books tagged “modern lit”

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  • About a Boy
    by Nick Hornby, Harald Hellmann, Clara Drechsler
    ISBN 3426616904 (3-426-61690-4)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Warum Nick Hornby seinen neuen Roman About a Boy genannt hat, ist eigentlich am Ende der Lektüre nicht ganz klar, denn eigentlich beschreibt er zwei Jungs. Der eine, Will, ist zwar schon 35 Jahre alt und Marcus erst 12. Doch Will ist in seiner Art, sich vor Verantwortung zu drücken und andere für seine Zwecke zu benutzen kaum älter als Marcus. Wie die beiden sich fanden und warum sie sich wunderbar ergänzen, erzählt Nick Hornby in einer rasanten Geschichte.

    Will hat es nicht nötig zu arbeiten, er kann ganz gut von den geerbten Tantiemen seines Vaters leben und mit festen Freundschaften zu Frauen oder gar die Gründung einer Familie hat er herzlich wenig am Hut. Am meisten haßt er es, wenn wieder einmal eine Beziehung tränenreich zu Ende geht. Bis er auf einen genialen Einfall kommt. Er müßte sich einfach um die schmählich vernachlässigten, alleinerziehenden Frauen kümmern. Es muß Tausende von ihnen überall in London geben, -- "alleinerziehende Mütter, intelligente, attraktive, willige Frauen", die "tollen Sex, reichlich Streicheleinheiten fürs Ego, Vaterschaft auf Zeit ohne Tränen und eine Trennung ohne Schuldgefühle -- was konnte ein Mann sich Besseres wünschen?" So beginnt Nicks Karriere als Seriensoftie.

    In seiner Rolle als Will, der Erlöser, trifft er Marcus und seine Mutter. Sie gefällt ihm auf Anhieb ganz gut, doch Marcus ist ganz und gar nicht der Zwölfjährige, wie ihn sich Will vorgestellt hat. Sein Musikgeschmack ist bei Joni Mitchell stehen geblieben, von Curt Cobain hat er keine Ahnung, er trägt die völlig verkehrten Schuhe, von Turnschuhen hat er noch nicht gehört, und vor allem nicht davon, daß es darum geht, die Richtigen zu tragen. Sein Haarschnitt ist eher schlicht und von seinen Hosen ganz zu Schweigen. Für Marcus ist das Leben in seiner Klasse, wie man sich vorstellen kann, nicht ganz leicht. Und nachdem er sich auch noch in das schönste Mädchen der Schule verliebt hat, muß ihm Will schleunigst auf die Sprünge helfen. Sonst wird da nichts Vernünftiges draus.

    Die Mutter von Marcus ist zwar attraktiv, doch in einer depressiven Stimmung unternimmt sie einen Selbstmordversuch. Ehe er sich versieht hat Will plötzlich, nachdem er wirklich nur an gutem Sex und etwas Unterhaltung interessiert war, eine ganz Menge Probleme am Hals, die sich nicht einfach ignorieren lassen, wenn er sich nur lange genug nicht rührt.

    About A Boy handelt vom Erwachsenwerden zweier ganz unterschiedlicher Männer. Ihre Schwierigkeiten dabei schildert der Engländer Nick Hornby, der schon mit High Fidelity und Fever Pich -- Ballfieber große Erfolge gelandet hat, in einem unangestrengten, schnodderigen Ton. Er geht sein Thema locker an, doch immer wieder werden seine beiden Helden vom Ernst des Alltags eingeholt. Mitten in der schönsten Slapstick-Einlage bleibt dabei dem Leser das Lachen im Halse stecken. Gut geschriebene Unterhaltung. --Manuela Haselberger [via]

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  • Amsterdam
    by Ian McEwan
    ISBN 3257232845 (3-257-23284-5)
    Softcover, Diogenes Verlage

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  • Arrowsmith
    by Sinclair Lewis, Richard R. Lingeman
    ISBN 1931082081 (1-931082-08-1)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Written at the height of his powers in the 1920s, the three novels in this volume continue the vigorous unmasking of American middle-class life begun by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street and Babbitt. In Arrowsmith (1925) Lewis portrays the medical career of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who finds his commitment to the ideals of his profession tested by the cynicism and opportunism he encounters in private practice, public health work, and scientific research. The novel reaches its climax as its hero faces his greatest challenges amid a deadly outbreak of plague on a Caribbean island.

    Elmer Gantry (1927) aroused intense controversy with its brutal depiction of a hypocritical preacher in relentless pursuit of worldly pleasure and power. Through his satiric exposé of American religion, Lewis captured the growing cultural and political tension in the 1920s between the forces of secularism and fundamentalism.

