Biography, Literature and Literary studies Books
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 Life on the Mississippi Bantam Classics
Book SynopsisFashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write.Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.
£6.99
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
Cengage Learning, Inc Gilgamesh
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£999.99
Harvard University Press Stranger Magic Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
Book SynopsisOur foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.Trade ReviewMy favorite work of non-fiction this year was Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. In her exploration of this immense, protean and much-translated Arabic collection of folk and fairy tales (fifteen of them banded in here at intervals) she has found a subject which seems an ideal fit for her own particular cast of mind. This book is like one of the densely patterned carpets it describes, rich in overlapping narrative strands and in associative weave of thought. A gorgeous last chapter, ‘The Couch: A Case History,’ glides from the coded site of passion, the flying sofa, to the magic carpet via prayer mat, festive balcony hanging, nomadic house, Smyrna rug on Freud’s analytical couch—recalling the structural importance of eavesdropping in the Arabian Nights—then a description of Gabbeh, an Iranian film about tribal carpet-weaving, and back to Freud and his thoughts on levitation and sexual delight (with a side swoop over Goethe’s Faust calling for a magic cloak). -- Helen Simpson * Times Literary Supplement *Marina Warner is a veteran magus, and an adept mythographer of the vast global traditions of magic, metaphor and myth… Pursuing the enigmas of imaginative desire throughout her career, Warner persuasively redefines The Arabian Nights as an overgrown garden of the delights and hazards of desire… Warner quests for contemporary meaning in the major traditions of literary magic and carries with her, back to The Arabian Nights, our sore need for another way of knowledge… Warner’s Stranger Magic harbors many richnesses, of which I find the most beguiling what she names, in her subtitle, ‘charmed states.’… Warner takes an honored place in the sequence of those who have studied what Isaiah Berlin and others have called the Counter-Enlightenment, the speculations that renewed Neoplatonic and Gnostic heterodox versions of ancient wisdom. Her choice of The Arabian Nights, as a vital strand in the Counter-Enlightenment, is refreshing, since she shows some of the ways in which storytelling is essential to this kind of knowledge. As a contemporary scholar of myth and magic, she aids immensely in the struggle for literary values that has to be ongoing, whatever the distractions of our moment. -- Harold Bloom * New York Times Book Review *Stranger Magic is an unabashedly joyful work of scholarship, a study of the history of the human imagination as it shapes and reinvents reality through stories. Here, Warner comes close to inventing a genre of literary criticism: she takes fifteen tales from the Nights and uses them as her own frame tales to embark on a series of erudite adventures. She performs a kind of intellectual free association based on rigorous research and enhanced by handsome illustrations, a number from her own collection. In homage to the Nights, this is a scholarly entertainment…Warner demonstrates that there is nothing idle about imagining. -- Patricia Storace * New York Review of Books *[A] wide-ranging, erudite, wondrously polymathic exploration of the tales of magic, bound to the ‘huge narrative wheel’ with which Scheherazade enchanted the Sultan Shahryar through one thousand and one nights of storytelling. Warner, too, is a beguiling storyteller: her fascination with true knowledge embedded in realms of wonder. She releases the jinn of cultural modernism and scientific progress from the bottle in which it has been long confined by Western tradition. -- Iain Finlayson * The Times *Ebullient… With Stranger Magic, Warner has written a nimble but daring work of criticism that draws on her work as a novelist and scholar, combining aspects of literary history, formal analysis, personal essay, and cultural forensics into topics as disparate as the ‘Smyrna rug’ that draped Freud’s couch to the flying turtles that Danish artist Melchior Lorck sketched in the 1550s. It’s a remarkable feat of synthetic knowledge, with particularly rich forays into those whom the Arabian Nights provided both fantastic inspiration and parodic ‘cover’: from Voltaire, Goethe, who taught himself Persian to compose West-Eastern Divan, and William Beckford to such unexpected veins of influence as Sir Walter Scott. There are historical personages both familiar (Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane) and less so (John Wilkins, Robert Patlock) brought into an encyclopedic sweep of French, German, and British sources. Even given the thoroughness of her investigation into just how deep an impression Orientalist fantasies left on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, she offers an inspired reading of why it was cinema—particularly the phantasmagoric chic-of-Araby ‘Easterns’ of the early silver screen—that offered a germane new life to Aladdin and Ali Baba… Warner has created a sparkling work of criticism, full of graciousness, learning, and fascination. -- Eric Banks * National Book Critics Circle blog *I was entranced by Marina Warner’s encyclopedic and pathbreaking study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. -- Pankaj Mishra * The Guardian *Wonderful… Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices… Many of the stories in the Nights