
     
    [David] Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novels every page.The New York Times Book Review

    One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt isand should beread by any student of contemporary literature.Dave Eggers
     
    Wildly entertaining . . . a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative.People
     
    The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yetnot just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. Ive never read anything quite like it, and Im grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds.Michael Chabon [via]

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  • Larkin, Philip: Collected Poems
    Collected Poems
    by Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite
    ISBN 0374529205 (0-374-52920-5)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    One of the best-known, best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Larkin had a relatively small number of poems published during his lifetime. This Collected Poems, which J. D. McClatchy called "a fascinating and indispensable text" in The New York Times Book Review, brings together not only all of Larkin's published verseThe North Ship (1945), the pamphlet of XX Poems (1953), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974)but also a vast selection of his uncollected poetry. A brief Introduction by Anthony Thwaite illuminates both the life and verse of this highly perceptive and deeply acerbic poet, a dour yet witty soul whose brilliant writings so often suggest an ongoing conflict between the traditional and the modern.
    [via]

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  • Betjeman, John: Collected Poems
    Collected Poems
    by John Betjeman
    ISBN 0374126534 (0-374-12653-4)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • The Complete Poems, 1927-1979
    by Elizabeth Bishop
    ISBN 0374518173 (0-374-51817-3)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet." In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.

    Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow. [via]

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  • Ballard, J.G.: Concrete Island
    Concrete Island
    by J.G. Ballard
    ISBN 0374524130 (0-374-52413-0)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Crash
    by J. G. Ballard
    ISBN 0374524122 (0-374-52412-2)
    Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    J. G. Ballard's graphic, violent novel is controversial wherever it is read, even on Amazon.com's own Web page! The book's characters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined to narrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In the words of the novel's protagonist, the wounds caused by automobile collisions are "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology." Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg, who had previously adapted Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch for the screen, fought to turn it into his latest film. [via]

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  • The Cricket in Times Square
    by George Selden, Garth Williams
    ISBN 0374316503 (0-374-31650-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    One night, the sounds of New York City--the rumbling of subway trains, thrumming of automobile tires, hooting of horns, howling of brakes, and the babbling of voices--is interrupted by a sound that even Tucker Mouse, a jaded inhabitant of Times Square, has never heard before. Mario, the son of Mama and Papa Bellini, proprietors of the subway-station newsstand, had only heard the sound once. What was this new, strangely musical chirping? None other than the mellifluous leg-rubbing of the somewhat disoriented Chester Cricket from Connecticut. Attracted by the irresistible smell of liverwurst, Chester had foolishly jumped into the picnic basket of some unsuspecting New Yorkers on a junket to the country. Despite the insect's wurst intentions, he ends up in a pile of dirt in Times Square.

    Mario is elated to find Chester. He begs his parents to let him keep the shiny insect in the newsstand, assuring his bug-fearing mother that crickets are harmless, maybe even good luck. What ensues is an altogether captivating spin on the city mouse/country mouse story, as Chester adjusts to the bustle of the big city. Despite the cricket's comfortable matchbox bed (with Kleenex sheets); the fancy, seven-tiered pagoda cricket cage from Sai Fong's novelty shop; tasty mulberry leaves; the jolly company of Tucker Mouse and Harry Cat; and even his new-found fame as "the most famous musician in New York City," Chester begins to miss his peaceful life in the Connecticut countryside. The Cricket in Times Square--a Newbery Award runner-up in 1961--is charmingly illustrated by the well-loved Garth Williams, and the tiniest details of this elegantly spun, vividly told, surprisingly suspenseful tale will stick with children for years and years. Make sure this classic sits on the shelf of your favorite child, right next to The Wind in the Willows. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]

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  • Darkness Visible
    by William Golding
    ISBN 0374530513 (0-374-53051-3)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    A reissue of the tour de force by the Nobel laureate that is "a vision of elemental reality so vivid we seem to hallucinate the scenes" (The New York Times Book Review). It opens during the London blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire; that child, Matty, becomes a wanderer and a seeker. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. In a final conflagration, William Golding's book lights up both the inner and outer darknesses of our time.
    [via]

