Stanley Elkin0.0 Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.
Jane Smiley0.0 The hallowed halls of Moo University, a midwestern agricultural institution (aka "cow college"), are rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upsmanship. In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the prizewinning author of A Thousand Acres, offers a wickedly funny, darkly poignant comedy.
Richard Powers0.0 After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 — Richard Powers — returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.
Пол Уэст0.0 In December 1937 the city of Nanking, China, falls to brutal Japanese invaders. Thus begins a compelling drama wherein the teenaged daughter of an eminent scholar is forced to work as a prostitute. Short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, The Tent of Orange Mist illuminates the plight of intellectuals and artists during profound social and cultural upheaval.
Ричард Форд3.6 Этот роман, получивший Пулитцеровскую премию и Премию Фолкнера, один из самых важных в современной американской и мировой литературе. Экзистенциальная хроника, почти поминутная, о нескольких днях из жизни обычного человека, на долю которого выпали и обыкновенное счастье, и обыкновенное горе и который пытается разобраться в себе, в устройстве своего существования, постигнуть смысл собственного бытия и бытия страны. Здесь циничная ирония идет рука об руку с трепетной и почти наивной надеждой. Фрэнк Баскомб ступает по жизни, будто она – натянутый канат, а он – неумелый канатоходец. Он отправляется в нескончаемую и одновременно стремительную одиссею, смешную и горькую, чтобы очистить свое сознание от наслоений пустого, добраться до самой сердцевины самого себя. Ричард Форд создал поразительной силы образ, вызывающий симпатию, неприятие, ярость, сочувствие, презрение и восхищение. «День независимости» – великий роман нашего времени.
Jonathan Harr0.0 A Civil Action is a non-fiction book by Jonathan Harr about a water contamination case in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the 1980s.
After finding that her child is diagnosed with leukemia, Anne Anderson notices a high prevalence of leukemia, a relatively rare disease, in her city. Eventually she gathers other families and seeks a lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, to consider their options.
Schlichtmann originally decides not to take the case due to both the lack of evidence and a clear defendant. Later picking up the case, Schlichtmann finds evidence suggesting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town's water supply by Riley Tannery, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods; a chemical company, W. R. Grace; and another company named Unifirst.
In the course of the lawsuit Schlichtmann gets other attorneys to assist him. He spends lavishly as he had in his prior lawsuits, but the length of the discovery process and trial stretch all of their assets to their limit.
Николас Эндрю Басбейнс0.0 When it was first published, A Gentle Madness astounded and delighted readers with stories about the lengths of passion, expense, and more that collectors will go in pursuit of the book. Written before the emergence of the Internet but newly updated for the twenty-first century reader, A Gentle Madness captures that last moment in time when collectors frequented dusty bookshops, street stalls, and high-stakes auctions, conducting themselves with the subterfuge befitting a true bibliomaniac. A Gentle Madness is vividly anecdotal and thoroughly researched. Nicholas A. Basbanes brings an investigative reporter’s heart and instincts to the task of chronicling collectors past and present in pursuit of bibliomania. Now a classic of collecting, A Gentle Madness is a book lover’s delight.
Фокс Баттерфилд0.0 From the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of China: Alive in the Bitter Sea comes the poignant story of how the tradition of white Southern violence and racism has long affected and still haunts one black family. Butterfield follows the Bosket family of Edgefield County, South Carolina, from the days of slavery to the present. Photos.
Мадлен Блэйс0.0 They were a talented team with a near-perfect record. But for five straight years, when it came to the crunch of the playoffs, the Amherst Lady Hurricanes -- a "finesse" high school girls' basketball team of nice girls from a nice town -- somehow lacked the scrappy, hard-driving desire to go all the way. Now led by the strong back-court of All-American Jamila Wideman and three-point specialist Jen Pariseau, and playing beyond their personal best, this is their year to prove themselves in the state championships. Their season to test their passion for the sport and their loyalty to each other. Their time to discover who they really are. In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle is the fierce, funny, and intimate look into the minds and hearts of one group of girls and their quest for success and, most important of all, respect.
Лоуренс Уэшлер1.0 Writing with great style and humor, Weschler guides the readers through the Museum of Jurassic Technology and through the mind of its curator, David Wilson, a man of unusual imagination who mounts exhibits such as spore-inhaling ants, bats deploying ultraviolet frequencies, peach-pit carvings, and other exhibits that seem the manifest definition of bizarre. Illustrations.
Уильям Мэтьюз0.0 William Matthews's ten books have gradually earned him a place on the first roster of American poets -" as water licks its steady way through stone." " Very little of the poetry of the past twenty years," Henry Taylor has written in the Washington Times, " is more intelligent and engaging than that of William Matthews . .. Admiring gratitude seems perfectly appropriate." The New Yorker has described Matthews's work as " poems that revel in etymology and delight in colloquialism." And Carol Muske, in The Nation, has added: " If asked, I couldn't come up with a poet more in tune with the ironies and stand-up vernacular, the jazz of the everyday, than William Matthews . . . Matthews is a wise and fine poet and a funny person. Like time and money, an unbeatable combination. " This is a large-hearted book, a strong and worldly book, the work of five years by one of the most admired and generous of American poets. The National Book Critics Circle named it the winner of its 1995 award in poet
Эллен Брайант Фойгт0.0 In this mosaic of sonnets, her fifth collection, Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a little-recorded event that killed 25 million worldwide, half a million in America alone. The Nation calls Kyrie "an astonishing collection . . . so spare and tightly woven, yet so mindful of the cadences of the speaking voice, that the poems read like verse drama."
Starting with the family, Voigt creates voices that gather into one vast community story, a "true tour de force" (Boston Sunday Globe) that speaks to our own time of plague.
