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Demons in the Spring
By Joe Meno. 2010
"An inspired collection of 20 stories, brilliant in its command of tone and narrative perspective...Creativity and empathy mark the collection…
. . . Illustrations enhance the already vivid storytelling."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Spanning worlds, generations, cultures and environments, each of Meno's short stories in this stellar collection explores depression, loneliness and insanity in the world . . ."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Eclectic, funny, constantly surprising-these are the things a short story collection should be allowed to be, and Joe Meno's Demons in the Spring absolutely is . . . a rich, unforgettable stew of a book."--Dave EggersThe limited-edition hardcover of Demons in the Spring was a finalist for the 2009 Story Prize, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2008, a Time Out Chicago Best Book of 2008, and it drew starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. It is a collection of twenty short stories with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds.Joe Meno is the best-selling author of five novels, including the smash hits Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails (both published by Akashic Books), and two story collections. He was the winner of the 2003 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago.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.Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
By William Shakespeare, Arthur Rackham. 2003
Shakespeare's incomparable romantic comedy takes on a new and vivid life in these brilliant images by one of the 20th…
century's leading illustrators. The fairy world of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the perfect milieu for the artistry of Arthur Rackham, a popular illustrator of fairy tales who possessed a striking gift for depicting fanciful creatures. His dreamlike visions provide a series of unique portraits from the enchanted wood outside ancient Athena, where Oberon and Titania rule a kingdom of diminutive sprites. Rackham's career coincided with the era known as the Golden Age of Illustration, an age that witnessed the rise of increasingly sophisticated color printing techniques. His interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which first appeared in 1908, received the full benefit of the improved technology, and this faithful reprint offers a quality of printing and sharpness of reproduction that rivals the limited and first editions. The complete text of the play appears here, along with 40 full-color and numerous black-and-white illustrations — a splendid tribute by a master of fantasy art to an immortal play.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.Kokoschka's Doll
By Afonso Cruz. 2010
"A novel par excellence that is destined to become a classic' of almost byzantine splendour . . . At its…
best worthy of comparison with Gabriel García Márquez" Catherine Taylor, Irish Times"Afonso Cruz is one of the strongest voices in contemporary Portuguese literature" Antonio Saez Delgado, El PaisAt the age of forty-two, Bonifaz Vogel begins to hear a voice.But it doesn't belong to the mice or the woodworm, as he first imagines. Nor is it the voice of God, as he comes to believe. It belongs to young Isaac Dresner, who takes refuge in the cellar of Vogel's bird shop on the run from the soldier who shot his best friend. Soon Vogel comes to rely on it for advice: he cannot make a sale without first bending down to confer with the floorboards. Thus begins the story of two Dresden families, fractured and displaced by the devastating bombing of the city 1945, their fates not only intertwined, but bound also to that of a life-sized doll commissioned by the artist Oskar Kokoschka in the image of his lost lover.Based on a curious true story, Kokoschka's Doll is an imaginative and playful novel that transports the reader to Dresden, Paris, Lagos and Marrakesh, introducing them to an unforgettable cast of characters along the way.Translated from the Portuguese by Rahul BeryKokoschka's Doll
By Afonso Cruz. 2010
"A novel par excellence that is destined to become a classic' of almost byzantine splendour . . . At its…
best worthy of comparison with Gabriel García Márquez" Catherine Taylor, Irish Times"Afonso Cruz is one of the strongest voices in contemporary Portuguese literature" Antonio Saez Delgado, El PaisAt the age of forty-two, Bonifaz Vogel begins to hear a voice.But it doesn't belong to the mice or the woodworm, as he first imagines. Nor is it the voice of God, as he comes to believe. It belongs to young Isaac Dresner, who takes refuge in the cellar of Vogel's bird shop on the run from the soldier who shot his best friend. Soon Vogel comes to rely on it for advice: he cannot make a sale without first bending down to confer with the floorboards. Thus begins the story of two Dresden families, fractured and displaced by the devastating bombing of the city 1945, their fates not only intertwined, but bound also to that of a life-sized doll commissioned by the artist Oskar Kokoschka in the image of his lost lover.Based on a curious true story, Kokoschka's Doll is an imaginative and playful novel that transports the reader to Dresden, Paris, Lagos and Marrakesh, introducing them to an unforgettable cast of characters along the way.Translated from the Portuguese by Rahul BeryThe Art of the Body: A beautiful, unflinching debut about love, loss and intimacy