take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few—such as the story of Hayqar the Wise—date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the Nights on artists, composers and writers… From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino—on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions—the influence of the Nights has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell. -- Eric Ormsby * Literary Review *In Stranger Magic Warner surveys just how pervasively The Arabian Nights has influenced art and literature since the eighteenth century. On the surface, her book covers what more dogmatic critics would call the West’s cultural appropriation of the East… Stranger Magic is packed with information and insight… Warner writes with clarity, and sometimes with exquisite beauty… Warner possesses an exceptionally synoptic mind, almost Sherlockian in its sensitivity to connections and repeated motifs… Stranger Magic is, in fact, simply the latest in an exhilarating series of studies that reexamine the West’s fantastic imagination. From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, and Phantasmagoria explore the cultural meanings of folktales and Mother Goose stories, children’s literature, and fairy tales, the fearful monsters, beasts, and ogres of nightmare, and all the ways humankind has attempted to represent the spiritual. Ranged together, these substantial works, now joined by Stranger Magic, look solid and magisterial on the bookshelf, calling to mind the encyclopedic scholarship we associate with an earlier age. Nonetheless, while Marina Warner is as learned as any Victorian polymath, she also employs contemporary feminist theory and the insights of cultural studies to make us look once more, or look more deeply, at the history of cinema, art, theater, and literature. Each of her books is an Aladdin’s cave of wonders. -- Michael Dirda * Barnes & Noble Review *Insightful… It’s fascinating and highly informed. -- Doug Johnstone * Big Issue *[Warner] astonishes with the granularity of her accounts of the impact of these stories on their original European readers… What kind of stories is Shahrazad telling us now? Immediately obvious is the relevance of Arabian Nights to crucial questions of perception of the East by the West during this season of Arab thaw and Iranian freeze… Warner does a good job, especially in her ‘Conclusion: “All the story of the night told over…”’ to tease out these new interpretative figures in the textual carpet. -- Brad Gooch * Daily Beast *Warner’s massive work remains a powerful testimony to the enduring appeal of the 1,001 Nights. Complex, frequently subtle…her book will reward readers with sophisticated insights into the cultural exchange between West and East—a bit like The Arabian Nights itself. -- Paul McMichael Nurse * Globe and Mail *If we might forget how central [The Arabian Nights] tales are to our culture, Marina Warner’s wondrous Stranger Magic is a scholarly excursion around some of the stories, her mind as rich and fascinating as the stories themselves, taking us on a magic carpet from Borges and Goethe, to Edward Said and the movies. -- Hanif Kureishi * The Guardian *Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic is as absorbing, wise and playful as the Arabian Nights tales themselves. A book about the triumph of imagination over experience. -- Jeanette Winterson * The Guardian *Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, it’s reminiscent of Christopher Booker’s brick-sized Seven Basic Plots. Warner’s chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold… Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It’s encyclopedic, a book to be savored in slices. -- Robin Yassin-Kassab * The Guardian *Warner’s gentle authority proves to be the perfect guide not only through many of the tales themselves but also through their attendant history, and theories about them. What she’s really exploring is the West’s fascination with the Orient, and how it has accommodated that alternative culture into its own: why was The Arabian Nights, a text that wasn’t sacred and wasn’t even valued, the one that the West alighted on so eagerly? The fabulism, the shape-shifting, the play between the figurative and the literal, that is found in the tales, speaks to something in the West’s psyche, a need for fantasy. Warner cleverly relates this to 20th-century psychiatry (Freud and his dreams), and new technologies such as cinema and aeroplanes (the allure of that magic carpet). Her immersion in her subject makes for an enthusiasm that proves to be infectious. -- Lesley McDowell * The Independent *Wondrous and lucid… When it comes to the tales themselves and their fantastical content, Warner is an excellent guide and a stylish storyteller in her own right: her renderings of 15 of the stories punctuate the book… The remarkable feat she has pulled off in Stranger Magic [is] nothing less than a history of magic, storytelling and centuries of cultural exchange between east and west. All in the guise of a book about one book, albeit an inexhaustible one. There are more dutiful histories of those subjects, just as there are scholarly studies of Arabian Nights that adequately describe its form, politics or translations but never truly fly. The product of Warner’s meticulous research is a weighty volume that feels airborne on every page. -- Brian Dillon * Irish Times *More even than an inquisitive, authoritative study of one of the greatest imaginative enterprises of human history, this is a further chapter in Warner’s unfolding of the power—the magical power as it may be—of the magical imagination… Some of the most original and compelling arguments in Stranger Magic concern the uses of Arabian flights of fantasy as vehicles for scientific and technological speculation… Jung said that the job of the mythographer might be not so much to spell out the meaning of myth as to ‘dream the myth onward.’ This is in a sense what Warner has undertaken to do, for her account of The Arabian Nights and their transmigrations is itself knitted into the fabric of the history she presents. Each section of her account is prefaced by a retelling of one of the stories, usually a neglected or less well known one, and in the writing and the reading, the separate threads of her argument—her accounts of the history of magic, or the responses of particular writers to the stories, or the nature of magical things, or the politics of enchantment—pass under and over each other. Warner’s scholarly imagination has never been less than compendious, but it has never before been so intricately wrought, or drawn together with such ingenuity the hitherto distinct currents of her writing, as mythographer, fabulist, critic, speculator and polemicist. -- Steven Connor * London Review of Books *This remarkable study is an arabesque, and an intricate Persian rug of themes, eras, tales, and authors—of the Middle East and West, playing on ‘states of consciousness’ as well as state-cultures. With a basic knowledge of Arabic from childhood as well as a Catholic upbringing, Warner is almost divinely positioned to unravel the infinite strands of the wily Scheherazade, as she weaves her way through the Arabian Nights, exploring their boundless capacity to ‘keep generating more tales, in various media, themselves different but alike: the stories themselves are shape-shifters.’ From Disney’s Aladdin to the works of Freud, Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and others, Warner explores the impact of the Arabian Nights on the West and the power of enchantment and fantasy. Like all myth, these of flying carpets, sofas, and beds of genies and heroic connivers grant lasting insights into human aspirations, transcendence, and love. Carefully documented, Warner’s ever shifting work takes its place alongside that of Edward Said, though she is refreshingly less polemical and less theoretical. No one need cover this enchanting ground again. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *Noted mythographer and novelist Marina Warner here turns her piercing gaze to one of the most influential set of fables ever assembled, The Thousand and One Nights. Analyzing the inner meanings of Scheherazade’s tall tales, she finds in these familiar narratives fresh import and life-changing potential. * Barnes & Noble Review *Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic has a double mission: On the one hand, the author traces, with a swelling, orchestral richness, why the [Arabian] Nights held such potent sway over figures like Coleridge, becoming a runaway best seller in Europe and retaining a lock grip over the Western imagination for generations. But she also shows why its themes and preoccupations remain relevant today… Stranger Magic explores, with immense learning and panache, how it might be possible to develop an intellectual, reasoned relationship to magic, conjuring an alternative to the binary choice between Enlightenment thought and esoterica… Warner sprinkles the historical detective work of Stranger Magic with her own versions of key scenes from the Nights, and her verve as a storyteller is among the book’s delights… Stranger Magic is a large volume, and it can sometimes be difficult not to get disoriented, or suffer what Warner nicely dubs ‘eyeskip’ in the twists and involutions of the arabesque patterns being traced. However, one of the merits of the book is that it teaches us why getting lost now and again can be salutary. In our absurdly busy, bottom-line–fetishizing lives, digression has become a bad word. But it’s precisely the wide-roaming, whirling vicissitudes of Shahrazad’s tales that dazzle the sultan and keep her alive. Stranger Magic reveals that the fate of the human spirit hangs not by a single thread, but by an extravagant skein of fancy. -- George Prochnik * Bookforum *This learned, lively, and well-written book concerns the wide-ranging influence of The Arabian Nights—a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairy tales—on Western culture… Warner’s densely detailed, loose, baggy monster of a book covers an impressive array of subjects from Voltaire and Goethe to Borges and Nabokov. -- Jeffrey Meyers * Booklist *Warner’s analysis of Arabian Nights aims at redefining the relationship between East and West, reason and imagination, science and magic. -- S. Gomaa * Choice *Warner has long been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of the fairy tale and myth. Here, she brings her characteristic erudition and insight to one of the great works of world literature, The Arabian Nights, using the best-known as well as some of the lesser-known stories to demonstrate how the Nights contributed to the rise of magical thinking across European and world culture… She ably demonstrates how the tales loom large in European culture and have provided the basis for much creativity and imagination since their discovery by the West in the 18th century… General readers and scholars in folklore, history, and Arabic literature alike will appreciate Warner’s ability to make connections between the Nights and the way the stories have resonated over time and space. -- David S. Azzolina * Library Journal *An elegant study of The Arabian Nights and the far-reaching influence of Scheherazade’s endlessly unfolding takes on Western culture and on our visions of enchantment and fantasy. * Publishers Weekly *
£999.99
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 Bartleby Co.