"An astonishing debut by an African-American poet with mandarin grace and surpassing elegance of form married to unflinchingly bold and discerning content. Phillips refuses to write what might be expected of him on any subject, whether it's gender, race, faith, or morality. His reticence, his refusal of polemic, remind me sometimes of the young James Merrill, even of Auden."--Marilyn Hacker
Priase for Cortège
"Carl Phillips is a poet of eros, but for him eros isn't simply sex, or even sexual desire sublimated into social ritual, or art, or any of the overdetermined ploys by which all of us, men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, attempt to close the distance between ourselves and others. Rather, eros is the never ending struggle, as he puts it, 'to fill a space in so there's no room left for awhile for what he surely calls a suffering inside him.' In the intricacies of thinking and feeling enacted in every poem of Cortège, no feeling ever quite escapes its opposite--the joy of fulfilled desire is infused with the isolation it has momentarily eclipsed, the heaven of intimacy only heightens 'how it feels to be stranded.' Cortège is a book that has been packed in salt: the durable salt of artistic making, and the bitter salt of longing. Few other poets writing today can track so well, so unforgettably, the estranging spaces in the heart of love, the perils of beauty or the beauty of peril."--Alan Shapiro
"Out so much farther than our present pieties, attentive to no social or sentimental voice, only passion's (so often ruinous, defiant of upshot), it is not in every case, every poem, that Carl Phillips triumphs over my timidity. As with Sappho and Pasolini, though, traces of the winged god are everywhere unmistakable, even when this new poet has kicked them over: it is a sacred entail his harsh graces make. I for one am an awed (if lacerated) heir."--Richard Howard
Carl Phillips is author of In the Blood, winner of the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and has published widely in journals including the
dn0 Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, and the Yale Review. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Harvard University.
Джеймс Меррилл0.0 The tragic death of James Merrill in February 1995 coincided with the publication in hardcover of this, his last book of poems. "In these last poems, lucid, deft, fond, shrewd, faithful, Merrill once again reveals himself as our most visual poet, combining a superb eye with an unfailing ear."--Peter Davison, Boston Globe.
Линда Халл0.0 A stunning collection of poems that touch upon the most pressing issues of our time, by an award-winning poet who was one of the most dynamic and highly regarded figures of her generation.
Robert Darnton0.0 Robert Darnton's work is one of the main reasons that cultural history has become an exciting study central to our understanding of the past.
More popular than the canon of the great Enlightenment philosophers were other books, also banned by the regime, written and sold "under the cloak." These formed a libertine literature that was a crucial part of the culture of dissent in the Old Regime. Robert Darnton explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers, from which he includes substantial excerpts. Winner of the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
Thomas M. Disch0.0 This provocative collection of essays and commentary about the practice and politics of the poetry encompasses a range of writing and poets including Ogden Nash, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Raine, Galway Kinnell, & others.
Клиффорд Джеймс Гирц4.0 In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz creates a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world.
Джон Фелстинер0.0 Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems—including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"—plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.
Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems.
To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."
Стэнли Крауч0.0 In this brilliant collection of speeches, essays, and reviews both long and short, the vigorous intellectual combatant Stanley Crouch gives us refreshing iconoclastic views on race and culture in American society from 1990 to 1994.
Роберт Полито0.0 Robert Polito recounts Thompson's relationship with his father, a disgraced Oklahoma sheriff, with the women he adored in life and murdered on the page, with alcohol, would-be censors, and Hollywood auteurs. Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos.
Дэвид С. Рейнольдс0.0 In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.
Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.
Мэри Карр3.5 У Мэри странная семья. Мать-художница была замужем семь раз, отец-работяга страдает от алкоголизма, а бабушка носит в сумке ножовку и собирает частички пыли в гостях в криминалистические конверты. Единственный в мире друг Мэри – старшая сестра Лиша, но даже с ней Мэри дерется до переломов костей и терпит обидные подколы.
Мэри – единственная девочка, которой разрешено присутствовать на встречах «клуба лжецов» - попойках отца с друзьями, на которых мужчины обмениваются выдуманными байками.
Жизнь Мэри настолько непредсказуема, что о каждом новом событии можно рассказывать в «клубе лжецов», и все примут за чистую монету.
Джон Хокенберри0.0 John Hockenberry's Moving Violations is one of the most entertaining, provocative, unexpected, outspoken, and occasionally outrageous books in recent memory. It is a story of obstacles--physical, emotional, and psychic--overcome again, and again, and again. Whether riding a mule up a hillside in Iraq surrounded by mud-stained Kurdish refugees, navigating his wheelchair through intractable stretches of Middle Eastern sand, or auditioning to be the first journalist in space, John Hockenberry, ace reporter, is determined not only to bring back the story, but also to prove that nothing can hold him back from death-defying exploits. However, he will never be a poster boy for a Jerry Lewis telethon. A paraplegic since an auto accident at age nineteen, Hockenberry holds nothing back in this achingly honest, often hilarious chronicle that ranges from the Ayatollah's funeral (where his wheelchair is pushed by a friendly Iranian chanting "Death to all Americans"), to the problems of crip sex and the inaccessibility of the New York City subway system. In this immensely moving chronicle--so filled with marvelous storytelling that it reads like a novel--John Hockenberry finds that the most difficult journey is the one that begins at home, as he confronts the memories of his beloved one-armed grandfather, and finally meets his institutionalized Uncle Peter, whose very existence was long a secret buried in the family history. Moving Violations is a sometimes harrowing but ultimately joyful ride.
Роберт Дейл Ричардсон мл.0.0 Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.
These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age.
Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator.
The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature.
Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.
