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The Bad Girl
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting "Comrade Arlette," an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the ily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as—whether it's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman—and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. The protean Lily, gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse—does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In Mario Vargas Llosa's beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear. |
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Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
by Nadine Gordimer
Senses play a telling part in three of the stories in Nadine Gordimer's magnificent new collection. In one we meet a woman who can gauge the stability of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello, and in another by the scent in the nape of her husband's neck. For one couple who emigrate to South Africa, the husband's gaze remains firmly fixed on their native Budapest, while his wife is spellbound by the visual pleasures of their new homeland. There is lively conversation amongst recently departed literary luminaries in the Chinese restaurant of "Dreaming of the Dead", and a widow seeks an incarnation of her husband which she never knew in life when she meets his former gay lover in "Allesverloren". In "A Frivolous Woman", an old woman compromises not just her own, but others' safety escaping from war-time Germany, while the title story illuminates a new discrimination, where people seek to claim - not hide - a trace of 'the tar brush'. With consummate artistry, Nadine Gordimer illustrates the show-downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race. This rich, multi-faceted story collection will be a reminder to her countless admirers, and a taster for the uninitiated, of her enduring, yet ever fresh, imaginative power. |
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Ghost
by Alan Lightman
Alan Lightman's first novel, Einstein's Dreams, became an international best seller and was hailed by Salman Rushdie as "at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written." His novel The Diagnosis, called "highly original and imaginative" by the New York Times, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Now comes a stunning and disturbing new novel about a man's encounter with the unfathomable. David is a person of modest ambitions who works in a bank, lives in a rooming house, enjoys books and quiet walks by the lake. Three months after unexpectedly being fired from his job, he takes a temporary position at a mortuary. And there, sitting alone in the "slumber room" one afternoon at dusk, he sees something that he cannot comprehend, something that no science can explain, something that will force him to question everything he believes in, including himself. After his metaphysical experience, all his relationships change—with his estranged wife, his girlfriend, his mother—and he grudgingly finds himself at the center of a bitter public controversy over the existence of the supernatural. As David struggles to understand what has happened to him, we embark on a provocative exploration of the delicate divide between the physical world and the spiritual world, between skepticism and faith, between the natural and the supernatural, and between science and religion. Combining a dramatic story with compelling characters and provocative ideas, Ghost investigates timeless questions that continue to challenge contemporary society. |
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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
by Dinaw Mengestu
Barely suppressed despair and black wit infuse this beautifully observed debut from Ethiopian émigré Mengestu. Set over eight months in a gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhood in the 1970s, it captures an uptick in Ethiopian grocery store owner Sepha Stephanos's long-deferred hopes, as Judith, a white academic, fixes up the four-story house next to his apartment building, treats him to dinner and lets him steal a kiss. Just as unexpected is Sepha's friendship with Judith's biracial 11-year-old daughter, Naomi (one of the book's most vivid characters), over a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Mengestu adds chiaroscuro with the story of Stephanos's 17-year exile from his family and country following his father's murder by revolutionary soldiers. After long days in the dusty, barely profitable shop, Sepha's two friends, Joseph from Congo and Kenneth from Kenya, joke with Sepha about African dictators and gently mock his romantic aspirations, while the neighborhood's loaded racial politics hang over Sepha and Judith's burgeoning relationship like a sword of Damocles. The novel's dirge-like tone may put off readers looking for the next Kite Runner, but Mengestu's assured prose and haunting set pieces (especially a series of letters from Stephanos's uncle to Jimmy Carter, pleading that he respect "the deep friendship between our two countries") are heart-rending and indelible. (PW Review) |
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How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
by Pierre Bayard
If civilized people are expected to have read all important works of literature, and thousands more books are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those awkward social situations in which we're forced to talk about books we haven't read? In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn attention from critics around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that it's actually more important to know a book's role in our collective library than its details. Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, and even the movie Groundhog Day, he describes the many varieties of "non-reading" and the horribly sticky social situations that might confront us, and then offers his advice on what to do. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them. It's the book that readers everywhere will be talking about—and despite themselves, reading—this holiday season. |