    Dodsworth (1929) follows Sam Dodsworth, a wealthy, retired Midwestern automobile manufacturer, as he travels through Europe with his increasingly restless wife, Fran. The novel intimately explores the unraveling of their marriage, while pitting the proud heritage of European culture against the rude vigor of American commercialism. [via]

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  • Blindness
    by Jose Saramago
    ISBN 1860466850 (1-86046-685-0)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

    In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

    Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

    And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Sabatini, Rafael: Captain Blood
    Captain Blood
    by Rafael Sabatini
    ISBN 1888173440 (1-888173-44-0)
    Softcover, Trafalgar Square

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  • Keane, John B.: The Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane
    The Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane
    by John B. Keane
    ISBN 1856351564 (1-85635-156-4)
    Softcover, Mercier Pr Ltd

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  • The Clerkenwell Tales
    by Peter Ackroyd
    ISBN 1856197069 (1-85619-706-9)
    Hardcover, Chatto & Windus

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    Book summary:

    Peter Ackroyd opts for full immersion in The Clerkenwell Tales after dipping a toe, or ten, in the Middle Ages with Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. The Clerkenwell Tales is a gripping novel about murder and religious and political intrigue in 14th century London. As hinted at in the title, a cap is generously doffed to The Canterbury Tales; several characters and chapter headings mimic Chaucer and, at least superficially, it takes the form of a series of interconnected tales.

    Although this is a work of fiction, it is nonetheless as rich in historical material as, say, his evocative London: A Biography. Set in 1399, it's heavily underwired by events surrounding Henry Bolingbroke's usurpation of Richard II. On the whole an appendix, dubbed "The Author's Tale", keeps the Ye Olde London factoids from intruding on the yarn but there are moments, especially when he touches on Medieval customs and eating habits, where the research bubbles to the surface. However, like Hawksmoor and The House of John Dee, it's Ackroyd's judicious use of the more esoteric shards of the capital's past that really fuels the drama. This is, after all, Clerkenwell in the era of the mystery plays; a district inhabited by quack physicians, dung rakers, heretical sects and murderous clerics. (Think Umberto Eco in EC1.)

    Clarice, the novel's demonic central force, is a sister of the House of St Mary beset by visions. "Some called her the mad nun ... others revered her as the Blessed Maid of Clerkenwell" but in this "turbulent time of a weak and wretched king" Clarice's prophecies of impending doom strike an ominous chord. Elsewhere in the City, a shadowy group of pre-eminent Londoners, known as Dominus, have long been plotting to dethrone Richard and install Henry. William Exmewe, an Austin Friar and Dominus member, has slowly nurtured a gang of lowly religious dissenters--the foreknown, or predestined ones--to, unknowingly, aid their cause. Believing themselves, as Christ's true followers, to be absolved from all sin, William has persuaded them to wage, essentially, a terrorist campaign to bring on God's day of judgement. The predestined ones will fire five churches, making five wounds upon London, mirroring the five wounds of Christ and the five circles of an ancient Christian symbol. (A mystical five-pointed pentagram was something of a motif in Hawksmoor.) Quite how these schemes (and counter schemes) pan out is best left unspoiled. Ackroyd fans and anyone who savours cunning, intellectually exhilarating mystery tales will not be disappointed. --Travis Elborough [via]

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  • Ballard, J.G.: Cocaine Nights
    Cocaine Nights
    by J.G. Ballard
    ISBN 188717866X (1-887178-66-X)
    Hardcover, Counterpoint

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    When travel writer Charles Prentice arrives at Estrella de Mar, a resort town near Gibraltar populated primarily by British retirees, to find out why his brother Frank has been jailed, he's shocked to find that Frank has confessed to a spectacular act of arson that left five people dead. Charles tries to find the real culprit by hanging around Estrella de Mar, which one resident describes as "like Chelsea or Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There are theatre and film clubs, a choral society, cordon blue classes.... Stand still for a moment and you find yourself roped into a revival of Waiting for Godot." But the longer he stays, the more confused Charles is by the residents' breezy lack of concern about the constant background of vandalism, rape, prostitution, and drug dealing.

    Things become clearer as Charles makes the acquaintance of local tennis pro Bobby Crawford, who has some interesting hypotheses about how to maintain the quality of the inner life in the age of affluence. As another of the locals explains, "Leisure societies lie ahead of us, like those you see on this coast. People ... will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them.... But how do you energize people, give them some sense of community?" Bobby's succinct answer, provided to Charles in another context: "There's nothing like a violent reflex now and then to tune up the nervous system." Bobby convinces Charles to help him replicate his social experiment in an adjacent retirement community, slowly convincing him that crime and creativity really do go hand in hand. But who, if anybody, takes the responsibility?

