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Showing 1 - 20 of 39 items
By Anton Chekhov, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. 2004
Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be…
called short novels, here brought together in one one volume for the first time, in a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa VolokhonskyBy Dorothy West. 1995
A collection of works by the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance. West includes her first short story, The…
Typewriter, written when she was seventeen, along with later stories and essays recounting everyday experiences: needing money, relating to family members, and coping with death. 1995By Benny Green. 1981
Reviews the life of the British comic novelist who is most noted for his 'schoolboy' writing style and as creator…
of Jeeves the Butler, Bertie Wooster, and Psmith. Considers the relationship between Wodehouse's works and his real life experiences as student, bank clerk, and screenwriter. 1981By Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. 1989
Autobiographical sketches chronicle the author's upper-class childhood in Russia, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that forced his family into exile in…
Europe, and his 1940 move to the United States. First published in 1951 under the title Conclusive Evidence and revised in 1966. 1947By Annie Ernaux. 2011
"Yvetot, un dimanche d'août 1950. Annie a dix ans, elle joue dehors, au soleil, sur le chemin caillouteux de la…
rue de l'Ecole. Sa mère sort de l'épicerie pour discuter avec une cliente, à quelques mètres d'elle. La conversation des deux femmes est parfaitement audible et les bribes d'une confidence inouïe se gravent à jamais dans la mémoire d'Annie. Avant sa naissance, ses parents avaient eu une autre fille. Elle est morte à l'âge de six ans de la diphtérie. Plus jamais Annie n'entendra un mot de la bouche de ses parents sur cette soeur inconnue. Elle ne leur posera jamais non plus une seule question. Mais même le silence contribue à forger un récit qui donne des contours à cette petite fille morte. Car forcément, elle joue un rôle dans l'identité de l'auteur. Les quelques mots, terribles, prononcés par la mère ; des photographies, une tombe, des objets, des murmures, un livret de famille : ainsi se construit, dans le réel et dans l'imaginaire, la fiction de cette " aînée " pour celle à qui l'on ne dit rien. Reste à savoir si la seconde fille, Annie, est autorisée à devenir ce qu'elle devient par la mort de la première..." -- 4e de couvPresents Wright's complete autobiography for the first time, combining his childhood in the South (Black Boy) with his life as…
an adult in the North (American Hunger). Also contains his 1953 novel (The Outsider), a literary chronology, and extensive notes. Sequel to Richard Wright: Early Works (DB 41552, BR 10299). Violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sexBy Catharine Maria Sedgwick. 1987
Set in seventeenth-century New England, Hope Leslie portrays early American life and celebrates the role of women in history. At…
the heart of the story is a cross-cultural friendship between Hope-Leslie, a spirited thinker in a repressive Puritan society and Magawisca, the passionate daughter of a Pequot chief. It challenges the conventional view of Indians, tackles interracial marriage and claims for women their rightful place in history. Adult. UnratedBy Elie Wiesel. 1999
Ce que j'affirme, c'est que ce témoignage qui vient après tant d'autres et qui décrit une abomination dont nous pourrions…
croire que plus rien ne nous demeure inconnu, est cependant différent, singulier, unique... L'enfant qui nous raconte ici son histoire était un élu de Dieu. Il ne vivait, depuis l'éveil de sa conscience, que pour Dieu, nourri du Talmud, ambitieux d'être initié à la Kabbale, voué à l'Eternel. Avions-nous jamais pensé à cette conséquence d'une horreur moins visible, moins frappante que d'autres abominations, - la pire de toutes, pourtant, pour nous qui possédons la foi : la mort de Dieu dans cette âme d'enfant qui découvre d'un seul coup le mal absolu ?By David Homel, Naomi Fontaine. 2013
Kuessipan is an extraordinary, meditative novel about life among the Native Innu people of northeast Quebec. With the grace and…
perfect pitch, author Naomi Fontaine (herself an Innu) conjures up a world that reads like no other, and a community-of nomadic hunters and fishers, of mothers and children-who endure a harsh and sometimes cruel reality with quiet dignity.By Velma Wallis. 1993
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River…
Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine. Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Velma Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community, and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness, and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).By José Barreiro. 2012
"Written" by Guaikán, the elderly Taino man who, in his youth, was adopted by Christopher Columbus and saw history unfold,…
Taino is the Indian chronicle of the American encounter, the Native view on Columbus and what happened in the Caribbean. This novel, based on a true story, penetrates the historical veil that still enshrines the "discovery." Presently a senior fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, José Barreiro is a novelist, essayist, and an activist of nearly four decades on American indigenous hemispheric themes. Barreiro is a member of the Taino Nation of the Antilles.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-TurnerBy 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.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.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.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.By Tiffany McDaniel. 2020
'Breahtaking'Vogue'So engrossing! Betty is a page-turning Appalachian coming-of-age story steeped in Cherokee history, told in undulating prose that settles right…
into you'Naoise Dolan, Sunday Times bestselling author of Exciting Times 'I felt consumed by this book. I loved it, you will love it' Daisy Johnson, Booker Prize shortlisted author of Everthing Under'I loved Betty: I fell for its strong characters and was moved by the story it portrayed' Fiona Mozley, Booker Prize shortlisted author of Elmet 'A girl comes of age against the knife.' So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence - both from outside the family and also, devastatingly, from within. When her family's darkest secrets are brought to light, Betty has no choice but to reckon with the brutal history hiding in the hills, as well as the heart-wrenching cruelties and incredible characters she encounters in her rural town of Breathed, Ohio.Despite the hardship she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters and her father's brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all she bears witness to, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write.A heartbreaking yet magical story, Betty is a punch-in-the-gut of a novel - full of the crushing cruelty of human nature and the redemptive power of words. 'Not a story you will soon forget' Karen Joy Fowler, Booker Prize shortlisted author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 'Shot through with moonshine, Bible verses, and folklore, Betty is about the cruelty we inflict on one another, the beauty we still manage to find, and the stories we tell in order to survive' Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow ChildBy 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-TurnerBy 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.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 Domínguez