Джонатан Летем3.5 Четверо сирот, в числе которых страдающий нервными тиками Лайонел Эссрог, слепо преданы своему покровителю Фрэнку Минне, вытащившему их из приюта, чтобы сделать "своими парнями". Они готовы выполнить любое его поручение, чем, собственно, и занимаются под крышей то ли транспортного, то ли детективного агенства. Но в один черный день Фрэнка убивают, и Лайонелу приходится стать настоящим детективом, расследующим преступление.
Дж. М. Кутзее3.8 Самый загадочный писатель из всех нобелевских лауреатов, дважды удостоенный премии "Букер" и ни разу не явившийся на вручение, посвятивший нобелевскую речь не кому-нибудь, а Робинзону Крузо, человек, само имя которого долго оставалось загадкой.
"Бесчестье" - возможно, главный роман писателя. Герой книги, университетский профессор, из-за скандальной истории со студенткой лишается буквально всего - и работы, и благорасположения общества.
Роман-полемика, ответ писателя на вопрос, в свое время поставленный Францем Кафкой, - быть или не быть человеку, если жизнь низвела его в глазах окружающих до состояния насекомого, стать ли ему нулем или начать с нуля.
А. Манетт Ансей0.0 April Liesgang and Caleb Shannon have known each other for just three short months, so their Valentine's Day wedding at a chapel near the shores of Lake Michigan has both families in an uproar. As the festivities unfold (and the cash bar opens), everyone has an opinion and a lively prediction about April and Caleb's union, each the reflection of a different marital experience.
Meanwhile, at the nearby Hideaway Lodge, a domestic quarrel ends in tragedy. As April and Caleb's life together begins, death parts another man and woman in angry violence—and as the two stories gradually intersect, their juxtaposition explores the tangled roots of vulnerability and desire.
By the time the last polka has been danced and the bouquet tossed, Midnight Champagne has cast an extraordinary spell. From the novel's opening epigraph from Chekhov—"If you fear loneliness, then marriage is not for you"—to its final moments in the honeymoon suite, A. Manette Ansay weaves tenderness and fury, passion and wonder into a startling tapestry of love in all its paradox and power.
Фредерик Буш0.0 An immensely powerful story, The Night Inspector follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in a venture that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the conflict he has left behind. He also befriends a deputy inspector of customs named Herman Melville who, largely forgotten as a writer, is condemned to live in the wake of his vanished literary success and in the turmoil of his fractured family.
Delving into the depths of this country's heart and soul, Frederick Busch's stunning novel is a gripping portrait of a nation trying to heal from the ravages of war--and of one man's attempt to recapture a taste for life through the surging currents of his own emotions, ambitions, and shattered conscience.
Дэвид Гейтс0.0 The author of the highly acclaimed novels Jernigan (Pulitzer Prize Finalist) and Preston Falls (National Book Critics Cirlce Award Finalist) offers up a mordantly funny collection of short stories about the faulty bargains we make with ourselves to continure the high-wire act of living meaningful lives in late twentieth-century America.
Populated by highly educated men and women in combat with one another, with substance abuse, and above all with their own relentless self-awareness, the stories in The Wonders of the Invisible World take place in and around New York City, and put urbanism into uneasy conflict with a fleeting dream of rural happiness. Written with style and ferocious black humor, they confirm David Gates as one of the best-and funniest-writers of our time.
Джонатан Уэйнер0.0 "A fascinating history--. Literate and authoritative--.Marvelously exciting." --The New York Times Book Review
Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch, brings his brilliant reporting skills to the story of Seymour Benzer, the Brooklyn-born maverick scientist whose study of genetics and experiments with fruit fly genes has helped revolutionize or knowledge of the connections between DNA and behavior both animal and human.
How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer's Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer, and his asssociates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific detective story, Time, Love, Memory forcefully demonstrates how Benzer's studies are changing our world view--and even our lives.