    Cocaine Nights resonates quite neatly with Ballard's earlier science fiction and experimental stories. As early as The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard was speculating about the salubrious effects of transgression, and his science fiction novel High Rise also deals with the introduction of violence to a self-contained paradise. Cocaine Nights differs from that earlier work primarily in that it is a naturalistic fiction set in a world that is much more ostensibly real, a world that, with a little less detached theorizing (even at his most natural, it seems, Ballard cannot help but be clinical) on the part of its characters, might even be mistaken for real. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • McCullers, Carson: Complete Novels
    Complete Novels
    by Carson McCullers, C. L. Barney Dews
    ISBN 1931082030 (1-931082-03-0)
    Hardcover, Library of America

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  • The Course of the Heart
    by M. John Harrison
    ISBN 1892389975 (1-892389-97-5)
    Hardcover, Nightshade Book

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    The author of Things That Never Happen (starred review, Publishers Weekly) and Light (Tiptree Award winner) delivers an extraordinary, genre-bending novel that weaves together mythology, sexuality, and the troubled past and present of Eastern Europe. It begins on a hot May night, when three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Years later, none of the participants can remember what exactly transpired; but their clouded memories can't rid them of an overwhelming sense of dread. Pam Stuyvesant is an epileptic haunted by strange sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The seemingly least effected participant in the ritual (who is haunted by the smell of roses) attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. [via]

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  • Kafka, Franz: Der Process [sic]
    Der Process [sic]
    by Franz Kafka, Malcolm Pasley, Hans-Gerd Koch
    ISBN 3100381300 (3-10-038130-0)
    Hardcover, S. Fischer

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  • Eleutheria
    by Samuel Beckett
    ISBN 2707315192 (2-7073-1519-2)
    Hardcover, Editions De Minuit

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  • Bevilacqua, Alberto: Eros
    Eros
    by Alberto Bevilacqua, Ann McGarrell
    ISBN 1883642353 (1-883642-35-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Erotique Legs
    by Carlton Books Staff
    ISBN 1858688701 (1-85868-870-1)
    Hardcover, Carlton Books, Limited

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    Book summary:

    In this series, Objects of Desire, each book is individually celebrated with exquisite and erotic photography. [via]

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  • Fencing Master
    by Arturo Perez-Reverte
    ISBN 1860464556 (1-86046-455-6)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    In The Club Dumas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte explored the labyrinthine world of antiquarian book dealers, spicing his tale of mystery and murder with characters straight out of Paradise Lost and The Three Musketeers. Next came The Flanders Panel, a brilliant puzzle comprised of art, chess, and untimely death whose resolution lies in a painting by a Flemish master. In The Seville Communion, Pérez-Reverte turned his sights on the tangled politics of the Roman Catholic Church as an appropriate backdrop--for murder. In his fourth novel translated into English, the Spanish writer changes centuries (if not his focus on homicide), returning to the mid-1800s to follow the exploits of Don Jaime Astarloa, the eponymous fencing master.

    The year is 1866 and revolution is brewing in Spain. The corrupt Bourbon queen, Isabella II, is slowly losing her grip on power as equally corrupt exiled politicians vie to be her successor in a new republic. Against this background of political upheaval, Don Jaime goes about his business, teaching a dying art to a dwindling number of students. This is a man who resists changing times; to a friend he explains, "I have spent my whole life trying to preserve a certain idea of myself, and that is all. You have to cling to a set of values that do not depreciate with time. Everything else is the fashion of the moment, fleeting, mutable. In a word, nonsense." But then Adela de Otero--a woman with a mysterious past and an amazing talent for swordplay--comes into his life, and Don Jaime's world is turned upside down. As always, Pérez-Reverte offers literary excellence, a thumping good mystery, and fascinating insight into an arcane practice, in this case, fencing. Though the 19th-century politics in the book may resonate more with a Spanish audience than with English readers, the moral at the heart of The Fencing Master is universal: "to be honest, or at least honorable--anything, indeed, that has its roots in the word honor." In this, Don Jaime and Arturo Pérez-Reverte both succeed. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • From Hell
    by Alan Moore
    ISBN 1880325071 (1-880325-07-1)
    Softcover, Borderlands Pr

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    The mad, shaggy genius of the comics world dips deeply into the well of history and pulls up a cup filled with blood in From Hell. Alan Moore did a couple of Ph.D.'s worth of research into the Whitechapel murders for this copiously annotated collection of the independently published series. The web of facts, opinion, hearsay, and imaginative invention draws the reader in from the first page. Eddie Campbell's scratchy ink drawings evoke a dark and dirty Victorian London and help to humanize characters that have been caricatured into obscurity for decades. Moore, having decided that the evidence best fits the theory of a Masonic conspiracy to cover up a scandal involving Victoria's grandson, goes to work telling the story with relish from the point of view of the victims, the chief inspector, and the killer--the Queen's physician. His characterization is just as vibrant as Campbell's; even the minor characters feel fully real. Looking more deeply than most, the author finds in the "great work" of the Ripper a ritual magic working intended to give birth to the 20th century in all its horrid glory. Maps, characters, and settings are all as accurate as possible, and while the reader might not ultimately agree with Moore and Campbell's thesis, From Hell is still a great work of literature. --Rob Lightner [via]