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  • Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight : An African Childhood
    by Alexandra Fuller
    ISBN 0375507507 (0-375-50750-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Dont Lets go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderfully evocative memoir of Alexandra Fullers African childhood. Fuller regards herself "as a daughter of Africa", who spent her early life on farms in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia throughout the turbulent 1970s and 80s, as her parents "fought to keep one country in Africa white-run", but "lost twice" in Kenya and Zimbabwe. This is a profoundly personal story about growing up with a pair of funny, tough, white African settlers, and living with their "sometimes breathlessly illogical decisions", as they move from war-torn Zimbabwe to disease and malnutrition in Malawi, and finally the "beautiful and fertile" land of Zambia.

    Central to Fullers book is the intense relations between herself and her parents, a chain-smoking father able to turn round any farm in Africa, her glamorous older sister Vanessa, and the character who sits at the heart of the book, Fullers "fiercely intelligent, deeply compassionate, surprisingly witty and terrifyingly mad" mother.

    Fuller weaves together painful family tragedy with a wider understanding of the ambivalence of being part of a separatist white farming community in the midst of Black African independence. The majority of the book focuses on Fullers early years in war-torn Zimbabwe, with "more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass." This is the most successful dimension of the book, as Fuller describes growing up on farm where her father is away most nights fighting "terrorists", and stripping a rifle takes precedence over school lessons. The sections on Malawi and Zambia are more prosaic, but this is a lyrical and accomplished memoir about Africa, which is "about adjusting to a new world view" and the authors "passionate love for a continent that has come to define, shape, scar and heal me and my family." --Jerry Brotton [via]

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  • McCaffrey, Anne: Dragonquest
    Dragonquest
    by Anne McCaffrey
    ISBN 0345419375 (0-345-41937-5)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Eight
    by Katherine Neville
    ISBN 0345419081 (0-345-41908-1)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Katherine Neville's debut novel is a postmodern thriller set in 1972 ... and 1790. In the 20th century, Catherine Velis is a computer expert with a flair for music, painting, and chess who, on her way to Algeria at the behest of the accounting firm where she is employed, is invited to take a mysterious moonlighting assignment: recover the pieces of an old chess set missing for centuries.

    In the midst of the French Revolution, a young novice discovers that her abbey is the hiding place of a chess set, once owned by the great Charlemagne, which allows those who play it to tap into incredible powers beyond the imagination. She eventually comes into contact with the major historical figures of the day, from Robespierre to Napoleon, each of whom has an agenda.

    The Eight is a non-stop ride that recalls the swashbuckling adventures of Indiana Jones as well as the historical puzzles of Umberto Eco which, since its first publication in 1988, has gone on to acquire a substantial cult following. [via]

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  • The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374147043 (0-374-14704-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.

    Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Behr, Mark: Embrace
    Embrace
    by Mark Behr
    ISBN 0349113009 (0-349-11300-9)
    Softcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited

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  • The Empire of Signs
    by Roland Barthes
    ISBN 0374522073 (0-374-52207-3)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    With this book, Barthes offers a broad-ranging meditation on the culture, society, art, literature, language, and iconography--in short, both the sign-oriented realities and fantasies--of Japan itself.
    [via]

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  • The Executioner's Song
    by Norman Mailer
    ISBN 0375700811 (0-375-70081-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Executioner's Song is a work of unprecedented force. It is the true story of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first person executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty. Gilmore, a violent yet articulate man who chose not to fight his death-penalty sentence, touched off a national debate about capital punishment. He allowed Norman Mailer and researcher Lawrence Schiller complete access to his story. Mailer took the material and produced an immense book with a dry, unwavering voice and meticulous attention to detail on Gilmore's life--particularly his relationship with Nicole Baker, whom Gilmore claims to have killed. What unfolds is a powerful drama, a distorted love affair, and a chilling look into the mind of a murderer in his countdown with a firing squad. [via]

