В. Г. Зебальд4.1 Роман В.Г.Зебальда (1944-2001) "Аустерлиц" литературная критика ставит в один ряд с прозой Набокова и Пруста, увидев в его главном герое черты "нового искателя утраченного времени".
...Жак Аустерлиц, посвятивший свою жизнь изучению устройства крепостей, дворцов и замков, вдруг осознает, что ничего не знает о своей личной истории, кроме того, что в 1941 году его, пятилетнего мальчика, вывезли в Англию... И вот, спустя десятилетия, он мечется по Европе, сидит в архивах и библиотеках, по крупицам возводя внутри себя собственный "музей потерянных вещей", "личную историю катастроф"...
Газета "Нью-Йорк Таймс", открыв романом Зебальда "Аустерлиц" список из десяти лучших книг 2001 года, назвала его "первым великим романом XXI века".
Colson Whitehead4.0 In a glowing review of Colson Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, the" New York Times Book Review "concluded, "Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, but if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heading toward the upper floors." With John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead delivers on the promise of his critically acclaimed debut in a magnificent new novel: a retelling of the legend of John Henry that sweeps across generations and cultures in a stunning, hilarious, and unsettling portrait of American society.
Immortalized in folk ballads, John Henry has been a favorite American hero since the mid-nineteenth century. According to legend, John Henry, a black laborer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, was a man of superhuman strength and stamina. He proved his mettle in a contest with a steam drill, only to die of exhaustion moments after his triumph.
In John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead transforms the simple ballad into a contrapuntal masterpiece. The narrative revolves around the story of J. Sutter, a young black journalist. Sutter is a "junketeer," a freeloading hack who roams from one publicity event to another, abusing his expense account and mooching as much as possible. It is 1996, and an assignment for a travel Web site takes Sutter to West Virginia for the first annual "John Henry Days" festival, a celebration of a new U.S. postal stamp honoring John Henry. And there the real story of John Henry emerges in graceful counterpoint to Sutter's thoroughly modern adventure.
As he explores the parallels between the lives of these two black men, and between the Industrial Age, which literally killedJohn Henry, and the Digital Age that is destroying J. Sutter's soul, Whitehead adds multiple dimensions to the myth of the steel-driving man. And in dazzling set pieces, he traces the evolution of the famous ballad over the past century. John Henry Days" "is a novel of extraordinary scope and mythic power that juxtaposes history and popular culture, the blatant bigotry of the past with the more insidious racism of the present, and laugh-out-loud humor with unforgettable poignancy.
Энн Пэтчетт3.7 В одной из стран Южной Америки, в особняке вице-президента, проходит пышный прием в честь дня рождения влиятельного японского бизнесмена господина Хосокавы. Высокопоставленные гости со всего мира завороженно слушают специально приглашенную звезду — легендарную оперную певицу Роксану Косс. Внезапно в зале гаснет свет. В дом врываются вооруженные террористы и захватывают в заложники и певицу, и ее слушателей.
История, которая начинается с всеобщего ужаса перед лицом кажущейся неминуемой гибели, постепенно переходит в нечто совсем другое. В историю о красоте и искусстве. В историю о том, как между говорящими на разных языках незнакомыми людьми и даже между бандитами и их пленниками зарождаются взаимопонимание, дружба и… любовь. Ни террористы, ни заложники больше не хотят думать о смертельной опасности. Но она грозит и тем, и другим.
Впервые на русском языке книга вышла в 2003 году под названием "Заложники".
Alice Munro3.9 A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory–a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life.
The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.
Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro’s large and ever- growing audience has come to expect
Джонатан Франзен4.1 "Поправки" - это семейная сага, отражающая современную жизнь Америки во всей ее многогранности. Это хроника скандалов, методично разрушающих типичную американскую семью. Это безумный Запад и непредсказуемый постсоветский Восток. Это зараженный вирусом виртуальный мир Интернета и реальный "больной" мир, не устоявший перед американской "инфекцией". Жизнь без прикрас. Коллизии и чувства, близкие и понятные практически каждому. Не случайно роман Франзена сразу стал бестселлером в США и покорил Европу.
