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  • 84, Charing Cross Road
    by Helene Hanff
    ISBN 0140143505 (0-14-014350-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    84, Charing Cross Road is a charming record of bibliophilia, cultural difference, and imaginative sympathy. For 20 years, an outspoken New York writer and a rather more restrained London bookseller carried on an increasingly touching correspondence. In her first letter to Marks & Co., Helene Hanff encloses a wish list, but warns, "The phrase 'antiquarian booksellers' scares me somewhat, as I equate 'antique' with expensive." Twenty days later, on October 25, 1949, a correspondent identified only as FPD let Hanff know that works by Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson would be coming under separate cover. When they arrive, Hanff is ecstatic--but unsure she'll ever conquer "bilingual arithmetic." By early December 1949, Hanff is suddenly worried that the six-pound ham she's sent off to augment British rations will arrive in a kosher office. But only when FPD turns out to have an actual name, Frank Doel, does the real fun begin.

    Two years later, Hanff is outraged that Marks & Co. has dared to send an abridged Pepys diary. "i enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT." Nonetheless, her postscript asks whether they want fresh or powdered eggs for Christmas. Soon they're sharing news of Frank's family and Hanff's career. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, the firm's secretary informed her that Frank Doel had died. In the collection's penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, "If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much." [via]

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  • James, Henry: The Ambassadors
    The Ambassadors
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1853260347 (1-85326-034-7)
    Softcover, Wordsworth Edition

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    Book summary:

    The Ambassadors, which Henry James considered his best work, is the most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American innocence with European experience. This time, James recounts the continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome. His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e., European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett, Massachusetts. Instead, this all-American envoy finds Europe growing on him. Strether also becomes involved in a very Jamesian "relation" with the fascinating Miss Maria Gostrey, a fellow American and informal Sacajawea to her compatriots. Clearly Paris has "improved" Chad beyond recognition, and convincing him to return to the U.S. is going to be a very, very hard sell. Suspense, of course, is hardly James's stock-in-trade. But there is no more meticulous mapper of tone and atmosphere, nuance and implication. His hyper-refined characters are at their best in dialogue, particularly when they're exchanging morsels of gossip. Astute, funny, and relentlessly intelligent, James amply fulfills his own description of the novelist as a person upon whom nothing is lost. --Rhian Ellis [via]

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  • Babycakes
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0060924837 (0-06-092483-7)
    Softcover, Perennial

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    Book summary:

    "An extended love letter to a magical San Francisco."
    --New York Times Book Review

    When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby then meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first work of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

    "Armistead is a true original. His tales are bang up-to-date. They will surprise and maybe even shock you, but, I promise, they will make you laugh."
    --Ian McKellen

    "Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hop."
    --Denver Post

    "Armistead Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on."
    -- New York Times Book Review

    [via]

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  • The Color Purple
    by Alice Walker
    ISBN 0156028352 (0-15-602835-2)
    Softcover, Harcourt

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    Book summary:

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
    [via]

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  • Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
    by Niall Ferguson
    ISBN 0143034790 (0-14-303479-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    "The United States today is an empirebut a peculiar kind of empire," writes Niall Ferguson. Despite overwhelming military, economic, and cultural dominance, America has had a difficult time imposing its will on other nations, mostly because the country is uncomfortable with imperialism and thus unable to use this power most effectively and decisively. The origin of this attitude and its persistence is a principal theme of this thought-provoking book, including how domestic politics affects foreign policy, whether it is politicians worried about the next election or citizens who "like Social Security more than national security." Ferguson, a British historian, has no objection to an American empire, as long as it is a liberal one actively underwriting the free exchange of goods, labor, and capital. Further, he writes that "empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before" as a means to "contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations." The sooner America embraces this role and acts on it confidently, the better. Ferguson contrasts this persistent anti-imperialistic urge with the attitude held by the British Empire and suggests that America has much to learn from that model if it is to achieve its stated foreign policy objectives of spreading social freedom, democracy, development, and the free market to the world. He suggests that the U.S. must be willing to send money, civilians, and troops for a sustained period of time to troubled spots if there is to be real changeas in Japan and Germany after World War II--an idea that many American citizens and leaders now find repulsive. Rather than devoting limited resources and striving to get complex jobs done in a rush, Americans must be willing to integrate themselves into a foreign culture until a full Americanization has occurred, he writes. Overall, a trenchant examination of a uniquely American dilemma and its implications for the rest of the world. --Shawn Carkonen [via]

