Title search results
Showing 1 - 15 of 15 items
The Parable Book
By Per Olov Enquist, Deborah Bragan-Turner. 2013
"The love that dare not speak its name . . ." Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a…
garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of?Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write.This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film.Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-TurnerThe Unknown Kerouac (LOA #283)
By Jack Kerouac, Todd Tietchen, Jean-Christophe Cloutier. 2016
In On the Road and other iconic works, Jack Kerouac created a quintessentially American voice and a revolutionary prose style.…
This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings reveals as never before the extraordinary literary journey that led to his phenomenal success—a journey with deep roots in the language and culture of Kerouac’s French Canadian childhood.Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations.Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.Ursula K. Le Guin: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
By Ursula K. Le Guin, David Streitfeld. 2019
“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin…
When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable East Coast publishing circles. The interviews collected here—spanning a remarkable forty years of productivity, and covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to Le Guin envisioning the end of capitalism—highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine
By Bob Blaisdell. 2020
The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy.Anna Karenina is one…
of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy&’s family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoy&’s life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways. Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. At once a nuanced biography and portrait of the last decades of the Russian empire and artful literary examination, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.Necropolis (Russian Library)
By Vladislav Khodasevich. 2019
Necropolis is an unconventional literary memoir by Vladislav Khodasevich, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as “the greatest Russian poet of our…
time.” In each of the book’s nine chapters, Khodasevich memorializes a significant figure of Russia’s literary Silver Age, and in the process writes an insightful obituary of the era.Written at various times throughout the 1920s and 1930s following the deaths of its subjects, Necropolis is a literary graveyard in which an entire movement, Russian Symbolism, is buried. Recalling figures including Alexander Blok, Sergey Esenin, Fyodor Sologub, and the socialist realist Maxim Gorky, Khodasevich tells the story of how their lives and artworks intertwined, including a notoriously tempestuous love triangle among Nina Petrovskaya, Valery Bryusov, and Andrei Bely. He testifies to the seductive and often devastating power of the Symbolist attempt to turn one’s life into a work of art and, ultimately, how one man was left with the task of memorializing his fellow artists after their deaths. Khodasevich’s portraits deal with revolution, disillusionment, emigration, suicide, the vocation of the poet, and the place of the artist in society. One of the greatest memoirs in Russian literature, Necropolis is a compelling work from an overlooked writer whose gifts for observation and irony show the early twentieth-century Russian literary scene in a new and more intimate light.The Parable Book
By Per Olov Enquist. 2013
"The love that dare not speak its name . . ." Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a…
garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of?Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write.This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film.Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-TurnerPedigree
By Patrick Modiano. 2005
"It's a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me"Taking in a…
vast gallery of extraordinary characters from Paris' post-war years, Pedigree is an autobiographical portrait of Post-War Paris and a tumultuous childhood - a childhood replete with insecurity and sorrow that informed the oeuvre of France's Nobel Laureate. With his sometime-actress mother and shady businessman father barely functioning in any parental role, the young Modiano spent his childhood being packed off to the care of others, or held at a safe distance in a grimy boarding school - which he ran away from several times. His impecunious mother had "a heart of stone"; his womanising father once called the police when his son asked him for money, and later ceased all contact with him.But for all his parents' indifference, it is the death of his younger brother when Modiano is eleven that cuts deepest, leaving a wound that can never be healed.Nevada Days (MacLehose Press Editions #5)
By Bernardo Atxaga. 2017
Nevada Days is a fictionalised account of Atxaga's nine months' stay as writer-in-residence at the Centre for Basque Studies at…
the University of Nevada. He is accompanied by his wife, Ángela, who is also doing research there, and by their two daughters. During their first few weeks, the family encounter a strange mapache (racoon), which is always staring at them from the garden, a flight of helicopters immediately overhead, a black widow spider, a warning about bears, a party of prisoners in the desert, a lake that is somehow far too calm and too blue, and, not long into their stay, the kidnap and murder of a young girl living in the house right next door.Atxaga tells us about all these strange encounters, and about his colleagues at the university, about the trips the family make to California and across the Sierra Nevada and to Lake Tahoe, but this narrative is also interspersed with accounts of his dreams, with stories from his past.Nevada Days seductively weaves together past and present, and shows us how deeply marked we are by experience and history and relationships, however fleeting or enduring, and reminds us what a very strange thing life is.Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull CostaForgotten Fitzgerald: Echoes of a Lost America
By F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sarah Churchwell. 2014
While F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing the novels we remember him for today, he was also publishing short stories in…
popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Although many of Fitzgerald's short stories are celebrated and anthologised today, more remain out of print than would be expected for a writer of his stature. Some of these forgotten stories deserve to be rediscovered by the many readers who love Fitzgerald's work. Sarah Churchwell, author of the acclaimed Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, has selected twelve forgotten stories from throughout Fitzgerald's career that refract, in different ways, his most familiar motifs: the changing meanings of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the desire to reconcile rich and poor through a romantic search for glamour, hope and wonder. Each of these stories offers a riff on the theme of America, a world we have lost, but can hear echoes of in Fitzgerald's characteristically rich, vivid prose.Voyage Around My Room
By Richard Howard, Stephen Sartarelli, Joseph De Maistre, Xavier De Maistre. 1994
A lively and utterly singular travelogue of the intricate curiosities that are directly within one’s own reach In 1790, while…
serving in the Piedmontese army, the French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852) was punished for dueling and placed under house arrest for forty-two days. The result was a discursive, mischievous memoir Voyage Around My Room, and its sequel, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. Admired by Nietzsche and Machado de Assis, Ossian and Susan Sontag, this classic book proves that sitting on the living-room sofa can be as fascinating as crossing the Alps or paddling up the Amazon. In addition to the Voyage and Expedition, this edition also includes the dialogue “The Leper of the City of Aosta,” a preface by Xavier’s better-known older brother (the royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre), and an introduction by Richard Howard.Inventário de Algumas Perdas - Romance de Formação
By Judith Schalansky. 2018
VENCEDOR DO PRÉMIO STREGA EUROPEU 2020 FINALISTA DO INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2021 Sempre entre a ficção, a biografia e o…
ensaio, este livro único e estrondoso, escrito por um dos nomes mais originais da atual literatura europeia, é uma janela para um mundo perdido, uma reflexão sobre a destruição e a preservação. «Como todos os livros, também este é impelido pelo desejo de deixar que algo sobreviva, de tornar presente o que está no passado, de conjurar o que foi esquecido, de dar voz ao que é mudo e de chorar o que se perdeu.» A história do mundo está repleta de coisas que, desaparecidas, destruídas ou simplesmente esquecidas, se perderam para sempre. Animais, inteiras porções de terra, objetos e construções humanas que vivem agora uma espécie de não-existência, dependentes da imaginação ou da memória para serem resgatados de volta ao presente. Cada uma das doze histórias que compõem este «inventário» apresentauma realidade cujas fronteiras entre a presença e a ausência se tornaram ténues a ponto de se confundirem entre si. Assim, partindode poucos fragmentos e sempre entre a ficção, a biografia e o ensaio, um quadro perdido de Caspar David Friedrich, uma espécie de tigre há muito extinta, a escrita sagrada de uma antiga religião ou os pensamentos de uma Greta Garbo envelhecida que sonha com um último papel tornam-se janelas para um mundo perdido, uma forma de, com tanto de realista como de visionário, preencher o vazio. «(Schalansky) socorreu-se da filosofia, das artes plásticas, da literatura, da história, para criar um objeto único, de uma beleza que resulta do detalhe, de uma espécie de melodia nascida da conjugação minuciosa de cada palavra com a palavra seguinte (...) Um nome a reter entre os mais originais da atual literatura europeia.» — Isabel Lucas, Público «Um livro surpreendente e encantador.» — António Araújo, Público «Judith Schalansky habitua-nos ao estranho encanto da perda, a essa mágica defensiva de se lançar numa contemplação sobre o que à nossa volta reflecte a irremediável ruína de tudo e nos serve de balanço para o nosso próprio impulso de preservação e destruição. (...) Uma obra estrondosa.» — Diogo Vaz Pinto, Jornal i «Unindo ficção,autobiografia e História, esta sumptuosa coleção de textos oferece-nos uma reflexão sobre os variados fenómenos de desaparecimento e destruição.» — FINANCIAL TIMES, MELHOR LIVRO DO ANO «Um livro singular e maravilhoso.» Júri do International Booker Prize «Um livro que desafia géneros.» — The GuardianManhattan: Letters from Prehistory
By Hélène Cixous. 2007
Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright…
Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University’s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual’s first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous’s fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the “omnipotence-other” seductions of literature; a family’s flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary
By Lydia Lunch. 2003
The unspeakable sexual confessions of legend Lydia Lunch; introduction by Jerry Stahl, afterword by Thurston Moore. “Paradoxia reveals that Lunch…
is at her best when she’s at her worst . . . [and] gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song."—Barbara Kruger, Artforum Lydia Lunch relays in graphic detail the true psychic repercussions of sexual misadventure. From New York to London to New Orleans, Paradoxia is an uncensored, novelized account of one woman’s assault on men. Lydia Lunch was the primary instigator of the No Wave Movement and the focal point of the Cinema of Transgression. A musician, writer, and photographer, she exposes the dark underbelly of passion confronting the lusty demons whose struggle for power and control forever stalk the periphery of our collective obsessions.Selected works and incidental writings by the celebrated author of A River Runs Through It, plus excerpts from a 1986…
interview.In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written.The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career.In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana.Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices.Praise for The Norman MacLean Reader“A solid, satisfying, well-made body of work by a patient craftsman.” —Chicago Tribune“The Norman Maclean Reader fills out and makes more human the impressions of the restless, inquiring storyteller we saw in previously published works. In his writings, at their best, we too feel the thrusts and strains. He is a writer of great beauty, in his own terms.” —Financial Times“Weltzien has not only done great service for Norman Maclean’s readers, he has rightly expanded Maclean’s place in American literature . . . . For me, The Norman Maclean reader is discovered treasure.” —Bloomsbury ReviewThe Invented Part
By Rodrigo Fresán, Will Vanderhyden. 2017
What's the relationship between the real, the imagined, and the written? That's the question at the heart of Fresán's latest…
novel, an exploration of the mind of a disillusioned writer attempting to write his own story and rewrite reality. With a propulsive style that delves into memory, technology, literature, and pop culture, The Invented Part reaffirms the pleasures of storytelling.