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  • The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology
    by Peter Singer
    ISBN 0374234965 (0-374-23496-5)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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    Book summary:

    This volume gathers nearly all of the poems from Heaney's first four collections: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975).
    [via]

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  • Fairy Tales and Legends
    by H.C. Andersen, Rex Whistler
    ISBN 0370010388 (0-370-01038-8)
    Hardcover, Bodley Head

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  • Wolfe, Thomas: From Tom Wolfe Purple Decades: 1960-1980
    From Tom Wolfe Purple Decades: 1960-1980
    by Thomas Wolfe
    ISBN 0374278393 (0-374-27839-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Gateway
    by Frederick Pohl
    ISBN 0345475836 (0-345-47583-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Gateway opened on all the wealth of the Universe...and on reaches of unimaginable horror. When prospector Bob Broadhead went out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he decided he would know which was the right mission to make him his fortune. Three missions later, now famous and permanently rich, Robinette Broadhead has to face what happened to him and what he is...in a journey into himself as perilous and even more horrifying than the nightmare trip through the interstellar void that he drove himself to take!
    THE HEECHEE SAGA
    Book One:GATEWAY
    Book Two:BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON
    Book Three: HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS
    Book Four: THE ANNALS OF THE HEECHEE


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Larkin, Philip: High Windows
    High Windows
    by Philip Larkin
    ISBN 0374512124 (0-374-51212-4)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Sheehy, Gail: Hillary's Choice
    Hillary's Choice
    by Gail Sheehy
    ISBN 0345436563 (0-345-43656-3)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • The Hobbit
    by J.R.R. Tolkien, David Wenzel, Charles Dixon, Sean Deming
    ISBN 0345445600 (0-345-44560-0)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

    The hobbit-hole in question belongs to one Bilbo Baggins, an upstanding member of a "little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves." He is, like most of his kind, well off, well fed, and best pleased when sitting by his own fire with a pipe, a glass of good beer, and a meal to look forward to. Certainly this particular hobbit is the last person one would expect to see set off on a hazardous journey; indeed, when Gandalf the Grey stops by one morning, "looking for someone to share in an adventure," Baggins fervently wishes the wizard elsewhere. No such luck, however; soon 13 fortune-seeking dwarves have arrived on the hobbit's doorstep in search of a burglar, and before he can even grab his hat or an umbrella, Bilbo Baggins is swept out his door and into a dangerous adventure.

    The dwarves' goal is to return to their ancestral home in the Lonely Mountains and reclaim a stolen fortune from the dragon Smaug. Along the way, they and their reluctant companion meet giant spiders, hostile elves, ravening wolves--and, most perilous of all, a subterranean creature named Gollum from whom Bilbo wins a magical ring in a riddling contest. It is from this life-or-death game in the dark that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, would eventually spring. Though The Hobbit is lighter in tone than the trilogy that follows, it has, like Bilbo Baggins himself, unexpected iron at its core. Don't be fooled by its fairy-tale demeanor; this is very much a story for adults, though older children will enjoy it, too. By the time Bilbo returns to his comfortable hobbit-hole, he is a different person altogether, well primed for the bigger adventures to come--and so is the reader. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • The Ice Harvest
    by Scott Phillips
    ISBN 0345440196 (0-345-44019-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    For all that it involves organized crime, naked women, grumpy bouncers, a serious snowstorm, and a hero with a profound drinking pattern, The Ice Harvest is a quiet little book--noir-ish, certainly, but never to excess. As the novel traces Charlie Arglist's trail around his small Kansas hometown on Christmas Eve, 1979, the lawyer's literal footprints are clear enough, given the whopper of a blizzard that's descended, but his metaphorical path is far less obvious. He's killing time before leaving town, but where is he going? And why?

    Scott Phillips' sketch of a crooked lawyer on the lam is amusingly ironic: though there's violence aplenty in the novel--including a morbidly comic finger-breaking scene starring Spencer, a philosophical bouncer at the Sweet Cage, one of the strip clubs Charlie oversees for Bill Gerard--this is Waiting for Godot rather than Goodfellas. Phillips masterfully sets up the reader's expectations for action and adventure, dropping cryptic hints about Charlie's past, present, and future, then gleefully keeps Charlie in a holding pattern, circling from one strip club to another, from bars to massage parlors to his former in-laws' house.

