Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 66 items
The Brother
By Rein Raud, Adam Cullen. 2008
The Brother is a spaghetti western told in poetic prose, simultaneously paying tribute to both Clint Eastwood and Alessandro Baricco.…
It opens with a mysterious stranger arriving in a small town controlled by a group of men-men who recently cheated the stranger's supposed sister out of her inheritance. Following his arrival, fortunes change dramatically, enraging this group of powerful men.The Last Samurai
By Helen Dewitt. 2016
Called "remarkable" (The Wall Street Journal) and "an ambitious, colossal debut novel" (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is…
back in print at last Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was "destined to become a cult classic" (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so "Why not just, 'destined to become a classic?'" (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo's shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn't know: his father's name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He'll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.Alphabet
By Kathy Page. 2014
"Simply an epiphany."-Kirkus, starred reviewSimon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of…
Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation."Intense, revealing, challenging and above all riveting ... I kept saying to myself, how could she know this?"-Erwin James, convicted murderer, author of A Life Inside: A Prisoner's Notebook"Sometimes novelists go too far-and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go."-Time Out UKPraise for Kathy Page"Her unforgettable prose is moody, shape-shifting, provocative and always as compelling as a strong light at the end of a road you hesitate to walk down...but will."- Amy Bloom, author of Where the God of Love Hangs Out"Marvellously well-crafted ... I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel."- Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the VelvetAgainst the Wind
By Howard Scott, Madeleine Gagnon, Phyllis Aronoff. 2012
Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take…
drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault - the only maternal figure that he has ever known - it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity.Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation.After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death.In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" - Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments - in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.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.Betty: The International Bestseller
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 ChildFear: A brilliantly gripping and twisty psychological thriller
By Dirk Kurbjuweit. 2017
The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Irish Times Book of the Year.'Something we've not seen before in contemporary crime fiction' GUARDIAN'[An]…
uncomfortably close-to-home thriller' SUNDAY TIMES CRIME CLUB'As intellectually stimulating as it is gripping' DAILY TELEGRAPH, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2018'Takes you right into the heart of darkness' MAIL ON SUNDAY'A must-have new read' DAILY EXPRESS'Wonderfully sinister' THE OBSERVER'Frightening' THE TIMES'Addictive' INDEPENDENT'Terrific' JOANNE HARRIS'Brilliantly done' FIONA BARTON'A great achievement' HERMAN KOCH'Claustrophobic and unsettling' BBC NEWS'[A] creepy tale of obsession' SUNDAY MIRROR'An unsettling tale of merciless self-scrutiny' RENEE KNIGHT'A terrifying study of a family threatened by the tenant living downstairs' WOMAN & HOME*********How far would you go to protect your family?Family is everything. So what if yours was being terrorised by a neighbour - a man who doesn't listen to reason, whose actions become more erratic and sinister with each passing day?You go to the police, but they can't help you. You become afraid to leave your family at home alone. But there's nothing more you can do to protect them.Or is there...?FEAR is a brilliantly grippling, original psychological thriller - for fans of THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL and THE DINNER.-------------------------FEAR is translated from the German by Imogen TaylorThe 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.To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story
By Alistair Macleod. 2004
The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things…
were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus. The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancingthe text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift. For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.The Last Man Standing: The chilling apocalyptic thriller that predicts Italy's collapse
By Davide Longo. 2010
A chillingly plausible novel about the collapse of Italian society and one man's struggle to retain his humanity amid the…
horror"A bleak, lyrical tale that evokes Cormac McCarthy's The Road.... Gruesome, intense, and strange... a eurozone nightmare brought to life on the page."--James Lovegrove, Financial TimesIt is 2025, and Italy is on the brink of collapse. Borders are closed, banks withhold money, the postal service stalls. Armed gangs of drug-fuelled youths roam the countryside. Leonardo was a famous writer and professor before a sex scandal ended his marriage and career. Heading north in search of her new husband, his ex-wife leaves their daughter and her son in his care. If he is to take them to safety, he will need to find a quality he has never possessed: courage.The Enigma of the Return
By Dany Laferrière. 2009
"An affecting meditation on loss and exile" ANGEL GURRIA-QUINTANA, Financial TimesWindsor Laferrière left Haiti in fear of his life. He…
has lived in Montreal for thirty-three years, and when his father dies in New York, himself an exile for half a century, Windsor travels there to attend the funeral, and then back to Haiti to inform his mother of the death. In Haiti, Windsor is faced with the grim truth of life in his homeland - the endemic poverty, the thwarted ambitions and broken dreams. But only here can he become a writer again . . .The Enigma of the Return lives where fiction, poetry and autobiography meet. These creative tensions sustain a narrative of astonishing beauty, clarity and insight."Looks set to become one of the great poetic statements of homesickness and return . . . It should be read by all exiles everywhere" Ian Thomson, Independent"A poetic, melancholic tour de force . . . a compelling, intense, stark and poignant exploration of living life as an outsider . . . The great Haitian novel" Jo Lateu, New InternationalistRituals
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...Alone in the Classroom
By Elizabeth Hay. 2011
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing…
them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls.Good Offices
By Evelio Rosero. 2009
When Father Almida is summoned to an audience with the parish's principal benefactor, a stand-in is found in Father Matamoros,…
a drunkard with an angel's voice whose sung mass is mesmerizing to all. But Matamoros hides a darker side, and when the church's residents throw a feast for him he encourages them to lose all their inhibitions and give free reign to their most Bacchanalian desires. A satire on the iniquities of the Catholic church in Colombia, Good Offices is at once comic, surreal and startling, a novel that will linger long in the mind.El 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 Domínguez