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  • The Complete Illustrated Works of Edgar Allan Poe
    by Edgar Allan Poe
    ISBN 1851526307 (1-85152-630-7)
    Hardcover, Chancellor Press

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    Book summary:

    Famous for his horror stories and brooding poetry, Poe is often considered to be the inventor of the modern detective story, as well. Now, this one marvelously illustrated and popularly priced volume makes it possible to appreciate the full genius of this master of the mysterious and brilliant literary talent. Images, reproduced from a variety of sources (including Aubrey Beardsley, Edouard Manet, and Arthur Rackham) enhance the mood of such favorites as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, A Descent into the Maelström and The Masque of the Red Death. In addition to those "Tales of Mystery and Imagination"--70 chronicles of terror and fantasy that established Poe as the supreme craftsman of the short story--there is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe's only full-length work and a masterful blending of science and romance. Finally, a section devoted to "The Raven and Other Poems" reflects Poe's obsession with the macabre.
    [via]

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  • The Crying of Lot 49
    by Thomas Pynchon
    ISBN 006091307X (0-06-091307-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.

    [via]

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  • Dune: La Batalla De Corrin
    by Frank Herbert
    ISBN 8470021818 (84-7002-181-8)
    Softcover, Lectorum Pubns Inc

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  • Dune:La Yihad Butleriana / Dune:the Butlerian Yihad: La Yihad Butleriana/ the Butlerian Yihad
    by Brian Herbert, Random House Mondadori, Domingo Santos
    ISBN 849759682X (84-9759-682-X)
    Softcover, Debolsillo

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  • East of Eden
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0140049975 (0-14-004997-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

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    Book [via]

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  • Steinbeck, John: East of Eden: An Easy Guide to Car Maintenance And Repair
    East of Eden: An Easy Guide to Car Maintenance And Repair
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0140186395 (0-14-018639-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    'Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man'. California's fertile Salinas Valley is home to two families whose destinies are fruitfully, and fatally, intertwined. Over the generations, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, the Trasks and the Hamiltons will helplessly replay the fall of Adam and Eve and the murderous rivalry of Cain and Abel. "East of Eden" was considered by Steinbeck to be his magnum opus, and its epic scope and memorable characters, exploring universal themes of love and identity, ensure it remains one of America's most enduring novels. [via]

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  • Everything Is Illuminated
    by Jonathan Safran Foer
    ISBN 0060529709 (0-06-052970-9)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

    If all this sounds a little daunting, don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer who combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship, and loss. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Fahrenheit 451
    by Ray Bradbury, Jacques Chambon, Henri Robillot
    ISBN 2070415732 (2-07-041573-2)
    Softcover, Gallimard

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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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  • Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0000020532 (0-00-002053-2)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    With the same drug-addled alacrity and jaundiced wit that made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a hilarious hit, Hunter S. Thompson turns his savage eye and gonzo heart to the repellent and seductive race for President. He deconstructs the 1972 campaigns of idealist George McGovern and political hack Richard Nixon, ending up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic. A classic! [via]

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  • Gilead: A Novel
    by Marilynne Robinson
    ISBN 1594131244 (1-59413-124-4)
    Softcover, Thorndike Press

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    Book summary:

    In 1981, Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and became a modern classic. Since then, she has written two pieces of nonfiction: Mother Country and The Death of Adam. With Gilead, we have, at last, another work of fiction. As with The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzards's return, 22 years after The Transit of Venus, it was worth the long wait. Books such as these take time, and thought, and a certain kind of genius. There are no invidious comparisons to be made. Robinson's books are unalike in every way but one: the same incisive thought and careful prose illuminate both.

    The narrator, John Ames, is 76, a preacher who has lived almost all of his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his almost seven-year-old son, the blessing of his second marriage. It is a summing-up, an apologia, a consideration of his life. Robinson takes the story away from being simply the reminiscences of one man and moves it into the realm of a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the imperfectability of man.

