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books tagged “writers”
books tagged “writers”
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After the Quakeby Haruki Murakami, Jay RubinISBN 0375713271 (0-375-71327-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'After the Quake'Book summary:Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. --Claire Dederer [via]
Apple of My Eyeby Helene HanffISBN 038512483X (0-385-12483-X)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthoodby Laurie NotaroISBN 037576092X (0-375-76092-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Bellow: A Biographyby James AtlasISBN 0375759581 (0-375-75958-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Storiesby Patrick MerlaISBN 0380788357 (0-380-78835-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Burning the Days : Recollectionby James SalterISBN 0375500154 (0-375-50015-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Captiveby Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, D. J. Enright, Terence KilmartinISBN 0375753117 (0-375-75311-7)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Captive'Book summary:The Modern Librarys fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Prousts narrator describes living in his mothers Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. Rich with irony, The Captive and The Fugitive inspire meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection.
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartins acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieffs translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989). [via]More editions of The Captive:
Charmed Circleby James R. MellowISBN 0380002574 (0-380-00257-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrardby Sara WheelerISBN 0375754547 (0-375-75454-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard'Book summary:Sara Wheeler, author of the acclaimed Terra Incognita, became fascinated with Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard after reading The Worst Journey in the World, his classic account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole, of which he was a survivor. "His book was not the disembodied account of an expedition: it was an intimate reflection of the man behind the authorial mask. I wanted a glimpse of that man," she writes. What she offers is much more than a glimpse; Cherry is a fascinating and detailed look at this complicated and often troubled hero.
A man of substantial means and a strong sense of duty, Cherry "recoiled from the sedate life of the country squire," throwing himself into strenuous adventures whenever he was not crippled by episodes of severe depression which haunted him his entire life. After returning from the pole, he traveled to eastern China as part of a zoological expedition and then served Britain in World War I before writing The Worst Journey in the World, which National Geographic has called the greatest adventure book of all time. Wheeler covers not only his many adventures, but the inner workings of the man, such as his bouts with mental illness, including delusional phases, hypochondria, and severe anxiety, all of which affected his physical health as well. She also covers his often complex relationships, including his close friendship with George Bernard Shaw, who certainly influenced Cherry's writing. Written with the cooperation of Cherry's widow and full access to his papers and notes, this is the first authorized biography of this extraordinary man. --Shawn Carkonen [via]
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Childhood, Boyhood and Youthby Leo Tolstoy, Michael ScammellISBN 0375759441 (0-375-75944-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Coleridge : Darker Reflections, 1804-1834by Richard HolmesISBN 0375708383 (0-375-70838-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Coleridge: Early Visions 1772-1804by Richard HolmesISBN 0375705406 (0-375-70540-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Coleridge: Early Visions 1772-1804'Book summary:Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets.
Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge's poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief. [via]More editions of Coleridge: Early Visions 1772-1804:
Country of the Pointed Firsby Sarah Orne Jewett, Suzannah LessardISBN 037575671X (0-375-75671-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Dear Mr. Henshawby Beverly ClearyISBN 0380709589 (0-380-70958-9)
Softcover, Camelot
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dear Mr. Henshaw'Book summary:When, in second grade, Leigh writes to an author to tell him how much he "licked" his book, he never suspects that he'll still be writing to him four years later. And he never imagines the kinds of things he'll be writing about:
Dear Mr. Henshaw, I am sorry I was rude in my last letter... Maybe I was mad about other things, like Dad forgetting to send this month's support payment. Mom tried to phone him at the trailer park where, as Mom says, he hangs his hat.
It's not easy being the new kid in town, with recently divorced parents, no dog anymore, and a lunch that gets stolen every day (all the "good stuff," anyway). Writing letters, first to the real Mr. Henshaw, and then in a diary to a pretend Mr. Henshaw, may be just what he needs.This Newbery Medal-winning book, by the terrifically popular and prolific Beverly Cleary (Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and Runaway Ralph), exhibits a subtlety and sensitivity that will be appreciated by any youngster who feels lonely and troubled during the transition into adolescence. Winner of numerous other awards, including two Newbery Honors, Cleary teams up with Caldecott winner Paul O. Zelinsky, who creates a quiet backdrop for the realistic characters. (Ages 8 to 12) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 Vol. 2by Victor Klemperer, Michael ChalmersISBN 0375502408 (0-375-50240-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 Vol. 2'Book summary:The second volume of Victor Klemperer's searing diary, kept in secret during the 12 years he suffered under the Nazi regime, covers the period from 1942 to 1945. The humiliations visited on even such "privileged" Jews as Klemperer (whose wife was Aryan) grew increasingly severe, with house searches, arbitrary arrests, and brutal beatings becoming virtually routine. The 60-year-old historian is forced to shovel snow despite his heart condition; hunger gnaws at him as rations are mercilessly cut. Yet he clings to an intellectual life, continuing his reading and making notes on the lies and obfuscations of official Nazi discourse that would become his postwar masterpiece, Lingua Tertii Imperii. "The Russians, who have only just been annihilated, are tremendous and quite inexhaustible opponents," he notes sardonically after reading a mendacious fascist article in 1942. His lengthy account of his escape with his wife from Dresden after the Allied bombings of 1945 unforgettably captures the chaos of World War II's final days and the mixed feelings of a Jew who could never wholeheartedly gloat over the defeat of the nation that had persecuted him. Above all, his unflinching depiction of human nature and society in extremis amply justifies his cherished belief that even the Nazis "cannot prevent language from testifying to the truth." --Wendy Smith [via]
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Die for Loveby Elizabeth PetersISBN 0380731169 (0-380-73116-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paperby Nicholson BakerISBN 0375726217 (0-375-72621-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper'Book summary:Since the 1950s, our countrys greatest libraries have, as a matter of common practice, dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. The marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it are the subject of this passionately argued book, in which Nicholson Barker pleads the case for saving our recorded heritage in its original form while telling the story of how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public trust by auctioning off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself who eventually discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper is to buy it. Double Fold is an intense, brilliantly worded narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and controversy. [via]
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Everything You Needby A. L. KennedyISBN 0375707476 (0-375-70747-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everything You Need'Book summary:From the prodigiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and loves paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt for humanity is surpassed only by his corrosive self-loathing. Along with five equally dysfunctional colleagues Nathan lives on an island retreat off the coast of Wales, where he yearns for the daughter he lost years before. Now, in defiance of all his hopes, Mary Lambherself an aspiring writeris about to join him as the seventh member of the colony.
