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A Week at the Airport
by Alain de Botton
In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton will be invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever Writer in Residence. He will be installed in the middle of Terminal 5 on a raised platform with a laptop connected to screens, enabling passengers to see what he is writing and to come and share their stories. He will meet travellers from around the world, and will be given unprecedented access to wander the airport and speak with everyone from window cleaners and baggage handlers to air traffic controllers and cabin crew. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, de Botton will produce an extraordinary meditation upon the nature of place, time, and our daily lives. He will explore the magical and the mundane, personal and collective experiences and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious site. Like all airports, Heathrow (the 15th century village of Heath Row lies beneath the short stay car park) is a 'non-place' that we by definition want to leave, but it also provides a window into many worlds - through the thousands of people it dispatches every day. A Week at the Airport is sure to delight de Botton's large following, and anyone interested in the stories behind the way we live. |
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Nine Lives
by William Dalrymple
In this title, a Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfilment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as a deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison. An illiterate goet herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart. A devadasi - or temple prostitute - initially resists her own initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling. Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerising, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the region's rapid change. A distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, Nine Lives is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales. |
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Oilopoly
by Marshall Goldman
Financially crippled and besieged by political crises following the fall of the Soviet Union, it looked as if Russia's days as a superpower had come and gone. That it should recover and go on to accumulate the world's third-largest holdings of foreign currency reserves in less than a decade is nothing short of an economic miracle. Oilopoly is the riveting tale of this dramatic resurgence, bringing to light the far-reaching and politically troubling implications of Russia's new-found dominance in global energy markets. A story of oil and gas, corruption and naked power, Oilopoly traces the rise of the Russian oil economy from its origins in the nineteenth century right through to Vladimir Putin's determined efforts to rein in the oil oligarchs, re-nationalize Russia's industries, and pay off its international debt. Charting Putin's astounding success in transforming the country into the world's largest oil producer, Marshall Goldman argues that Russia has rapidly evolved into a new breed of superpower - one whose energy-driven economy can, at the flick of a switch, deprive entire nations of their most important resource. Narrated with panache by a world expert on Russia, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in world politics and the future of our global energy supply. |
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George Being George
by Nelson Aldrich
Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. For more than fifty years, his friends made a circle whose circumference was vast and whose center was a fashionable tenement on New York's East Seventy-second street. Taxi drivers, hearing his address, would ask, "Isn't that George Plimpton's place?" George was always giving parties for his friends. It was one of the ways this generous man gave back. This book is the party that was George's life—and it's a big one—attended by scores of people, including Peter Matthiessen, Robert Silvers, Jean Stein, William Styron, Maggie Paley, Gay Talese, Calvin Trillin, and Gore Vidal, as well as lesser-known intimates and acquaintances, each with candid and compelling stories to tell about George Plimpton and childhood rebellion, adult indiscretions, literary tastes, ego trips, loyalties and jealousies, riches and drugs, and embracing life no matter the consequences. In George, Being George people feel free to say what guests say at parties when the subject of the conversation isn't around anymore. Some even prove the adage that no best-loved man goes unpunished. Together, they provide a complete portrait of George Plimpton. They talk about his life: its privileged beginnings, its wild and triumphant middle, its brave, sad end. They say that George was a man of many parts: "the last gentleman"; founder and first editor of one of our best literary magazines, The Paris Review; the graceful writer who brought the New Journalism to sports in bestsellers such as Paper Lion, Bogey Man, and Out of My League; and Everyman's proxy boxer, trapeze artist, stand-up comic, Western movie villain, and Playboy centerfold photographer. And one of the brave men who wrestled Sirhan Sirhan, the armed assassin of his friend Bobby Kennedy, to the ground. A Plimpton party was full of intelligent, funny, articulate people. So is this one. Many try hard to understand George, and some (not always the ones you would expect) are brilliant at it. Here is social life as it's actually lived by New York's elites. The only important difference between a party at George's and this book is that no one here is drunk. They just talk about being drunk. George's last years were awesome, truly so. His greatest gift was to be a blessing to others—not all, sadly—and that gift ended only with his death. But his parties, if this is one, need never end at all. |