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  • The Haunted Bookshop (1879923025) by Morley, Christopher
    The Haunted Bookshop
    by Christopher Morley
    ISBN 1879923025 (1-879923-02-5)
    Softcover, Booksellers Pub

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  • His Dark Materials
    by Philip Pullman, Nicholas Wright
    ISBN 185459768X (1-85459-768-X)
    Softcover, Nick Hern Books

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    With sales of three-quarters of a million copies last year alone, Philip Pullmans trilogy His Dark Materials is already acknowledged as a classic. A cunning blend of traditional childrens adventure with sophisticated fantasy and science fiction, it follows the escapades of Lyra and Will in their parallel worlds. Dramatized by award-winning playwright Nicholas Wright for the National Theatre.

    [via]

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  • Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph/ Ficciones/ Antologia Poetica / El Aleph/ Fictions/ Poetic Anthology
    by Jorge Luis Borges
    ISBN 1853995908 (1-85399-590-8)
    Softcover, Duckbacks

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    Book summary:

    By common consent, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (18990-1986) is one of the greatest writers to have emerged from Latin America. His finest work is "Ficciones" (1944), a collection of brilliantly-crafted, essay-like short stories. This edition, updated from the original 1976 edition by the same authors, offers a comprehensive selection of stories from the work with a full introduction, detailed notes, a generous vocabulary, bibliography, as well as chronological and other tables.
    [via]

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  • Just So Stories Set : For Little Children
    by Rudyard Kipling, Safaya Salter
    ISBN 1857939042 (1-85793-904-2)
    Softcover, Anova Books

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    Rudyard Kipling''s Just So Stories are a clas sic part of children''s literature. Safaya Salter provides il lustrations to the tales which explain some of the mysteries of the animal world. ' [via]

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  • The Labyrinth
    by Catherynne M. Valente
    ISBN 1894815653 (1-894815-65-3)
    Hardcover, Wildside Press

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    Here Monsters are hidden ... A lyrical anti-quest through a conscious maze without center, borders, or escape--a dark pilgrim's progress through a landscape of vicious Angels, plague houses, crocodile-prophets, tragic chess-sets, and the mind of an unraveling woman, driven on by the mocking guide who seeks to destroy as much as save. Enter the world of the Labyrinth, where Doors do not wait to be opened, but hunt you in the night. This is Zarathustra in Wonderland, a puzzle which defies solution, a twisted path through language and madness... But where will you hide? [via]

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  • Delon, Michel: Les Crimes De L'amour: Nouvelles Heroiques Et Tragiques ; Precedees D'une Idee Sur Les Romans
    Les Crimes De L'amour: Nouvelles Heroiques Et Tragiques ; Precedees D'une Idee Sur Les Romans
    by Michel Delon, Sade, Eric Le Grandic
    ISBN 2909031640 (2-909031-64-0)
    Hardcover, Zulma

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  • Les Particules Elementaires
    by Michel Houellebecq
    ISBN 2080674722 (2-08-067472-2)
    Hardcover, Flammarion

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    L'un est un scientifique de renom, l'autre est anonyme ; l'un a choisi une solitude absolue, l'autre ne l'a pas choisie mais la subit quand même ; l'un et l'autre sont frères et n'ont rien en commun, sinon cette propension au malheur. Ou plutôt au "non-bonheur" : bonheur dont les auraient privés les débordements libertaires des années soixante-dix. Chacun de leur côté, en se traînant de fiasco en désastre, et de retraite en désert, ils vont faire de leur vie la preuve de ce désenchantement du monde et révéler enfin la clef des rapports entre les hommes : l'illusion.

    Lors de sa sortie, ce livre a fait couler beaucoup d'encre, suscité de vives passions et de violents débats, alimentés par la personnalité de son auteur, volontiers provocateur et irrévérencieux. Cela ne fait qu'ajouter à la fascination que provoque la lecture de ce roman, qui remet en cause toutes nos certitudes et nous oblige à réagir. Que l'on aime ou pas le style Houellebecq, il est urgent de lire Les Particules élémentaires. --Karla Manuele [via]

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  • Maldoror and the Complete Works
    by Alexis Lykiard, Comte De Lautreamont, Lautreamont
    ISBN 187897212X (1-878972-12-X)
    Softcover, Exact Change

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    Andre Breton described Maldoror as "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Maldoror 's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger." This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautreamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship. [via]

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  • Memoires d Hadrien
    by Marquerite Yourcenar
    ISBN 2070369218 (2-07-036921-8)
    Softcover, Gallimard