    But when the world isn't scripted by Beckett, all waiting games must come to an end. Charlie's gamble--it would be cheating to tell you more than that it involves a little cocaine, a beautiful woman of indeterminate origin, a Christmas package full of cash, and an embarrassing photograph--pays off, and he heads out of town. How far does he get? Well, that's another story--and another opportunity for Phillips to show off the mordant humor that may brand him as the Cohen brothers' literary heir apparent. In his hands, Kansas doesn't seem far at all from Fargo. --Kelly Flynn [via]

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  • Interview with the Vampire
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0345409647 (0-345-40964-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    In the now-classic novel Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice refreshed the archetypal vampire myth for a late-20th-century audience. The story is ostensibly a simple one: having suffered a tremendous personal loss, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac descends into an alcoholic stupor. At his emotional nadir, he is confronted by Lestat, a charismatic and powerful vampire who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. The two prey on innocents, give their "dark gift" to a young girl, and seek out others of their kind (notably the ancient vampire Armand) in Paris. But a summary of this story bypasses the central attractions of the novel. First and foremost, the method Rice chose to tell her tale--with Louis' first-person confession to a skeptical boy--transformed the vampire from a hideous predator into a highly sympathetic, seductive, and all-too-human figure. Second, by entering the experience of an immortal character, one raised with a deep Catholic faith, Rice was able to explore profound philosophical concerns--the nature of evil, the reality of death, and the limits of human perception--in ways not possible from the perspective of a more finite narrator.

    While Rice has continued to investigate history, faith, and philosophy in subsequent Vampire novels (including The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, and The Vampire Armand), Interview remains a treasured masterpiece. It is that rare work that blends a childlike fascination for the supernatural with a profound vision of the human condition. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

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  • Wolfe, Tom: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
    The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374504687 (0-374-50468-7)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Mahler, Jonathan: Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, And The Battle For The Soul Of A City
    Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, And The Battle For The Soul Of A City
    by Jonathan Mahler
    ISBN 0374175284 (0-374-17528-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • The Last King of Scotland
    by Giles Foden
    ISBN 0375703314 (0-375-70331-4)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Nicholas Garrigan has fled his native Scotland, and his parents' expectations, to take a position as a doctor in a remote rural outpost of Central Africa. Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, he is called to the scene of a bizarre car accident: Idi Amin, manically driving his red Maserati down the dirt tracks of Garrigan's small village, has run over a cow. Garrigan binds Amin's sprained wrist and puts the incident behind him, until a letter arrives from the Minister of Health informing him that Amin--in his obsession with all things Scottish--has ap-pointed Garrigan his personal physician. Garrigan is instructed to settle into State House, on the grounds of Amin's residence, immediately.  

    Later, Garrigan will reflect that had he known what awaited him, had he foreseen the terrifying concatenation of events this decision would set in motion, he would have boarded the first plane back to Scotland. He will wonder why it never occurred to him to simply say no. But--flattered, disarmed, and intrigued, if uneasily, by the pros-pect of entering Amin's inner circle--he steps into the role of caring for the man who will turn out to be one of the most brutal dictators of all time.  

    So begins Nick Garrigan's journey into a Con-radian heart of darkness, as his own moral center
    battles weakly against, and then succumbs to, the dark and irresistible seductions of Idi Amin Dada, whose cruelty and cunning are masked by brilliant rhetoric, hilarious wit, and electrifying personal magnetism. When at last Nick awakens to the horrors of Amin's regime, he must awaken also to his own complicity in it--he cared for Amin, as a doctor and as a friend--and to the knowledge that he is both a traitor to his own country and a prisoner in his new one. By turns comic and chilling, Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland is a masterful debut from a remarkable talent--a riveting history of "blood, misery and foolishness" that lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned, and a profound meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart. [via]

