books tagged “male author”

books tagged “male author”

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  • Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
    by Arthur Conan Doyle
    ISBN 0345327128 (0-345-32712-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
    by Lewis Carroll
    ISBN 0333722728 (0-333-72272-8)
    Hardcover, Trafalgar Square Books

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    Book summary:

    That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]

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  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland : And, Through the Looking Glass
    by Lewis Carroll, Jenny Thorne
    ISBN 0361028008 (0-361-02800-8)
    Hardcover, Purnell, Alice Kelly

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    Book summary:

    That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]

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  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass, and the Hunting of the Snark
    by Lewis Carroll
    ISBN 0370109279 (0-370-10927-9)
    Hardcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    Book summary:

    , 292 pages including Prefatory Notes at rear, illustrated throughout with numerous black and white illustrations within the text [via]

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  • The Amber Spyglass
    by Philip Pullman
    ISBN 0345413377 (0-345-41337-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    From the very start of its very first scene, The Amber Spyglass will set hearts fluttering and minds racing. All we'll say here is that we immediately discover who captured Lyra at the end of The Subtle Knife, though we've yet to discern whether this individual's intent is good, evil, or somewhere in between. We also learn that Will still possesses the blade that allows him to cut between worlds, and has been joined by two winged companions who are determined to escort him to Lord Asriel's mountain redoubt. The boy, however, has only one goal in mind--to rescue his friend and return to her the alethiometer, an instrument that has revealed so much to her and to readers of The Golden Compass and its follow-up. Within a short time, too, we get to experience the "tingle of the starlight" on Serafina Pekkala's skin as she seeks out a famished Iorek Byrnison and enlists him in Lord Asriel's crusade:

    A complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear king's mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch's insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.
    Meanwhile, two factions of the Church are vying to reach Lyra first. One is even prepared to give a priest "preemptive absolution" should he succeed in committing mortal sin. For these tyrants, killing this girl is no less than "a sacred task."

    In the final installment of his trilogy, Philip Pullman has set himself the highest hurdles. He must match its predecessors in terms of sheer action and originality and resolve the enigmas he already created. The good news is that there is no critical bad news--not that The Amber Spyglass doesn't contain standoffs and close calls galore. (Who would have it otherwise?) But Pullman brings his audacious revision of Paradise Lost to a conclusion that is both serene and devastating. In prose that is transparent yet lyrical and 3-D, the author weaves in and out of his principals' thoughts. He also offers up several additional worlds. In one, Dr. Mary Malone is welcomed into an apparently simple society. The environment of the mulefa (again, we'll reveal nothing more) makes them rich in consciousness while their lives possess a slow and stately rhythm. These strange creatures can, however, be very fast on their feet (or on other things entirely) when necessary. Alas, they are on the verge of dying as Dust streams out of their idyllic landscape. Will the Oxford dark-matter researcher see her way to saving them, or does this require our young heroes? And while Mary is puzzling out a cure, Will and Lyra undertake a pilgrimage to a realm devoid of all light and hope, after having been forced into the cruelest of sacrifices--or betrayals.

    Throughout his galvanizing epic, Pullman sustains scenes of fierce beauty and tenderness. He also allows us a moment or two of comic respite. At one point, for instance, Lyra's mother bullies a series of ecclesiastical underlings: "The man bowed helplessly and led her away. The guard behind her blew out his cheeks with relief." Needless to say, Mrs. Coulter is as intoxicating and fluid as ever. And can it be that we will come to admire her as she plays out her desperate endgame? In this respect, as in many others, The Amber Spyglass is truly a book of revelations, moving from darkness visible to radiant truth. --Kerry Fried [via]

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  • Blade Runner
    by Philip K. Dick
    ISBN 0345350472 (0-345-35047-2)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.

    The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Cider House Rules
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345387651 (0-345-38765-1)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch-saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. [via]

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  • A Clockwork Orange: Play with Music
    by Anthony Burgess
    ISBN 0345354435 (0-345-35443-5)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "Penguin Decades" bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" was published in 1962 and has been controversial ever since. It tells the story of fifteen-year-old Alex - whose chief preoccupations are Beethoven's Ninth and ultra-violence - as he and his droogs rampage though a dystopian future seeking thrills, until they come under the control of the state's sinister apparatus. [via]

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  • The Cloud Atlas
    by David Mitchell
    ISBN 0340832371 (0-340-83237-1)
    Softcover, Sceptre

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    Book summary:

    A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified 'dinery server' on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us. [via]

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  • Gordon: Cook
    Cook
    by Gordon
    ISBN 0340718560 (0-340-71856-0)
    Hardcover, Trafalgar Square

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  • The Corrections
    by Jonathan Franzen
    ISBN 0374129983 (0-374-12998-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.

    All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye:

    Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.
    Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids
    The Day of the Triffids
    by John Wyndham
    ISBN 0345328175 (0-345-32817-5)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
    by Philip K. Dick
    ISBN 0345404475 (0-345-40447-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.