    The reason for the letter is Ames's failing health. He wants to leave an account of himself for this son who will never really know him. His greatest regret is that he hasn't much to leave them, in worldly terms. "Your mother told you I'm writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you?" In the course of the narrative, John Ames records himself, inside and out, in a meditative style. Robinson's prose asks the reader to slow down to the pace of an old man in Gilead, Iowa, in 1956. Ames writes of his father and grandfather, estranged over his grandfather's departure for Kansas to march for abolition and his father's lifelong pacifism. The tension between them, their love for each other and their inability to bridge the chasm of their beliefs is a constant source of rumination for John Ames. Fathers and sons.

    The other constant in the book is Ames's friendship since childhood with "old Boughton," a Presbyterian minister. Boughton, father of many children, favors his son, named John Ames Boughton, above all others. Ames must constantly monitor his tendency to be envious of Boughton's bounteous family; his first wife died in childbirth and the baby died almost immediately after her. Jack Boughton is a ne'er-do-well, Ames knows it and strives to love him as he knows he should. Jack arrives in Gilead after a long absence, full of charm and mischief, causing Ames to wonder what influence he might have on Ames's young wife and son when Ames dies.

    These are the things that Ames tells his son about: his ancestors, the nature of love and friendship, the part that faith and prayer play in every life and an awareness of one's own culpability. There is also reconciliation without resignation, self-awareness without deprecation, abundant good humor, philosophical queries--Jack asks, "'Do you ever wonder why American Christianity seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?'"--and an ongoing sense of childlike wonder at the beauty and variety of God's world.

    In Marilynne Robinson's hands, there is a balm in Gilead, as the old spiritual tells us. --Valerie Ryan [via]

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  • Golden/Geisha
    ISBN 2253117951 (2-253-11795-1)
    Hardcover, Librairie Generale Francaise, LGF

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    Book summary:

    604pages. poche. broché. [via]

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  • Hannibal
    by Thomas Harris
    ISBN 8425399831 (84-253-9983-1)
    Hardcover, Grijalbo Mondadori

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    Siete aos han pasado desde que Clarice Starling, agente del FBI, se entrevistara con el doctor Hannibal Lecter en un hospital de maxima seguridad. Su ayuda fue decisiva para que ella capturara al asesino en serie Buffalo Bill. Y siete aos han transcurrido desde que Hannibal el Canibal burlara la vigilancia y desapareciera dejando una sangrienta estela de victimas a su paso. Desde entonces el doctor Lecter ha podido dedicarse a disfrutar libremente de sus truculentos gustos. Sin embargo, cuando Clarice cae en desgracia en el FBI, el doctor Lecter sale de las sombras para ponerse en contacto con ella. Asi el reaviva la caza de la presa mas codiciada, y perversa mente del psiquiatra, es encargada del caso. Desde su lujosa mansion, el millonario Mason Verger, unica victima superviviente de El Canibal, se mantiene vivo, conectado a un respirador, con el unico objetivo de cobrarse una cruel venganza. Para ello debe conseguir lo que mas gusta a Hannibal, el cebo mas exquisito e inocente... Una de las novelas mas esperadas de la decada, HANNIBAL nos introduce en los meandros del pensamiento de este personaje hipnotico, ambiguo, capaz de las mas inimaginables vilezas y de los gestos mas sublimes, un ser que nos arrastra, aun a pesar nuestro, a los abismos del terror.

    "UNA DE LAS NOVELAS MAS ATERRADORAS DE NUESTRO TIEMPO" [via]

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  • The Illustrated Souls Of Black Folk
    by W. E. B. Du Bois, Eugene F. Provenzo, Manning Marable
    ISBN 159451030X (1-59451-030-X)
    Hardcover, Paradigm Pub

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    Book summary:

    The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line . . . - W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903. This prophetic statement made by W. E. B. Du Bois over a century ago is from The Souls of Black Folk. One hundred years later, Souls remains the most important treatment of African-American life and culture published in the Twentieth century. Richly illustrated, this special edition of Du Bois's seminal work includes historical woodcuts and engravings, photos, and documents. Most of the photos, engravings, and documents are from the 19th and early 20th century and depict American slavery and its legacy, African-American life, and the prominent figures and events associated with the book's content. Assembled by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., this illustrated edition of The Souls of Black Folk also offers extensive annotations, commentary, and related materials from government, the media, advertising, and popular culture. Documents include: the Act Establishing the Freedman's Bureau; Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition Speech; W. E. B. Du Bois's essay The Talented Tenth; Ida B. Wells-Barnett's The Lynch Law in Georgia; W. E. B. Du Bois's report The Negro in the Black Belt; Alexander Crummell's sermon Common Sense and Schooling; W. E. B. Du Bois's story The Black Man Brings His Gifts; Thomas W. Higginson's Negro Spirituals, and more. Annotated, Illustrated, Documentary Editions are a new series of books created by Eugene Provenzo and Paradigm Publishers, offering classic works in Literature, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities with extensive commentary, illustrations, and related documentary sources. [via]