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  • The Last of Her Kind
    by Sigrid Nunez
    ISBN 0374183813 (0-374-18381-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work. As the novel's narrator, Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."
    [via]

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  • A Long Way from Verona
    by Jane Gardam
    ISBN 0349114056 (0-349-11405-6)
    Softcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited

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    Book summary:

    'I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal having had a violent experience at the age of nine' Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her- a confining world of Order Marks, wartime restrictions, viyella dresses, nicely-restrained essays and dusty tea shops. For Jessica she has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer. With her inability to conform, her absolute compulsion to tell the truth and her dedication to accurately noting her experiences, she knows this anyway. But what she doesn't know is that the experiences that sustain and enrich her burgeoning talent will one day lead to a new- and entirely unexpected- reality. [via]

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  • Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374204241 (0-374-20424-1)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    "When are the 1970s going to begin?" ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head-on in these rollicking essays -- and even provided the 1970s with its name: "The Me Decade."
    [via]

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  • Nichols, John Treadwell: The Milagro Beanfield War
    The Milagro Beanfield War
    by John Treadwell Nichols
    ISBN 0345410165 (0-345-41016-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Wolf, Christa: A Model Childhood
    A Model Childhood
    by Christa Wolf
    ISBN 0374211701 (0-374-21170-1)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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  • Trilling, Lionel: The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays
    The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays
    by Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier
    ISBN 0374527997 (0-374-52799-7)
    Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    With this re-publication of Lionel Trilling's finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many generations, a rich overview of Trilling's achievement. The exhilarating essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces - on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination.
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  • King, Stephen: Night Shift
    Night Shift
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 0373588585 (0-373-58858-5)
    Hardcover, Chivers North Amer

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  • On Photography
    by Susan Sontag
    ISBN 0374226261 (0-374-22626-1)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives. "Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites". (The Times). "A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves". (Washington Post). "The most original and illuminating study of the subject". (New Yorker). One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics. [via]

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  • Zencey, Eric: Panama: A Novel
    Panama: A Novel
    by Eric Zencey
    ISBN 0374229422 (0-374-22942-2)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Morrison, Toni: Paradise
    Paradise
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0375702172 (0-375-70217-2)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

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  • Patterns of Childhood
    by Christa Wolf
    ISBN 0374518440 (0-374-51844-0)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
    by Marjane Satrapi
    ISBN 0375422889 (0-375-42288-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Picking up the thread where her debut memoir-in-comics concluded, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return details Marjane Satrapi's experiences as a young Iranian woman cast abroad by political turmoil in her native country. Older, if not exactly wiser, Marjane reconciles her upbringing in war-shattered Tehran with new surroundings and friends in Austria. Whether living in the company of nuns or as the sole female in a house of eight gay men, she creates a niche for herself with friends and acquaintances who feel equally uneasy with their place in the world.

    After a series of unfortunate choices and events leave her literally living in the street for three months, Marjane decides to return to her native Iran. Here, she is reunited with her family, whose liberalism and emphasis on Marjane's personal worth exert as strong an influence as the eye-popping wonders of Europe. Having grown accustomed to recreational drugs, partying, and dating, Marjane now dons a veil and adjusts to a society officially divided by gender and guided by fundamentalism. Emboldened by the example of her feisty grandmother, she tests the bounds of the morality enforced on the streets and in the classrooms. With a new appreciation for the political and spiritual struggles of her fellow Iranians, she comes to understand that "one person leaving her house while asking herself, 'is my veil in place?' no longer asks herself 'where is my freedom of speech?'"