    The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers
    by Max Hastings
    ISBN 0333908376 (0-333-90837-6)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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    Book summary:

    In February 2002 Max Hastings retired from his career as a "Fleet Street" Editor. His is an illustrious career which started in 1985, when he was offered the editorship of a national institution - the Daily Telegraph - in a surprise move by its owners. This book tells the story of what happened to him, and to a great newspaper over the next decade. It's all here: the rows with prime ministers, the coverage of great events, the daily routine. Max Hastings describes his complex relationship with his proprietor, Conrad Black. He offers perspectives on the decline of John Major, the troubles of the Royal Family, and the difficulties of dealing with lawyers and celebrities, statesmen and stars. It is unblushing about the author's failures and embarassments as well as his successes. It is above all the story of the excitement and exhilaration of almost 10 years at the helm of one of the greatest newspapers in the world. [via]

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  • Fahrenheit 451
    by Ray Bradbury
    ISBN 0345342968 (0-345-34296-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

    Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.

    Bradbury--the author of more than 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man--is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Readers ages 13 to 93 will be swept up in the harrowing suspense of Fahrenheit 451, and no doubt will join the hordes of Bradbury fans worldwide. --Neil Roseman [via]

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  • Foundation
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0345336275 (0-345-33627-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field. --Brooks Peck [via]

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  • Powers, Richard: Galatea 2.2/a Novel
    Galatea 2.2/a Novel
    by Richard Powers
    ISBN 0374199485 (0-374-19948-5)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Generation X
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 0349103313 (0-349-10331-3)
    Hardcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Book summary:

    A riotous, raunchy tale about three 'twenty somethings' who inhabit adjoining bungalows in Palm Springs. [via]

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  • Give Me Ten Seconds
    by John Sergeant
    ISBN 0333904494 (0-333-90449-4)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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    Book summary:

    A deliciously funny insider account of British politics and of the BBC from one of our most highly regarded and well-liked broadcasters. John Sergeant is ITN's Political Editor and before that spent 30 years at the BBC coalface, latterly as the Corporation's political correspondent. He is widely respected both by the denizens of the Houses of Parliament and fellow journalists. More importantly, his appearances on shows like Radio 4's News Quiz, Have I Got News for You and Room 101 have proved him to be an inspired comic turn. This memoir will take us from his rather curious childhood, the son of decidedly eccentric parents to his flirtation with show business as part of the sixties satire boom - he starred in revue with Alan Bennett, and from his early years in journalism on the Liverpool Post to his thirty years at the BBC. Memorably handbagged by Margaret Thatcher on the steps of the Paris Embassy as she lost the leadership contest, and the man to whom Ron Davis confessed his midnight perambulations on Clapham Common, Sergeant has been the man on the spot in most of the major news stories of the last twenty years. His mordant wit, keen sense of the absurd and acute powers of analysis pervade the book. He has a wealth of killingly funny anecdotes featuring the dottier members of both Houses of Parliament and his understanding of the labyrinthine workings of Westminister - and of the corridors of Broadcasting House - is second to none. [via]

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  • Going to the Wars
    by Max Hastings
    ISBN 0333771044 (0-333-77104-4)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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    In his autobiography, Max Hastings records his experiences reporting from the battlefields of Northern Ireland, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Rhodesia and other trouble spots. It is also the story of a self-confessed coward, a writer with heroic ambitions but knowing he did not have what it takes to be a hero himself. [via]

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  • Golden Compass
    by Philip Pullman
    ISBN 0345413350 (0-345-41335-0)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Some books improve with age--the age of the reader, that is. Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullman's heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. The protagonist of this complex fantasy is young Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan growing up within the precincts of Oxford University. But it quickly becomes clear that Lyra's Oxford is not precisely like our own--nor is her world. For one thing, people there each have a personal daemon, the manifestation of their souls in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied:

    As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them.
    Not that Lyra spends much time worrying about it; what she likes best is "clambering over the College roofs with Roger the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war." But Lyra's carefree existence changes forever when she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, first prevent an assassination attempt against her uncle, the powerful Lord Asriel, and then overhear a secret discussion about a mysterious entity known as Dust. Soon she and Pan are swept up in a dangerous game involving disappearing children, a beautiful woman with a golden monkey daemon, a trip to the far north, and a set of allies ranging from "gyptians" to witches to an armor-clad polar bear.

    In The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman has written a masterpiece that transcends genre. It is a children's book that will appeal to adults, a fantasy novel that will charm even the most hardened realist. Best of all, the author doesn't speak down to his audience, nor does he pull his punches; there is genuine terror in this book, and heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. There is also love, loyalty, and an abiding morality that infuses the story but never overwhelms it. This is one of those rare novels that one wishes would never end. Fortunately, its sequel, The Subtle Knife, will help put off that inevitability for a while longer. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Hamlet
    by William Shakespeare, Nigel Alexander
    ISBN 0333015150 (0-333-01515-0)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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    Undoubtedly the most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet remains one of the most enduring but also enigmatic pieces of western literature. The story of Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark, his tortured relationship with his mother, and his quest to avenge his father's murder at the hand of his brother Claudius has fascinated writers and audiences ever since it was written around 1600.