As Nathan tortuously wins the trust of the child who has no inkling of their true relationship, Mary comes to a gradual understanding of her gift. In Everything You Need, A. L. Kennedy combines the mythic resonance of Arthurian legend with a sensibility as lyrical as it is profane. [via] -
Experience: A Memoirby Martin AmisISBN 0375726837 (0-375-72683-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Experience: A Memoir'Book summary:"We live in the age of mass loquacity," Martin Amis writes by way of introduction to Experience, thereby placing the reader in a curious bind. How to feel about a memoir by a writer who deplores our current enthusiasm for memoirs? Can such a public appeal for private life be convincing? The son of misanthropic comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Amis the Younger's life story is "a literary curiosity," he tells us, "which is also just another instance of a father and a son." He's spent his whole life bathed in the dubious yellow glow of celebrity, from the cries of nepotism surrounding his first novel's publication to the bizarre tempest in a teapot involving the size of the advance for The Information, his choice of literary agent, and of course that famously expensive set of new teeth.
Here, finally, is Amis's chance to set matters straight--and if you're looking for his take on these controversies, you won't be disappointed. In fact, you should turn right away to the end of the book. After all, how many memoirs have indices--and how many indices are this entertaining? In addition to movers and shakers like "Travolta, John," "Brown, Tina," and "Bellow, Saul," one finds an extended entry for "dental problems," which includes "of animals," "sexual potency and," "Bellow on," and--more ominously--"tumour."
Yet it's as "a clear view of the geography of a writer's mind," not as a celebrity tell-all, that Experience succeeds. Organized not by chronology but by a strange thematic schema all Amis's own, this messy, tangential book moves backward and forward in time and comes studded with footnotes and interspersed with schoolboy epistles. As a result, it's much truer to the actual texture of experience than anything more "novelistic" could possibly be. Amis's charming, quarrelsome, almost entirely helpless father; the tragic disappearance of his cousin, Lucy Partington; the daughter discovered only as an adult; those teeth--the narrative circles around these events and personages in prose as virtuoso but often less chilly than that found in his novels. This is memoir as anatomy of obsessions, and in the most profound way, it illuminates the source and power of Amis's remarkable work. --Mary Park [via]
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Forbidden Colorsby Yukio MishimaISBN 0375705163 (0-375-70516-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Gaudy Nightby Dorothy Leigh SayersISBN 0380012073 (0-380-01207-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Good-Bye to All Thatby Robert GravesISBN 0385093306 (0-385-09330-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Bye to All That: An Autobiography'Book summary:The quintessential memoir of the generation of Englishmen who suffered in World War I is among the bitterest autobiographies ever written. Robert Graves's stripped-to-the-bone prose seethes with contempt for his class, his country, his military superiors, and the civilians who mindlessly cheered the carnage from the safety of home. His portrait of the stupidity and petty cruelties endemic in England's elite schools is almost as scathing as his depiction of trench warfare. Nothing could equal Graves's bone-chilling litany of meaningless death, horrific encounters with gruesomely decaying corpses, and even more appalling confrontations with the callousness and arrogance of the military command. Yet this scarifying book is consistently enthralling. Graves is a superb storyteller, and there's clearly something liberating about burning all your bridges at 34 (his age when Good-Bye to All That was first published in 1929). He conveys that feeling of exhilaration to his readers in a pell-mell rush of words that remains supremely lucid. Better known as a poet, historical novelist, and critic, Graves in this one work seems more like an English Hemingway, paring his prose to the minimum and eschewing all editorializing because it would bring him down to the level of the phrase- and war-mongers he despises. --Wendy Smith [via]
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Hawthorne: A Lifeby Brenda WineappleISBN 0375400443 (0-375-40044-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hawthorne: A Life'Book summary:Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. Deep as Dante, Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. He always puts himself in his books, said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, he cannot help it. His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein ( Luminous Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with themhe was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.
Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.
Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.
Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthornes fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and childrens books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit. [via]More editions of Hawthorne: A Life:
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniusby Dave EggersISBN 0375725784 (0-375-72578-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'Book summary:National Bestseller The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author. [via]
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Henry James, Les Annees Dramatiquesby Leon EdelISBN 0380391074 (0-380-39107-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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- Henry James, Les Annees Dramatiques: ISBN 0380396513 (0-380-39651-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Henry James, Les Annees Dramatiques: ISBN 0380396696 (0-380-39669-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Henry James, Les Annees Dramatiques: ISBN 0380396777 (0-380-39677-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Henry James, Les Annees Dramatiques: ISBN 0380391074 (0-380-39107-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
- Henry James, Les Annees Dramatiques: ISBN 0380396513 (0-380-39651-3)
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Hungerby Knut Hamsun, Robert Bly, Paul AusterISBN 0374525285 (0-374-52528-5)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hunger'Book summary:Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.[via]
Originally published in 1890, this classic of modern literature follows an impoverished Norwegian writer through the streets of Christiania (now Olso) as he struggles on the edge of starvation. Existing on what little money he makes from selling the occasional article to the local paper, and down to pawning the clothes on his back, the young writer slowly loses control of his reason and begins to slip increasingly into bouts of madness, paranoia, and despair.
A gripping portrait of an artist struggling for integrity, Hunger mirrors the dire straits of Hamsun's own life when he brought this, his then incomplete first novel, to a publisher in 1888.More editions of Hunger:
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I Will Bear Witnessby Martin Chalmers, Victor KlempererISBN 0375756973 (0-375-75697-3)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Will Bear Witness'Book summary:The second volume of Victor Klemperer's searing diary, kept in secret during the 12 years he suffered under the Nazi regime, covers the period from 1942 to 1945. The humiliations visited on even such "privileged" Jews as Klemperer (whose wife was Aryan) grew increasingly severe, with house searches, arbitrary arrests, and brutal beatings becoming virtually routine. The 60-year-old historian is forced to shovel snow despite his heart condition; hunger gnaws at him as rations are mercilessly cut. Yet he clings to an intellectual life, continuing his reading and making notes on the lies and obfuscations of official Nazi discourse that would become his postwar masterpiece, Lingua Tertii Imperii. "The Russians, who have only just been annihilated, are tremendous and quite inexhaustible opponents," he notes sardonically after reading a mendacious fascist article in 1942. His lengthy account of his escape with his wife from Dresden after the Allied bombings of 1945 unforgettably captures the chaos of World War II's final days and the mixed feelings of a Jew who could never wholeheartedly gloat over the defeat of the nation that had persecuted him. Above all, his unflinching depiction of human nature and society in extremis amply justifies his cherished belief that even the Nazis "cannot prevent language from testifying to the truth." --Wendy Smith [via]
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I Will Bear Witnessby Victor KlempererISBN 0375753788 (0-375-75378-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Will Bear Witness'Book summary:When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), honored as a frontline veteran of World War I, was a distinguished professor at the University of Dresden. A scant few months later he was merely a Jew, protected from deportation to a death camp only by his marriage to an Aryan. He suffered every other indignity to which German Jews were subjected, from losing his job to having his driver's license revoked to being denied permission to own a pet, and all are recorded with bitter clarity in his diary entries, which cover the years 1933 to 1941. (A second volume continuing through 1945 will be published in English in 1999.) The German edition of this book caused a sensation when it was published in 1995, and it's easy to see why: the relentless, quotidian nature of Nazi racism comes through forcefully in Klemperer's litany of daily humiliations and insults, a painful chronicle of situations in which readers can readily imagine themselves. Like Anne Frank, but with a more adult understanding of political fanaticism and human weakness, he makes the abstract horror of genocidal persecution very intimate, very personal, and very real. --Wendy Smith [via]
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The Idiot Girls' Action Adventure Clubby Laurie NotaroISBN 0375760911 (0-375-76091-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Idiot Girls' Action Adventure Club'Book summary:Ive changed a bit since high school. Back then I said no to using and selling drugs. I washed on a normal basis and still had good credit.
Introducing Laurie Notaro, the leader of the Idiot Girls Action-Adventure Club. Every day she fearlessly rises from bed to defeat the evil machinations of dolts, dimwits, and creepy boyfriendsand thats before she even puts on a bra.
For the past ten years, Notaro has been entertaining Phoenix newspaper readers with her wildly amusing autobiographical exploits and unique life experiences. She writes about a world of hourly-wage jobs that require absolutely no skills, a mother who hands down judgments more forcefully than anyone seated on the Supreme Court, horrific high school reunions, and hangovers that leave her surprised that she woke up in the first place.
The misadventures of Laurie and her fellow Idiot Girls ( too cool to be in the Smart Group ) unfold in a world that everyone will recognize but no one has ever described so hilariously. She delivers the goods: life as we all know it. [via]More editions of The Idiot Girls' Action Adventure Club:
If It Die: An Autobiographyby Andre GideISBN 0375726063 (0-375-72606-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequencesby Truman CapoteISBN 0375507906 (0-375-50790-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences'Book summary:"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. [via]
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In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writingby Thomas MallonISBN 0375409165 (0-375-40916-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing'Book summary:Every profession is rich in what might be called marginalia: odd rituals, freakish human behaviors, and accidental blessings. In his second essay collection, Thomas Mallon admits to his love of the incidental in his own trade: "I have always been drawn to literature's suburbs." No wonder In Fact includes pieces on fan mail, obituaries, indexing, handwriting, the book tour, and plagiarism. Yet Mallon has more than marginal points to make. In his rumination on plagiarism, he discusses the frustrations of a poet who's had his work pilfered, and concludes: "In these times when there are fewer and fewer ways to be unlike everyone else--writing, with its fingerprint uniqueness, its irreducibility, may be more precious than ever to those who produce it."