    Satrapi's starkly monochromatic drawing style and the keenly observed facial expressions of her characters provide the ideal graphic environment from which to appeal to our sympathies. Bereft of fine detail, this graphic novel guides the reader's attention instead toward a narrative rich with empathy. Don't be fooled by the glowering self-portrait of the author on the back flap; its nearly impossible to read Persepolis 2 without feeling warmth toward Marjane Satrapi. --Ryan Boudinot [via]

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  • Adams, Richard: The Plague Dogs
    The Plague Dogs
    by Richard Adams
    ISBN 0345494024 (0-345-49402-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Play It As It Lays
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0374529949 (0-374-52994-9)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. Anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, she is seemingly unaffected by her fraught personal history. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, and somehow detached from her past and future, Wyeth epitomises a generation made ill by too much freedom. Set beyond good and evil -- literally in Los Angeles and the barren wastescapes of the Mojave desert, and figuratively in the landscapes of a broken spirit -- Play It As It Lays is an immaculately wrought vision of Californian culture on the cusp of the 1970s. Three decades after its original publication, the novel remains an intense dissection of a very particular time and place. [via]

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  • The Pleasure of the Text
    by Roland Barthes
    ISBN 0374521603 (0-374-52160-3)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthess answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard
    [via]

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  • Heaney, Seamus: Poems
    Poems
    by Seamus Heaney
    ISBN 0374516529 (0-374-51652-9)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Abse, Leo: Private Member
    Private Member
    by Leo Abse
    ISBN 0356046028 (0-356-04602-8)
    Hardcover, Macdonald

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  • The Purple Decades
    by Tom Wolfe, Joe David Bellamy
    ISBN 0374239282 (0-374-23928-2)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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  • Wolfe, Tom: The Purple Decades: A Reader
    The Purple Decades: A Reader
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374239274 (0-374-23927-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Raney
    by Clyde Edgerton
    ISBN 0345419057 (0-345-41905-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    "This book is too good to keep to yourself. Read it aloud with someone you love, then send it to a friend. But be sure to keep a copy for yourself, because you'll want to read it again and again."
    Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
    Raney is a small-town Baptist. Charles is a liberal from Atlanta. And RANEY is the story of their marriage. Charming, wise, funny, and truthful, it is a novel for everyone to love.
    "A real jewel."
    RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • The Reader
    by Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown Janeway
    ISBN 0375408266 (0-375-40826-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, February 1999: Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable.... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"

    The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What does it mean to love those people--parents, grandparents, even lovers--who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue, and excess in any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre- and postwar generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and silence. --R. Ellis [via]

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  • Reunion
    by Fred Uhlman
    ISBN 0374525153 (0-374-52515-3)
    Softcover, Noonday Pr

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    Book summary:

    A daring novella about the loss of innocence in pre-war Germany.

    Reunion is the story of intense and innocent devotion between two young men growing up in "the soft, serene, bluish hills of Swabia," and the sinister (but all too mundane) forces that end both their friendship and their childhood.

    The year is 1932. Hans Schwartz is Jewish, the son of a Stuttgart doctor who asserts that the rise of the Nazis is "a temporary illness, something like measles which will pass off as soon as the economic situation improves." The Holocaust would be unthinkable for these characters, but of course it looms over the story: Hans's friend, the young Count Konradin von Hohenfels, has a mother who keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dresser. The two boys share their most private thoughts and trips to the countryside of southwest Germany, discuss poetry and the past and present of their country, and argue the existence of a benevolent God.

    The eventual disintegration of this cherished relationship foreshadows the fate of Europe's Jews-- but Uhlman doesn't end his story with neat polarities. Years later, exiled in America, Hans comes upon a revelation about von Hohenfels which provides a stunning denouement and leaves the reader recalling Uhlman's haunting, lyrical descriptions of the vineyards, opera houses, and dark forests of Württemberg.

    "Hundreds of bulky tomes have now been written about the age when corpses were melted into soap to keep the master race clean; yet I sincerely believe that this slim volume will find its lasting place on the shelves."--Arthur Koestler, from the Introduction
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  • Ringworld
    by Larry Niven
    ISBN 0345418409 (0-345-41840-9)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    A new place is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity, and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be formed. We can start again!