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    364pages. poche. Broché. [via]

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  • Sassoon, Siegfried: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
    Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
    by Siegfried Sassoon
    ISBN 1931541701 (1-931541-70-1)
    Softcover, Simon Pubns

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  • Sassoon, Siegfried: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
    Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
    by Siegfried Sassoon
    ISBN 1931313814 (1-931313-81-4)
    Softcover, Simon Pubns

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  • Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America (1859840663) by Guevara, Ernesto
    Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America
    by Ernesto Guevara, Ann Wright
    ISBN 1859840663 (1-85984-066-3)
    Softcover, Verso Books

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    Book summary:

    In January 1952, two young men from Buenos Aires set out to explore South America on an ancient Norton motorbike. The journey lasted six months and took them thousands of miles, all the way from Argentina to Venezuela. En route, there was disasters and discoveries, high drama, low comedy, fights, parties and a lot of serious drinking. They met an extraordinary range of people: native indians and copper miners, lepers, police, wanderers and tourists. They became stowaways, firemen and football coaches, and joined in a strike. They sometimes fell in love, and frequently fell off the motorbike. Both of them kept diaries. One of them was a tall and good-looking medical student called Ernest Guevara de la Serna. Using the standard Argentinean nickname, others would sometimes refer to the two companions as Big Che and Little Che. In Ernesto's case, the nickname stuck. Within a decade the whole world would know Che Guevara. This is the story of that remarkable journey, eight years before the Cuban Revolution, in Che's own words, and illustrated with contemporary photographs. For Che, it was a formative experience, and amidst the humour and pathos of the tale, there are examples of his idealism and his solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. But it is far from being the diary of a militant, and sometimes very far from being "political correct", which may be the reason that the manuscript has only been made available now, a quarter century after Che's death in the Bolivian jungle. Instead, it is a record kept by an exuberant, intelligent and observant 23-year-old, describing what might have been the adventure of a lifetime - had his lifetime not turned into a much greater adventure. [via]

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  • The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
    by Ernesto Guevara, Cintio Vitier
    ISBN 1876175702 (1-876175-70-2)
    Softcover, Ocean Pr

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    Book summary:

    The book of the popular movie

    STARRING GAEL GARCIA BERNAL

    NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

     

    The young Che Guevaras lively and highly entertaining travel diary.This new, expanded edition features exclusive, unpublished photos taken by the 23-year-old Ernesto on his journey across a continent, and a tender preface by Aleida Guevara, offering an insightful perspective on the man and the icon.

     

    As his journey progresses, Guevaras voice seems to deepen, to darken, colored by what he witnesses in his travels. He is still poetic, but now he comments on what he sees, though still poetically, with a new awareness of the social and political ramifications of whats going on around him.January Magazine

     

    A journey, a number of journeys. Ernesto Guevara in search of adventure, Ernesto Guevara in search of America, Ernesto Guevara in search of Che. On this journey of journeys, solitude found solidarity, I turned into we. Eduardo Galeano

     

    When I read these notes for the first time, I was quite young myself and I immediately identified with this man who narrated his adventures in such a spontaneous manner& To tell you the truth, the more I read, the more I was in love with the boy my father had been& Aleida Guevara

     

    Our film is about a young man, Che, falling in love with a continent and finding his place in it. Walter Salles, director of The Motorcycle Diaries.

     

    Also available in Spanish: DIARIOS DE MOTOCICLETA (978-1-920888-11-4)

     

    Features of this edition include:

    •  

      Published in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center, Havana

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  • The New York Trilogy: City Of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room
    by Paul Auster
    ISBN 1931243573 (1-931243-57-3)
    Hardcover, Green Integer Books

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1985â¬1986, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room) brought immediate international attention to its author, Paul Auster, and elevated him to near-celebrity status, particularly in France.

    This trilogy and his many works since then (including In the Country of Last Words, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo, Moon Palace, and others) have been translated into numerous languages and have brought him further world attention. Auster's trilogy broke ground in its mix of serious fictional techniques and detective and mystery genres. Geoffrey O'Brien of The Village Voice wrote: "The New York Trilogy are novels of desire: the desire to write a detective novel, to read one, to -inhabit it. . . . By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have -initiated a whole new round of storytelling." This new edition will delight readers and collectors of Auster's work.

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  • Norwegian Wood
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 1860468004 (1-86046-800-4)
    Softcover, Random House

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    Book summary:

    "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me" "Norwegian Wood" (Lennon/McCartney).

    With Norwegian Wood Murakami, best known as the author of off-kilter classics such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland, finally achieved widespread acclaim in his native Japan. The novel sold upwards of 4 million copies and forced the author to retreat to Europe, fearful of the expectations accompanying his new-found cult status.