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  • The Jungle
    by Upton Beall Sinclair, Maura Spiegel
    ISBN 1593080085 (1-59308-008-5)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
    • Biographies of the authors
    • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
    • Footnotes and endnotes
    • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
    • Comments by other famous authors
    • Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
    • Bibliographies for further reading
    • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    Upton Sinclairs muckraking masterpiece The Jungle centers on Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant working in Chicagos infamous Packingtown. Instead of finding the American Dream, Rudkus and his family inhabit a brutal, soul-crushing urban jungle dominated by greedy bosses, pitiless con-men, and corrupt politicians.

    While Sinclairs main target was the industrys appalling labor conditions, the reading public was most outraged by the disgusting filth and contamination in American food that his novel exposed. As a result, President Theodore Roosevelt demanded an official investigation, which quickly led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws. For a work of fiction to have such an impact outside its literary context is extremely rare. (At the time of The Jungles publication in 1906, the only novel to have led to social change on a similar scale in America was Uncle Toms Cabin.)

    Today, The Jungle remains a relevant portrait of capitalism at its worst and an impassioned account of the human spirit facing nearly insurmountable challenges.

    Maura Spiegel teaches literature and film at Columbia University and Barnard College. She is the coauthor of The Grim Reader and The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History. She coedits Literature and Medicine, a journal.

    [via]

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  • Less Than Zero
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 0140088946 (0-14-008894-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

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    Book summary:

    Clay comes home to L.A. for Christmas vacation and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs. Morally barren, ethically bereft and tinged with implicit violence, "Less Than Zero" is a shocking coming-of-age novel about the casual nihilism that comes with youth and money. "An extraordinarily accomplished first novel." - "New Yorker." "One of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." - Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times." "The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation." - "USA Today." "Remarkable. A killer - sexy, sassy, sad." - "Village Voice." [via]

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  • Memorias De Una Geisha / Memoirs of a Geisha
    by Arthur Golden
    ISBN 9681905849 (968-19-0584-9)
    Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    En Memorias de una geisha, Arthur Golden abre una ventana al misterioso mundo del erotismo en Japón y describe con fidelidad la delicada fortaleza de la cultura de las geishas de Kioto a lo largo del siglo. [via]

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  • More Tales of the City
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0060929383 (0-06-092938-3)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures for afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppleganger in a desert whore-house, and Michael Tolliver bumps into a certain gynecologist in a seedy Mexican Bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all'without ever leaving home. A new, full color 16-page insert makes this seamless work complete.

    "Maupin has always been a humane storyteller, and an accessible one. His life-is-good-but-sloppy soap operas are marked by solid craft, superb dialogue, and what used to be called heart."
    --Entertainment Weekly

    "Maupin writes with warmth, acuity and tremendous wit about ordinary people learning to live with themselves and one another. Read him."
    --Harpers & Queen

    "Sparkling entertainments...lit by a glowing humanity that brings each character to vivid, poignant life."
    --Publishers Weekly

    Don't miss the much anticipated continuation of the classic miniseries "Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City" premiering June 1998 and airing all summer on SHOWTIME. Check your local listings for times.

    Visit the Tales of the City website at www.talesofthecity.com [via]

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  • Mr. Vertigo
    by Paul Auster
    ISBN 0140231900 (0-14-023190-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Paul Auster, the New York Times-bestselling author of The New York Trilogy presents a dazzling, picaresque novel set in the late 1920s  the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone. Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as "Walt the Wonder Boy," is a Saint Louis orphan rescued from the streets by a mysterious Hungarian Jew, Master Yehudi, who teaches Walt to walk on air. Master Yehudi brings Walt into a Kansas circus troupe consisting of Mother Sioux and Aesop, a young black genius. The vaudeville act takes them across a vast and vibrant country, through mythic Americana where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob. Walt's rise to fame and fortune mirrors America's own coming of age, and his resilience, like that of the nation, is challenged over and over and over again.
    [via]