This sense of the "fingerprint uniqueness" of writing infuses the entire book. Having fled academe to become a novelist (Dewey Defeats Truman , Henry and Clara, Two Moons), Mallon wrote the "Doubting Thomas" book column in GQ for a decade. A clutch of his reviews are collected here, and his critical writing has a feeling of urgency: this guy believes books matter. His passions are most evident (and most entertaining) when he's writing about books he doesn't like. His review of David Guterson's East of the Mountains, for example, contains this felicitous reference to the same author's bestselling debut, Snow Falling on Cedars: "Let us start by trying to divine the appeal of the by now ubiquitous Cedars." The sentence possesses the refined disgust of someone holding a dead mouse between forefinger and thumb. Elsewhere Mallon takes on DeLillo, Wolfe, and Vidal, along with such past masters as H.L. Mencken, Siegfried Sassoon, and John Kennedy Toole. One caveat: Most of these essays were written for a magazine with the word gentleman right in its title, and women get short shrift here. Mary McCarthy--"an object of youthful admiration, then a critical subject, and eventually a friend"--makes several appearances, and Jane Smiley receives an enthusiastic notice. Otherwise, this is Boy's Town. --Claire Dederer [via]
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In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowlesby Jeffrey Miller, Paul BowlesISBN 0374524599 (0-374-52459-9)
Softcover, Noonday Pr
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Kissby Kathryn HarrisonISBN 0380731479 (0-380-73147-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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The Life and Death of Yukio Mishimaby Henry Scott-Stokes, Henry Scott StokesISBN 0374524645 (0-374-52464-5)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoirby Bill BrysonISBN 0375434305 (0-375-43430-5)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimageby Paul ElieISBN 0374529213 (0-374-52921-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Limboby A. Manette AnsayISBN 0380732874 (0-380-73287-4)
Softcover, Perennial
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Little Womenby Louisa May Alcott, Susan CheeverISBN 0375756728 (0-375-75672-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Women'Book summary:It is no surprise that Little Women, the adored classic of four sisters and their enduring devotion to and protection of one another, was loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's own life. Alcott drew from her own personality to create a unique protagonist: Jo, willful, headstrong, and undoubtedly the backbone of the March family, is a heroine unlike any seen before. Follow the sisters from innocent adolescence to sage adulthood, with all the joy and sorrow of life in between, and fall in love with them and this endearing story.
Praised by Madeleine Stern as "a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal," Little Women has been an avidly read, and reread, tale for generations. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes newly written notes that offer more description and insight than those of previous editions. [via]More editions of Little Women:
Lives of the Poetsby Michael SchmidtISBN 0375706046 (0-375-70604-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lives of the Poets'Book summary:Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets should engender endless debates. Anytime anyone attempts a project this monumental--nothing less than the entire history of poetry in English, after all!--plenty of people will disagree with how he or she goes about it. Take, for example, the fact that Schmidt crams 500 years of poetry (Richard Rolle of Hampole through Walt Whitman) into the first half of his massive tome, then spreads a mere century and a half (Emily Dickinson to the present) across the rest. And even 900-plus pages isn't enough space to treat every poet equally--indeed, it may be that Schmidt's choices will spark the liveliest disagreements. Then there are his various pronunciamentos on poetry itself--everything from its form to its influences. But no matter what you may think of Schmidt's methods or conclusions, his credentials are above reproach. Editor of PN Review and founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press, he is a man both passionate and knowledgeable about poetry--and poets. While Schmidt does, indeed, provide biographical information about his subjects, it is with their inner lives, their imaginative landscapes, that he is chiefly concerned. Open the book to almost any page or any era, and you'll find detailed analyses of not only the poems themselves but also the times, the culture, and the literary antecedents that affected them. Of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound he writes: "Eliot and Pound rebelled together against what they saw as the misuse of free or unmetered verse." And in discussing Eliot's The Waste Land, he remarks:
In The Waste Land he demanded to be read differently from other poets. He alters our way of reading for good, if we read him properly. The poem does not respond to analysis of its meanings--meanings cannot be detached from the texture of the poetry itself.
In addition to giving the analytical part of the reader's brain a good workout, as he parses everyone from Spenser to Ashbery to Walcott, Schmidt offers up plenty of idiosyncratic opinion that will alternately raise hackles or set heads nodding in vigorous agreement. This may not be the most objective treatment of poetry to come down the pike, but it is an invaluable--and deeply entertaining--reference. --Margaret Prior [via]-
Love in the Time of Choleraby Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman, Nicholas ShakespeareISBN 0375400699 (0-375-40069-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Love in the Time of Cholera'Book summary:From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márquez has created a vividly absorbing fictional world, as lush and dazzling as a dream and as real and immediate as our own deepest longings. Now available for the first time in the Contemporary Classics series! [via]
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Lovecraft; A Biography,by Lyon Sprague De CampISBN 0385005784 (0-385-00578-4)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lovecraft; A Biography,'Book summary:Few writers have had more ironic, paradoxical lives that Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), the great horror-fantasy writer of Providence, Rhode Island. Never having a book of his stories published in his lifetime, he became a best seller after his death. Dying in poverty and obscurity, convinced of his own utter failure, he has been hailed not only as the equal of Poe but even as once of the greatest writers of all time. A self-proclaimed misanthrope, he collected a circle of devoted friends, who remember him as one of the kindest, most delightful and most lovable persons they had known. The son of parents both of whom died insane, Lovecraft became a powerful philosophical thinker. A scientific materialist, he embraced pseudo-scientific racial theories, only to abandon them in his last years. A poseur who liked to fancy himself as an eighteenth century English gentleman, he condemned poses and affectations in others. A political ultra-conservative, he became a Socialist and New Dealer. A man who prided himself on aristocratic reticence, he poured out his inmost thoughts in at least 100,000 letters, making him one of the greatest letter writers of all time. Here is the tale of his weird upbringing; his bizarre habits, preferences, his tragi-comic literary and marital careers; his key role in the origin of science-fiction fandom; and how he worked his nightmares and neuroses into the stories that became a legend after his death. [via]
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Lunar Parkby Bret Easton EllisISBN 0375727272 (0-375-72727-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Book Description:
Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety--only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father's, his stepdaughter's doll violently "malfunctions," and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events--a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his sons age--Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.
Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution--about love and loss, fathers and sons--in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.
A Tale of Two Brets: An Amazon.com Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
In his novel Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis takes first-person narrative to an extreme, inserting himself (and a host of real characters from the publishing world) into the haunting story of a drugged-out famous writer living in the suburbs trying to reconnect with his wife and son and reconcile his damaged past. Ellis is at the top of his game in Lunar Park, his first novel since 1999's Glamorama, delivering a disturbing and delirious novel about celebrity, writers, and fathers and sons (not to mention a cameo from notorious Ellis creation, Patrick Bateman). Amazon.com senior editor Brad Thomas Parsons spoke with Ellis in a Seattle to Los Angeles phone call to talk about the fact and fiction behind Lunar Park, New York versus LA, '80s music, and the whole "American Psycho thing."
Read the Amazon.com interview with Bret Easton EllisLess Than Zero (1985)
Published when Ellis was a junior at Bennington, Less Than Zero is the mesmerizing first-person chronicle of Clay, our laconic, zoned-out guide to a subculture of over-privileged nihilism in early '80s Los Angeles. He travels back home from Camden College (a thinly veiled Bennington) for Christmas break and re-enters his circle of jaded friends--including his ex-girlfriend Blair, and his best friend Julian, who's now hustling to support his drug habit--and a parade of Porches, late-night parties, cocaine, and casual destruction.Ellis on Ellis: "I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19."
The Rules of Attraction (1987)
A line-up of Camden College students share the narrating duties in The Rules of Attraction, Ellis' sex-fueled, drug-baked second novel. There's Lauren (who's in the midst of losing her virginity as the book opens), who longs for her boyfriend Victor, currently traveling through Europe; Lauren's ex, Paul, a bisexual party boy who hooks up with hard-drinking closet-case Sean (surname Bateman--that's right, younger brother of Patrick), who also has the hots for Lauren. Less than Zero's Clay makes a cameo appearance as well as a passing glimpse of Ellis' Bennington classmate Donna Tartt's murderous Classics majors from The Secret History. Ellis on Ellis: "It might be my favorite book of mine. I was writing that book while I was at college. Sort of like the best of times, the worst of times. There was a lot of elation, there was a lot of despair. It was just a really fun book to write. I loved mimicking all the different voices. The stream of conscious does get a little out of hand. I kind of like that about the book. It's kind of all over the place. It's casual. It's scruffy. That's the one book of mine that I have a very, very soft spot for."
American Psycho (1991)
Shopaholic sociopath Patrick Bateman's killer grip drags readers into a bloody, brand-name, urban nightmare as the 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie executes his grooming habits and eviscerates strangers with equal élan. Simon & Schuster dropped the too-hot-to-handle American Psycho which was then published as a paperback original by Vintage Books. Ellis received death threats while the book was boycotted, sliced up by reviewers, and went on to become a bestseller. Mary Harron's 2000 film version starred then little-known British actor Christian Bale, who would later suit up as the Dark Knight in 2005's Batman Begins. Ellis on Ellis: "It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to re-read those passages."
The Informers (1994)
Ellis returns to early '80s Los Angeles ennui with The Informers, a loosely connected collection of stories of the bored, rich, and morally depraved, written around the same time as Less than Zero. Sex, drugs, and gratuitous violence take center stage, with characters including an aging, predatory anchorwoman, a debauched rock star tearing through Japan, and a pick-up artist vampire. While some of the vignettes echo better Ellis works, ultimately the stories don't add to much as a whole. Book critics are less than receptive to Ellis' post-American Psycho offering. Ellis on Ellis: "Those were written while I was at Bennington. I wrote a lot of short stories between 1981 or 1982 or so... The Informers more or less kind of represented probably the best of those stories. I wrote a lot of really bad ones, but those are the ones that worked the best together."
Glamorama (1999)
Actor-model Victor Ward (who first made an appearance in the Ellis oeuvre in The Rules of Attraction) is the narrator of Glamorama, Ellis longest novel yet. Ellis offers bold-faced names and celebrity skewering in the first half of the book as Victor tries to open a Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and double-crossing his partner, but the second half takes a violent, paranoid turn as Victor is sent to England and unwittingly lured into a sadistic ring of international terrorists (posing as supermodels) leaving a bloody trail across the globe. Ellis on Ellis: "[T]he book wasn't necessarily about terrorism to me. It was about a whole bunch of other stuff. It's definitely the book that I can tell--I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer--is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it."
Ellis on DVD
Less Than Zero
American Psycho
The Rules of AttractionWill the Real Bret Easton Ellis Please Stand Up?
Visit the author's Web site at www.2brets.com.