Book SynopsisA marvelous novel by one of Spain's most important contemporary authors, in which a clerk in a Barcelona office takes us on a romping tour of world literature.
£999.99
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 Seven Nights New Directions Paperbook
Book SynopsisA collection drawn from Jorge Luis Borges' lectures.
£12.82
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
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Leviathan 0 New Directions Pearls
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£12.33
New Directions Publishing Corporation On Booze
Book SynopsisA collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best drinking stories makes this the most intoxicating New Directions Pearl yet!Trade Review"Smart, sophisticated, and evocative." "His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings." -- Ernest Hemingway "His writing is a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartets." -- Raymond Chandler
£8.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Sinistra Zone
Book SynopsisLyrical, surreal, and yet unsettlingly realistic, The Sinistra Zone swims in the totalitarian backwaters of Eastern EuropeTrade Review"If there’s a magic realism Eastern-bloc style, The Sinistra Zone is surely its paradigm." -- Alison McCulloch - The New York Times Book Review"A fascinating novel that links intense realism with a boundless imagination, as if it could have written by Gabriel García Márquez." -- Die Zeit"The Sinistra Zone begins a la Chandler. But that's not how it continues. Like all good things, it embodies a wealth of possibilities: it can be read as a sociological intelligence briefing; a political/cultural situation report; a supplication; a finely wrought, postmodern feat of literary virtuosity; a chronicle of a bygone world, and so on. Again and again I was amazed by the fullness of the words, by the compact and luminous text — by the rich and powerful fabric that Ádám Bodor has woven into these pages." -- Péter Esterházy"It is hard to find in contemporary European literature a satire more dark and brutal and yet at the same time, more lyrical than this book." -- El País"The Sinistra Zone is a small masterpiece of stunning beauty that begs to be savored slowly." -- La Vanguardia
£12.34
New Directions Publishing Corporation A Little Ramble
Book SynopsisOver 50 original full-color artworks address newly translated writings of Robert WalserTrade Review"Texts like these demonstrate not only Walser’s effect on the literary and aesthetic work in world literature half a century after his death but also his status as a niche author, a seeming prerequisite for any 'writer’s writer'... It is no wonder that Walser has been so influential to artists and writers whose work is similarly charged with social criticism, examinations of the individual in relation to the world, and the attempt to fathom artistic inspiration." -- The Quarterly Conversation
£999.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Derangements of My Contemporaries
Book SynopsisProudly part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, a classical Chinese poet considered one of the great masters
£8.99
Ohio State University Press Works Vol IX TwiceTold Tales 0009 Centenary
Book Synopsis
£91.18
Ohio State University Press Works Vol XIII the Elixir of Life Manuscript 0013
Book Synopsis
£91.98
Carcanet Press Ltd The Winter Orchards
Book SynopsisA collection of poems that deal with the personal - family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and, poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos.Trade Review'Nina Bogin's poems are impeccable in craft, elegant in their economy, and emotionally profound; they are arrows, swift and quiet, hitting their mark, sinking deep. There is no better poet of her generation, and few as good' - Denise Levertov'Her imagery is disciplined and vivid, communicated in vocabulary and phrasing that are simple yet rich' - Library Journal
£10.91
WW Norton & Co The Last Cowboy A Life of Tom Landry
Book SynopsisA Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2013 An action-packed biography of a man, his team, and the league he helped create—in the tradition of Maraniss’s When Pride Still Mattered.Trade Review"[Ribowsky] recounts Landry’s life honestly, avoiding both distortion and hagiography while portraying a stoic, flawed man of honor…. A triumph of extensive research and interviews. It will be welcomed by all football fans." -- Library Journal, starred review"A meaty biography of one of the NFL’s legendary coaches…. [Ribowsky] provides as complete a picture of ‘God’s Coach’ as we’re likely to get. A must-read for fans of America’s Team and, given Landry’s impact on the game, for Cowboy haters too." -- Kirkus Reviews"In Ribowsky’s authoritative biography, Landry appears more stoic king than coach, his ever-present fedora serving as a crown…. Ribowsky’s thorough examination of a surprisingly complicated man offers original reporting, which serves here as merely a complement to this impressively researched work…. An eloquent, honest tribute to a football genius." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Fascinating…. Readers looking for a recap of one of football’s greatest innovators and coaches will be enthralled." -- Booklist"[A] huge and hugely entertaining biography…. Extraordinary…. That Ribowsky, an outstanding biographer with books on Al Davis, Satchel Paige and Howard Cosell to his credit, doesn’t idolize Landry across the book’s 640 pages makes his judgment all the keener." -- Allen Barra - Dallas Morning News
£22.79
WW Norton & Co Tropic Death
Book SynopsisFinally available after three decades, a lost classic of the Harlem Renaissance that Langston Hughes acclaimed for its hard poetic beauty.
£17.09
WW Norton & Co As Texas Goes How the Lone Star State Hijacked
Book Synopsis“Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one.” —Rachel Maddow A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction)Trade Review"The reader who senses a touch of sarcasm would not be wrong…[Collins] has a good eye for absurd details." -- Erica Grieder - New York Times"There is no one like Gail Collins: uproarious fun on every page, but with a serious point. In this wonderful book she devastates Texas for its hypocrisy, its ignorance, its worship of wealth. But you cannot keep laughing as she shows how the Texan mind works a baleful influence on the rest of the country." -- Anthony Lewis"With wit and humor, Collins focuses on major Texas figures, from Davy Crockett to Rick Perry, to offer a portrait of an outsize state anxious to take on the task of setting the rest of the country straight and of the broader implications that has for the rest of the country." -- Booklist"Starred review. New York Times political columnist Collins zeroes in on what makes Texas so important and why the rest of the country needs to know and care about what’s happening there…A timely portrait of Texas delivered with Collins’ unique brand of insightful humor." -- Kirkus Reviews"[Collins] set off on a whirlwind tour to discover the Lone Star State and its transcendent meaning, deploying a breezy, wisecracking polemical style familiar to fans (including me) of her twice-weekly column in The Times." -- Lloyd Grove - New York Times Book Review"New York Times columnist Gail Collins makes a compelling case in As Texas Goes… that much of what ails the nation began down in the Lone Star State." -- Steve Almond - Boston Globe
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Local Souls
Book SynopsisWith the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America’s most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.Trade Review"It’s been 12 years since Gurganus last published a full-length work—but if there remains any doubt of his literary greatness, his fifth book, Local Souls, should put it to rest forever…. A tour de force in the tradition of Hawthorne. It shows that Gurganus’s vast creative and imaginative powers, still rooted in the local, are increasingly universal in scope and effect. The book is an expansive work of love…Gurganus moves beyond [Sherwood] Anderson and Faulkner in calling into question the very notion of ‘inappropriate’: the emotional misalignments in his fiction feel both understandable and familiar. Like Chekhov and Cheever before him, Gurganus registers an enormous amount of compassion for the characters he holds to the fire." -- Jamie Quatro - New York Times Book Review"Allan Gurganus breathes so much life into the town of Falls, North Carolina, his reader is able to walk down the streets and mingle with the local souls. This book underscores what we have long known—Gurganus stands among the best writers of our time." -- Ann Patchett"Allan Gurganus is our verbal magician. He turns factual rabbits into poetic doves. Every sentence contains a surprise, but the brilliant surface doesn’t dazzle us from peering into the tender human depths." -- Edmund White"Allan Gurganus has the uncanny ability to make you laugh and shudder at the same time. That rare gift is on full and glorious display here." -- T. C. Boyle"Vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader’s consciousness. [Gurganus] shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances." -- Booklist"Gurganus returns to Falls, N.C., the setting of his Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, with this trio of linked novellas…. In these layered, often funny narratives, close reading is rewarded as Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species." -- Publishers Weekly, "Pick of the Week""In this first work in 12 years, Gurganus offers three luscious, perceptively written pieces, each as rich as any full-length novel and together exploring the depth of our connections…. In all three novellas, there’s a pervasive sense of the power of community expectations and the question of whether we can challenge fate…. These pieces are so fresh and real that the reader has the sense of walking through a dissolving plate-glass window straight into the lives of the characters. Highly recommended." -- Library Journal, starred review"A serious and important American writer—his work has meant a lot to me over time… It’s good to have him back after a long absence." -- Dwight Garner - New York Times"The first-person voice’s capacity for lifelikeness and oral illusion has been Gurganus’s great Southern storytelling inheritance… Local Souls stays true to its author’s vocal aesthetic." -- Thomas Mallon - New Yorker"Gurganus [is] fearfully gifted…. The gem of Local Souls is the gorgeous Decoy, in which Gurganus removes the gloves and delivers the literary equivalent of a bare-knuckled knockout. Decoy is so good that you want to lob all sorts of adjectives its way: warm, humane, profound, sagacious, hilarious, nostalgic, and incisive…. The last pages of Local Souls prove once again that there is no writer alive quite like Allan Gurganus." -- Laura Albritton - Miami Herald"Allan Gurganus proves once again that small-town life in the New South can be as tragic and twisted as anything out of an ancient Greek playbook…. The chatty, roundabout storytelling, the wicked humor and sense of the absurd often disguise the gravity of these investigations into life’s tendency to ‘retract its promise overight,’ to ‘become a vale of tears breaking over you in sudden lashing.’ Hidden above the safe confines of the Falls, Zeus readies his lightning bolts." -- Gina Webb - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
£19.94
WW Norton & Co Drawn Together The Collected Works of R and A
Book SynopsisRumored for years, Drawn Together finally charts the daily exploits and erotic craziness of this “First Couple” of comics.Trade Review"Since the 1970s, pioneering underground comics creators R. Crumb and Aline Crumb (nee Kominsky) have been drawing comics together, their distinct art styles sharing the same panels…. The thematic cohesion, despite the two very different styles, is an achievement, one further enhanced by guest illustrations from daughter Sophie and cameos from Art Spiegelman and Charles Burns. A must for Crumb fans." -- Publishers Weekly"The collection documents the changes in their lives as they’ve grown older, had a daughter (now a published cartoonist herself), moved to the south of France, and received more attention than they’d wanted through a couple of films (a documentary on the Crumb family and the adaptation of American Splendor, the acclaimed bio-pic of friend and collaborator Harvey Pekar). From the bathroom to the bedroom, they respond to the question of just how open and honest a marital comic can be. Not the most ambitious Crumb work, but there’s a lot of love here." -- Kirkus Reviews"Starred review. If his drawing is wonderfully detailed, volumetric, and fluid—the justly most famous and admired comics style of our time—hers is flat, messy, childishly exuberant, an avatar of the art brut manners of such of her peers as Linda Barry, Roz Chast, and Nicole Hollander. That contrast between them becomes yet more grist for their endless, self-conscious, ludicrously frank (often literally unbuttoned; this is adult comics, folks) yattering on sex, art, parenthood, guilt, fashion, collecting, shopping mania, the Jews and the goys, France and the French, him being more famous than her, blah blah blah. And gloriosky! It gets funnier as the years pile up. The last long story here, “A Couple a’ Nasty, Raunchy Old Things,” is as hilarious as the best routines of George and Gracie, the Bickersons, and The Honeymooners." -- Booklist"[One] of the 50 sublime coffee table books for the true sophisticate." -- Flavorwire"Drawn Together brims with life… one can’t help but be charmed by the Crumbs…. A wonderful creation… offers much more than even its considerable bulk suggests." -- QUIETUS
£23.99
WW Norton & Co Why Not Say What Happened