John W. Dower4.5 A history of Japan, this work draws on a range of Japanese sources to offer an analysis of how shattering defeat in World War II, followed by over six years of military occupation by the USA, affected every level of Japanese society - in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. Here is the history of an extraordinary moment in the history of Japanese culture, when new values warred with old, and when early ideals of "peace and democracy" were soon challenged by the "reverse course" decision to incorporate Japan into the Cold War Pax Americana. The work chronicles not only the material and psychological impact of utter defeat but also the early emergence of dynamic countercultures that gave primacy to the private as opposed to public spheres - in short, a liberation from totalitarian wartime control. John Dower shows how the tangled legacies of this intense, turbulent and unprecedented interplay of conqueror and conquered, West and East, wrought the utterly foreign and strangely familiar Japan of today.
Жан Поль Кауфман0.0 Like his subject, Napoleon, author Jean-Paul Kauffmann has experienced captivity, as a three-year hostage in Beirut. He brings his insider's knowledge to this moving account of the most famous French soldier's last years in seclusion on a tropical island. After his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled and imprisoned by the British on the island of St. Helena. He became increasingly withdrawn, surviving on a diet of memories that he recounted to the few people around him. But the book -- part history, part travelogue -- portrays the leader as a prisoner also of his mind, poisoned by nostalgia for his triumphs and grief over his defeats. "A haunting, unforgettable book....Kauffmann captures the desolate atmosphere of Napoleon's last home with evocative precision." -- Boston Globe
Джейн Брокс0.0 Amid the turmoil after her father's death-decisions to be made, the future of the family farm to be settled-Jane Brox, using her acclaimed "compassion, honesty, and restraint" (The Boston Globe), begins a search for her family's story. The search soon leads her to the quintessentially American history of New England's Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age.
Jane Brox's first book, Here and Nowhere Else, won the 1996 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and has been represented in Best American Essays. She is a frequent contributor to The Georgia Review. Jane Brox lives in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts
Патриция Хэмпл0.0 In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions, reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!"—a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.
Жан Поль Кауфман0.0 Perdue au milieu de l'Atlantique Sud, Sainte-Hélène, l'île d'où on ne s'échappe jamais. Un rocher lugubre, battu par les flots et le vent. Déporté par les Anglais après Waterloo, Bonaparte s'efforcera, pendant cinq ans et demi, de rester Napoléon en dépit des humiliations.Amoureux des îles, Jean-Paul Kauffmann s'est embarqué un jour à bord du seul bateau qui dessert Sainte-Hélène. Il découvre ses falaises noires, ses habitants reclus, son gouverneur britannique, son ex-consul de France érudit et misanthrope, ses prisonniers qui pêchent face à l'océan.Sainte-Hélène : la vie quotidienne dans l'étrange maison de Longwood au temps de Napoléon, la promiscuité, l'ennui, l'humidité, les rats.Récit de voyage et enquête sur les derniers jours de l'Empereur, ce livre décrit avec justesse la captivité et l'enfermement. La chambre noire de Longwood est une méditation sur la mélancolie historique, un huis-clos policier qui atteste que Napoléon a bel et bien été empoisonné. Par la nostalgie de sa gloire et le regret de son passé.
Рут Стоун0.0 Ordinary Words celebrates Ruth Stone’s 84th birthday. This brilliant new collection is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of Americana” marked by Stone’s characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor.
Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender and wacky, filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet’s poet. Her following is devoted and ever-growing. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone’s subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonald’s as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.
Сьюзан Кинсолвинг0.0 “The passion, playfulness, and regret in these wonderful poems will make many women think this book was written just for them.” — Susan Cheever
“Susan Kinsolving’s poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day’s figures and memory’s pattern. But she’s headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself — and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well—triumphantly there.” — J. D. McClatchy
“What rings with authenticity in Susan Kinsolving’s poems is a lovely severity. . . . Sorrow and courage and pleasure register themselves in lucid distillations, like the purities of winter air.” — Anthony Hecht
“‘Things just are,’ Susan Kinsolving writes, in a matter-of-fact tone that belies a fiery intensity. In her poetry, commonplace things are imbued with a magical aura. Her wry wit clarifies as it deepens a tragic vision.” — Grace Schulman
“In her first major collection Susan Kinsolving shows herself to be a poet of ravenous amplitudes, of wit schooled by feeling, of observations had owed by memory, and of landscape rising to what she calls ‘an oblique sublimity’ which is also the hallmark of her art.” — Edward Hirsch
Рита Дав0.0 In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos", to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.