    The novel is atypical for Murakami: seemingly autobiographical, in the tradition of many Japanese "I" novels, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age tale set, primarily, in 1969/70, the time of Murakami's own university years. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the backdrop of the novel but the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs and the pain (and pleasure) of growing up with all its attendant losses, (self-)obsessions and crises.

    The novel is split into two volumes and beautifully presented here in a "gold" box containing both the green book and the red book. Young Japanese fans became so obsessed with the work that they would dress entirely in one or other colour denoting which volume they most identified with. And the novel is hugely affecting, reading like a cross between Plath's Bell Jar and Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, if less complex and ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical, work. He captures the huge expectation of youth, and of this particular time in history, for the future and for the place of love in it. He also saturates the work with sadness, an emotion that can cripple a novel but which here underscores the poignancy of the work's rather thin subject matter. --Mark Thwaite [via]

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  • Nouvelles Orientales
    by Marguerite Yourcenar
    ISBN 2070299732 (2-07-029973-2)
    Softcover, Schoenhofs Foreign Books

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    Book summary:

    149pages. poche. Broché. [via]

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  • Novels, 1942-1952
    by John Steinbeck, Robert Demott
    ISBN 1931082073 (1-931082-07-3)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    This third volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck's writings shows one of America's most enduring popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling.

    The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey's sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all Steinbeck's novels. Steinbeck's long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he had heard about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.

    Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer's deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance.
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  • On Blindness
    by Jose Saramago
    ISBN 1860462987 (1-86046-298-7)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    Book summary:

    In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

    In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

    Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

    And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Morley, Christopher: Parnassus on Wheels
    Parnassus on Wheels
    by Christopher Morley
    ISBN 1879923017 (1-879923-01-7)
    Softcover, Booksellers Pub

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  • The Partnership
    by Barry Unsworth
    ISBN 1857990706 (1-85799-070-6)
    Hardcover, Phoenix

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    Book summary:

    Booker Prize-winning author Barry Unsworth's first novel, published for the first time in the United States.

    Foley and Moss are partners in a successful small business, making plaster pixies for the tourist trade. Foley is the artistic member of the partnership; he thinks up the ideas and designs and has pretensions to even greater artistry in his cherub lamps and fixtures. Moss, the seemingly quiet one who supplied the capital for the venture, manufactures them. Barry Unsworth sets his scene magnificentlya Cornish village, Lanruan, thriving on specious tourism, and its local characters: Graham, the primitive painter; Bailey, the loud-mouthed Northerner who comes to Lanruan to make his fortune; Barbara, the nearest thing the village possesses to a bad girl; and above all Gwendoline, who, inadvertently, begins the rift in the partnership between Foley and Moss. The Partnership is a disquieting, darkly funny tale about hidden desires and the unspoken attachments we have for one another. [via]

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  • Pearl
    by Anon
    ISBN 1853266094 (1-85326-609-4)
    Softcover, Wordsworth Editions Ltd

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    Book summary:

    These three novellas are taken from "The Pearl", a subterranean magazine that had a brief life of 18 months in the years 1879 and 1880. It was devoted to unrestrained erotica, comprising sexual escapades, jokes and bawdy rhymes. [via]

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  • Lawrence, D. H.: The Plumed Serpent
    The Plumed Serpent
    by D. H. Lawrence
    ISBN 1905432593 (1-905432-59-3)
    Softcover, Dodo Pr

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  • Pnin
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 1857152727 (1-85715-272-7)
    Hardcover, Alfred A. Knopf

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    Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader's deepest protective instinct. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, PNIN brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity. [via]

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  • Risibles Amours
    by Milan Kundera
    ISBN 2070708136 (2-07-070813-6)
    Hardcover, Gallimard

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  • Room With a View
    by Lucy Fur
    ISBN 1932595163 (1-932595-16-3)
    Hardcover, Feral House

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    A motel, a camera and Lucy Fur. Dreamy.Jimmy McDonough, author of Shakey: Neil Youngs Biography and Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer

    The young, buxom Burlesque Queen of Portland, Oregon, has begun a distinctive photographic career by posing in a vanishing breed of unique motel room environ-ments across the country.


    Writes Lucy in her introduction, Room With a View is not merely a pin-up book: it is as much about the room as it is about me. I think of myself as a fixture in that room, like a lamp or a chair. The kind of motel rooms that particularly attracted me had wood paneling, forgotten 60s- and 70s-era oil paintings, strange lighting, fantasy themes, tiled bathrooms, wacky wallpaper, and no outside view. All the photo-graphs are in some way a reaction to the established lexicon of pin-up sexy.


    Room With a View contains nearly one hundred of Lucy Furs photographs, bound handsomely with an inlaid photograph surrounded by an elegant embossed cloth binding.