Nicholson Baker0.0 The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.
With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing in his own retirement account to save one important archive–all twenty tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system.
Сэм Робертс0.0 In 1951, Julius & Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiring to steal atomic secrets. Their '53 execution tore American apart. 50 years later, the debate over their guilt, & the emotions unleashed by a case that fueled McCarthyism & the cold war, still reverberate. One man doomed them: David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, a young army sergeant who spied for the USSR at Los Alamos during WWII & whose testimony later sealed his sister & brother-in-law's fate. After serving a decade in prison, he was released in '60 & vanished. But NY Times editor Roberts found him &, after 14 years, persuaded him to talk. Drawn from the 1st unrestricted-access interviews ever granted by Greenglass & supplemented by revelations from dozens of other players in the case--including the Russian agent who controlled Julius Rosenberg; by newly declassified US & USSR government documents; & by personal letters never before published, among them one from Einstein; The Brother is a mesmerizing inside story of misplaced idealism, love & betrayal behind the atomic-espionage case that J. Edgar Hoover called the Crime of the Century. In over 50 hours of taped conversations with the author, Greenglass detailed his recruitment into espionage on Manhattan's Lower East Side, how he spied for the USSR at American's most secret military installation, & how the plot unraveled & led to the arrests of David, Julius & Ethel. Beyond that, this book reveals how Greenglass perjured himself in court--testimony that strapped his sister & brother-in-law into Sing Sing's electric chair. Delivering a narrative punch on every page, The Brother is the story of a family. It's a story of atomic espionage. It's the story of the trial that turned a nation upside down & that still divides the American left.
Нина Бернштейн0.0 IIn 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system’s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America’s child-welfare system.
The Lost Children of Wilder gives us the galvanizing history of this landmark case and the personal story at its core. Nina Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, but she also traces the life of Shirley Wilder and her son, Lamont, born when Shirley was only fourteen and relinquished to the very system being challenged in her name. Bernstein’s account of Shirley and Lamont’s struggles captures the heartbreaking consequences of the child welfare system’s best intentions and deepest flaws. In the tradition of There Are No Children Here, this is a major achievement of investigative journalism and a tour de force of social observation, a gripping book that will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.
Лора Хилленбранд4.4 Низкорослый кривоногий жеребец по кличке Сухарь, почти два сезона прозябавший на последних строчках списка скаковых лошадей, и полуслепой жокей-неудачник, кочующий с места на место… На центральном ипподроме Калифорнии в провале такой команды никто не сомневался. Да и кто мог соперничать с фаворитом скачек — непобедимым красавцем Адмиралом? Невероятно, но Сухарю это удалось! Именно он в конце Великой депрессии стал кумиром Америки!
Поклонение ему было всеобщим и не ограничивалось лишь любителями конного спорта. Однако главная заслуга Сухаря в том, что он сумел объединить трех разных и по-своему несчастных людей: слепнущего чемпиона по боксу Реда Полларда, бывшего объездчика мустангов Тома Смита и автомобильного магната Чарльза Ховарда.
Книга «Фаворит. Американская легенда» — писательский дебют Лоры Хилленбранд. Кто бы мог подумать, что повествование о карьере великой скаковой лошади, выдержанное в жанре документальной прозы, получит столь восторженные отзывы читателей со всего мира. «Фаворит» Лоры Хилленбранд попал в 50 списков лучших книг года и вдохновил создателей легендарной экранизации с Тоби Магуайром, Крисом Купером и Джеффом Бриджесом в главных ролях.
Ян Гросс0.0 On a summer day in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children-all but seven of the town's Jews. In this shocking and compelling study, historian Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts as well as physical evidence into a comprehensive reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but hidden to history. Revealing wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism, Gross's investigation sheds light on how Jedwabne's Jews came to be murdered-not by faceless Nazis, but by people who knew them well.