Tory Dent0.0 Tory Dent's is a voice like no other. Her use of language is virtuosic, complex, and plangent. These are daring poems that also dare the reader. HIV positive, Dent writes out of her own experience and profound refusal to look away or suspend feeling or turn from love. When her first book of poems, What Silence Equals, appeared in 1993, it was recognized as "immediately one of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis, flinging its challenge in the face of death." With HIV, Mon Amour she moves further into the whirlwind -- as witness, lover, and observer.
Рафаэль Кампо0.0 A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed younger poets, Rafael Campo’s Diva appears at the intersection of confession and confinement, hyperbole and humility. In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America’s newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man.
At once relishing and resisting the poetic traditions of formal English verse, Diva showcases Campo moving deftly between received forms and free verse. In each poem the sound of words is transformed into the highest of arts, the act of performance into the exercise of power, and the most profound abjection into the sweet promise of divinity. Culminating with his new and daring translations of Federico García Lorca’s sonetos—the great Spanish poet’s most homoerotically explicit and formally accomplished poems—Campo’s music instills in the reader an exalted understanding of beauty, suffering, and, ultimately, the human capacity for empathy.From reviews of Campo’s previous poetry:
“Extraordinary meditations on illness and the healing power of words.”—Lambda Literary Foundation
“Read Campo to enter the bloodstream of a man who, with a haunting clarity of vision, shares his memories, his anguish, his healing love.”—Cortney Davis, Literature and Medicine
“Riveting, provocative, and refreshing—[this volume] is a gift to the clinician who is trying to re-invoke in his or her students the humility, compassion, and deep caring that brought us all into medicine in the first place.”—Dr. Sandra L. Bertman, Annals of Internal Medicine
“[Campo] listens to the sounds the body makes, but what he hears is poetry.”—Zoë Ingalls, Chronicle of Higher Education
“Powerful and accessible.”—Jonathan Jackson, Washington Blade
“Bemused, indelible, and heartbreaking.”—Marilyn Hacker, Out
“[Campo’s] private corral of disparate words twist, torque, collide with gorgeous creative imperative.”—Nomi Eve, Independent Weekly
Jorge Luis Borges0.0 It will come as a surprise to some readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture—though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work—have scarcely been translated into English.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators
Уильям Логан0.0 "I have heard writers refer to [William Logan] as ‘the most hated man in American poetry,’ a title one could be proud of in this time of fawning and favor-trading."--Robert McDowell, Hudson Review
"Is there today a more stringent, caring reader of American poetry than William Logan? Reputations of the Tongue may, at moments, read harshly. But this edge is one of deeply considered and concerned authority. A poet-critic engages closely with his masters, with his peers, with those whom he regards as falling short. This collection is an adventure of sensibility."—George Steiner
William Logan has been called the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. A critic of intensity and savage wit, he is the most irritating and strong-minded reviewer of contemporary poetry we have. A survey of American, British, and Irish poetry in the eighties and early nineties, Reputations of the Tongue is a book of poetry criticism more honest than any since Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age.
The book opens with an essay arguing with Eliot over tradition and individual talent; it closes with a close scrutiny of contemporary British and Irish poetry. At the heart of the book are long essays on W. H. Auden, W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and Geoffrey Hill--and the reviews of major and minor contemporary poets that have earned Logan his reputation.
Appearing in publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, Poetry, Parnassus, and Sewanee Review, Logan’s reviews have been noted for their violence, intelligence, candor, and humor. Many aroused tempers on first publication, leading one Pulitzer Prize winner to offer to run the critic over with a truck. Even as he tackles the radical excess of Ashbery and Ginsberg, however, Logan lauds the rich quietudes of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, the froth and verbal fervor of Amy Clampitt, the philosophical comedies of Gjertrud Schnackenberg.
The essays in this collection take the long view. Aspiring to more than miscellany or gossip, Reputations of the Tongue is the work of a critic for whom the reviewing of poetry is still a high calling.
William Logan is the author of four books of poems, Sad-faced Men, Difficulty, Sullen Weedy Lakes, and Vain Empires , and a book of criticism, All the Rage. He has won the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches at the University of Florida, where he is Alumni/ae Professor of English. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, England.