    For many years interest focused on both Hamlet's inability to avenge his father's death, claiming that "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", and, according to none other than Freud, his oedipal fixation with his mother. However, more recently critics have turned their attention to Hamlet's bold theatrical self-reflexivity (most famously reflected in the performance of "The Mousetrap"), its fascination with issues of theology and Renaissance humanism, and its dense, complex poetic language. What is so remarkable about the play is the way in which it tends to uncannily reflect the concerns of different epochs. As a result, Hamlet has been at different moments defined as a romantic rebel, an angst-ridden existentialist, a paralysed intellectual and an ambivalent New Man. Whatever subsequent generations make of Hamlet, they are unlikely to exhaust the possibilities of this most extraordinary play. --Jerry Brotton [via]

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  • Hell's Angels
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0345410084 (0-345-41008-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Gonzo journalist and literary roustabout Hunter S. Thompson flies with the angels--Hell's Angels, that is. He's lived with them, he knows them and their machines, he speaks their langauge,and he reports it back to the world with all the fearsome force of a souped-up cyclone burning rubber. [via]

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  • McGeechan: Heroes All - Official Lions Tour
    Heroes All - Official Lions Tour
    by McGeechan
    ISBN 0340707402 (0-340-70740-2)
    Hardcover, Trafalgar Square

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  • Vidal, Gore: Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920's
    Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920's
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0345370139 (0-345-37013-9)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • How to Be Alone: Essays
    by Jonathan Franzen
    ISBN 0374173273 (0-374-17327-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Jonathan Franzen is smart and brash, the kind of person you want as your social critic but not as a brother-in-law. Many of the 14 essays in How to Be Alone, by the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and elsewhere. A long, much-discussed rumination on the American novel, (newly) titled "Why Bother?," is included, as well as essays on privacy obsession, the U.S. post office, New York City, big tobacco, and new prisons. At his best, as in "My Father's Brain," a piece on his father's struggle with Alzheimer's, Franzen can make the ordinary world utterly riveting. But at times, it can be difficult to discern where Franzen stands on any particular subject, as he often takes both sides of an argument. Valid attempts to reflect ambiguity s! ometimes lead to obfuscation, especially in his essays on privacy and tobacco, although his belief that small-town America of years gone by offered the individual little privacy certainly rings true. Franzen can write with panache, as in this comment after he watched, without headphones, a TV show during a flight: "(It) became an exposé of the hydraulics of insincere smiles." A few of the shorter pieces appear to be filler. Franzen shines brightest when he gets edgy and a little angry, as in "The Reader in Exile": "Instead of Manassas battlefield, a historical theme park. Instead of organizing narratives, a map of the world as complex as the world itself. Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data." --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca [via]

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  • I Am Charlotte Simmons
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374281580 (0-374-28158-0)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler. [via]

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  • Asimov, Isaac: I, Robot
    I, Robot
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0345331397 (0-345-33139-7)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Iliad
    by Homer, Robert Fitzgerald, Andrew Ford
    ISBN 0374174415 (0-374-17441-5)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Anger be now your song, immortal one,
    Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,
    that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
    and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
    leaving so many dead men-carrion
    for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
    -Lines 1-6

    Since it was first published more than twenty-five years ago, Robert Fitzgerald's prizewinning translation of Homer's battle epic has become a classic in its own right: a standard against which all other versions of The Iliad are compared. Fitzgerald's work is accessible, ironic, faithful, written in a swift vernacular blank verse that "makes Homer live as never before" (Library Journal).

    This edition includes a new foreword by Andrew Ford.
    [via]

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  • Homer: The Iliad of Homer, Books I-XII
    The Iliad of Homer, Books I-XII
    by Homer, Malcolm M. Willcock
    ISBN 0333157389 (0-333-15738-9)
    Hardcover, Macmillan Education

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  • Inherit the Wind
    by Robert E. Lee, Jerome Lawrence
    ISBN 0345466276 (0-345-46627-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    One of the most moving and meaningful plays in American theatre--based on the famed Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was tried for teaching evolution--now on Broadway starring Tony Award® Winners Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, and Directed by Tony Award® Winner Doug Hughes

    The accused was a slight, frightened man who had deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American.

    Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans. . . . Inherit the Wind is a perpetually prescient courtroom battle over the legality of teaching evolution. . . . Were still arguing this caseall the way to the White House.
    Chicago Tribune

    Powerful . . . a crackling good courtroom play . . . [that] provides two of the juiciest roles in American theater.
    Copley News Service

    [This] historical drama . . . deserves respect.
    The Columbus Dispatch [via]

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  • Schulz, Charles M.: It's a Dog's Life, Snoopy
    It's a Dog's Life, Snoopy
    by Charles M. Schulz
    ISBN 0345442695 (0-345-44269-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Gill, A. A.: The Ivy Cookbook : The Restaurant and the Recipes
    The Ivy Cookbook : The Restaurant and the Recipes
    by A. A. Gill
    ISBN 0340693126 (0-340-69312-6)
    Hardcover, Hodder & Stoughton Canada

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  • Gill, A.A.: The Ivy: The Restaurant and Its Recipes
    The Ivy: The Restaurant and Its Recipes
    by A.A. Gill
    ISBN 0340693134 (0-340-69313-4)
    Softcover, Trafalgar Square

