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The Cows
By Lydia Davis. 2011
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany…
and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. It could be compared to some sections of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" or to Claude Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
By Anne Fadiman, Marina Keegan. 2014
An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured…
the world's attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation. Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.The Dalai Lama's Cat: A Novel
By David Michie. 2012
"In the months that followed I watched His Holiness working on a new book . . . I began to…
think that perhaps the time had come for me to turn my paws to a book of my own . . . one that tells my own tale . . . How I was rescued from a fate too grisly to contemplate, to become constant companion to a man who is not only one of the world’s greatest spiritual leaders and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but who is also a dab hand with the can opener."Not so much fly-on-the-wall as cat-on-the-sill, this is the warmhearted tale of a small kitten rescued from the slums of New Delhi who finds herself in a beautiful sanctuary with sweeping views of the snow-capped Himalayas. In her exotic new home, the Dalai Lama’s cat encounters Hollywood stars, Buddhist masters, Ivy-league professors, famous philanthropists, and a host of other people who come visiting His Holiness. Each encounter offers a fresh insight into finding happiness and meaning in the midst of a life of busy-ness and challenge. Drawing us into her world with her adorable but all-too-flawed personality, the Dalai Lama’s cat discovers how instead of trying to change the world, changing the way we experience the world is the key to true contentment.Featuring a delightful cast of characters, timeless Buddhist wisdom, and His Holiness’s compassion pervading every chapter, The Dalai Lama’s Cat is simply enchanting.The Prophet (A Penguin Classics Hardcover)
By Rupi Kaur, Kahlil Gibran. 2017
A stunning new hardcover edition--with a full linen case, copper stamping, gilded edges, and colored endpapers--of one of the world's…
most beloved and popular spiritual classics, featuring a new foreword by Rupi Kaur, the multimillion-copy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers"This book cracked my heart wide open. And I think it's going to do the same to yours." --Rupi Kaur, from the ForewordThe most famous work of spiritual fiction of the twentieth century, The Prophet is rooted in Kahlil Gibran's own experience as an immigrant and provides inspiration to anyone feeling adrift in a world in flux. As a prophet named Almustafa is about to board a ship to travel back to his homeland after twelve years in exile, he is stopped by a group of people who ask him to share his wisdom before he leaves. In twenty-eight poetic essays, he does so, offering profound and timeless insights on many aspects of life, including love, pain, friendship, family, beauty, religion, joy, sorrow, and death. An immediate success when first published in 1923, The Prophet is a modern classic, having been translated into more than forty languages and sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone. The message it imparts, of finding divinity through love, made it the bible of 1960s culture and continues to touch hearts and minds across generations and national borders. This edition is illustrated with twelve of Gibran's famous visionary paintings and features a foreword by Rupi Kaur.In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.The Prince
By Niccolò Machiavelli, Christopher Celenza. 2018
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential works. From the musings of intellectuals…
such as Thomas Paine in Common Sense to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our intellectual history through the words of the exceptional few.Widely acknowledged as Machiavelli’s defining work, The Prince is an innovative and rich treatise marked by his political theories and the principles of leadership. Based upon his own experiences witnessing “the actions of great men” and the often immoral aspects that come with power, Machiavelli encouraged ambition amongst leaders—which was a break from the philosophy of other contemporary thinkers. The Prince identifies the aims of powerful leaders, which can help to justify the use of largely immoral means in their methods.With a new foreword by scholar Christopher Celenza, this essential work on politics contemplates leadership in a manner still relevant today. This lesson in autocratic rule will provide the reader with the author’s rational approach to control and the contextualization for the term “Machiavellian.”Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream: Translated with Introductions by Leonard Tancock
By Denis Diderot. 1966
In Rameau's Nephew, the eccentric and foolish nephew of the great composer Jean-Philippe Rameau meets Diderot by chance, and the…
two embark on a hilarious consideration of society, music, literature, politics, morality and philosophy.An Inventory of Losses
By Judith Schalansky. 2020
A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote Islands A Publishers Weekly Best Book…
of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (Port William Ser.)