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Miss Herbert
by Adam Thirlwell
The secret history of novelists is often a history of exile and tourism - a history of language learning. Like the story of Gustave Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, it is a history of loss and mistakes. As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. Translation, and emigration, is the way into a new history of the novel. We assume that we can read novels in translation. We also assume that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. "The Delighted States" solves this conundrum. This book is not a novel, but an inside-out novel - with novelists as characters. It demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams. And it includes a slim appendix: "Mademoiselle O", a story by Vladimir Nabokov, written in French, about his own governess, never before fully translated into English. |
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2666
by Roberto Bolano
During the course of a single night, Fatherr Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Thus we are given glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger, General Pinochet, whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine, as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched upon his. |
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What the Dog Saw
by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is the master of playful yet profound insight. His ability to see underneath the surface of the seemingly mundane taps into a fundamental human impulse: curiosity. From criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Malcolm Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising new ways of looking at them, and the world around us. Are smart people overrated? What can pit bulls teach us about crime? Why are problems like homelessness easier to solve than to manage? How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job? Gladwell explores the minor geniuses, the underdogs and the overlooked, and reveals how everyone and everything contains an intriguing story. What the Dog Saw is Gladwell at his very best—asking questions and seeking answers in his inimitable style. |
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Madoff: The Man Who Stole $65 Billion
by Erin Arvedlund
Take the combined fortunes of Bill Gates, Tiger Woods and Roman Abramovich. Now imagine someone stealing that much money—and being hailed as a financial genius. That man is Bernard Madoff. Backed by governments and global banks, Madoff defrauded $65 billion from charities and individual investors including Stephen Spielberg. Finally turned in by his own sons, Madoff opened his door in his dressing gown to be arrested by the FBI. Eleven charges and eleven guilty verdicts later he swapped his penthouse for a prison cell. Only $1 billion was left. Madoff is the first definitive account of the rise and fall of the biggest fraudster ever. It's a story of greed, betrayal and lies, of remorseless risk-taking, family tragedy and financial disaster. Investigative reporter Erin Arvedlund was the first to expose Madoff back in 2001, but Wall Street and the world didn't listen. In this astonishing book she answers the crucial unsolved questions: why and when did Madoff turn his business into a massive fraud? How did he fool so many investors for so long? Who knew the truth? And who, ultimately, is Bernard Madoff? |
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The Tanners
by Robert Walser
"The Tanners is a contender for Funniest Book of the Year." —The Village Voice
The Tanners, Robert Walser's amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Three brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family—Simon, Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two are the threads from which Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous fabric. "Walser's lightness is lighter than light," as Tom Whalen said in Bookforum: "buoyant up to and beyond belief, terrifyingly light."
Robert Walser—admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin—is a radiantly original author. He has been acclaimed "unforgettable, heart-rending" (J.M. Coetzee), "a bewitched genius" (Newsweek), and "a major, truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer" (Susan Sontag). Considering Walser's "perfect and serene oddity," Michael Hofmann in The London Review of Books remarked on the "Buster Keaton-like indomitably sad cheerfulness [that is] most hilariously disturbing." The Los Angeles Times called him "the dreamy confectionary snowflake of German language fiction. He also might be the single most underrated writer of the 20th century....The gait of his language is quieter than a kitten's."
"A clairvoyant of the small" W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of his favorite writers in the world, in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs. |
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Paperback Book Archives
October 2009
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| Even with 18,000 titles regularly in stock, we realize that you may want a book that we don't usually carry. We are happy to take special orders. Timing varies with publishers and distributors but on average books are delivered within 5 to 10 working days. Books can be ordered by mail or email (including French books) and mailed all over the world. Click here for ordering instructions. |
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