Andrew McMillan0.0 Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed – ‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory.
Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart.
Колин Барретт3.5 This magnificent collection takes us to Glanbeigh, a small town in rural Ireland – a town in which the youth have the run of the place. Boy racers speed down the back lanes; couples haunt the midnight woods; young skins huddle in the cold once The Peacock has closed its doors. Here the young live hard and wear the scars. It matters whose sister you were seen with. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, it matters a very great deal.
Colin Barrett’s debut does not take us to Glanbeigh alone; there are other towns, and older characters. But each story is defined by a youth lived in a crucible of menace and desire – and each crackles with the uniform energy and force that distinguish this terrific collection.
Donal Ryan4.5 The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland and with uncanny perception articulates the words and thoughts of a generation. Technically daring and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is witty, dark and sweetly poignant.
Сиддхартха Мукерджи4.6 Книга "Царь всех болезней. Биография рака" переведена на 33 языка и удостоена:
- пулитцеровской премии;
- премии Пен-клуба как лучшее научно-популярное произведение;
- премии за исследования в области онкологии;
- премии "New York Times" как лучшая книга 2010 года;
- премии журнала "Time" как лучшая книга 2010 года.
Номинирована на:
- книжную премию "Los Angeles Times";
- национальную премию литературных критиков США.
Александра Харрис4.0 In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.
Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern”
need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.
A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,
and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.
Петина Гаппа0.0 Petina Gappah is the voice of Zimbabwe. In this astonishingly powerful debut collection, she dissects with real poignancy the lives of people caught up in a situation over which they have no control, as they deal with spiralling inflation, power cuts and financial hardship - a way of life under Mugabe's regime - and cope with issues common to all people everywhere; failed promises, disappointments and unfulfilled dreams. Compelling, unflinching and tender, "An Elegy for Easterly" is a defining book, and a stunning portrait of a country in chaotic meltdown.
Алекс Росс4.3 Увлекательная и драматическая история, написанная музыкальным критиком The New Yorker Алексом Россом, охватывает весь ХХ века - из Вены до Первой мировой войны в Париж двадцатых, из гитлеровской Германии и сталинской России в нью-йоркский даунтаун шестидесятых-семидесятых, из Пекина наших дней в увлеченную экспериментами Европу. Книга Росса - это виртуозный проводник по лабиринту музыкальных стилей, который не только укажет путь, но и поведает о самых известных композиторах ХХ века и связи их произведений с окружающей действительностью. "Дальше - шум" - удивительная летопись ХХ века, пересказанная с помощью музыки.
Динау Менгесту4.0 Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.
Yiyun Li0.0 Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.
“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives.
“After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.
These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.
Александр Мастерс4.8 In this extraordinary book, Alexander Masters has created a moving portrait of a troubled man, an unlikely friendship, and a desperate world few ever see. A gripping who-done-it journey back in time, it begins with Masters meeting a drunken Stuart lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, England, and leads through layers of hell…back through crimes and misdemeanors, prison and homelessness, suicide attempts, violence, drugs, juvenile halls and special schools–to expose the smiling, gregarious thirteen-year-old boy who was Stuart before his long, sprawling, dangerous fall.
Shocking, inspiring, and hilarious by turns, Stuart: A Life Backwards is a writer’s quest to give voice to a man who, beneath his forbidding exterior, has a message for us all: that every life–even the most chaotic and disreputable–is a story worthy of being told.