Albert Goldbarth0.0 Albert Goldbarth "just may be the American poet of his generation for the ages", says Judith Kitchen in a recent feature on him in the Georgia Review. "Often humorous but always serious, Goldbarth combines erudite research, pop-culture fanaticism, and personal anecdote in ways that make his writings among the most stylistically recognizable in the literary world". This new volume, Saving Lives, both consolidates and extends his passions and their presentations.The poems range from a few tight, resonant lines to works of long storytelling drive, from sequences that encompass the most flexible of free verse to an homage to the sestina. Some center on familiar cultural icons (Rembrandt, Houdini, Barnum, the Hardy Boys), others on little-known fringe players in subculture's oddest unlit corners, and yet others on family histories. But always they examine an essential subject: the ways in which we try to "save lives" -- whether through a transplanted lung, the archeological remnant, the conserved book.
As ever, Goldbarth dazzles, displaying an energetic mind eager to share his arcane learning, oddball musings, and observations of intimate moments, joys, and despairs. A zany wit and a generous sense of humanity reign equally. Saving Lives only enhances this writer's grand signature tradition.
Czesław Miłosz0.0 The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable A Treatise on Poetry in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal Kultura. Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.
A Treatise on Poetry is a great poem about some of the most terrible events in the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem begins at the end of the nineteenth century as a comedy of manners and moves with a devastating momentum through World War I to the horror of World War II. Then it takes on directly and plainly the philosophical abyss into which the European cultures plunged.
"Author's Notes" on the poem appear at the end of the volume. A stunning literary composition, these notes stand alone as brilliant miniature portraits that magically re-create the lost world of prewar Europe.A Treatise on Poetry evokes the European twentieth century, its comedy and terror and grief, with the force and expressiveness of a great novel. A tone poem to a lost time, a harrowing requiem for the century's dead, and a sober meditation on history, consciousness, and art: here is a masterwork that confronts the meaning of the twentieth century with a directness and vividness that are without parallel.
Jane Hirshfield0.0 In this luminous and authoritative new collection, Jane Hirshfield presents an ever-deepening and altering comprehension of human existence in poems utterly unique, as William Matthews once wrote of her work, in their "praise of ceaseless mutability as life's central splendor."
In poems complex in meaning yet clear in statement and depiction, Hirshfield explores questions of identity, aging, death, and of time and the variegated gifts brought by its relentless passage. Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.
Боб Хикок0.0 Chosen alongside celebrated poets Louise Glück and Czeslaw Milosz, Bob Hicok’s Animal Soul was the standout surprise of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. According to author David Wojahn, a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, this collection of poetry “is the best collection yet by a poet who has become one of the most individual and necessary voices of his generation. An almost prophetic rage seems to inhabit these poems, which present us with a speaker who is tender and brutally rueful by turns. Bob Hicok asks to be a voice of conscience in a conscience-less world. And, like all true prophets, his rage and consternation in the end transform themselves into a form of prayer, what one of his poems calls a ‘mad . . . devotion.’ Hicok is able to instruct and console us, and that is a very rare thing indeed.”
Louise Glück0.0 The Seven Ages was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1999.
The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features of Glück's earlier work, returning to themes of nature and the classical narratives that explain the phenomena of the world around us. Like Ararat, Glück's fifth book, this collection explores the hazards and pleasures of the domestic sphere and the family with an eye to the demonic. As in The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and Vita Nova, imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition in these poems. Unlike her past
work, many of these poems inhabit the realm of dreams, moving backward in time to an eidetic, unrecoverable past and ahead to an as-yet unrealized future. "Earth was given to me in a dream/ In a dream I possessed it." In these poems, Glück is wry, dreamlike, idiomatic, undeceived, unrelenting.
This new transparent mode, although charged by the indelible imagery and exact phrasing her readers will recognize, represents an ecstatic departure from her previous work.