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  • Shakespeare, William: King Lear
    King Lear
    by William Shakespeare, Philip Edwards
    ISBN 0333155882 (0-333-15588-2)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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  • O'Toole, James: Leading Change: The Argument for Values-Based Leadership
    Leading Change: The Argument for Values-Based Leadership
    by James O'Toole
    ISBN 0345402545 (0-345-40254-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Newby, Eric: Love and War in the Apennines
    Love and War in the Apennines
    by Eric Newby
    ISBN 0340105585 (0-340-10558-5)
    Hardcover, Hodder and Stoughton

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  • Goldman, William: Marathon Man
    Marathon Man
    by William Goldman
    ISBN 0345439724 (0-345-43972-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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  • Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
    The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
    by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joe Gores
    ISBN 0345327144 (0-345-32714-4)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice
    by William Shakespeare, Christopher Parry
    ISBN 0333176553 (0-333-17655-3)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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  • The Metaphysical Club
    by Louis Menand
    ISBN 0374199639 (0-374-19963-9)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    If past is prologue, then The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand may suggest an intellectual course for the United States in the 21st century. At least Menand, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, thinks so. This enthralling study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey shows how these four men developed a philosophy of pragmatism following the Civil War, a period Menand likens to post-cold-war times. Together, "they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world."

    Despite this potentially forbidding theme, The Metaphysical Club is not a dry tome for academics. Instead, it is a quadruple biography, a wonderfully told story of ideas that advances by turning these thinkers into characters and bringing them to life. Menand links them through the Metaphysical Club, a conversational club formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. It lasted but a few months, and references to it appear only in Peirce's writings (its real significance seems rather limited), though Holmes and James were both members. (Dewey was much younger than these three, and more an heir than a contemporary.) It is difficult to describe in a sentence or two what they accomplished, though Menand takes a stab at it: "They helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril." Academic freedom and cultural pluralism are just two of their legacies, and they are linchpins of democracy in a nonideological age, says Menand.

    A book like this is necessarily idiosyncratic, yet at the same time this one is sweeping. It presents an accessible survey of intellectual life from roughly the end of the Civil War to the start of the cold war. Dozens of figures receive fascinating thumbnail sketches, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin to Jane Addams and Eugene Debs. The result is a grand portrait of an age that will appeal to anyone with even a modest interest in the history of philosophy and ideas. --John Miller [via]

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  • Middlesex
    by Jeffrey Eugenides
    ISBN 0374199698 (0-374-19969-8)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.

    Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

    Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." & I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

    When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]

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  • Persico, Joseph E.: My American Journey
    My American Journey
    by Joseph E. Persico, Colin L. Powell
    ISBN 0345407288 (0-345-40728-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    The story of Colin Powell is the classic American story, or at least, it's what we like to think the classic American story should be. The son of hard-working Jamaican immigrants, Powell was born in Harlem, grew up in the racially integrated South Bronx, attended the City College of New York, joined the R.O.T.C. and discovered his passion for things military. After stints in Korea, Vietnam and Germany he made his most important marks in the Pentagon bureaucracy, cultivating civilian and military contacts and advancing above his colleagues on an express ride through the ranks. As the ultimate insider, Powell is coveted by both political parties, but questions his own ability to switch from military hero to politician. [via]

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  • My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism
    by Andrew Marr
    ISBN 0330411926 (0-330-41192-6)
    Softcover, Macmillan Pub Ltd

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    Book summary:

    How do you decide what is a "story" and what isn't? What does a newspaper editor actually do all day? The purpose of this insider's account is to provide an answer to all these questions and more. Andrew Marr's brilliantly funny book is a guide for those of us who read newspapers, or who listen to and watch news bulletins but want to know more.
    [via]

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  • The Newlyweds
    by Elizabeth Bevarly
    ISBN 0373613938 (0-373-61393-8)
    Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited

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    Book summary:

    Follow the investigation by a "husband and wife" team as true crime turns to true love. . .

    Known more for her work ethic than for her romantic history, FBI agent Bridget Logan landed an assignment that involved issues too close to home-and a "husband" as part of the sting. If Agent Samuel Jones weren't so sexy, Bridget would have had no problem handling this case. But he was, and for the first time in her career, Bridget had trouble keeping a cool head under fire. A lot was at stake, though, and Bridget was determined to solve this case and move on, no harm done. But then her "husband" made love to her. . .and suddenly their role as a devoted couple transformed into a passion over which neither had control! [via]

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  • Simpson, John: News from No Man's Land: Reporting the World
    News from No Man's Land: Reporting the World
    by John Simpson
    ISBN 0333905741 (0-333-90574-1)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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  • The Odyssey
    by Homer, Robert Fitzgerald, D. S. Carne-Ross
    ISBN 0374224382 (0-374-22438-2)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature, the Homeric saga of the shipwrecks, wanderings, and homecoming of the master tactician Odysseus encompasses a virtual inventory of the themes and attitudes that have shaped Western culture. The tale of Odysseuss encounters with such obstacles as Calypso, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, and the lotus-eaters, and his dramatic return to Ithaca and his patient wife, Penelope, forms a prototype for all subsequent Western epics.