Арман Мари Леруа4.4 Для того, чтобы посмотреть, как развивается зародыш, Клеопатра приказывала вспарывать животы беременным рабыням. Сегодня мы знаем о механизмах, которые заставляют одну-единственную клетку превращаться сначала в эмбрион, после - в ребенка, а затем и во взрослого человека, несравненно больше, чем во времена жестокой египтянки, однако многие вопросы по-прежнему остаются без ответов. Один из основных методов исследовать пути формирования человеческого тела - это проследить за возникающими в этом процессе сбоями или, как говорят ученые, мутациями. Именно об этих "неполадках", приводящих к появлению сиамских близнецов, двухголовых ягнят и прочих мутантов, рассказывает в своей увлекательной и порой шокирующей книге британский биолог Арман Мари Леруа. Используя истории знаменитых "уродцев" в качестве отправной точки для своих рассуждений, автор подводит читателя к пониманию сложных законов, позволяющих человеческим телу на протяжении многих поколений сохранять относительную стабильность, оставаясь при этом поразительно многообразным.
Robert Macfarlane4.0 Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is the most interesting of the crop of books published to mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest. Macfarlane is both a mountaineer and a scholar. Consequently we get more than just a chronicle of climbs. He interweaves accounts of his own adventurous ascents with those of pioneers such as George Mallory, and in with an erudite discussion of how mountains became such a preoccupation for the modern western imagination.
The book is organised around a series of features of mountaineering--glaciers, summits, unknown ranges--and each chapter explores the scientific, artistic and cultural discoveries and fashions that accompanied exploration. The contributions of assorted geologists, romantic poets, landscape artists, entrepreneurs, gallant amateurs and military cartographers are described with perceptive clarity. The book climaxes with an account of Mallory's fateful ascent on Everest in 1924, one of the most famous instances of an obsessive pursuit. Macfarlane is well-placed to describe it since it is one he shares.
MacFarlane's own stories of perilous treks and assaults in the Alps, the Cairngorms and the Tian Shan mountains between China and Kazakhstan are compelling. Readers who enjoyed Francis Spufford's masterly I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination will enjoy Mountains of the Mind. This is a slighter volume than Spufford's and it loses in depth what it gains in range, but for an insight into the moody, male world of mountaineering past and present it is invaluable. --Miles Taylor
Джонатан Сафран Фоер3.9 "Юмор — это единственный правдивый способ рассказать печальный рассказ", — утверждает Джонатан Фоер устами своего героя. В печально-смешном путешествии двух подростков — американца и украинца — сплелись воедино события Второй мировой войны, традиции еврейского народа и взгляд на современную молодежь, которая цинизмом и бахвальством скрывает свои по-детски тонкие, ранимые души.
Роман был переведен на 15 языков. А после экранизации 2005 года книга стала по-настоящему культовой.
Chris Ware4.2 Jimmy Corrigan has rightly been hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever to be published. It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize. It is the tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody in Chicago who one day meets the father who abandoned him as a child. With a subtle, complex and moving story and the drawings that are as simple and original as they are strikingly beautiful, Jimmy Corrigan is a book unlike any other and certainly not to be missed.
Зэди Смит3.6 Два незадачливых ветерана Второй мировой войны становятся, несмотря на все различия между ними, лучшими друзьями на всю жизнь. Арчи Джонс, чистокровный британец, берет себе в жены молодую крупную девушку с Ямайки. Самад Икбал вступает в брак по договоренности и вынужден ждать, пока его жена появится на свет. И если бы обоих друзей ждало счастливое будущее! Дети приносят головную боль, прошлое наступает на пятки, и никому нет покоя в этом многослойном романе.
Филипп Гуревич4.3 В 1994 году мир шокировали новости из Руанды, когда в течение 100 дней были жестоко убиты более 800 000 человек.
Филип Гуревич, журналист The New Yorker, отправился в Руанду, чтобы собрать по кусочкам историю массового убийства, произошедшего в этой маленькой африканской стране. Он взял интервью у оставшихся в живых представителей тутси, которые рассказали ему свои ужасные истории потерь и опустошения.
Как случилось, что через 50 лет после Холокоста произошло подобное зверство? Почему люди согласились убивать соседей, друзей, коллег? Как жить дальше в стране насильников и жертв?
Эта мощная, мастерски написанная книга дает неожиданные ответы на вопросы.
