Philip Roth4.2 Roth's most ambitious and daring novel for many years, Operation Shylock is at once a real-life espionage thriller, an erotic obsession, the search for a Philip Roth "double", and a "confession" that tells the true story of Roth's recruitment for an intelligence mission by Israel's Mossad. The results are sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious, and always dramatic.
Рейнольдс Прайс0.0 For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections -- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors -- as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before.
In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed -- for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life -- to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance....A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writer's preoccupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose -- the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats's assertion that 'the excellence of every Art is its intensity' has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat -- passion and mystery, often passion for the mystery I've found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter -- and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act."
There is, indeed, much for the reader to "witness" here of passion and mystery, of character and act. And the variety of stories -- many of them set in Reynolds Price's native North Carolina, but a surprising number set in distant parts: Jerusalem in "An Early Christmas," the American Southwest in "Walking Lessons," and a number in Europe -- will astonish even his most devoted readers. In short, The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is as deeply rewarding a book as any he has yet published.
Питер Гей0.0 The bestselling author of Freud: A Life for Our Time now presents a remarkable journey through middle-class Victorian culture. The 19th century restrained aggressive behavior until ultimately, their aggressions exploded in WWI.
Джон Лукаш0.0 Historian John Lukacs's brilliant new book offers a provocative summing-up of the twentieth century, that age of iron which began with the guns of August in 1914 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Distinguished by its author's masterly style and command of detail, The End of the Twentieth Century is a startling examination of where we are today, how we got here, and where we are headed. Centering on Europe, America, and the relations between the two, Lukacs argues that the major battle of our time has been waged between forms of nationalism rather than between communism and democracy; that the great watershed events have been the two world wars, not the Russian Revolution; and that the century's radical revolutionary was neither Lenin nor Chairman Mao but Adolf Hitler. The book puts into sharp perspective such events as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the civil war raging in what was Yugoslavia, and the resurgence of right-wing politics in a reunited Germany. Rather than the end of history, we are now witnessing the end of the modern era, and what awaits us is not the triumphal reign of liberal democracy but a troubled time that may echo much that is most questionable in our age. Informed by the precision and insight that have made Lukacs a leading historian, The End of the Twentieth Century is a reckoning both personal and professional - at once a brilliant rebuttal to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and an outstanding, if sobering, work of historical mediation.
The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx