Biography, Literature and Literary studies Books
WW Norton & Co The Sufferings of Young Werther A New Translation
Book Synopsis“Stanley Corngold’s translation is a triumph. This is a glorious achievement, a Werther for the ages.”—Christopher Prendergast
£18.04
WW Norton & Co Miss Manners Minds Your Business
Book SynopsisA witty guide to managing a real life wisely in a work-centered world.Trade Review"Intrepid, practical, and always humane, Miss Manners tackles common workplace hazards: irritating colleagues, rude customers, business travel, and office parties, which she’d prefer to see replaced by 'genuine workplace treats such as bonuses and time off.'" -- Publishers Weekly"As they parse delicate questions of hierarchy, privacy, focus, gender, age, family matters, illness, gossip, rants, business trips, meetings, and socializing, the Martins broach the very core of human relationships. They also drive home the fact that our lives would be vastly improved if we consistently worked together with dignity, respect, responsibility, patience, and, as they so ably demonstrate, a sense of humor." -- Booklist"[H]umorous yet helpful advice… an enjoyable collection." -- Library Journal"The business world would run much more smoothly if everyone lived by Miss Manners’s rules of etiquette. Her latest witty guidebook is written with her son Nicholas, who has a day job as director of operations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago." -- Bloomberg.com
£18.99
WW Norton & Co Where Mountains Are Nameless
Book SynopsisThe "compelling" (Seattle Times) story behind a most sacred piece of American wilderness.Trade Review"It will effectively send you screaming to your computer to pound out an e-mail to your congressman." -- National Geographic Adventure Magazine
£11.99
WW Norton & Co The Boy Who Followed Ripley
Book Synopsis"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing." —Frank RichTrade Review"Exquisitely chilling." -- Olivia Laing, author of Crudo
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Ripleys Game
Book SynopsisWith its sinister humor and genius plotting, Ripley's Game is an enduring portrait of a compulsive, sociopathic American antihero.
£13.41
WW Norton & Co The Undertaking Life Studies from the Dismal
Book SynopsisA National Book Award Finalist "One of the most life-affirming books I have read in a long time…brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor." —Tom VanderbiltTrade Review"A startling and eloquent meditation on death and bereavement…If you think this book isn't about you, or for you, think again." -- Spin"Forceful, authentic, and full of a kind of ethical and aesthetic clarity." -- Richard Bernstein - New York Times"A memoir that is stand-out superb." -- Esquire"[Lynch] is able to take us inside the palpable business of blood, tears, and the final verse of life in a manner that is almost shocking in the relief it delivers…[A] fine, sensible, and wise book." -- Boston Globe"Lynch’s vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community—and the secret places of the heart." -- USA Today"[Lynch] brings the lessons of death to life, and turns life and death into art." -- Time Out New York"Lynch’s essays are consistently humane and observant of the tragic, humorous, and occasionally startling vagaries of human life…Highly recommended reading for fans of poetry, Ireland, funeral and cultural customs, or anything else. More than a study of ‘the dismal trade,’ it is a long view of what it means to be human." -- Detroit Free Press"[An] unusual and affecting book. Lynch writes beautifully and affectingly…Each of the book’s chapters…enchants and instructs while enlightening us in the ways of living, dying, and most important, in Lynch’s anything-but-dismal view, loving." -- Elle"[Lynch] devotes most of his finely composed pages to gently humorous and unabashedly affectionate portraits of the people he loves…[A] collection of powerful and cadenced essays." -- Chicago Tribune
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Garden of Last Days A Novel
Book Synopsis“So good, so damn compulsively readable, that I can hardly believe it.” —Stephen King, Entertainment WeeklyTrade Review"Storytelling of the finest kind . . . [an] incandescent and absorbing novel." -- Boston Sunday Globe"Muscular and disquieting and turn-the-pages-so-fast-you-tear-them good." -- Esquire"A very fast and entertaining read. . . . Every passage is expertly, elegantly achieved." -- Madison Smart Bell - Philadelphia Inquirer
£11.99
WW Norton & Co All Other Nights
Book SynopsisA New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Slam-bang.…superb." —Washington PostTrade Review"Engrossing.…delicious." -- New York Times Book Review"Vibrant and compelling." -- Ruth Andrew Ellenson - Los Angeles Times"All Other Nights has the propulsive, suspenseful narrative of an espionage thriller, but the novel stands out because of the larger moral dilemmas Horn weaves into an epic." -- Sarah Weinman - New York Post"An enjoyably fast-paced amalgam of historical romance, spy novel and political thriller.…a rare and memorable portrait of Jewish life during the Civil War." -- Emily Bingham - Wall Street Journal"An astonishing storyteller.…[an] extraordinary novel." -- Financial Times"Riveting…written in meticulous but energetic prose…All Other Nights interrogates and celebrates nationhood and freedom.…Conflating Jewish and American history, Horn’s third and most accomplished novel portrays Passover, the festival of freedom, amid the carnage caused by slavery. Horn’s lively, timely tale extends the range of American Jewish literature beyond familiar themes of immigration, assimilation and extermination." -- Steven G. Kellman - The Forward"The richness of the background painted so ably by Dara Horn makes what is a coming-of-age saga a compelling account of one man’s development through the horrors of the Civil War.…Dara Horn’s skill as a writer and depth of comprehension is fully realized in this remarkable novel." -- Morton Teicher - Jewish Journal"A Civil War spy page-turner meets an exploration of race and religion in 19th-century America in Horn’s enthralling latest.…Horn propels the love story at a thriller’s pace; the mix of love and loyalty played out in a divided America is sublime." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A complex, multilayered, and thoroughly involving historical novel. Horn both unearths a fascinating, relatively unexplored aspect of American history—the role of Jewish Americans in the Civil War—and delivers a novel rich in human emotion and ambiguity. A triumph" -- Booklist (starred review)"A tale of adventure that weaves the Civil War and the Jews of the North and South together in a web of betrayal and love, dignity and loss, that takes the breath away and makes the heart pound." -- Anne Roiphe
£13.29
WW Norton & Co A Bounty of Blandings
Book SynopsisP. G. Wodehouse’s uproarious portrait of an aristocratic family whose lives revolve around an enormous Berkshire sow.
£14.99
WW Norton & Co To the Point A Dictionary of Concise Writing
Book SynopsisThe essential guide to writing succinctly.Trade Review"At a time when we are drowning in language, Robert Hartwell Fiske has thrown us a lifeline." -- Roy Peter Clark, author of How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times"If you want to write lean, succinct prose, you can do no better than to consult To the Point: A Dictionary of Concise Writing." -- Rod L. Evans, author of Tyrannosaurus Lex: The Marvelous Book of Palindromes, Anagrams, and Other Delightful and Outrageous Wordplay
£16.99
Random House Publishing Group 18 Best Stories
Book SynopsisA chilling compilation of some of Edgar Allen Poe''s best-loved stories, edited by Vincent Price and Chandler Brossard and with an introduction by Vincent Price, including: The Black Cat - The Fall of the House of Usher - The Masque of the Red Death - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - The Premature Burial - Ms. Found in a Bottle - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - The Sphinx - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - The Tell-Tale Heart - The Gold-Bug - The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether - The Man That Was Used Up - The Balloon Hoax - A Descent Into the Maelstrom - The Purloined Letter - The Pit and The Pendulum - The Cask of Amontillado
£8.13
Random House USA Inc Les Misérables
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£9.49
Random House USA Inc Death Of Ivan Ilyich Bantam Classics
Book SynopsisHailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?This short novel was the artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction. A thoroughly absorbing and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.
£7.45
Random House USA Inc The Aeneid Classics Classics S
Book SynopsisAeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world--as literature as well. Virgil's Aeneid is as eternal as Rome itself, a sweeping epic of arms and heroism--the searching portrait of a man caught between love and duty, human feeling and the force of fate--that has influenced writers for over 2,000 years. Filled with drama, passion, and the universal pathos that only a masterpiece can express. The Aeneid is a book for all the time and all people.
£7.84
Random House USA Inc Leaves of Grass Classics
Book SynopsisOne of the great innovative figures in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daringly new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. Leaves Of Grass is his one book. First published in 1855 with only twelve poems, it was greeted by Ralph Waldo Emerson as 'the wonderful gift . . . the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.' Over the course of Whitman's life, the book reappeared in many versions, expanded and transformed as the author's experiences and the nation's history changed and grew. Whitman's ambition was to creates something uniquely American. In that he succeeded. His poems have been woven into the very fabric of the American character. From his solemn masterpieces 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' and 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking' to the joyous freedom of 'Song of Myself,' 'I Sing the Body Electric,' and 'Song of the Open Road,'
£8.17
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Tess of the dUrbervilles
Book SynopsisViolated by one man, forsaken by another, Tess Durbeyfield is the magnificent and spirited heroine of Thomas Hardy’s immortal work. Of all the great English novelists, no one writes more eloquently of tragic destiny than Hardy. With the innocent and powerless victim Tess, he creates profound sympathy for human frailty while passionately indicting the injustices of Victorian society. Scorned by outraged readers upon its publication in 1891, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is today one of the enduring classics of nineteenth-century literature.
£7.92
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Peter Pan
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£7.43
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc David Copperfield
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£9.23
Random House Publishing Group Villette
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£7.76
Random House USA Inc The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
Book SynopsisFlamboyant and controversial, Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage. Here in one volume are his immensely popular novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; his last literary work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a product of his own prison experience; and four complete plays: Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first dramatic success, An Ideal Husband, which pokes fun at conventional morality, The Importance of Being Earnest, his finest comedy, and Salomé, a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann.Every selection appears in its entirety-a marvelous collection of outstanding works by the incomparable Oscar Wilde, who’s been aptly called “a lord of language” by Max Beerbohm.
£8.14
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Ethan Frome And Other Short Stories Bantam
Book SynopsisOn a bleak New England farm, a taciturn young man has resigned himself to a life of grim endurance. Bound by circumstance to a woman he cannot love, Ethan Frome is haunted by a past of lost possibilities until his wife’s orphaned cousin, Mattie Silver, arrives and he is tempted to make one final, desperate effort to escape his fate. In language that is spare, passionate, and enduring, Edith Wharton tells this unforgettable story of two tragic lovers overwhelmed by the unrelenting forces of conscience and necessity.Included with Ethan Frome are the novella The Touchstone and three short stories, “The Last Asset,” “The Other Two,” and “Xingu.” Together, this collection offers a survey of the extraordinary range and power of one of America’s finest writers.
£7.34
Random House USA Inc The Prince and the Pauper
Book SynopsisRich with surprise and hilarious adventure, The Prince and the Pauper is a delightful satire of England’s romantic past and a joyful boyhood romp filled with the same tongue-in-cheek irony that sparks the best of Mark Twain’s tall tales. Two boys, one an urchin from London’s filthy lanes, the other a prince born in a lavish palace, unwittingly trade identities. Thus a bedraggled “Prince of Poverty” discovers that his private dreams have all come true—while a pampered Prince of Wales finds himself tossed into a rough-and-tumble world of squalid beggars and villainous thieves. Originally written as a story for children, The Prince and the Pauper is a classic novel for adults as well—through its stinging attack on the ageless human folly of attempting to measure true worth by outer appearances.
£7.61
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Kidnapped
Book SynopsisAcclaimed by Henry James as Robert Louis Stevenson''s best novel, Kidnapped achieves what Stevenson called, the particular crown and triumph of the artist...not simply to convince, but to enchant.Spirited, romantic, and full of danger, Kidnapped is Robert Louis Stevenson''s classic of high adventure. Beloved by generations, it is the saga of David Balfour, a young heir whose greedy uncle connives to do him out of his inherited fortune and plots to have him seized and sold into slavery. But honor, loyalty, and courage are rewarded; the orphan and castaway survives kidnapping and shipwreck, is rescued by a daredevil of a rogue, and makes a thrilling escape to freedom across the wild highlands of Scotland.
£8.18
Random House USA Inc Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Book SynopsisRobert Louis Stevenson originally wrote Dr. Jekyll And Mr Hyde as a 'chilling shocker.' He then burned the draft and, upon his wife's advice, rewrote it as the darkly complex tale it is today. Stark, skillfully woven, this fascinating novel explores the curious turnings of human character through the strange case of Dr. Jekyll, a kindly scientist who by night takes on his stunted evil self, Mr. Hyde. Anticipating modern psychology, Jekyll And Hyde is a brilliantly original study of man's dual nature—as well as an immortal tale of suspense and terror. Published in 1866, Jekyll And Hyde was an instant success and brought Stevenson his first taste of fame. Though sometimes dismissed as a mere mystery story, the book has evoked much literary admirations. Vladimir Nabokov likened it to Madame Bovary and Dead Souls as 'a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction.'
£7.89
Random House Publishing Group Ivanhoe
Book SynopsisHailed by Victor Hugo as the real epic of our age, Ivanhoe was an immensely popular bestseller when first published in 1819. The book inspired literary imitations as well as paintings, dramatizations, and even operas. Now Sir Walter Scott''s sweeping romance of medieval England has prompted a lavish new television production. In the twelfth century, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe returns home to England from the Third Crusade to claim his inheritance and the love of the lady Rowena. The heroic adventures of this noble Saxon knight involve him in the struggle between Richard the Lion-Hearted and his malignant brother John: a conflict that brings Ivanhoe into alliance with the mysterious outlaw Robin Hood and his legendary fight for the forces of good. Scott''s characters, like Shakespeare''s and Jane Austen''s, have the seed of life in them, observed Virginia Woolf. The emotions in which Scott excels are not those of human beings pitted against other human beings, but of man pitted againstNature, of man in relation to fate. His romance is the romance of hunted men hiding in woods at night; of brigs standing out to sea; of waves breaking in the moonlight; of solitary sands and distant horsemen; of violence and suspense. For Henry James, Scott was a born storyteller. . . . Since Shakespeare, no writer has created so immense a gallery of portraits.
£7.82
Random House USA Inc Awakening The bantam Classicsshort Stories
Book SynopsisFirst published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman's abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threated to consumer her. Originally entitled 'A Solitary Soul,' this portrait of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier is a landmark in American fiction, rooted firmly in the romantic tradition of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Here, a woman in search of self-discovery turns away from convention and society, and toward the primal, from convention and society, and toward the primal, irresistibly attracted to nature and the sensesThe
£7.10
Random House USA Inc Sense and Sensibility
Book SynopsisIn 1811, Jane Austen’s first published work, Sense and Sensibility, marked the debut of England’s premier novelist of manners. Believing that “3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on,” she created a brilliant tragicomedy of flirtation and folly. Romantic walks through lush Devonshire and genteel dinner parties at a stately manor draw two pretty sisters into the schemes and manipulations of landed gentry determined to marry wisely and well. Neither sense nor sensibility can guarantee happiness for either—as romantic Marianne falls prey to a dangerous rascal, and reasonable Elinor loses her heart to a gentleman already engaged. Wonderfully entertaining yet subtle and probing in its characterizations, Sense and Sensibility richly displays the supreme artistry of a great English novelist.
£7.72
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc The Three Musketeers
Book SynopsisPerhaps the greatest “cloak and sword” story ever written, The Three Musketeers, first published ion 1844, is a tale for all time. Pitting the heroic young d’Artagnan and his noble compatriots, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis against the master of intrigue, Cardinal Richelieu, and the quintessential wicked woman, Lady de Winter, Alexandre Dumas has created an enchanted France of swordplay, schemes and assignations. The era and the characters are based on historical fact, but the glittering romance and fast-paced action spring from a great writer’s incomparable imagination. From the perilous retrieval of the queens gift to her lover in time to foil Rechelieu’s plot to the melodramatic revelation of Lady de Winter’s true identity, The Three Musketeers is the unchallenged archetype for literary romance and a perennial delight for generations of readers.
£9.20
Random House USA Inc The War of the Worlds Bantam Classics
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£7.59
Random House USA Inc Madame Bovary Bantam Classics
Book SynopsisThis exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary. Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgement. - Henry James Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. This volume, with its fine
£9.38
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc The Hunchback of Notre Dame
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£7.36
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Sister Carrie
Book Synopsis“When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” With Sister Carrie, first published in 1900, Theodore Dreiser transformed the conventional “fallen woman” story into a genuinely innovative and powerful work of fiction. As he hurled his impressionable midwestern heroine into the throbbing, amoral world of the big city, he revealed, with brilliant insight, the deep and driving forces of American culture: the restless idealism, glamorous materialism, and basic spiritual innocence.Sister Carrie brought American literature into the twentieth century. This volume, which reprints the text Dreiser approved for publication during his lifetime and includes a special appendix discussing his earlier, unedited manuscript, is the original standard edition of one of the great masterpieces of literary
£8.10
Random House USA Inc The Swiss Family Robinson
Book Synopsis“For many days we had been tempest-tossed…the raging storm increased in fury until on the seventh day all hope was lost.” From these dire opening lines, a timeless story of adventure begins. One family will emerge alive from this terrible storm: the Robinsons—a Swiss pastor, his wife, and four sons, plus two dogs and a shipload of livestock. Inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, this heartwarming tale portrays a family’s struggle to create a new life on a strange and fantastic tropical island. There each boy must learn to utilize his own unique nature as their adventures lead to difficult challenges and amazing discoveries, including a puzzling message tied to an albatross’s leg. But it is in the ingenuity and authenticity of the family itself, and the natural wonders of this exotic land that have made The Swiss Family Robinson, first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the most
£7.38
Random House USA Inc The Cossacks
Book SynopsisA brilliant short novel inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s experience as a soldier in the Caucasus, The Cossacks has all the energy and poetry of youth while also foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy’s later years. His naïve hero, Olenin, is a young nobleman who is disenchanted with his privileged and superficial existence in Moscow and hopes to find a simpler life in a Cossack village. As Olenin foolishly involves himself in their violent clashes with neighboring Chechen tribesmen and falls in love with a local girl, Tolstoy gives us a wider view than Olenin himself ever possesses of the brutal realities of the Cossack way of life and the wild, untamed beauty of the rugged landscape. This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the Russian frontier—completed in 1862, when the author was in his early thirties—has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast, panoramic fictions of his middle years. Unlike those works, The Cossacks is lean and supple, economical in design and execution. But Tolstoy could never touch a subject without imbuing it with his magnificent many-sidedness, and so this book bears witness to his brilliant historical imagination, his passionately alive spiritual awareness, and his instinctive feeling for every level of human and natural life. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
£20.40
Random House USA Inc Death in Venice
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£13.30
James Clarke Company Words for All Seasons
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£21.00
Lutterworth Press Writers and Their Other Work TwentiethCentury
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£36.00
ABC Books Lawson
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£20.02
Schiffer Publishing Ltd Literary Legends of the British Isles
Book SynopsisJourney into the best of British Isles literati in this comprehensive and concise review of 50 of the greatest writers and poets. Learn how these distinctive individuals shaped prose from the late medieval period through the mid-twentieth century. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, this anthology takes a fresh approach to the lives and burial places of these literary greats. It includes such masters as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Wilde, Kipling, Woolf, Joyce, and many more. Featuring complete introductions to each period, there is an overview of the historical, cultural, and literary backgrounds of the era. Through engaging biographies, extensive descriptive observations, and 158 illustrations, these great writers come alive. Innovative, authoritative, and comprehensive, Literary Legends of the British Isles embodies a new perspective to the study of English literature and the authors whose works have become classics.
£25.19
Northwestern University Press Omoo a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
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£113.05
Northwestern University Press Sofia Petrovna European Classics
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£25.43
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Bridge Over the Neroch
Book SynopsisFrom the acclaimed author of Summer in Baden-Baden, a collection of short work finally in English.Trade Review"Excellent translations of Tyspkin's...small literary oeuvre of astonishing originality." -- Rachel Polonsky - New York Review of Books"The word “Jewish,” as translator Jamey Gambrell points out in the introduction, appears rarely for how often the story concerns otherness within one’s own country and family. The narrator’s son is beaten up, held down in front of the girls during a jokey teenage gathering because he is Jewish, though the reason is never made explicit. That’s the book for you—the surreal treated as commonplace and vice versa until it’s all the same." -- Dan Duray - New York Observer"There is no prose quite like Tsypkin’s. Inside his dependent clauses, nested in his parentheses, the past is preserved, intact, contemporary with the present. The effect is vertiginous and profoundly moving." -- BookList"One of the great pleasures of seeing The Bridge Over the Neroch become available is that it should make clear that Tsypkin’s novel was not an aberration. The seven stories collected here will, I hope, confirm Tsypkin’s reputation as a writer of peculiar distinction." -- The Quarterly Conversation"Tsypkin’s prose glows with ingenuity and experimentation as he creates a chaotic, raging river of consciousness in which present, past, and future; dream, reality, and memory all collide within the same paragraph, even within the same sentence." -- The Jewish Book Council
£12.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande New Directions
Book SynopsisIn Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande, Jimmy Santiago Baca continues his daily pilgrimage through the meadows, riverbanks, and bosques of the Rio Grande where winter dies, spring explodes, and inextricable links between the human spirit and the natural world are revealed.
£9.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Written Lives
Book SynopsisAn affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).Trade Review"Reading these portraits is addictive; one keeps turning pages in anticipation of Marías' keen and amusing analyses." -- Publishers Weekly"It is difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits...Delicious, slyly ironic.... A delightful volume." -- Michael Dirda - The Washington Post Book World"They may be miniatures, but they're curious, addictive, and profound in their brevity.... The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize." -- The Observer [London]"His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility." -- Wyatt Mason - The New Yorker"A great writer." -- Salman Rushdie"I am greatly impressed by the quality of Marías's writing." -- W. G. Sebald"Javier Marías is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers." -- J. M. Coetzee"Mini-biographies of classic authors like Nabokov, Wilde, Rimbaud, Faulkner and Brontë written from the point of view of everything that went wrong in their lives. But funny! A must-read for any bibliophile." -- Caroline Stanley - Flavorwire
£11.39
New Directions Publishing Corporation New Selected Poems and Translations
Book SynopsisThe essential collection of Ezra Pound’s poetry—newly expanded and annotated with essays by Richard Sieburth, T. S. Eliot, and John Berryman.Trade Review"Starred Review. At last we have what we've needed for more than half a century: a career-spanning selection gathering all of Pound's major verse, offering both the academic and pleasure reader more than enough Pound to get them going...This will become the standard Pound."
£16.27
New Directions Publishing Corporation Varamo
Book SynopsisThe surprising, magnificent story of a Panamanian government employee who, one day, after a series of troubles, writes the celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry.Trade Review"An avant-garde literature that combines the impossible with the real, a literature in which every statement of fact suggests its opposite and even casual observations and plot twists are turned upside down." -- Michael Greenburg - The New York Review of Books"Varamo, like all the Aira books in translation, is charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular visions." -- Ben Raliff - The New York Times Book Review"Aira's prose can be slapdash, but the book teems with delightful, off-the-cuff metaphysical speculation." -- The New Yorker"Aira's literary significance, like that of many other science fiction writers, comes from how he pushes us to question the porous line between fact and fantasy, to see it not only as malleable in history, but also blurred in the everyday. The engrossing power of his work, though, comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park." -- Los Angeles Review of Books"The book is structured around a series of chance encounters, while also giving Aira some asides on broader concepts like the nature of perception, the promises of narrative form, and human thought." -- Publishers Weekly"The novel, in enacting the criticism it mocks, is playful and clever." -- The Rumpus"The latest English translation in Aira’s enormous corpus, Varamo accommodates his fondness for mixing metaphysics, realism, pulp fiction, and an attention to the raw strangeness of life’s ordinary details... The eccentricity of plot here is its own pleasure, but the slow, carefully written digressions it enfolds are what make the work such extravagant fun." -- Alice Whitwam - Coffin Factory"Each element Aira draws our attention to is placed into sharp focus before being discussed in short, entertaining digressions. If anything, the book implies a distrust of the very notion of plot, a comfort with play, and that is why I feel it grasps something of value. Once again Aira has given us a series of memorable, highly interpretable images held together by gossamer strings of meaning." -- The National"Slim, cerebral, witty, fanciful, and idiosyncratic." -- Boston Review"With a light, almost hypnotic style, Aira creates an intriguing balance between realism and comedic absurdity." -- Critical Mob"The overriding impression of Varamo is one of facility that dips periodically into facileness. Aira encounters the elements of his story as Varamo stumbles upon his masterpiece, by chance, as objets trouvés, and enjoyable as it is to see each pulled in turn from the hat, even a short novel built on such a principle can’t help but demonstrate the principle’s limits. Flaubert, the presiding genius of literature as sealed artifact, once claimed that he took such endless pains with his style precisely because was not naturally gifted with words. Aira is a manifestly gifted writer who may find writing all too easy a job." -- Quarterly Conversation
£9.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Seamstress and the Wind
Book SynopsisAs he runs wildly amok, Aira captures childhood’s treasures — the reality of the fable and the delirium of invention — in this hilariously funny book.Trade Review"A first reaction to this virtuosic confection is to delight in its cascade of images and the sheer craziness of a roller-coaster sequence of events that all seem so plausible. César Aira, an Argentine writer of fiction and literary criticism, is the obvious heir to Jorge Luis Borges. Along with a daring sense of fun, Aira has a playful imagination and the ability to spin a yarn as intricate as a spider’s web." -- Eileen Battersby - The Irish Times"His brutal humor and off-kilter sense of beauty make his stories slip down like spiked cream puffs." -- Natasha Wimmer - The New York Times"Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald, those great late modernists for whom fiction was a theater of ideas." -- Mark Doty - The Los Angeles Times"Aira’s voice is clear, his characters are palpable, and his ideas —elucidations on literary theory, existential ruminations, and thought experiments — are evocative and infectious." -- Cristóbal McKinney - ZYZZYVA"Once you start reading Aira, you don’t want to stop." -- Roberto Bolaño
£11.39
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Magic Tower and Other OneAct Plays New
Book SynopsisA wonderful collection of never-before-collected one-acts: “The peak of my virtuosity was in the one- act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope” (Tennessee Williams).Trade Review"Within his early one-acts there are intriguing prototypes of characters and seeds of ideas Williams developed more fully in his later, larger dramas." -- The New York Times"Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths." -- Randy Gener - American Theater Magazine"Just as young painters make their stabs at impressionism and cubism, in his early one-acts Williams tried his hand with political satire, expressionism, social realism, and even drawing-room comedy." -- Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson"The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope." -- Tennessee Williams in a 1950 letter to Elia Kazan"Reading these plays of the very young Tennessee, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s he had become, we are offered a panoramic yet detailed view of the themes, the demons, and the wit of this iconic playwright." -- Terrence McNally, from his foreword
£14.24