    Robert Fitzgeralds much-acclaimed translation, fully possessing as it does the body and spirit of the original, has helped to assure the continuing vitality of Europes most influential work of poetry. This edition includes twenty-five new line drawings by Barnaby Fitzgerald. [via]

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  • On the Beach
    by Nevil Shute
    ISBN 0345311485 (0-345-31148-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    "The most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off."
    THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
    They are the last generation, the innocent victims of an accidental war, living out their last days, making do with what they have, hoping for a miracle. As the deadly rain moves ever closer, the world as we know it winds toward an inevitable end.... [via]

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  • A Prayer for Owen Meany
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345361792 (0-345-36179-2)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

    The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Princess Bride
    by William Goldman
    ISBN 0345348036 (0-345-34803-6)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The Princess Bride is a true fantasy classic. William Goldman describes it as a "good parts version" of "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure." Morgenstern's original was filled with details of Florinese history, court etiquette, and Mrs. Morgenstern's mostly complimentary views of the text. Much admired by academics, the "Classic Tale" nonetheless obscured what Mr. Goldman feels is a story that has everything: "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

    Goldman frames the fairy tale with an "autobiographical" story: his father, who came from Florin, abridged the book as he read it to his son. Now, Goldman is publishing an abridged version, interspersed with comments on the parts he cut out.

    Is The Princess Bride a critique of classics like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers, that smother a ripping yarn under elaborate prose? A wry look at the differences between fairy tales and real life? Simply a funny, frenetic adventure? No matter how you read it, you'll put it on your "keeper" shelf. --Nona Vero [via]

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  • Berkmann, Marcus: Rain Men: The Madness of Cricket
    Rain Men: The Madness of Cricket
    by Marcus Berkmann
    ISBN 0349107424 (0-349-10742-4)
    Hardcover, Abacus

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  • Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Return of Sherlock Holmes
    The Return of Sherlock Holmes
    by Arthur Conan Doyle, Nicholas Meyer
    ISBN 0345327136 (0-345-32713-6)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Right Stuff
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374250324 (0-374-25032-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the nation was reeling from the catastrophe of Vietnam, and in 1979--the year the book appeared--Americans were being held hostage by Iranian militants. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. "The Right Stuff," he explains, "became a story of why men were willing--willing?--delighted!--to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero."

    Wolfe's roots in New Journalism were intertwined with the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote had pioneered with In Cold Blood. As Capote did, Wolfe tells his story from a limited omniscient perspective, dropping into the lives of his "characters" as each in turn becomes a major player in the space program. After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot's wife, the story cuts back to the late 1940s, when Americans were first attempting to break the sound barrier. Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of them airborne.

    Wolfe traces Alan Shepard's suborbital flight and Gus Grissom's embarrassing panic on the high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded his Liberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch too soon). The author also produces an admiring portrait of John Glenn's apple-pie heroism and selfless dedication. By the time Wolfe concludes with a return to Yeager and his late-career exploits, the narrative's epic proportions and literary merits are secure. Certainly The Right Stuff is the best, the funniest, and the most vivid book ever written about America's manned space program. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

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  • Robot Trilogy : The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0345331192 (0-345-33119-2)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Mieville, China: The Scar
    The Scar
    by China Mieville
    ISBN 0345444388 (0-345-44438-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    In the third book in an astounding, genre-breaking run, China Miéville expands the horizon beyond the boundaries of New Crobuzon, setting sail on the high seas of his ever-growing world of Bas Lag.

    The Scar begins with Miéville's frantic heroine, Bellis Coldwine, fleeing her beloved New Crobuzon in the peripheral wake of events relayed in Perdidio Street Station. But her voyage to the colony of Nova Esperium is cut short when she is shanghaied and stranded on Armada, a legendary floating pirate city. Bellis becomes the reader's unbelieving eyes as she reluctantly learns to live on the gargantuan flotilla of stolen ships populated by a rabble of pirates, mercenaries, and press-ganged refugees. Meanwhile, Armada and Bellis's future is skippered by the "Lovers," an enigmatic couple whose mirror-image scarring belies the twisted depth of their passion. To give up any more of Miévilles masterful plot here would only ruin the voyage through dangerous straits, political uprisings, watery nightmares, mutinous revenge, monstrous power plays, and grand aspirations.

