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Resistance
by Barry Lopez
From the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams, a highly charged, stunningly original work of fiction—a passionate response to the changes shaping our country today. In nine fictional testimonies, men and women who have resisted the mainstream and who are now suddenly "parties of interest" to the government tell their stories. A young woman in Buenos Aires watches bitterly as her family dissolves in betrayal and illness, but chooses to seek a new understanding of compassion rather than revenge. A carpenter traveling in India changes his life when he explodes in an act of violence out of proportion to its cause. The beginning of the end of a man's lifelong search for coherence is sparked by a Montana grizzly. A man blinded in the war in Vietnam wrestles with the implications of his actions as a soldier—and with innocence, both lost and regained. Punctuated with haunting images by acclaimed artist Alan Magee, Resistance is powerful fiction—Barry Lopez at his best.
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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco
Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory-he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image: that of his first love. A fascinating, abundant new novel-wide-ranging, nostalgic, funny, full of heart-from the incomparable Eco.
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Imelda
by John Herdman
What is the secret surrounding the birth of Imelda's child? This dark novella presents us with two contradictory accounts of events which lead to madness and death for the scions of a genteel Border family. The reader is invited to decide which testimony, if either, is to be relied upon. The short stories show superably the familiar Herdman preoccupations: reckless and unreliable narrators, states of mind bordering on the insane, and partially submerged complexes which erupt into the normal circumstances of life with surreal and unforgettable results.
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Here is Where We Meet
by John Berger
Lisbon is to Mother as Geneva is to Borges? Berger's elegiac gathering of semi-autobiographical vignettes seems at first to propose an elegant, somewhat chilly game of linking European cities to their dead. But as the table of correspondences broadens to include a formerly unhip London neighborhood, a French Cro-Magnon cave site, two rivers at opposite ends of a continent and a woman nicknamed Clarinette, it gets harder and harder to identify which of Berger's equally vivid characters exists only in memory. Most poignantly, in a section centered on the tiny Ching and Szum rivers of England and Poland as remembered by his father, Berger juxtaposes a boyhood spent at the edges of his father's WWI trauma with a contemporary portrait of a friend from Galicia, Danka, who lives exuberantly, meets her husband-to-be in Paris and gives birth to a son, Olek; threaded throughout are Berger's preparations as he cooks for their visit. Berger (Ways of Seeing) will be 80 next year; a mammoth collection of his essays was published in 2001. With its clarity and beautifully proportioned contours of fictive memory, this book makes the perfect site to encounter Berger for the first or 50th time. (PW Review)
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The Madonnas of Leningrad
by Debra Dean
One of the most talked about books of the year . . . Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. And while the elderly Russian woman cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—her distant past is preserved: vivid images that rise unbidden of her youth in war-torn Leningrad. In the fall of 1941, the German army approached the outskirts of Leningrad, signaling the beginning of what would become a long and torturous siege. During the ensuing months, the city's inhabitants would brave starvation and the bitter cold, all while fending off the constant German onslaught. Marina, then a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum, along with other staff members, was instructed to take down the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, yet leave the frames hanging empty on the walls -- a symbol of the artworks' eventual return. To hold on to sanity when the Luftwaffe's bombs began to fall, she burned to memory, brushstroke by brushstroke, these exquisite artworks: the nude figures of women, the angels, the serene Madonnas that had so shortly before gazed down upon her. She used them to furnish a "memory palace," a personal Hermitage in her mind to which she retreated to escape terror, hunger, and encroaching death. A refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . . Seamlessly moving back and forth in time between the Soviet Union and contemporary America, The Madonnas of Leningrad is a searing portrait of war and remembrance, of the power of love, memory, and art to offer beauty, grace, and hope in the face of overwhelming despair. Gripping, touching, and heartbreaking, it marks the debut of Debra Dean, a bold new voice in American fiction.
