books tagged “Vignettes”

From the vignette incorporated into the cover design to an encrypted story mischieviously embedded within the book and a major new novella, "The Cage", the deluxe hardcover version of City of Saints & Madmen represents an innovative re-imagining of the original trade paperback (published in 2001). The 55,000 words of new material, work from seven artists, and the subtle but important revisions to the four main novellas, make the hardcover an entirely different book from the Locus-recommended trade paperback.

City of Saints & Madmen holds a number of unique pleasures for readers with a strong sense of play and literary adventure. At least two or three elements of the hardcover have rarely, if ever, been attempted before in fiction.

"I like the idea of books as artifacts, a concept that sometimes slips away from us in this electronic era. I had a lot of fun putting this book together--working with artists, graphic designers, for example. The encrypted story turned out to be more involved than I thought it would be. The numbers in the encryption refer to words in the four main novellas. I quickly found that using an 'of' from one section of a novella created a different emotional resonance than from other sections. The reader who takes the time to decrypt the story will be rewarded by seeing both the decoded story and the four main novellas in a different light."

Readers have been beguiled by VanderMeer's strange and ancient metropolis, a city that developed in the author's imagination almost by accident. "I never set out to create Ambergris - it just sort of happened. One night, I woke up at about midnight and suddenly had this image in my head of a busy street and a missionary looking up at a woman in a third-story window. I sat down and typed out the first few pages of Dradin, In Love. After I finished that piece, I realized the setting had infinite possibilities. I've been gratified by the response from readers and critics. And I've tried to build on the original novella and flesh out a complete setting while still retaining a sense of mystery."

As Michael Moorcock writes in his introduction, "Examining VanderMeer, one is reminded of the glories of Angkor and Anudhapura combined with the bustle and swagger of Captain Conrad's Indonesia, the adventurous intrigues of Byzantium and Venice, the brutal Spice Wars of the Dutch. But sometimes it is as if Proust intrudes, insensed and reminiscent. VanderMeer describes a world so rich and exaggerated and full of mysterious life that it draws you away from any intended moral or pasquinade deep into the wealth of the world's womb."

The "mysterious life" alluded to by Moorcock manifests itself most uniquely in the form of the gray caps or "mushroom dwellers," the indigenous race slaughtered and driven underground by the first settlers of Ambergris.This event, the subsequent retaliation, and the uneasy co-existence with dangerous subterranean neighbors, has shaped most all historical and social issues in Ambergris.

"The thing that most intrigued me about Dradin, In Love, when I tried to distance myself from the text, was the presence of the gray caps. Who they are and how they fit in is something I've given a lot of thought to and will continue to explore even in the material I'm writing now."

VanderMeer's work has appeared in ten languages in 17 countries, including in such magazines and an-thologies as Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Nebula Awards 30, Best New Horror 7, The Year's Best Fantastical Fiction, Infinity Plus: The Anthology, Dark Terrors, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy 2001. Forthcoming books include the mass market paperback Veniss Underground, also from Prime, and the nonfiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat? from Cosmos. VanderMeer has also completed work as co-editor on two ambitious projects: Leviathan 3 (Ministry of Whimsy/ Prime) and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (Chimeric). He is 33 years old and can be reached at vanderworld@hotmail.com. [via]

Once upon a time, on the banks of the River Moth, a city sprang up like no other in or out of history. Founded on the blood of the original inhabitants, the stealthy gray caps, and steeped for centuries in the aftermath of that struggle, Ambergris has become a cruelly beautiful metropolis--a haven for artists and thieves, for composers and murderers. City includes the World Fantasy Award-winning novella The Transformation of Martin Lake. [via]

Classic Irish Literature; Irish Studies; Literary Studies [via]

En esta coleccion de sutiles relatos que James Joyce comenzo a escribir en 1904 y que sera publicada completa solo diez anos despues, luego de tortuosas peripecias editoriales, pueden leerse anticipaciones del estilo y la compleja vision del mundo que desarrollara despues en su obra capital Ulises. Dublineses puede leerse, y efectivamente lo es, como un minucioso fresco de un lugar y una epoca. Traduccion y prologo de Marcos Mayer. [via]

If you liked the eerie whimsy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Steven Millhauser's Little Kingdoms, or Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, you will love Alan Lightman's ethereal yet down-to-earth book Einstein's Dreams. Lightman teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping bridge the light-year-size gap between science and the humanities, the enemy camps C.P. Snow famously called The Two Cultures.

Einstein's Dreams became a bestseller by delighting both scientists and humanists. It is technically a novel. Lightman uses simple, lyrical, and literal details to locate Einstein precisely in a place and time--Berne, Switzerland, spring 1905, when he was a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre, unheard-of theory of relativity. The town he perceives is vividly described, but the waking Einstein is a bit player in this drama.

The book takes flight when Einstein takes to his bed and we share his dreams, 30 little fables about places where time behaves quite differently. In one world, time is circular; in another a man is occasionally plucked from the present and deposited in the past: "He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future ... he is forced to witness events without being part of them ... an inert gas, a ghost ... an exile of time." The dreams in which time flows backward are far more sophisticated than the time-tripping scenes in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, though science-fiction fans may yearn for a sustained yarn, which Lightman declines to provide. His purpose is simply to study the different kinds of time in Einstein's mind, each with its own lucid consequences. In their tone and quiet logic, Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity, and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end, and acts accordingly.

"Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic," writes Lightman. "Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting.... In this world, artists are joyous." In another dream, time slows with altitude, causing rich folks to build stilt homes on mountaintops, seeking eternal youth and scorning the swiftly aging poor folk below. Forgetting eventually how they got there and why they subsist on "all but the most gossamer food," the higher-ups at length "become thin like the air, bony, old before their time."

There is no plot in this small volume--it's more like a poetry collection than a novel. Like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, it's a mind-stretching meditation by a scientist who's been to the far edge of physics and is back with wilder tales than Marco Polo's. And unlike many admirers of Hawking, readers of Einstein's Dreams have a high probability of actually finishing it. [via]

En 1949, cuatro mujeres chinas emigradas a San Francisco se reunen regularmente para comer dim sum,jugar al mah-jong y hablar. Unidas por sentimientos de perdida y esperanza, se hacen llamar El Club de laBuena Estrella. Amy Tan explora la conexion entre las protagonistas y sus hijas, ya nacidas en Estados Unidos, un mundo totalmente distinto al suyo. [via]

There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence--no appraisal, no papers--to support his claim. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home:

That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

Jane Rosenal, the narrator of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is wise beyond her years. Not that that's saying much--since none of her elders, with the exception of her father, is particularly wise. At the age of 14, Jane watches her brother and his new girlfriend, searching for clues for how to fall in love, but by the end of the summer she's trying to figure out how not to fail in love. At twice that age, Jane quickly internalizes How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right, even though that retro manual is ruining her chances at happiness. In the intervening years, Melissa Bank's heroine struggles at love and work. The former often seems indistinguishable from the latter, and her experiences in book publishing inspire little in the way of affection. As Jane announces in "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine": "I'd been a rising star at H----- until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane."

Bank's first collection has a beautiful, true arc, and all the sophistication and control her heroine could ever desire. In "The Floating House," Jane and her boyfriend, Jamie, visit his ex-girlfriend in St. Croix, and right from the start she can't stop mimicking her beautiful competitor, in a notably idiotic fashion. "I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive," she realizes--one of several thousand of Bank's ruefully funny phrases. But even as Jane clowns around, desperately trying to keep up appearances, she is so hyperaware it hurts. Again and again, the author explores the dichotomy between life as it happens and the rehearsed anecdote, the preferred outcome. In The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, even suburban quiet has "nothing to do with peace." Bank's much-anticipated debut merits all its buzz and, more to the point, transcends it. --Kerry Fried [via]

This jewel-like vignette from Sandra Cisneros's best-selling The House on Mango Street shows, through simple, intimate portraits, the diversity among us.

A Dragonfly Book in English and Spanish.

A Parenting Magazine Best Children's Book of the Year  

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Un excelente constructor de vocabulario, con nombres de objetos en Inglés y en Español, acompañados por ilustraciones, agrupados por tópicos como colores, juguetes, animales y herramientas. [via]

Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes - sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous - it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers. [via]

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. [via]

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. [via]

La novela mejor vendida, trata de una niña que crece en una de las comunidades latinas de Chicago-algunas veces le romperá el corazón y otras veces le dará gran alegría-describe un nuevo paisaje americano a través de sus múltiples personajes. -"Una novela profundamente conmovedora . . . Como lo mejor de la poesía, abre las ventanas del corazón sin desperdiciar las palabras." -Miami Herald. [via]

Uruguayan/French, tr George Bogin [via]

"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamiya notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroine addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. [via]

For years, Mike Trout has helped fill the airways with fascinating accounts of God's work and helped fill our hearts with inspiration. Now the co-host of Christian radio's popular Focus on the Family takes you behind the scenes for an in-depth look at some of the program's best-loved stories, including his own. [via]

Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, "the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography." This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the strange power of desire. Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature's subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the always unlikely nature of love. [via]

Collection of short stories written by Ms. Nin and some of her friends written for Roy Johnson back in the '40s. (Johnson paid $1 a page for private smut... Henry Miller also wrote for him.) Contains six stories and a brief guide to lovemaking, for no apparent reason. One of the tales is definitely by Nin. [via]

This collection of six sensual, yet explicit short stories is thought to have been written for an Oklahoma oil millionaire, Roy M. Johnson. Anais Nin is said to have paid a dollar per page to produce typescripts of explicit erotica for his own private amusement. In 'Alice' a couple spying on another couple screwing in a public park become involved in a steamy group sex scene. In 'Florence', a New York office girl enjoys sex for the first time sleeping with two men in quick succession! In 'Memories' a man recounts his youth and his teenage initiation into sex by a variety of older women.

This facsimile reproduction also contains an explicit sex manual, Love's Cyclopaedia, originally published with the stories. The intorduction by Dr. C.J. Schiener tells the story of the book's first clandestine edition by New York publisher Samuel Roth during the 1940s and all the evidence for attributing this anonymous work to Anais Nin. [via]