Lytton Stracheyby Michael HolroydISBN 0374524653 (0-374-52465-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Melville: His World And Workby Andrew DelbancoISBN 0375702970 (0-375-70297-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Murder at the ABA: A Puzzle in Four Days and Sixty Scenesby Isaac AsimovISBN 0385113056 (0-385-11305-6)
Hardcover, Doubleday
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Murder at the ABA: A Puzzle in Four Days and Sixty Scenes'Book summary:Murder at the ABA: A puzzle in four days and sixty scenes [Hardcover] Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov (Author) [via]
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A New Lifeby Bernard Malamud, Jonathan LethemISBN 0374529493 (0-374-52949-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A New Life'Book summary:"An overlooked masterpiece. It may still be undervalued as Malamud's funniest and most embracing novel." --Jonathan Lethem[via]
In A New Life, Bernard Malamud--generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer--took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.
When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it.
A New Life--as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear--is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.Nobody's Perfect: Writings from the New Yorkerby Anthony LaneISBN 0375714340 (0-375-71434-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nobody's Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker'Book summary:In an aside that reads like a declaration of intent, Anthony Lane writes that he never quite thrilled to the battle pitched between mainstream and art cinema which is to say that he glories in highbrow and lowbrow alike, and respectfully suggests that the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics . . . books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.
In almost ten years as a critic for The New Yorker, Lane has not only written an indispensable column on the latest movie releases, great and small. He has also turned his gaze upon subjects as various as Evelyn Waugh, Shakespeare, the glory of cookbooks, and the fine art of the obituary. Whether he is examining Alfred Hitchcock or astronauts, to read him is to be carried along on a current of urgent inquiry ( What is the point of Demi Moore? ), wry reflection, and penetrating wit. An essay on The Sound of Music leads him to consider not only singing nuns but the comedy of our cultural memories ( For all our searchings and suppressings, the past comes unbidden or not at all ); his now infamous pieces on the best-seller lists both celebrate the exultantly bad prose of Judith Krantz and deride the marshes of the middlebrow, where serious novelists lumber around with too many ideas on their back. His writings on the poetry of Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and especially T. S. Eliot showcase his erudition, dispensed with a piercing insight into human folly. In his survey of events as disparate as Oscar night, a Walker Evans retrospective, and the craziness of a Chanel show in Paris, the acuity of Lanes intellect is matched by a quality of heart that is his alone, and by a willingness to be carried away. His writings remind us of what criticism can achieve at its best.
Arguably the most gifted reviewer at work today, Anthony Lane sets the standardas a reader, as a critic, and as an observer of life. Nobody's Perfect is a must for fans old and new. [via]More editions of Nobody's Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker:
Notes from a Small Islandby Bill BrysonISBN 0380727501 (0-380-72750-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Notes from a Small Island'Book summary:Paperback [via]
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Old Schoolby Tobias WolffISBN 0375701494 (0-375-70149-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Old School'Book summary:Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a final, pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.
The unnamed narrator is one of several boys whose life revolves around the school's English teachers, those polymaths who seemed to know "exactly what was most worth knowing." For the boys, literature is the center of life, and their obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their final year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer who serves as judge for the entries.
At first, the narrator is entirely taken with the battle. As he fails in his effort to catch Robert Frost's attention and then is unable--due to illness--to even compete for his moment with Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero, Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realizes, even from his roommate. He has used his fiction to create a patrician gentility, a mask for his middle class home and his Jewish ancestry. Through the competition for Hemingway, fittingly, all of his illusions about literature dissolve.
Old School is a small, neatly made book, spare and clear in its prose. Each chapter is self-contained and free of anything extraneous to the essentials of plot, mood, and character. Near the end of the novel, the narrator, now a respected writer, imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is daunted. "Memory," he says, "is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test." Old School enters this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory. Risking sentimentality, Wolff confronts a golden age that never was. From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
Original Story by: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywoodby Arthur LaurentsISBN 0375400559 (0-375-40055-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Orthodoxyby G. K. ChestertonISBN 0385015364 (0-385-01536-4)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Orthodoxy'Book summary:If G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith is, as he called it, a "slovenly autobiography," then we need more slobs in the world. This quirky, slender book describes how Chesterton came to view orthodox Catholic Christianity as the way to satisfy his personal emotional needs, in a way that would also allow him to live happily in society. Chesterton argues that people in western society need a life of "practical romance, the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." Drawing on such figures as Fra Angelico, George Bernard Shaw, and St. Paul to make his points, Chesterton argues that submission to ecclesiastical authority is the way to achieve a good and balanced life. The whole book is written in a style that is as majestic and down-to-earth as C.S. Lewis at his best. The final chapter, called "Authority and the Adventurer," is especially persuasive. It's hard to imagine a reader who will not close the book believing, at least for the moment, that the Church will make you free. --Michael Joseph Gross [via]
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Out of Africaby Isak DinesenISBN 0375508457 (0-375-50845-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa'Book summary:In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
The Random House colophon made its debut in February 1927 on the cover of a little pamphlet called "Announcement Number One." Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the company's founders, had acquired the Modern Library from publishers Boni and Liveright two years earlier. One day, their friend the illustrator Rockwell Kent stopped by their office. Cerf later recalled, "Rockwell was sitting at my desk facing Donald, and we were talking about doing a few books on the side, when suddenly I got an inspiration and said, 'I've got the name for our publishing house. We just said we were go-ing to publish a few books on the side at random. Let's call it Random House.' Donald liked the idea, and Rockwell Kent said, 'That's a great name. I'll draw your trademark.' So, sitting at my desk, he took a piece of paper and in five minutes drew Random House, which has been our colophon ever since." Throughout the years, the mission of Random House has remained consistent: to publish books of the highest quality, at random. We are proud to continue this tradition today.
