Шань Са 4.1 "Играющая в го" в 2001 г. удостоена Гонкуровской премии французских лицеистов, а в Великобритании признана лучшей зарубежной книгой 2003 года.
События романа развиваются в Маньчжурии 30-х гг. ХХ века. Японская армия завоевывает Китай. В древнем городе юная китаянка и японский самурай играют в го. В этой партии победы не будет. На последнем черно-белом пересечении любовь смыкается со смертью.
Шань Са (р.1972) могла бы стать гордостью китайской литературы, но покинула родину и талант ее расцвел во Франции. Музыку французского языка Шань Са обогащает поэзией и образным строем китайского.
"Играющая в го" - первая ее книга в России.
Питер Кэри3.5 …Эта история началась на задворках цивилизации вскоре после войны как безобидная шутка. Посредственный поэт Кристофер Чабб решил доказать застойному австралийскому обществу, что поэзия жива, - и создал Боба Маккоркла, веломеханика, интеллектуала и автора гениальных стихов, равных которым еще не знала мировая культура. Случился страшный скандал - редактор, опубликовавший их, отправился под суд за оскорбление морали и встретил таинственную и незаслуженно жестокую смерть. Но личина оказалась живучей: на суде человек, которого быть не должно, встал и заявил, что Боб Маккоркл - это он. Поэзия и впрямь ожила, чтобы мстить своему создателю.
И тем, кто пойдет по стопам нового Франкенштейна, даже в ночном кошмаре не может привидеться, насколько жестокой окажется эта месть. А читателю предстоят бессонные ночи и попытки распутать тенета самой изобретательной мистификации литературы ХХ века.
Роман дважды лауреата Букеровской премии Питера Кэри "Моя жизнь как фальшивка" - впервые на русском языке.
Моника Али3.5 "Брик-лейн" - дебютный роман Моники Али, английской писательницы бангладешского происхождения (родилась в Дакке).
Назнин, родившуюся в бангладешской деревне, выдают замуж за человека вдвое ее старше и увозят в Англию. В Лондоне она занимается тем, чего от нее ждут: ведет хозяйство и воспитывает детей, постоянно балансируя между убежденностью мужа в правильности традиционного мусульманского уклада и стремлением дочерей к современной европейской жизни. Это хрупкое равновесие нарушает Карим - молодой активист радикального движения "Бенгальские тигры". Карим заставляет Назнин задуматься о справедливости общественного устройства и правильности семейного положения, однако традиционный конфликт долга и страсти разрешается совершенно неожиданным для них обоих образом.
Роман вошел в шорт-лист Букеровской премии 2003 года.
Самрат Упадхьяй0.0 Writing of Samrat Upadhyay’s story collection, critics raved: “like a Buddhist Chekhov . . . speak[s] to common truths . . . startlingly good” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “subtle and spiritually complex” (New York Times). Upadhyay’s novel showcases his finest writing and his signature themes. The Guru of Love is a moving and important story—important for what it illuminates about the human need to love as well as lust, and for the light it shines on the political situation in Nepal and elsewhere.
Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment with his wife and two children. Moonlighting as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished young woman who is also a new mother. She provides for him what his wife, who comes from a privileged background, does not: desire, mystery, and a simpler life. Complicating matters are various political concerns and a small city bursting with the conflicts of modernization, a static government, and a changing population. Just as the city must contain its growing needs, so must Ramchandra learn to accommodate both tradition and his very modern desires.
Absolutely absorbing yet deceptively simple, this novel cements Upadhyay’s emerging status as one of our most exciting writers.
Ширли Хаззард0.0 The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.
Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.
Инга Клендиннен0.0 In January 1788, the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales, Australia and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who would be their new neighbors. Dancing with Strangers tells the story of what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and these Aborigines. Inga Clendinnen interprets the earliest written sources, and the reports, letters and journals of the first British settlers in Australia. She reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader 'Bennelong' (Baneelon) that was ultimately destroyed by the assertion of profound cultural differences. A Prize-winning archaeologist, anthropologist and historian of ancient Mexican cultures, Inga Clendinnen has spent most of her teaching career at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan (Cambridge, 1989) and Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1995) are two of her best-known scholarly works; Tiger's Eye: A Memoir, (Scribner, 2001) describes her battle against liver cancer. Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2002) explores World War II genocide from various perspectives.