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On Ugliness
by Umberto Eco
In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco's On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder? Eco's encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling skills combine in this ingenious study of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we're most attracted to subliminally. Topics range from Milton's Satan to Goethe's Mephistopheles; from witchcraft and medieval torture tactics to martyrs, hermits, and penitents; from lunar births and disemboweled corpses to mythic monsters and sideshow freaks; and from Decadentism and picturesque ugliness to the tacky, kitsch, and camp, and the aesthetics of excess and vice. With abundant examples of painting and sculpture ranging from ancient Greek amphorae to Bosch, Brueghel, and Goya among others, and with quotations from the most celebrated writers and philosophers of each age, this provocative discussion explores in-depth the concepts of evil, depravity, and darkness in art and literature. |
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Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press
by Neil Pearson
Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press details the history of one of the most extraordinary—and controversial—publishing enterprises of the twentieth century. Publisher simultaneously of the infamous novels of the literary elite as well as low-budget erotica and "dirty books," Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published the likes of Henry Miller, James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, and D.H. Lawrence, alongside a lengthy list of censor-baiting eccentrics like N. Reynolds Packard, the New York Daily News' Rome correspondent and the self-styled "Marco Polo of Sex." Here, for the first time, is the story of this remarkable venture, which captures some of the twentieth century's most outrageous literary personalities and their often scandalous exploits, including the failed golf club society magazine run by Nin, Miller, and Lawrence Durrell and the tortured relationship between Obelisk author Marjorie Firminger and Wyndham Lewis. A richly illustrated cultural history of 1920s Paris, a fully-narrated bibliography of works published by an unforgettable literary institution, and a glimpse into the remarkable life of the Press's creator, Jack Kahane, The Obelisk Press is a publishing event not to be missed by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century literary lives and letters. |
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The Age of Turbulence
by Alan Greenspan
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly. After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change. Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy. |
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Proust Was a Neuroscientist
by Jonah Lehrer
A gifted young writer explores the unexpected links between art and modern science. From a rising journalist and Rhodes scholar, a dazzling look at how five writers, a painter, a composer, and a chef discovered the truth about the mind. In this technology-driven age, its tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling and original book, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, where the brain is concerned, art got there first. Focusing on a group of artists -- a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists -- Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the human mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brains malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language a full half-century before Chomsky. Its the ultimate tale of art trumping science. More broadly, Lehrer shows that there is a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than science. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science to listen more closely to art, for the right minds can combine the best of both to brilliant effect. |
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Young Stalin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
A revelatory account that finally unveils the shadowy journey from obscurity to power of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar the man who, along with Hitler, remains the modern personification of evil. What makes a Stalin? What formed this merciless psychopath who was, as well, a consummate politician, the dynamic world statesman who helped create and industrialize the USSR, outplayed Churchill and Roosevelt, organized Stalingrad, took Berlin and defeated Hitler? Young Stalin tells the story of a charismatic, darkly turbulent boy born into poverty, of doubtful parentage, scarred by his upbringing but possessed of unusual talents. Admired as a romantic poet and trained as a priest—both by the time he was in his early twenties—he found his true mission as a fanatical revolutionary. A mastermind of bank robbery, protection rackets, arson, piracy and murder, he was equal parts terrorist, intellectual and brigand. Here is the dramatic story of his friendships and hatreds, his many love affairs—with women from every social stratum and age group—his illegitimate children and his complicated relationship with the Tsarist secret police. Here is Stalin the arch-conspirator and escape artist whose brutal ingenuity so impressed Lenin that Lenin made him, along with Trotsky, top henchman. Montefiore makes clear how the paranoid criminal underworld was Stalin's natural habitat, and how murderous Caucasian banditry and political gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, enabled Stalin to dominate the Kremlin—and create the USSR in his flawed image. Based on ten years of research in newly opened archives in Russia and Georgia, Young Stalin—companion to the prizewinning Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar—is a brilliant prehistory of the USSR, a chronicle of the Revolution, and an intimate biography. A thrilling work of history, unparalleled in its scope, full of astonishing new evidence and utterly fascinating: this is how Stalin became Stalin. |
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Hardcover Book Archives
November 2007
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