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The Nimrod Flip-Out
by Etgar Keret
In this collection of brilliant, bite-sized satiric tales, as painfully funny as they are brief, Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain, confirming his status as both Israel's bestselling young writer and new national conscience. |
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With Borges
by Alberto Manguel
In 1964, a blind writer approached a sixteen-year old bookstore clerk in Buenos Aires and asked if the latter would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. The boy accepted, and for the following four years read to him, three to four times a week, from books by Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James and many others. The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the finest literary minds in any era in any country; the boy (who did not consider himself especially privileged at the time) was Alberto Manguel, who would become internationally acclaimed as a prolific novelist, essayist, editor and bibliophile in his own right, intimately bound up himself with the pleasures of literature and of reading. In this slender volume, Manguel recalls those long-ago evenings when he would climb six flights of stairs to visit a darkened apartment (where the great man lived with his aged mother), which 'seemed to exist outside time'. Despite the urging of his aunt, who recognised the extraordinary opportunity to draw close to a living legend, Manguel took no notes during these sessions because he felt too 'contented': 'the conversations with Borges were what, in my mind, conversations should always be about: about books and about the clockwork of books, and about the discovery of writers I had not read before, and about ideas that had not occurred to me.' Part memoir, part biography, and all celebration of the living quality of literature, Manguel's reflections on the works of Borges and of the writers he admired form a portrait in mosaic of this enigmatic figure, and describe an important stage in the formation of a world-class reader. |
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Rules for Old Men Waiting
by Peter Pouncey
A brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge, Rules for Old Men Waiting is about three wars of the twentieth century and an ever-deepening marriage. In a house on the Cape "older than the Republic," Robert MacIver, a historian who long ago played rugby for Scotland, creates a list of rules by which to live out his last days. The most important rule, to "tell a story to its end," spurs the old Scot on to invent a strange and gripping tale of men in the trenches of the First World War. Drawn from a depth of knowledge and imagination, MacIver conjures the implacable, clear-sighted artist Private Callum; the private's nemesis Sergeant Braddis, with his pincerlike nails; Lieutenant Simon Dodds, who takes on Braddis; and Private Charlie Alston, who is ensnared in this story of inhumanity and betrayal but brings it to a close. This invented tale of the Great War prompts MacIver's own memories of his role in World War II and of Vietnam, where his son, David served. Both the stories and the memories alike are lit by the vivid presence of Margaret, his wife. As Hearts and Minds director Peter Davis writes, "Pouncey has wrought an almost inconceivable amount of beauty from pain, loss, and war, and I think he has been able to do this because every page is imbued with the love story at the heart of his astonishing novel." |
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In the Fold
by Rachel Cusk
As a college student Michael visited Egypt Hill, the curiously named estate of his roommate's family, for a garden party, and in one afternoon met a host of eccentric characters who have stayed with him ever since. Years later he decides a return to Egypt Hill would be an ideal sojourn—a place where he can escape the chaos at home that is destroying his marriage, his fashionably old townhouse, and possibly his worrisomely taciturn young son, Hamish. But now nothing in Egypt Hill is as it was, or at least how it once seemed. With Hamish in tow, Michael discovers the house teeming with age-old deceptions, broken confidences, and sordid alliances. At the heart of the turmoil is a lie so shameful, every Hanbury is responsible for its concealment. With his marriage crumbling in a series of telephone calls and his son growing more peculiar by the day, Michael is witness to the spectacular unraveling of a family-until a violent accident draws him, inexorably, into the fold. |
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In Fond Remembrance of Me
by Howard Norman
In the fall of 1977, Howard Norman went to Churchill, Manitoba, to translate Inuit folktales, and there he met Helen Tanizaki, an extraordinary linguist translating the same tales into Japanese. In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures their intimacy, and the remarkable influence that she, and the tales themselves, would have on the future novelist. Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Norman evokes with vivid immediacy their brief but life-shifting encounter, and the earthy, robust Inuit folklore that occasioned it. |
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