By Alex Allison. 2019
'A bold, unflinching debut' GUARDIAN'Brutal, tender, philosophical, visceral, complex and so well written' EMMA JANE UNSWORTHMaintaining one person's dignity comes…
nearly always at the expense of someone else's. I have learned this for you.Janet is caught between care work and caring for herself. Her life revolves around Sean, a talented fine art student, living and working with cerebral palsy. Both Janet and Sean are new to London and far from their families. Both are finding a means of escape through pushing their bodies to the limit.When Sean is faced with an unexpected and deeply personal tragedy, Janet must let her guard down at last and discover what she's prepared to fight for. The Art of the Body is a novel about dignity and intimacy, tenderness and brutality, unafraid to explore uncommon bodies in unusual ways.'Raw and powerful' IMAGEAnne-Marie the Beauty
By Yasmina Reza. 2019
Another thought-provoking master class in how we perform life by the award-winning novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza."I was bored with…
my husband," says Anne-Marie, the irrepressible voice of Anne-Marie la Beauté, "but you know, boredom is part of love." Mostly she is speaking here of her more famous friend and colleague, the French actress Giselle Fayolle, in whose shadow she has spent her career. "My life was a near miss," she adds, before explaining that she enunciated well because "I loved to say the words." A very short novel with the power and resonance of a much longer one, Anne-Marie la Beauté is a profound and moving act of remembrance, a clear-eyed assessment of the hard-edged nature of fame, a meditation on aging--and a wonderfully observant and comic exploration of human foibles. In short, another thought-provoking master class in how we perform life by the peerless Yasmina Reza.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.Portrait Of A Man
By Georges Perec. 2015
Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on…
his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun. Fittingly for such an enigmatic writer, Portrait of a Man is both Perec's first novel and his last. Frustrated in his efforts to find a publisher, he put it aside, telling a friend: 'I'll go back to it in ten years when it'll turn into a masterpiece, or else I'll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk.' An apt coda to one of the brightest literary careers of the twentieth century, it is - in the words of David Bellos, the 'faithful exegete' who brought it to light - 'connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create - but it's not like anything else that he wrote.The Wandering Pine: Life as a Novel
By Per Olov Enquist. 2008
When everything began so well, how could it turn out so badly? A blisteringly frank autobiographical novel by Sweden's great…
man of letters - for readers of K. O. Knausgaard's My Struggle."Some life. Some novel . . . Wonderful, brave, evocative . . . It is a remarkable story, and Enquist is remarkably frank in narrating every last detail" HeraldWhat was it about Hjoggböle, a farming village in the northernmost part of Sweden, that created so many idiots - and writers? There was nothing to indicate that P.O. Enquist would be stricken by an addiction to writing. Nothing in his family - honest, hardworking people. Not a trace of poetry. And yet he worked his way, via journalism, novels and plays, to the centre of Swedish politics and cultural life. His books garnered prize after prize. His plays ran for decades and premiered on Broadway. Why then, living with a new wife in Paris, does he hole up in their palatial Champes-Élysées apartment, talking only to his cat? How is it that he wakes to find himself in an uncoupled carriage on a railway siding in Hamburg, two - or was it three? - days after the first-night party finished? And what is it that drives him to run shoeless through the deep January snow of an Icelandic plain, leaving the lights of the drying out clinic far behind? Narrating in the third person, as if he were merely a character in the eventful, perplexing and ultimately triumphantly redemptive drama of his own life, P.O. Enquist is as elliptical as Karl Ove Knausgaard is exhaustive. Clear-eyed, rueful, written with elegance and humour, this is the singular story of a remarkable man.All One Horse
By Breyten Breytenbach. 2008
All One Horse is a marvel-filled journey through Breyten Breytenbach's kaleidoscopic imagination. The electrifying colors and penetrating images of his…
paintings converse with his lyrical and satirical dream-fables. These visions and parables emerge from a mélange of cultures and traditions: African and Eastern thought, the spirit world, and the spheres of visual art, philosophy, history and politics. Breytenbach's watercolors communicate in hieroglyphs, where private conversation embraces myth and dream. These reflections and images - clear and complex at once - are cries for human dignity and justice, are truth disguised as play. With octopus-like grace, Breytenbach pulls together worlds and watches them dance and struggle together; echoes of Afrikaans haunt his English, the fantastic melds into the quotidian, love glimmers beneath rage, the immediate rises to the universal.Heart of Tango
By Elia Barceló. 2007