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  • My Antonia
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 1593080247 (1-59308-024-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

    Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

    As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • My Year of Meats
    by Ruth L. Ozeki
    ISBN 0140280464 (0-14-028046-4)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    At first glance, a novel that promises to expose the unethical practices of the American meat industry may not be at the top of your reading list, but Ruth Ozeki's debut, My Year of Meats is well worth a second look. Like the author, the novel's protagonist, Jane Takagi-Little, is a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker; like Ozeki, who was once commissioned by a beef lobbying group to make television shows for the Japanese market, Jane is invited to work on a Japanese television show meant to encourage beef consumption via the not-so-subliminal suggestion that prime rib equals a perfect family:

    TO: AMERICAN RESEARCH STAFF
    FROM: Tokyo Office
    DATE: January 5, 1991
    RE: My American Wife!...

    Here is list of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!

    DESIRABLE THINGS:
    1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
    2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: "Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!")
    3. Attractive, docile husband
    4. Attractive, obedient children
    5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
    6. Attractive, clean house...

    UNDESIRABLE THINGS:
    1. Physical imperfections
    2. Obesity
    3. Squalor
    4. Second class peoples

    The series, My American Wife!, initally seems like a dream come true for Jane as she criss-crosses the United States filming a different American family each week for her Japanese audience. Naturally, the emphasis is on meat, and Ozeki has fun with out-there recipes such as rump roast in coke and beef fudge; but as Jane becomes more familiar with her subject, she becomes increasingly aware of the beef industry's widespread practice of using synthetic estrogens on their cattle and determines to sabotage the program.

    Cut to Tokyo where Akiko Ueno struggles through the dull misery of life with her brutish husband, who happens to be in charge of the show's advertising. After seeing one of Jane's subversive episodes about a vegetarian lesbian couple, Akiko gets in touch and the two women plot to expose the meat industry's hazardous practices. Romance, humor, intrigue, and even a message--My Year of Meats has it all. This is a book that even a vegetarian would love. [via]

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  • The Namesake
    by Jhumpa Lahiri
    ISBN 000225901X (0-00-225901-X)
    Hardcover, Flamingo

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    Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. He is given the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories that he held, and hauled him from the train. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks.

    Awkwardness is Gogol's birthright. He grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends, becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation immigrants, he can never quite find his place in the world. There's a lovely section where he dates a wealthy, cultured young Manhattan woman who lives with her charming parents. They fold Gogol into their easy, elegant life, but even here he can find no peace and he breaks off the relationship. His mother finally sets him up on a blind date with the daughter of a Bengali friend, and Gogol thinks he has found his match. Moushumi, like Gogol, is at odds with the Indian-American world she inhabits. She has found, however, a circuitous escape: "At Brown, her rebellion had been academic ... she'd pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge--she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind." Lahiri documents these quiet rebellions and random longings with great sensitivity. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life. --Claire Dederer [via]

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  • Raban, Jonathan: Old Glory
    Old Glory
    by Jonathan Raban
    ISBN 0140063080 (0-14-006308-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Raban, Jonathan: Old Glory: An American Voyage
    Old Glory: An American Voyage
    by Jonathan Raban
    ISBN 006097480X (0-06-097480-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • One for the Money
    by Janet Evanovich
    ISBN 0061009059 (0-06-100905-9)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Stephanie Plum is so smart, so honest, and so funny that her narrative charm could drive a documentary on termites. But this tough gal from New Jersey, an unemployed discount lingerie buyer, has a much more interesting story to tell: She has to say that her Miata has been repossessed and that she's so poor at the moment that she just drank her last bottle of beer for breakfast. She has to say that her only chance out of her present rut is her repugnant cousin Vinnie and his bail-bond business. She has to say that she blackmailed Vinnie into giving her a bail-bond recovery job worth $10,000 (for a murder suspect), even though she doesn't own a gun and has never apprehended a person in her life. And she has to say that the guy she has to get, Joe Morelli, is the same creep who charmed away her teenage virginity behind the pastry case in the Trenton bakery where she worked after school.

    If that hard-luck story doesn't sound compelling enough, Stephanie's several unsuccessful attempts at pulling in Joe make a downright hilarious and suspenseful tale of murder and deceit. Along the way, several more outlandish (but unrelentingly real) characters join the story, including Benito Ramirez, a champion boxer who seems to be following Stephanie Plum wherever she goes.