Martin Amis0.0 Is there anything that Martin Amis can’t write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.
In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
Х. Дж. Джексон0.0 From Pierre de Fermat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Graham Greene, readers have related to books through the notes they write in the margins. In this pioneering book—the first to examine the phenomenon of marginalia—H.J. Jackson surveys an extraordinary range of annotated books to explore the history of marginalia, the forms they take, the psychology that underlies them, and the reactions they provoke.
Based on a study of thousands of books annotated by readers both famous and obscure over the last three centuries, this book reveals the intensity of emotion that characterizes the process of reading. For hundreds of years, readers have talked to other people in the margins of their books—not only to authors, but also to friends, lovers, and future generations.
With an infectious enthusiasm for her subject, Jackson reflects on the cultural and historical value of writing in the margins, examines works that have invited passionate annotation, and presents examples of some of the most provocative marginalia. Imaginative, amusing, and poignant, this book will be treasured by—and maybe even annotated by—anyone who cares about reading.
y W.D. Snodgrass0.0 This original, illuminating, and sometimes quite funny poetry anthology is primarily concerned with a fundamental and familiar question: How can we tell good poetry from bad? To illustrate precisely why these 101 poems, many of them well-loved classics, are so accomplished and remarkable, the prize-winning poet, author, critic, and veteran teacher Snodgrass herein rewrites them—wrongly. De/Compositions tellingly presents these rewrites next to the originals—by poets ranging from William Shakespeare to William Stafford—and thus we can more fully appreciate the artistry of these astonishing poems word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza. This book will appeal to anyone studying the craft and/or creativity that good poems demand.
Joy Williams0.0 Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving, Ill Nature is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.
Rebecca Solnit0.0 To Rebecca Solnit, the word "landscape" implies not only literal places, but also the ground on which we invent our lives and confront our innermost troubles and desires. The organic world, to Solnit, gives rise to the social, political, and philosophical landscapes we inhabit. As Eve Said to the Serpent skillfully weaves the natural world with the realm of art--its history, techniques, and criticism--to offer a remarkable compendium of Solnit's research and ruminations.The nineteen pieces in this book range from the intellectual formality of traditional art criticism to highly personal, lyrical meditations. All are distinguished by Solnit's vivid, original style that blends imaginative associations with penetrating insights. These thoughts produce quirky, intelligent, and wryly humorous content as Solnit ranges across disciplines to explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders, deserts, clouds, and caves--as well as ideas of the feminine and the sublime as they relate to our physical and psychological terrains.
Sixty images throughout the book display the work of the contemporary artists under discussion, including landscape photographers, performance artists, sculptors, and installation artists. Alongside her text, Solnit's gallery of images provides a vivid excursion into new ways of perceiving landscape, bodies, and art. Animals and the human body appear together with space and terra firma as Solnit reconfigures the blurred lines that define nature.
Адам Сисман0.0 James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself has generally been considered little more than an idiot and condemned by posterity as a lecher and drunk. How could such a fool have written such a book? With great wit, Adam Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task-the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his great mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write The Life of Samuel Johnson.
David Hajdu5.0 When twenty-five-year-old Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was already recognized as a genius, a youth idol with an acid wit and a barbwire throat; and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark, was unquestionably the center of youth culture.
In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu recounts the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular and enduring art form as the story of a colorful foursome: not only Dylan but also his part-time lover Joan Baez -- the first voice of the new generation; her sister Mimi -- beautiful, haunted, and an artist in her own right; and Mimi's husband, Richard Fariña, a comic novelist (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me) who invented the worldly-wise bohemian persona that Dylan adopted -- some say stole -- and made his own.
A national bestseller in hardcover, acclaimed as "one of the best books about music in America" (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post), Positively 4th Street is that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s -- about how the decade and all that it is now associated with were created in a fit of collective inspiration, with an energy and creativity that David Hajdu has captured on the page as if for the first time.