    Miéville's skill in articulating brilliantly macabre and involving descriptions is paralleled only by his ability to set up world-moving plot twists that continually blow away the reader's expectations. Man-made mutations, amphibious aliens, transdimensional beings, human mosquitoes, and even vampires are merely neighbors, coworkers, friends, and enemies coexisting in the dizzying tapestry of diversity that is Armada. The Scar proves Miéville has the muscle and talent to become a defining force as he effortlessly transcends the usual clichés of the genre. --Jeremy Pugh [via]

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  • Silmarillion
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0345325818 (0-345-32581-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    part of lord of the rings story [via]

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  • The Solitaire Mystery
    by Jostein Gaarder, Sarah Jane Hails, Hilde Kramer
    ISBN 0374266514 (0-374-26651-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Jostein Gaarder had an unlikely international success with Sophie's World, a novelized exploration of western philosophy through the eyes of a young girl. This is an earlier work, translated from the Norwegian by Sarah Jane Hails. This fable-like story dabbles in philosophy too, though more lightly. It tells of a Norwegian boy traveling across Europe with his calm and reflective father in search of his long lost mother. The boy finds a tiny manuscript that reveals the secret of a magic deck of cards that can tell the future. [via]

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  • Something Happened
    by Joseph Heller
    ISBN 0345313526 (0-345-31352-6)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Bob Slocum was living the American dream. He had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a nice house...and all the mistresses he desired. He had it all -- all, that is, but happiness. Slocum was discontent. Inevitably, inexorably, his discontent deteriorated into desolation until...something happened.

    Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonderfully inventive and controversial second novel satirizing business life and American culture. The story is told as if the reader was overhearing the patter of Bob Slocum's brain -- recording what is going on at the office, as well as his fantasies and memories that complete the story of his life. The result is a novel as original and memorable as his Catch-22. [via]

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  • Subtle Knife
    by Philip Pullman
    ISBN 0345413369 (0-345-41336-9)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    With The Golden Compass Philip Pullman garnered every accolade under the sun. Critics lobbed around such superlatives as "elegant," "awe-inspiring," "grand," and "glittering," and used "magnificent" with gay abandon. Each reader had a favorite chapter--or, more likely, several--from the opening tour de force to Lyra's close call at Bolvangar to the great armored-bear battle. And Pullman was no less profligate when it came to intellectual firepower or singular characters. The dæmons alone grant him a place in world literature. Could the second installment of his trilogy keep up this pitch, or had his heroine and her too, too sullied parents consumed him? And what of the belief system that pervaded his alternate universe, not to mention the mystery of Dust? More revelations and an equal number of wonders and new players were definitely in order.

    The Subtle Knife offers everything we could have wished for, and more. For a start, there's a young hero--from our world--who is a match for Lyra Silvertongue and whose destiny is every bit as shattering. Like Lyra, Will Parry has spent his childhood playing games. Unlike hers, though, his have been deadly serious. This 12-year-old long ago learned the art of invisibility: if he could erase himself, no one would discover his mother's increasing instability and separate them.

    As the novel opens, Will's enemies will do anything for information about his missing father, a soldier and Arctic explorer who has been very much airbrushed from the official picture. Now Will must get his mother into safe seclusion and make his way toward Oxford, which may hold the key to John Parry's disappearance. But en route and on the lam from both the police and his family's tormentors, he comes upon a cat with more than a mouse on her mind: "She reached out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to Will." What seems to him a patch of everyday Oxford conceals far more: "The cat stepped forward and vanished." Will, too, scrambles through and into another oddly deserted landscape--one in which children rule and adults (and felines) are very much at risk. Here in this deathly silent city by the sea, he will soon have a dustup with a fierce, flinty little girl: "Her expression was a mixture of the very young--when she first tasted the cola--and a kind of deep, sad wariness." Soon Will and Lyra (and, of course, her dæmon, Pantalaimon) uneasily embark on a great adventure and head into greater tragedy.

    As Pullman moves between his young warriors and the witch Serafina Pekkala, the magnetic, ever-manipulative Mrs. Coulter, and Lee Scoresby and his hare dæmon, Hester, there are clear signs of approaching war and earthly chaos. There are new faces as well. The author introduces Oxford dark-matter researcher Mary Malone; the Latvian witch queen Ruta Skadi, who "had trafficked with spirits, and it showed"; Stanislaus Grumman, a shaman in search of a weapon crucial to the cause of Lord Asriel, Lyra's father; and a serpentine old man whom Lyra and Pan can't quite place. Also on hand are the Specters, beings that make cliff-ghasts look like rank amateurs.

    Throughout, Pullman is in absolute control of his several worlds, his plot and pace equal to his inspiration. Any number of astonishing scenes--small- and large-scale--will have readers on edge, and many are cause for tears. "You think things have to be possible," Will demands. "Things have to be true!" It is Philip Pullman's gift to turn what quotidian minds would term the impossible into a reality that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. --Kerry Fried [via]

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  • Sun-Tzu: The Art of Warfare The First English Translation Incorporating the Recently Discovered Yin-Ch'Ueh-Shan Texts
    by Roger T. Ames, Sun-Tzu
    ISBN 034536239X (0-345-36239-X)
    Hardcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    The most widely read military classic in human history, newly translated and revised in accordance with newly discovered materials of unprecedented historical significance. Fluid, crisp and rigorously faithful to the original, this new text is destined to stand as the definitive version of this cornerstone work of Classical Chinese. Of compelling importance not only to students of Chinese history and literature, but to all readers interested in the art or the philosophy of war. [via]

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  • Maupin, Armistead: Tales of the City
    Tales of the City
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0345351908 (0-345-35190-8)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • A Tall Man in a Low Land
    by Harry Pearson
    ISBN 0349112061 (0-349-11206-1)
    Softcover, Little Brown Uk