Дэвид Шилдс0.0 The National Basketball Association is a place where, without ever acknowledging it, white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. In Black Planet, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans--including especially himself--think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies.
During the 1994-95 NBA season, Shields went to the Seattle SuperSonics' home games; watched their away games on TV; listened to interviews and call-in shows; talked, or tried to talk, to players, coaches, and agents; attended charity events; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the Web. He kept a journal and over the next few years transformed that journal into this book, which is focused sharply on white spectators' relationship to black athletes, in particular Shields' own identification with Gary Payton, the team's language-besotted point-guard.
Through the apparently simple vehicle of a daily diary running from November 5, 1994 to May 5, 1995, and ranging from a dispute between two fans over the sale of a ticket to the national media frenzy surrounding Charles Barkley's jest "That's why I hate white people," David Shields confronts the nature of racism (including his own)--the otherness in ourselves that we project onto strangers. He takes us via sports passion deep into the American racial divide.
Майкл Шмидт0.0 Book DescriptionWhen Michael Schmidt’s last book, Lives of the Poets, was published, Mark Strand called it “a tour de force, an astonishing view of the whole of poetry in English, a superb read.” Now Schmidt brings the same
Генри Винцек0.0 Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.
The black family's story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves—who took their rightful place in mainstream America.
In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family—once one of the wealthiest in America—to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family's fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history—the history of slavery's curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.
For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons' stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching.
Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation's attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.
Ричард Холмс0.0 Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium addiction increased, he quarreled bitterly with Wordsworth, and his son, Hartley (a gifted poet himself), became an alcoholic. But after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge reemerged as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author, a great and daring poet, and a lecturer of genius.
Holmes traces the development of Coleridge into a legend among the younger generation of Romantic writers--the "hooded eagle amongst blinking owls"--and the influence he had on Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Carlyle, and J. S. Mill, among others. And he rediscovers Coleridge's power as a conversationalist and a ceaseless generator of ideas. As Charles Lamb noted, "his face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."
Although Coleridge's later life was not a happy one, it is continually fascinating. As Holmes brings it vividly to life in these pages, we feel his hopeless heartaches, his moments of elation, his electrifying creativity and boundless energy, his unfailing ability to rescue himself from the darkest abyss. The result is a brilliantly animated, superbly detailed, wondrously provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist and an even more extraordinary human being.
Джин Строуз0.0 History has remembered J. Pierpont Morgan as a complex and contradictory figure, part robber baron and part patron saint. Now this magisterial biography, based extensively on new material, draws a definitive, full-scale portrait of Morgan's tumultuous life both in and out of the public eye.Morgan earned his reputation as "the Napoleon of Wall Street" by reorganizing the nation's railroads and creating some of its greatest industrial trusts, including General Electric and U.S. Steel. At a time when the United States had no Federal Reserve System, he appointed himself a one-man central bank. He had two wives, three yachts, four children, six houses, mistresses, and one of the finest art collections in America. In this extraordinary book, award-winning biographer Jean Strouse vividly portrays the financial colossus, the avid patron of the arts, and the entirely human character behind all the myths.
Brilliantly crafted, epic in scope, Morgan reveals a man we have never seen before, offering new insights on the culture, political struggles, and social conflicts of America's Gilded Age.
Сьюзен Тиффт0.0 The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. With full cooperation from the families and unconditional access to the Times archives, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones have written the first insiders biography of the most powerful media clan in North America. When Adolph Ochs, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, bought the bankrupt New York Times in 1896, he transformed it into North Americas most respected and powerful newspaper. His familys values and prejudices set the agenda for the paper. The Trust is a dramatic saga set against a backdrop of world events, succession battles, and the burden and privilege of wealth and power. Spanning four generations, The Trust tells the story of Ochs, a visionary plagued by depression and insecurity; his daughter Iphigene, who fiercely guarded the family mystique; her husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the papers most controversial publisher; their son Punch, whose amiable nature masked a steely toughness; and Arthur Jr., the brash successor, who is leading the Times into the future. Despite the authors access, The Trust was written independent of family control.