By Wendell Berry. 2004
Originally published in 2005, That Distant Land brings together twenty–three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional…
chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry’s mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations.This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua (Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination #9)
By Yael Halevi-Wise. 2020
Once referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of…
Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist.Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the "condition of Israel," constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity.Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.Los que no
By Álvaro Uribe. 2021
«Los que no es un libro excepcional tanto en la fecunda trayectoria del autor como en el panorama de la…
literatura mexicana. […] Uribe revisa su paso por el mundo y descubre que lo ocurrido es tan importante como lo que pudo ser.» Juan Villoro «Conviértete en quien eres» dice un verso de Píndaro. Nietzsche se apropió de la sentencia como lema personal. Pero: ¿y si quienes somos es Don Nadie o Don Fracaso Reiterado o Doña Nostalgia Eterna? Los que no narra la saga rota de una generación de personajes que no llegaron a la meta de sí mismos. Por el contrario, con el paso del tiempo se fueron alejando. Este grupo de amigos, o casi, se conocieron de jóvenes, en la secundaria; los unieron el gusto por la literatura y la música, los diversos ritos de iniciación propios de la edad -el alcohol, las drogas, el sexo- y la admiración por un maestro que sería su guía, entre otras cosas, en extraviarse para siempre. El narrador de este libro, que se funde y confunde con el autor, también forma parte de esa constelación accidentada, cuyos miembros están vinculados por hilos invisibles de cariño, envidia y enfermedad. Magistral combinación de memorias y novela de formación, Los que no nos recuerda que el gremio de los que no cumplieron la promesa que llevaban dentro es mayoría absoluta en este mundo. La crítica ha dicho: «Los que no es un libro excepcional tanto en la fecunda trayectoria del autor como en el panorama de la literatura mexicana. Álvaro Uribe revela la misteriosa proximidad entre la vida y la escritura: la forma en que los hechos se convierten en historias. Novela múltiple, Los que no se alimenta de experiencias, pero también de posibilidades. Uribe revisa su paso por el mundo y descubre que lo ocurrido es tan importante como lo que pudo ser. Es testigo de la realidad, pero también de su principal fantasma: la imaginación.» Juan Villoro «Es, por mucho, nuestro estilista más fino y, también, nuestro mejor escritor en activo.» Rafael Lemus «Un escritor que conoce como pocos en qué consiste la verdad novelesca.» Christopher Domínguez Michael «No cabe duda: Álvaro Uribe es el poseedor de la palabra y de la linterna que la alumbra, y es el demiurgo que creó a los dioses que imaginan a los hombres.» Roberto PliegoEntrapment and Other Writings
By Nelson Algren, Dan Simon, Brooke Horvath. 2009
Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards…
and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren's eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places. In Entrapment and Other Writings--containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays--Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and '50s do, in part because he hasn't yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. "You should not read [Algren] if you can't take a punch," Ernest Hemingway declared. "Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. 1999
From Slapstick's "Turkey Farm" to Slaughterhouse-Five's eternity in a Tralfamadorean zoo cage with Montana Wildhack, the question of the afterlife…
never left Kurt Vonnegut's mind. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and the Afterlife as if the difference between them were rather slight. In thirty odd "interviews," Vonnegut trips down "the blue tunnel to the pearly gates" in the guise of a roving reporter for public radio, conducting interviews: with Salvatore Biagini, a retired construction worker who died of a heart attack while rescuing his schnauzer from a pit bull, with John Brown, still smoldering 140 years after his death by hanging, with William Shakespeare, who rubs Vonnegut the wrong way, and with socialist and labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, one of Vonnegut's personal heroes.What began as a series of ninety-second radio interludes for WNYC, New York City's public radio station, evolved into this provocative collection of musings about who and what we live for, and how much it all matters in the end. From the original portrait by his friend Jules Feiffer that graces the cover, to a final entry from Kilgore Trout, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian remains a joy.Rituals
By Cees Nooteboom. 1984
In Rituals, Amsterdam of the fifties, sixties and seventies is viewed from the perspective of the capricious Inni Wintrop. An…