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  • Wilde, Oscar: Salome & Under the Hill
    Salome & Under the Hill
    by Oscar Wilde
    ISBN 1871592127 (1-871592-12-7)
    Softcover, Creation Pub Group

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  • Villiers De L'Isle-Adam, Auguste: The Scaffold And Other Cruel Tales
    The Scaffold And Other Cruel Tales
    by Auguste Villiers De L'Isle-Adam, Brian Stableford
    ISBN 1932983015 (1-932983-01-5)
    Softcover, Black Coat Pr

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  • Scaramouche
    by Rafael Sabatini
    ISBN 1888173580 (1-888173-58-0)
    Softcover, Akadine Pr

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    Book summary:

    A vigorous, page-turning historical romance set in revolutionary-era France. [via]

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  • Sabatini, Rafael: The Sea-hawk
    The Sea-hawk
    by Rafael Sabatini
    ISBN 1931839530 (1-931839-53-0)
    Softcover, Ross & Perry Inc

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  • Vandermeer, Jeff: Secret Life
    Secret Life
    by Jeff Vandermeer, Jeffrey Ford
    ISBN 1930846274 (1-930846-27-4)
    Hardcover, Golden Gryphon Pr

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  • Seville Communion
    by Arturo Perez-Reverte
    ISBN 1860465536 (1-86046-553-6)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    Book summary:

    Spain's Arturo Perez-Reverte continues his string of comfortably old-fashioned, modestly intellectual thrillers with a touching and suspenseful story of faith and duty, set in the timeless and enchanting city of Seville. "In Seville different histories were superimposed and interdependent," he writes, aided by Sonia Soto's seamless translation. "A rosary stringing together time, blood and prayers in different languages beneath a blue sky and wise sun that leveled everything over the centuries. Stone survivors that could still be heard. You just had to forget for a moment the camcorders, postcards, coaches full of tourists and cheeky young girls, and put your ear to the stones and listen." As in his previous surprise bestsellers--The Club Dumas and The Flanders Panel, both available in paperback--Perez-Reverte takes a supposedly cool observer and turns the person into a hot-blooded participant in the action. In The Seville Communion it's Father Lorenzo Quart, who works for an investigative branch of the Vatican that is referred to by an angry, upstaged Archbishop of Seville as "you and your mafiosi in Rome, playing God's police." Father Quart, a very attractive man with prematurely gray hair cropped short, wears expensive suits and has to fight off the women who test his vows of celibacy. His toughest challenge is a breathtaking, titled beauty named Macarena, whose banker husband is at the center of a plot to tear down a historic church. Two people have already been killed because of the intrigue, and more violence threatens as Father Quart is pursued by a trio of ineptly dangerous villains, straight out of Bogart's Beat the Devil, through the gorgeous streets of a city to die for. [via]

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  • Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
    by Jeff VanderMeer, Mark Roberts, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Alan Moore
    ISBN 1892389541 (1-892389-54-1)
    Hardcover, Night Shade Books

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    Book summary:

    From Delusions of Universal Grandeur to Twentieth Century Chronoshock, this amusing pocket guide to concocted diseases - designed and illustrated by John Coulthart - features an anthology of slightly morbid, darkly humorous ailments and prognosis srved up by such renowned luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, Gahan Wilson, Brian Stableford, and Michael Bishop. [via]

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  • Beckett, Samuel: Trilogy
    Trilogy
    by Samuel Beckett
    ISBN 1857152360 (1-85715-236-0)
    Hardcover, Everyman's Library Ltd

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  • Hearn, Lafeadio: Two Years in the French: West Indies
    Two Years in the French: West Indies
    by Lafeadio Hearn
    ISBN 1902669177 (1-902669-17-7)
    Softcover, Signal Books

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  • Hitchens, Christopher: Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
    Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
    by Christopher Hitchens
    ISBN 1859843832 (1-85984-383-2)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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  • Veniss Underground
    by Jeff Vandermeer
    ISBN 1894815645 (1-894815-64-5)
    Softcover, Prime Books

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    Book summary:

    Jeff VanderMeer's last book, City of Saints & Madmen, explored the limits of literary fantasy, garnering raves from critics, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Now, with Veniss Underground, VanderMeer explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a far future SF novel that combines the grotesque and the sublime in a rousing adventure-mystery. [via]

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  • Venus in Furs
    by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
    ISBN 1853266418 (1-85326-641-8)
    Softcover, Wordsworth Edition

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    Book summary:

    This is a story of obsessive love. Severin von Kusiemski loves the beautiful Wanda van Dunajew, but feels that the best way to express his love is to suffer at her hands. Reluctantly she agrees to take him as her slave, renames him Gregor and submits him to frightful humiliations. [via]

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  • The War of the Worlds
    by H. G. Wells, Glenn Yeffeth
    ISBN 1932100555 (1-932100-55-5)
    Softcover, Benbella Books

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    H.G. Wells has been called the father of science fiction, and with genre-defining classics like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, its obvious why.