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    Book summary:

    Can any nation whose most famous monument is a statue of a small boy urinating really be that dull? Harry Pearson lived In Belgium for several months, burying himself in the local culture. He drank many of the 800 different beers the Belgians produce, and ate local delicacies such as kip kap, or jellied pig cheeks. This book commemorates strange events such as The Festival of Shrimps at Oostduinkerke, and laments the passing of the Underpant Museum in Brussels.
    [via]

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  • Shakespeare, William: The Tempest
    The Tempest
    by William Shakespeare, A. C. Spearing, J.E. Spearing
    ISBN 0333001109 (0-333-00110-9)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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  • Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0333168852 (0-333-16885-2)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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    Book summary:

    Tess is a young country girl from a decayed aristocratic family who suffers ravishment at the hands of a nouveau riche cad. The confession of her misfortune to her husband, a sanctimonious Anglican, blights her marriage and leads to her downfall. A critical introduction accompanies the text. [via]

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  • Pollard, Arthur: Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Casebook
    Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Casebook
    by Arthur Pollard
    ISBN 0333215133 (0-333-21513-3)
    Hardcover, Macmillan

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  • The Tin Woodman of Oz
    by L. Frank Baum, John R. Neill
    ISBN 0345334361 (0-345-33436-1)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Woot the Wanderer and the Scarecrow help the Tin Woodman find his old love, Nimmie Amee, suffering the ignominious enchantments of Mrs. Yoop's yookoohoo magic along the way. [via]

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  • Two Towers
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0345339711 (0-345-33971-1)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    The prequel to The Lord of the Rings-The Hobbit-is now a major motion picture directed by Peter Jackson   THE GREATEST FANTASY EPIC OF OUR TIME   The Fellowship is scattered. Some are bracing hopelessly for war against the ancient evil of Sauron. Some are contending with the treachery of the wizard Saruman. Only Frodo and Sam are left to take the accursed One Ring, ruler of all the Rings of Power, to be destroyed in Mordor, the dark realm where Sauron is supreme. Their guide is Gollum, deceitful and lust-filled, slave to the corruption of the Ring.   Thus continues the bestselling epic that began in The Fellowship of the Ring, and which reaches its magnificent climax in The Return of the King. [via]

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  • United States Essays 1952-1992
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0349105243 (0-349-10524-3)
    Softcover, Trafalgar Square

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    Book summary:

    Gore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin. [via]

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  • Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
    by Niall Ferguson
    ISBN 0333647289 (0-333-64728-9)
    Softcover, Trans-Atlantic Pubns

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    Book summary:

    This meaty, scholarly collection of essays by gifted historian Niall Ferguson tackles the controversial topic of counterfactual questions: What if Hitler had invaded Britain in WWII? What if JFK had survived his assassination? What if there had been no Gorbachev to usher in the collapse of Communism? What if there had been no American Revolution? Ferguson points out that while questions such as these are a vital part of how we learn as individuals ("What if I had observed the speed limit, or refused that last drink?"), there remains a great deal of resistance--even hostility--to such musings among professional historians. "[I]n the dismissive phrase of E.H. Carr, 'counterfactual' history is a mere 'parlour game,' a 'red herring.'" E.P. Thompson is less charitable, calling counterfactual histories "'Geschichtswissenschlopff', unhistorical shit."

    But Ferguson and his distinguished collaborators (many of whom are also Oxford fellows) lodge some convincing counterfactuals of their own to counter this arguably blinkered notion, this "idea that events are in some way preprogrammed, so that what was, had to be." In addition to the what-ifs above, Ferguson and his comrades tackle eight questions in all, including "What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War?", "What if Home Rule had been enacted [in Ireland] in 1912?", and "What if Britain had 'stood aside' in August 1914?" Virtual History makes for a stimulating and intellectually rigorous trip, with Ferguson's own delightful afterword as the collection's crowning jewel, a brilliant--and often bitingly clever--timeline tying together all the threads from 1646 to 1996. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • Cheever, John: The Wapshot Scandal
    The Wapshot Scandal
    by John Cheever
    ISBN 0345343239 (0-345-34323-9)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy
    ISBN 0345472403 (0-345-47240-3)
    Softcover, Bantam Classic & Loveswept

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    Book summary:

    Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoys genius is seen clearly in the multitude of fully realized and equally memorable characters that populate this massive chronicle. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individuals place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: To read him . . . is to find ones way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane. [via]

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  • Irving, John: The Water-Method Man
    The Water-Method Man
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345367421 (0-345-36742-1)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
    "Three or four times as funny as most novels."
    THE NEW YORKER


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • What Should I Do With My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question
    by Po Bronson
    ISBN 0345485920 (0-345-48592-0)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    In What Should I Do with my Life? Po Bronson manages to create a career book that is a page-turner. His 50 vivid profiles of people searching for "their soft spot--their true calling" will engage readers because Bronson is asking himself the same question. He explores his premise, that "nothing is braver than people facing up to their own identity," as an anthropologist and autobiographer. He tackles thorny, nuanced issues about self-determination. Among them: paradoxes of money and meaning, authorship and destiny, brain candy and novelty versus soul food. Bronsons stories, limited to professional people and complete with photos, are gems. They include a Los Angeles lawyer who became a priest, a Harvard MBA catfish farmer turned biotech executive, and a Silicon Valley real estate agent who opened a leather crafts factory in Costa Rica.