    Janet Evanovich shares an authentic feel for the streets of Trenton in her debut mystery (she developed her talents in a string of romance novels before creating Ms. Plum), and her tough, frank, and funny first-person narrator offers a winning mix of vulgarity and sensitivity. Evanovich is certainly among the best of the new voices to emerge in the mystery field of the 1990s. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

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  • The Portrait of a Lady
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1593080964 (1-59308-096-4)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives her freedom, but despite all her natural advantages she makes one disastrous error of judgement and the result is genuinely tragic. [via]

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  • Post Office
    by Charles Bukowski
    ISBN 0061177571 (0-06-117757-1)
    Softcover, Ecco Pr

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    Book [via]

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  • Postmortem
    by Patricia Cornwell
    ISBN 8466313435 (84-663-1343-5)
    Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc

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    1st installment of the Scarpetta Series.On Saturdays, and under the cover of night, in Richmond, a human monster strikes leaving a gruesome trail of stranglings that has paralyzed the city. Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta suspects the worst: a deliberate campaign by a brilliant serial killer whose signature offers precious few clues. With an unerring eye, she calls on the latest forensic advances to unmask the madman; but this investigation will test Kay like no other, because it is being sabotaged by someone who wants her dead.
    Description in Spanish: Tres mujeres han aparecido salvajemente asesinadas en sus propios dormitorios. El responsable de estos crimenes actua siempre los sabados, de madrugada, y deja muy pocas pistas. De manera que cuando la doctora Kay Scarpetta, jefa del departamento de Medicina Legal de la ciudad, recibe una llamada a las 2.33, supone que algo grave ha sucedido: hay una cuarta victima. Kay Scarpetta recurrira a los ultimos avances en medicina legal y tendra que verselas con aquellos que quieren sabotear su trabajo&, y es que no a todo el mundo le gusta ver a una mujer en el puesto que ella ocupa. [via]

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  • Secret Life of Bees
    by Sue Monk Kidd
    ISBN 0142001740 (0-14-200174-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler [via]

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  • Significant Others
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0060924810 (0-06-092481-0)
    Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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    "An extended love letter to a magical San Francisco."
    --New York Times Book Review

    Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer and the world's most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin's cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.

    "Comedy in its most classical form...some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read."
    --The Guardian

    "The color is wonderful, the line bold and flowing. It is also wise, witty, loving and caring about the foibles and frailties we all seem to have."
    --David Hockney [via]

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  • The Souls of Black Folk
    by W. E. B. Du Bois
    ISBN 159308014X (1-59308-014-X)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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    William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.

    With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]

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  • The Sun Also Rises
    by Ernest Hemingway
    ISBN 0020518706 (0-02-051870-6)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

    Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

    But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin [via]

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  • Una Mujer Dificil / Stories
    by John Irving
    ISBN 8483100959 (84-8310-095-9)
    Softcover, Ediciones Urano

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  • Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Amanda Claybaugh
    ISBN 1593080387 (1-59308-038-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    Nearly every young author dreams of writing a book that will literally change the world. A few have succeeded, and Harriet Beecher Stowe is such a marvel. Although the American anti-slavery movement had existed at least as long as the nation itself, Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) galvanized public opinion as nothing had before. The book sold 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 in its first year. Its vivid dramatization of slaverys cruelties so aroused readers that it is said Abraham Lincoln told Stowe her work had been a catalyst for the Civil War.

    Today the novel is often labeled condescending, but its characters—Tom, Topsy, Little Eva, Eliza, and the evil Simon Legree—still have the power to move our hearts. Though “Uncle Tom has become a synonym for a fawning black yes-man, Stowes Tom is actually American literatures first black hero, a man who suffers for refusing to obey his white oppressors. Uncle Toms Cabin is a living, relevant story, passionate in its vivid depiction of the cruelest forms of injustice and inhumanity—and the courage it takes to fight against them.

    Amanda Claybaugh is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

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  • White Noise
    by Don Delillo
    ISBN 0140077022 (0-14-007702-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Winner of the National Book Award in 1985, White Noise is the story of Jack and Babette and their children from their six or so various marriages. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading from the tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.
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  • Why Do People Hate America?
    by Ziauddin Sardar, Merryl Wyn Davies
    ISBN 184046383X (1-84046-383-X)
    Softcover, Icon

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