unintentional suicide survivor, the unexpected gift of life returned lends him the curiousity, and impartiality, to survey others' lives and rountines. Inni's opposite, the one-eyed downhill skier Arnold Taads measures his life by the clock, while his disowned son Philip follows Japanese rituals which themselves seem to render his existence meaningless. A novel for those who seek to unravel our mysterious, apparently directionless lives...Souvenir
By Michael Bracewell. 2021
'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a…
sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan CoeA vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...Souvenir
By Michael Bracewell. 2021
'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a…
sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan CoeA vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...Repair (Boston Review / Forum)
By Ed Pavlić, Ivelisse Rodriguez. 2022
How we can recover from terrible ruptures, the pandemic, toxic politics, racist horrors, class warfare, gendered violence, and ecological brinksmanship.Individually…
and collectively, we bear deep wounds. Some of these are generations old; all have been worsened by a destructive period of pyrrhic politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, Boston Review believes that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal. In this new anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays from renowned writers and newcomers, writers explore whether and how we can repair terrible ruptures, life-threatening illnesses and the pandemic, toxic politics, racist horrors, class warfare, gendered violence, and ecological brinksmanship. ContributorsAriella Aisha Azoulay, Kemi Alabi, Donia Elizabeth Allen, Don Mee Choi, Adebe DeRango-Adem, Emma Dries, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Randall Horton, Savonna Johnson, Kim Hyesoon, Maya Marshall, Colleen Murphy, Simone Person, aureleo sans, Bishakh Som, Olúfmi O. Táíwò, Meredith Talusan, Brian Teare, Yiru ZhangÉloge de la procrastination et autres facéties
By Robert Major. 2022
Un notable laisse, à son décès, un manuscrit étonnant, qui plonge dans l’embarras son filleul et liquidateur testamentaire. Que faire…
de ces essais tout à fait déroutants, qui abordent les sujets les plus disparates, dans une saisie tour à tour iconoclaste, ironique, attendrissante, provocatrice, pédante, farfelue, quelquefois loufoque, sinon risible, le tout tirant à hue et à dia ? Question difficile, et d’autant plus que rien de tout cela ne colle au personnage lui-même, qui semble s’être avancé masqué, écrivant a contrario de tout ce qu’il était. Éloge de la procrastination, vraiment, lui qui était un bourreau de travail ? Ou éloge de la taverne, lui qui n’y est jamais entré ? Sont-ce des éloges, vraiment ? Ces essais ne seraient-ils pas plutôt des facéties, des tours burlesques, à intention ironique, ou carrément des mystifications, permettant à l’auteur de se dérober pour mieux dire ? Une seule chose à faire, finalement : les publier, advienne que pourra.Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
By Friedrich Nietzsche. 2022
A new translation of Nietzsche&’s seminal work by a prize-winning translator of W. G. Sebald, Goethe, Rilke, Herta Müller, and…
Elfriede Jelinek.In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche&’s infamous protagonist sets off on a grand and noble quest to find meaning in a secular world and to live joyfully alongside the knowledge of death. In this new translation by Michael Hulse—the first in English by a poet—Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendor as a man who prizes self-worth above all else as a moral code to live by. Radical, uncategorizable, contradictory, and often humorous, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a grand celebration of human existence by one of the most influential thinkers of the past two centuries.Selected Essays
By Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1982
Contains a selection from the essays Johnson published twice weekly as The Rambler in the early 1750s. It was here…
that he first created the literary character and forged the distinctive prose style that established him as a public figure. This volume also includes Johnson's essays from the periodicals The Adventurer and The Idler.The Algonquin Reader: Spring 2018
By Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 2018
Get an inside look at Algonquin’s outstanding forthcoming fiction with the Spring 2018 Algonquin Reader. Discover the inspiration behind each…
book through an original essay by the author. Then enjoy a short preview of each novel. The books featured in this issue are:The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel On Sale May 2018Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories by Kelly Barnhill On Sale February 2018Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison On Sale April 2018Remind Me Again What Happened by Joanna Luloff On Sale June 2018The Price of the Haircut: Stories by Brock Clarke On Sale March 2018Southernmost by Silas House On Sale June 2018 Cover illustration by Mark Hoffmann.