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Roland Barthes
    by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard
    ISBN 0374521549 (0-374-52154-9)
    Softcover, Hill & Wang Pub

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorists most original worka brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthess tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.
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  • Selected Poems, 1966-1987
    by Seamus Heaney
    ISBN 0374522804 (0-374-52280-4)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Seamus Heaney was the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize, and this collection reveals the range, sureness, and quality of his achievements. Includes the complete and revised version of his long poem, "Station Island," as well as a number of prose poems previously unpublished in the U.S. [via]

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  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0374521727 (0-374-52172-7)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has become a modern classic. More than any other book of its time, this collection captures the mood of 1960s America, especially the center of its counterculture, California. These essays, keynoted by an extraordinary report on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, all reflect that, in one way or another, things are falling apart, "the center cannot hold." An incisive look at contemporary American life, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for several decades as a stylistic masterpiece.

    Contents:

    I. LIFE STYLES IN THE GOLDEN LAND
    Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
    John Wayne: A Love Song
    Where the Kissing Never Stops
    Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)
    7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38
    California Dreaming
    Marrying Absurd
    Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    II. PERSONALS
    On Keeping a Notebook
    On Self-Respect
    I Can't Get That Monster out of My Mind
    On Morality
    On Going Home

    III. SEVEN PLACES OF THE MIND
    Notes from a Native Daughter
    Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W
    Rock of Ages
    The Seacoast of Despair
    Guaymas, Sonora
    Los Angeles Notebook
    Goodbye to All That
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  • Hassler, Jon: Staggerford
    Staggerford
    by Jon Hassler
    ISBN 0345418247 (0-345-41824-7)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Sula
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0375415351 (0-375-41535-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two women--friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood, and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men, and life in the big city, an exceptional choice for a black woman to make in the late 1920s.

    As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, only children who find in each other a kindred spirit to share in each girl's loneliness and imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's clear that Nel has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula must fight to defend her seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs. But regardless of the physical and emotional distance that threatens this extraordinary friendship, the bond between the women remains unbreakable: "Her old friend had come home.... Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself."

    Lyrical and gripping, Sula is an honest look at the power of friendship amid a backdrop of family, love, race, and the human condition. --Gisele Toueg [via]

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  • Highsmith, Patricia: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley under Ground, Ripley's Game
    The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley under Ground, Ripley's Game
    by Patricia Highsmith
    ISBN 0375407928 (0-375-40792-8)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • To Your Scattered Bodies Go
    by Philip Jose Farmer
    ISBN 0345419677 (0-345-41967-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the Hugo Award-winning beginning to the story of Riverworld, Philip José Farmer's unequaled tale about life after death. When famous adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton dies, the last thing he expects to do is awaken naked on a foreign planet along the shores of a seemingly endless river. But that's where Burton and billions of other humans (plus a few nonhumans) find themselves as the epic Riverworld saga begins. It seems that all of Earthly humanity has been resurrected on the planet, each with an indestructible container that provides three meals a day, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, a lighter, and the odd tube of lipstick. But why? And by whom?

    That's what Burton and a handful of fellow adventurers are determined to discover as they construct a boat and set out in search of the river's source, thought to be millions of miles away. Although there are many hardships during the journey--including an encounter with the infamous Hermann Goring--Burton's resolve to complete his quest is strengthened by a visit from the Mysterious Stranger, a being who claims to be a renegade within the very group that created the Riverworld. The stranger tells Burton that he must make it to the river's headwaters, along with a dozen others the Stranger has selected, to help stop an evil experiment at the end of which humanity will simply be allowed to die. --Craig E. Engler [via]

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  • Trance
    by Christopher Sorrentino
    ISBN 0374278644 (0-374-27864-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    1974: A tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then abruptly announces that she has adopted the guerrilla name "Tania" and chosen to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Coerced? Could she be sincere? Why would such a nice girl disavow her loving parents, her adoring fiancé, her comfortable home? Why would she suddenly adopt the SLA's cri de coeur, "Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People"? Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her two remaining comrades--the pompous and abusive General Teko and his duplicitous lieutenant, Yolanda--into hiding, where they will remain for the next sixteen months.