    The War of the Worlds is as vivid and powerful today as the day it was written. In this collection, which also includes the full text of The War of the Worlds, fourteen of science fictions greatest talents come together to discuss, with insight and humor, one of science fictions most important works.

    Essays include:

    • “H. G. Wells Enduring Mythos of Mars, in which Stephen Baxter provides the history of mans investigators of Mars and explains why Wells was right after all
    • “Just Who Were Those Martians, Anyway? in which Lawrence Watt-Evans explains how ridiculously incompetent the Martians were as interplanetary invaders, and why
    • “In Workings Image, in which Mercedes Lackey takes us to a different alien world: Wells hometown of Working during the late 19th century
    • “The Tiniest Assassins, in which Mike Resnick suggests that Wells gets one tiny thing wrong
    • The Hugo-winning “The Soul Selects Her Own Society (the only reprint in this anthology), in which Connie Willis describes the unfortunate encounter between Emily Dickinson and Wells Martians
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  • Sinclair, Iain: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: OS Mpt
    White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: OS Mpt
    by Iain Sinclair
    ISBN 186207206X (1-86207-206-X)
    Softcover, Granta Books

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  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 1860464696 (1-86046-469-6)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

    Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

    If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com [via]

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  • The Woman and the Ape
    by Peter Hoeg
    ISBN 1860463681 (1-86046-368-1)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    Book summary:

    Peter Høeg, author of the international bestseller Smilla's Sense of Snow, has written a fable that explores our human status as inhabitants of paradise lost, and the trade-off between civilization and freedom. The story begins with a captured ape, dubbed Erasmus, a specimen of an apparently new species with a cognitive ability that seems to rival human capacities. Erasmus is rescued from scientific study and experimentation by Madelene, whose husband, Adam, is the zoo director. Escaping to an Eden-like nature reserve, Madelene finds an empathy with Erasmus that develops into a wild sexual liberation. When the pair emerge from Eden to try to stop Adam continuing researches on others of Erasmus' kind, paradise dissolves, and civilization wins out. Read an interview with Peter Høeg. [via]

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  • Zulieka Dobson
    by Max Beerbohm
    ISBN 1933382031 (1-933382-03-1)
    Softcover, Green Integer Books

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1911, Zulieka Dobson is the story of the beautiful young granddaughter of the warden of Judas College at Oxford. The entire student body falls in love with her, but she is aloofshe has never loved a man! This hilarious novel mocks sexual mores, British education, and everything along with it using outrageous humor.

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  • Das Tagebuch Der Bridget Jones
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 344244392X (3-442-44392-X)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Bridget Jones ist knapp über 30, arbeitet als Lektorin in einem Verlag, hat einen aktiven großen Freundeskreis -- eine selbstbewusste junge Frau also. Aber ihr Lebenslauf weist ein großes Manko auf: Sie ist Single. Ein unhaltbarer Zustand, wie auch ihre Eltern, deren Freunde sowie ihre verheirateten Freundinnen finden. Die sie prompt immer wieder einladen, um ihr alleinstehende Männer vorzustellen. Dieses Weihnachten war Mark Darcy der auserwählte Kandidat ihrer Eltern -- ein unmöglicher Mensch, grauenhaft gekleidet, mit dem man keine zwei vernünftigen Worte wechseln kann. Außerdem flirtet sie wie wild mit Daniel, ihrem Chef. Und ihre Freundinnen sind stolz auf sie -- hat sie es doch geschafft, sich wieder anzuziehen und zu gehen, nachdem Daniel ihr erklärt hatte, nur weil er scharf auf sie sei, wolle er noch lange keine Beziehung mit ihr. Nebenbei kämpft sie noch mit ihren Gewichtsproblemen, einem langweiligen Job, dem Single-Dasein als solchem und mit der Tatsache, dass ihre Mutter nun nach all den Jahren plötzlich anfängt auf Männerpirsch zu gehen und ein rasantes Eigenleben entwickelt.

    Ein Unterhaltungsroman im besten Sinne des Wortes. Singles um die 30, die schon mindestens eine Diät hinter sich haben, werden sicher vieles wieder erkennen. Die Krisensitzungen mit den besten Freundinnen zum Beispiel, die wohlmeinenden Ratschläge derer, die schon unter der Haube sind (und deren Männer fremdgehen). Und bekannt ist vielleicht auch das Kalorienzählen, die Ausreden vor sich selbst, warum es denn nun ausgerechnet Schokolade anstelle vollwertiger Ernährung sein musste -- und das schlechte Gewissen am Tag danach. Ich konnte auf alle Fälle herzlich lachen. --Daniela Ecker [via]

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