    Bronson is a gifted intuitive writer, the bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift, whose thoughtful, vulnerable voice emerges as the books greatest strength and challenge. He describes his subjects lives along with the ways they annoy, puzzle, and worry him. He frets about meddling with his questions, yet once, memorably and appropriately, he offers a talented man a top post in his publishing company. While this creates the juiciness of his portraits, it also can make Bronson the books most memorable character and the only one whose story is not resolved. Even so, this remarkable career chronicle sets the gold standard for the worth of the examined life. --Barbara Mackoff [via]

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  • A Widow for One Year: A Novel
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345424719 (0-345-42471-9)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    John Irving fans will not be startled to find that A Widow for One Year is a sprawling farce-tragedy crawling with characters who are writers. In the opening scene, 4-year-old Ruth Cole walks in on her melancholy mother, Marion, who is in flagrante with 16-year-old Eddie, the driver for drunken Ted (Ruth's dad and Marion's estranged, womanizing husband).

    Eddie spends the rest of his life obsessively writing novels like Sixty Times, his roman à clef about his 60 seductions by Marion. Ted is a failed novelist who gets rich and famous writing creepy children's stories based on tales he tells Ruth (such as The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls). Marion abandons Ruth, Ted, and Eddie and becomes a successful pseudonymous novelist. And Ruth becomes the most richly celebrated writer of them all because of her early training by Ted, who not only told her stories, but also helped her craft narratives to explain their home's many photographs of her brothers, who died in a gory car wreck the year before she was born. Grief over the boys is why Ruth's mother does not dare to love her.

    Ruth, Irving's first female main character, works brilliantly, first as an imaginative, almost Salingeresque child coming to terms with her bewildering family, then as a grownup striving to understand her mother's motives--or at least to track her down. Ted is a mordantly funny caricature, interestingly sinister and plausibly self-justifying when most inexcusable. Eddie is a lovable schlemiel, yet not too sentimentally drawn. And what set pieces Irving can write! The story of the boys' death is horrific and effective in dramatizing the character of Ted, who narrates it. Ted's attempted murder by a spurned lover is as hilarious as the VW-down-the-marble-stairway scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany (which has been adapted by Disney Studios), though not quite on a par with the celebrated "Pension Grillparzer" episode in The World According to Garp (reissued in a 20th anniversary edition by Modern Library).

    Irving has the effrontery to get away with practically any scene that comes into his head--Ruth winds up an eyewitness to a hooker's murder in Amsterdam, a Dutch detective starts tracking her down (just as Ruth is hunting Marion), and the multiple plot strands all converge in a finale that neatly echoes the opening scene. It's all done with the outrageously coincidental yet minutely realistic brio of Charles Dickens, with a sad, self-conscious jokiness like that of Irving's mentor, Kurt Vonnegut. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The World According to Garp
    by John Irving
    ISBN 034536676X (0-345-36676-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    "Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."

    Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.

    In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?

    Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."

    All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Fuentes, Carlos: The Years With Laura Diaz
    The Years With Laura Diaz
    by Carlos Fuentes, Alfred MacAdam
    ISBN 0374293414 (0-374-29341-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    by Robert M. Pirsig
    ISBN 0370103386 (0-370-10338-6)
    Hardcover, Bodley Head

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    Book summary:

    In his now classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig brings us a literary chautauqua, a novel that is meant to both entertain and edify. It scores high on both counts.

    Phaedrus, our narrator, takes a present-tense cross-country motorcycle trip with his son during which the maintenance of the motorcycle becomes an illustration of how we can unify the cold, rational realm of technology with the warm, imaginative realm of artistry. As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details--be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.

    In his autobiographical first novel, Pirsig wrestles both with the ghost of his past and with the most important philosophical questions of the 20th century--why has technology alienated us from our world? what are the limits of rational analysis? if we can't define the good, how can we live it? Unfortunately, while exploring the defects of our philosophical heritage from Socrates and the Sophists to Hume and Kant, Pirsig inexplicably stops at the middle of the 19th century. With the exception of Poincaré, he ignores the more recent philosophers who have tackled his most urgent questions, thinkers such as Peirce, Nietzsche (to whom Phaedrus bears a passing resemblance), Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. In the end, the narrator's claims to originality turn out to be overstated, his reasoning questionable, and his understanding of the history of Western thought sketchy. His solution to a synthesis of the rational and creative by elevating Quality to a metaphysical level simply repeats the mistakes of the premodern philosophers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, Pirsig writes a compelling story. And he is a true innovator in his attempt to popularize a reconciliation of Eastern mindfulness and nonrationalism with Western subject/object dualism. The magic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to lie not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises and the way it raises them. Like a cross between The Razor's Edge and Sophie's World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes us into "the high country of the mind" and opens our eyes to vistas of possibility. --Brian Bruya [via]

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