    Trance, Christopher Sorrentino's mesmerizing and brilliant second novel, traces this fugitive period, leading the reader on a breathtaking, hilarious, and heartbreaking underground tour across a beleaguered America, in the company of scam artists, visionaries, cultists, and a mismatched gang of middle-class people who typify the guiding conceit of their time, that of self-renovation. Along the way he tells the story of a nation divided against itself--parents and children, men and women, black and white; a story of hidebound tradition and radical change, of truth and propaganda, of cynicism and idealism; a story as transfixing and relevant today as it was then.

    Insightful, compassionate, scathingly funny, and moving, Trance is a virtuoso performance, placing Christopher Sorrentino in the first rank of American novelists.
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  • Tuck Everlasting
    by Natalie Babbitt
    ISBN 0374378487 (0-374-37848-7)
    Hardcover, Sunburst

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    Book summary:

    Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. To live forever--isn't that everyone's ideal? For the Tuck family, eternal life is a reality, but their reaction to their fate is surprising. Award winner Natalie Babbitt (Knee-Knock Rise, The Search for Delicious) outdoes herself in this sensitive, moving adventure in which 10-year-old Winnie Foster is kidnapped, finds herself helping a murderer out of jail, and is eventually offered the ultimate gift--but doesn't know whether to accept it. Babbitt asks profound questions about the meaning of life and death, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the perfect cycle of nature. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever--in the reader's imagination. An ALA Notable Book. (Ages 9 to 12) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • White Teeth: A Novel
    by Zadie Smith
    ISBN 0375501851 (0-375-50185-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie--working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt--is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families--one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad--devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"--weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant café, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes--faith, race, gender, history, and culture--and triumphs. [via]

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  • A Wrinkle in Time: Library Edition
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0374386137 (0-374-38613-7)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Everyone in town thinks Meg is volatile and dull-witted and that her younger brother Charles Wallace is dumb. People are also saying that their father has run off and left their brilliant scientist mother. Spurred on by these rumors, Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their new friend Calvin, embark on a perilous quest through space to find their father. In doing so they must travel behind the shadow of an evil power that is darkening the cosmos, one planet at a time.

    Young people who have trouble finding their place in the world will connect with the "misfit" characters in this provocative story. This is no superhero tale, nor is it science fiction, although it shares elements of both. The travelers must rely on their individual and collective strengths, delving deep into their characters to find answers.

    A classic since 1962, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is sophisticated in concept yet warm in tone, with mystery and love coursing through its pages. Meg's shattering yet ultimately freeing discovery that her father is not omnipotent provides a satisfying coming-of-age element. Readers will feel a sense of power as they travel with these three children, challenging concepts of time, space, and the power of good over evil. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]

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  • Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights
    by Emily Bronte
    ISBN 0361031637 (0-361-03163-7)
    Hardcover, Purnell

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Spanish

  • Tuck Para Siempre
    by Natalie Babbitt, Narcis Fradera
    ISBN 0374480117 (0-374-48011-7)
    Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Spanish translation of the story of the Tuck family, doomed to - or blessed with - eternal life after drinking from a magic spring. The Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a starnger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune.
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  • UN Grillo En Times Square
    by George Selden
    ISBN 0374480605 (0-374-48060-5)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Tucker is a streetwise city mouse. He thought hed seen it all. But hes never met a cricket before, which really isnt surprising, because, along with his friend Harry Cat, Tucker lives in the very heart of New York Citythe Times Square subway station. Chester Cricket never intended to leave his Connecticut meadow. Hed be there still if he hadnt followed the entrancing aroma of liverwurst right into someones picnic basket. Now, like any tourist in the city, he wants to look around. And he could not have found two better guidesand friendsthan Tucker and Harry. The trio have many adventuresfrom taking in the sights and sounds of Broadway to escaping a smoky fire.
         Chester makes a third friend, too. It is a boy, Mario, who rescues Chester from a dusty corner of the subway station and brings him to live in the safety of his parents newsstand. He hopes at first to keep Chester as a pet, but Mario soon understands that the cricket is more than that. Because Chester has a hidden talent and no onenot even Chester himselfrealizes that the little country cricket may just be able to teach even the toughest New Yorkers a thing or two.
    Spanish language edition.
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