This edition is set from the first American edition of 1937 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]More editions of Out of Africa:
A Piece of My Mindby Edmund WilsonISBN 0374526710 (0-374-52671-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Play of the Eyesby Elias Canetti, Ralph ManheimISBN 0374530610 (0-374-53061-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Play of the Eyes'Book summary:The third volume of Canetti's autobiography is set in Vienna between 1931 and 1937: years when the European catastrophe, already clear to anyone with eyes to see, was approaching its horrifying climax. To this great intellectual and spiritual self-portrait Canetti adds wonderful portraits of his friends and rivals: Herman Broch, Robert Musil, Fritz Wortruba, Alban Berg and Alma Mahler. Canetti brings these legends to life for modern readers as never before. Central to the book is Canetti's account of his friendship with the mysterious Doctor Sonne, a mentor whose effect on his life and work was enormous. [via]
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The Powerbookby Jeanette WintersonISBN 0375725059 (0-375-72505-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Powerbook'Book summary:While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, The PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Winterson's seventh novel (or eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners) travels with ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris, Capri, and London. Its interactive narrator, Ali, is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide whom you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the best video games, you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware: you can enter and play, but you cannot determine the outcome.
Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. She wants to make love as simple as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.
The PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several of which are at her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing, and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The PowerBook are stored a variety of stories that the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of the Roman Governor of London in Spitalfields Church, or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.
"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson has written. The PowerBook does just that. Her prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of coordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel Holmes [via]
Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journeyby Janet MalcolmISBN 0375761063 (0-375-76106-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey'Book summary:To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhovs writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhovs life and framed by an account of Malcolms journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhovs childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed exile always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov. [via]
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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Booksby Azar NafisiISBN 0375504907 (0-375-50490-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books'Book summary:An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.
Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen [via]
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The Real Life of Alejandro Maytaby Mario Vargas LlosaISBN 0374525552 (0-374-52555-2)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Redress of Poetryby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374524882 (0-374-52488-2)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His Worldby Daniel J. BoorstinISBN 0375704752 (0-375-70475-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World'Book summary:Renowned historian Daniel J. Boorstin completes the trilogy he began with The Discoverers and The Creators. The first volume covered explorers, scientists, and historians in their quest for raw knowledge, while the second book describes writers, painters, and composers in their pursuit of inspiring art; The Seekers describes people searching for an understanding of human existence--"Man is the asking animal," notes Boorstin. It's a big, bold theme, and although The Seekers is the shortest work in the trilogy, it's still vintage Boorstin: incredibly learned, richly anecdotal, and casually profound. It begins with the prophets of the Holy Land and the philosophers of ancient Greece, continues through the Renaissance, and concludes with the modern era of the social sciences. "In this long quest [for understanding], Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How," writes Boorstin. That's a neat summary of Western intellectual development over several thousand years. What other author could put it so succinctly? Boorstin is generally stronger with material that is more recent and more secular, but this is an accomplished book and a worthy capstone to an outstanding three-volume effort. --John J. Miller [via]
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Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Churchby Philip YanceyISBN 0375431284 (0-375-43128-4)
Hardcover, Ballantine Books
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The Spectator Birdby Wallace StegnerISBN 0385078900 (0-385-07890-0)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Sputnik Sweetheartby Haruki Murakami, J. Philip Gabriel, Philip GabrielISBN 0375726055 (0-375-72605-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sputnik Sweetheart'Book summary:Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. "There was nothing solid we could depend on," the reader is told. "We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."
The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears "like smoke." The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover.
Sputnik Sweetheart is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing--where doppelgängers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing. --Simon Leake [via]
Such a Strange Ladyby Janet HitchmanISBN 0380008076 (0-380-00807-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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The Tenantsby Bernard MalamudISBN 0380535386 (0-380-53538-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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This Heart of Mineby Susan Elizabeth PhillipsISBN 0380808080 (0-380-80808-0)
Softcover, Avon Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'This Heart of Mine'Book summary:Ever since she was a teenager, children's book author Molly Somerville has been infatuated with handsome Kevin Tucker, quarterback for her sister's Chicago Stars football team. Unfortunately, Kevin doesn't know she's alive until one fateful weekend when they're marooned together at the family vacation cabin. When Molly gets carried away by her creative imagination and compromises Kevin, the results are disastrous and before the dust settles, Kevin's in trouble with his boss, Molly's in deep trouble with her emotions and both of them are in danger of losing their hearts. Their journey to a happy ending is dicey, at best, and even if they can get past their outrageous and painful beginning, whether these two can lower their guards and let the other into their equally wary hearts, is questionable.
Bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips makes her hardcover debut with This Heart of Mine, a wonderful contemporary tale that features two familiar faces from prior novels as the hero and heroine. The characters are complicated, with difficult pasts that have shaped the adults they now are, and Phillips uses a deft touch in sketching their personal growth as they're tested with tragedy and bound together with love and a healthy dose of humour. As always, Phillips brings her delightful wit and a warm family setting to this novel that is sure to captivate readers. --Lois Faye Dyer [via]
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Time Regainedby D.J. Enright, Marcel Proust, Andreas Mayor, Joanna Kilmartin, Terence KilmartinISBN 0375753125 (0-375-75312-5)
Softcover, Modern Library
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Tolstoyby Henri TroyatISBN 0374980101 (0-374-98010-1)
Hardcover, Octagon Books
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Traveling Merciesby Anne LamottISBN 0375409173 (0-375-40917-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkmanby Louise PlummerISBN 0375895213 (0-375-89521-3)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): A Biographyby Stacy SchiffISBN 0375755349 (0-375-75534-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): A Biography'Book summary:She was wearing a black satin mask when they first met in 1923, and in a sense she wore a mask--that of the dutiful wife and helpmeet--throughout their 52-year marriage. Especially after the American publication of Lolita made her husband notorious in 1958, Véra Nabokov's presence at her husband's side was crucial, writes her biographer Stacy Schiff: "[It] kept the fiction in its place, reassured readers ... that Nabokov's perversities were of a different kind." But Véra Slonim (1902-91) was essential to Vladimir Nabokov's literary career from the beginning. She had a gift for handling practical matters that her spouse proudly lacked; she screened him from his publishers and his admirers with equal firmness, and in doing so she liberated him to fulfill the artistic genius they both believed he possessed. Praised for a previous biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Schiff here cements her reputation as a literary biographer of striking subtlety and perceptiveness. She establishes a strong base in chapter 1 with her excellent analysis of Véra Slonim's youth in a privileged Russian Jewish family in St. Petersburg. She then pursues her subject's elusive personality through hints in Nabokov's work and the comments of friends and colleagues. Schiff's elegant prose and eye for nuance nearly match Nabokov himself in this lucid, unsentimental portrait of a marriage. --Wendy Smith [via]
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Virginia Woolfby Hermione LeeISBN 0375701362 (0-375-70136-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virginia Woolf'Book summary:"A majestic literary biography, a truly new, surprisingly fresh portrait. --
Newsday
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
"A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit, and her sanity and strength.
It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come.
"One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history."
--Financial Times
"The most distinguished study of Woolf yet." --The New Republic [via]More editions of Virginia Woolf:
Waxwingsby Jonathan RabanISBN 0375709053 (0-375-70905-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waxwings'Book summary:Jonathan Raban's Waxwings is a canticle for the late 1990s told through the intertwined lives of several Seattlites. In the novel, the city becomes a microcosm of America at the turn of the millennium, and Raban's characters--all in some way tragic "tourists" in the world--are rendered with a compassion that redeems their personal failings.
Thomas Janeway is a British novelist and professor of literature at the University of Washington whose life is coming apart in his adopted home. He deeply loves his four-year-old son, Finn, but his wife, Beth, is caught up in the dot-com explosion, and the couple has grown apart. As Seattle erupts in the WTO riots and terrorist plots, Janeway's life crumbles around him. His wife leaves him, his house becomes a shambles of half-completed reconstruction, and his son is caught fighting in school. When he becomes a "person of interest" in the abduction and possible murder of a local girl, he is put on leave with pay from the university. Yet, Raban does not let Janeway--or any of his characters--wallow in self-pity. They all try to move forward with life, and even Janeway "the suspect" finds sympathetic allies in surprising places.
At one point in the novel, Janeway lectures his students on the "generosity" of V.S. Pritchett, saying that the writer believed "in a general redistribution of verbal wealth, in taking good lines from the haves, and giving them to the have-nots." This "liberal realism" also characterizes Raban's work. Raban treats all of his characters, from Janeway to Finn, with patience and balance. He fully inhabits each and tells fragments of the story from the perspective of Beth, Tom, Finn, and even Tom's illegal-immigrant contractor, Chick. One narrative infuses another, lending the novel a Dickensian universality. Together the disparate voices perfectly capture the particulars of a place, Seattle, at a unique moment in American history. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Tradeby William GoldmanISBN 0375703195 (0-375-70319-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade'Book summary:Something odd, if predictable, became of screenwriter William Goldman after he wrote the touchstone tell-all book on filmmaking, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), he became a Hollywood leper. Goldman opens his long-awaited sequel by writing about his years of exile before he found himself--again--as a valuable writer in Hollywood.
Fans of the two-time Oscar-winning writer (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men) have anxiously waited for this follow-up since his career serpentined into a variety of big hits and critical bombs in the '80s and '90s. Here Goldman scoops on The Princess Bride (his own favorite), Misery, Maverick, Absolute Power, and others. Goldman's conversational style makes him easy to read for the film novice but meaty enough for the detail-oriented pro. His tendency to ramble into other subjects may be maddening (he suddenly switches from being on set with Eastwood to anecdotes about Newman and Garbo), but we can excuse him because of one fact alone: he is so darn entertaining.
Like most sequels, Which Lie follows the structure of the original. Both Goldman books have three parts: stories about his movies, a deconstruction of Hollywood (here the focus is on great movie scenes), and a workshop for screenwriters. (The paperback version of the first book also comes with his full-length screenplay of Butch; his collected works are also worth checking out). This final segment is another gift--a toolbox--for the aspiring screenwriter. Goldman takes newspaper clippings and other ideas and asks the reader to diagnose their cinematic possibilities. Goldman also gives us a new screenplay he's written (The Big A), which is analyzed--with brutal honesty--by other top writers. With its juicy facts and valuable sidebars on what makes good screenwriting, this is another entertaining must-read from the man who coined what has to be the most-quoted adage about movie-business success: "Nobody knows anything." --Doug Thomas [via]
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The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fallby Daphne Du MaurierISBN 0380018489 (0-380-01848-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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