Эмико Онуки-Тирни0.0 Why did almost one thousand highly educated "student soldiers" volunteer to serve in Japan's tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor.
Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
Дом Мораес0.0 'This unerring journey through memory and reminiscence . . . is a triumph' ?Indian Express Despite all odds, it is often said, India holds together. Perhaps it does, the authors of this perceptive and provocative study of Indian society concede, but there are bitter truths that this uncertain success barely conceals. For, even after half a century of independence and the institution of democracy, India remains a deeply divided society, a 'fractured land'. While the old inequities of caste and class persist, there are new challenges posed by the advent of extreme religious fundamentalism and an unabashedly consumerist culture. Out of God's Oven is an uncompromising look at the drama of contemporary India, based on the authors' personal memories and first-hand accounts of terrible landmarks in Indian history, such as the communal riots in Gujarat, the strife in Ayodhya, Naxal violence in Bengal, terrorism in Punjab, and caste wars in Bihar. In the midst of so much despair, if there is hope, the authors discover, it lies in the resilience of ordinary people. But how long, they ask, before this too is lost? Recording the voices of several Indians, including the anonymous and the famous, the dispossessed and the privileged, the sane and the fanatical, Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa have produced a revelatory and sobering book that will be remembered and discussed for a long time to come. 'The travelogue is a time tested, time worn device, a trusty steed for philosophy and rambling prose. It is a tribute to Moraes' control over his material that God's Oven maintains its pace and rhythm without ever losing its focus or direction' ?Indian Express 'Out of God's Oven is that rare book that will be remembered long after other, lesser works have been forgotten' ?Telegraph 'A travel book with a difference . . . beautifully written.
Мара Мустафин0.0 WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD 2003 COMMUNITY RELATIONS COMMISSION AWARD SHORTLISTED NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2004 SHORTLISTED KIRIYAMA PRIZE 2004 SHORTLISTED TASMANIA PACIFIC BICENTENARY HISTORY PRIZE 2004 Harbin in north China was once the heart of a vibrant Russian community of diverse cultural and political origins. But by the mid-1930s, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria drove many Russians to seek refuge elsewhere. For the thousands who returned to their motherland in the Soviet Union, it was a bitter homecoming. At the height of Stalin's purges, they were arrested as Japanese spies. Some were shot, others sent to labour camp, few survived. Among them were members of the author's family. Driven by curiosity and armed with chutzpah, Mara Moustafine fronted up at the headquarters of the former KGB in post-Soviet Moscow and asked for help to discover what had happened. She got more than she bargained for. The family's secret police files, retrieved from archives at opposite ends of Russia, revealed the horror of the purges as well as startling secrets about their lives in turbulent years in China and the Soviet Union. What was fact? What was fiction? Written with sensitivity and humour, Secrets and Spies skilfully weaves personal and political, past and present to give an insider's perspective on the life of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
Уильям Далримпл0.0 White Mughals is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Kahir un-Nissa—'Most excellent among Women'—the great-niece of the Nizam's Prime Minister and a descendant of the Prophet. Kirkpatrick had gone out to India as an ambitious soldier in the army of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the conquest and subjection of the subcontinent. Instead, he fell in love with Khair and overcame many obstacles to marry her—not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company.
It is a remarkable story, involving secret assignations, court intrigue, harem politics, religious and family disputes. But such things were not unknown; from the early sixteenth century, when the Inquisition banned the Portuguese in Goa from wearing the dhoti, to the eve of the Indian mutiny, the 'white Mughals' who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassments to successive colonial administrations. William Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as 'Hindoo Stuart', who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his temple of idols, and who spent many years trying to persuade the memsahibs of Calcutta to adopt the sari; and Sir David Ochterlony, Kirkpatrick's counterpart in Delhi, who took all thirteen of his wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of their own elephant.
In White Mughals, William Dalrymple discovers a world almost entirely unexplored by history, and places at its centre a compelling tale of love, seduction and betrayal. It possesses all the sweep and resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel, set against a background of shifting alliances and the manoeuvring of the great powers, the mercantile ambitions of the British and the imperial dreams of Napoleon. White Mughals, the product of five years' writing and research, triumphantly confirms Dalrymple's reputation as one of the finest writers at work today.