Natalia is to be married to a German sailor much older than herself, but two days before the wedding she…
meets Diego, a mysterious young dancer, and they fall immediately in love. When he serenades her on the eve of the ceremony, Natalia's father unwittingly invites him to the festivities. There they dance a tango charged with passion, before Diego vanishes, knowing she is lost to him. Soon after the marriage Natalia's father dies, and her husband is lost at sea, presumed dead. Penniless and alone, Natalia is persuaded to become a dancer in a tango hall. Diego discovers her there and vows to bring her away from this existence, but their reunion has devastating consequences. Many years later, the spirit of the dance and the lovers' longing for each other draws together two strangers in a haunting meeting, a fusion of time and identities, despair and hope.The Art of the Body: A beautiful, unflinching debut about love, loss and intimacy
By Alex Allison. 2019
'A bold, unflinching debut' GUARDIAN'Brutal, tender, philosophical, visceral, complex and so well written' EMMA JANE UNSWORTHMaintaining one person's dignity comes…
nearly always at the expense of someone else's. I have learned this for you.Janet is caught between care work and caring for herself. Her life revolves around Sean, a talented fine art student, living and working with cerebral palsy. Both Janet and Sean are new to London and far from their families. Both are finding a means of escape through pushing their bodies to the limit.When Sean is faced with an unexpected and deeply personal tragedy, Janet must let her guard down at last and discover what she's prepared to fight for. The Art of the Body is a novel about dignity and intimacy, tenderness and brutality, unafraid to explore uncommon bodies in unusual ways.'Raw and powerful' IMAGEEl vendedor de silencio
By Enrique Serna. 2019
«No pedía mucho, carajo, sólo que lo dejaran prostituirse a su modo.» Novela ganadora del Premio Xavier Villaurrutia 2019. "El…
asunto histórico corresponde a tiempos próximos al nuestro, transformados en su novela en materia literaria gracias al brío de su discurso narrativo, la verosimilitud de personajes y situaciones, la velocidad de su prosa y su empeño en no dejar nada al azar, en atar todos los cabos. Serna obliga al lector a acompañarlo en cada una de sus acciones y a vivirlas con él." El jurado del Premio Xavier Villaurrutia. A mediados del siglo XX, Carlos Denegri era el líder de opinión más influyente de México. Reportero estrella del diario Excélsior, tenía una red de contactos internacionales envidiada por todos los periodistas. Mimado por el poder, como columnista político sobresalió por su falta de escrúpulos, al grado de que Julio Scherer lo llamó "el mejor y el más vil de los reporteros". Industrializó el "chayote" cuando esa palabra todavía no se usaba en la jerga política. En su Fichero Político, donde fungía como vocero extraoficial de la Presidencia y cobraba todas las menciones, podía difamar a cualquiera con impunidad absoluta. Según Carlos Monsiváis, un coscorrón en esa columna representaba "una temporada en el infierno" para cualquier aspirante a un cargo público. Aunque ganaba millones por publicar alabanzas, se hizo más rico aún por medio de la extorsión, callándose lo que sabía de sus poderosos clientes. La personalidad pública de Carlos Denegri es indisociable de las atroces vejaciones misóginas que cometió en su vida privada. Era tan prepotente y déspota en el trato con las mujeres como en el periodismo, de modo que su patología fue a la vez íntima y social. Radiografía del machismo a la mexicana y epitafio de la dictadura perfecta, esta novela es un estudio de carácter incisivo y mordaz, sustentado en un arduo trabajo de investigación, que por momentos linda con la farsa trágica. Enrique Serna vuelve a una de sus vetas narrativas predilectas, la reconstrucción del pasado, para entregarnos un fresco histórico apasionante. La crítica ha dicho: «Es una importante aportación a la historia y la literatura contemporáneas de México, salida de la pluma -o la laptop- de un autor caracterizado por su implacable ironía y su valiente voluntad estilística, virtudes que lo convierten en uno de los narradores imprescindibles de nuestro tiempo.» El jurado del Premio Xavier Villaurrutia 2019 «El arte de Serna consiste en una serie de procedimientos encaminados a hacernos más persuasiva la ilusión realista -esa que sólo puede darse en la mejor literatura-, a comunicar al lector la sensación de estar directamente enfrentado con la vida.» Ignacio Solares «En sus novelas y cuentos descubrimos un arte consumado de la sorpresa, una ferocidad no exenta de gracia y un sentido del sarcasmo que nunca se rebaja a la mera caricatura.» Claude Fell «Quien se acerca a las narraciones de Enrique Serna ríe mucho durante la lectura y al llegar al punto final un ligero malestar lo hace quedarse un tiempo pensativo, como si se reconociera de pronto en el patetismo de los personajes.» Eduardo Antonio Parra «Reconozco en Serna el entendimiento profundo, casi quisquilloso, que consiste en poner el archivo al servicio de la ficción y no ejercer ni de amanuense erudito ni de mero coleccionista de avisos y extravagancias.» Christopher DomínguezThe Stone Carvers
By Jane Urquhart. 2001
Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The…
Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward's ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.