Book SynopsisA renowned cultural critic tells his own deeply engaging story of growing up in the turbulent American culture of the postwar decades.Trade Review"Leading critic/historian Dickstein… here turns that spotlight mind on a subject close to home as he details his Lower East Side childhood, then breaking away from his close, observant Jewish family as he discovers Beat-imbued New York and the rich literary life at Columbia University. Then it’s on to oh-so-proper Yale and Cambridge and the wild Sixties." -- Library Journal"Morris Dickstein's magnetically intimate memoir is as much a record of an ardent young man's besotted hunger for literature as it is of his Zelig-like presence at nearly every significant aesthetic and political turning of the second half of the American twentieth century. And more: first love and first fatherhood; first immersion in the heady air of Cambridge, London, and Paris; portraits of illustrious teachers and critics (Leavis, Trilling, Bloom); the tremors and vagaries of first entering the demanding life of the academy; and an exhilarating glimpse into Dickstein's ripened mastery as he joins the storied generations of influential teachers, mentors, and cultural virtuosos." -- Cynthia Ozick"In this acutely observed, slyly funny memoir, we see the evolution of one of our foremost critics during a watershed moment of cultural history. Dickstein, a precocious, parochial yeshiva boy from the Lower East Side, makes the great trip to Columbia University, losing his virginity and wising up along the way. His naturally expansive sympathies are nurtured under some of the legendary teachers of the day, even as he gets caught up in the turbulence and changing tastes of the sixties. For me, this was both a page-turner and an intellectual joy ride—Dickstein put me in a front row seat of classes I’d give anything to have attended, and discussions I'd love to have been in on." -- Molly Haskell"A humane and benevolent account of an ideal education, by an ideal mentor and guide. A wonderful book." -- Mark Edmundson"Morris Dickstein's new book is at the same time a personal, cultural, and intellectual autobiography and an indispensable study of the tumultuous sixties. Charting the progress of an archetypical Jewish intellectual, Dickstein describes his evolution from Catskills innocent to Ivy League sophisticate, from Jewish minor to English major, from Lower East Side yeshiva bokher to apostle of higher Western learning, all the while paying generous tribute to his teachers, his students, and his friends and family. Written with wit, power, and insight, Why Not Say What Happened is a fascinating exploration of a clearheaded scholar and a controversial age." -- Robert Brustein"An esteemed cultural and literary critic charts the intellectual and religious paths of his early years… [leaving] indelible portraits of his contemporaries and mentors. There's the brilliant Lionel Trilling, who tended to wing his way through lectures; F.R. Leavis, a "slash and burn" critic cowed by his imperious wife; and the redoubtable Harold Bloom, who even then was already the smartest guy in every room… Dickstein hasn’t lost his zeal for art or ideas or his passion for writing about them." -- Kirkus Reviews"Dickstein’s rapt, unabashed delight in literature and his willingness to let it inform his own experience make for an indelible account of the life of the mind." -- Publishers Weekly"[A] lively, impressionistic account of the intellectual and personal transformation of a ‘brash Jewish kid from New York’ that paralleled the U.S.'s emergence from the torpor of the 1950s into the political and cultural explosion of the following decade… In vivid and entertaining prose, Dickstein describes his educational journey as he moved from his undergraduate years at Columbia College and on to Yale… One can only hope he's well on his way to completing another volume." -- Harvey Freedenberg - Shelf Awareness"Insightful… [D]escriptions can glint with illumination, and Mr. Dickstein is charmingly self-effacing as he tries to comprehend his life’s unfolding." -- Edward Rothstein - Wall Street Journal"Though an old-fashioned humanist like his mentors, Dickstein reveals himself to be in synch with his time. …Conjuring a lost age of intellect, Dickstein proves the most cheerful of elegists." -- New Yorker"[An] affecting memoir…. As you get deeper into Dickstein’s Sentimental Education, you begin to see… how far he has traveled from the confines of his Lower East Side Jewish childhood to a deep understanding of Western culture…. What’s impressive is how seamlessly everything in Dickstein’s story connects—his daily life, his studies and his reactions to the books he reads." -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Moment
£20.89
WW Norton & Co The Short Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan
Book SynopsisThe Washington Post Notable Non-Fiction of 2013 On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht comes this untold story of a teenager whose act of defiance would have dire international consequences.Trade Review"Kirsch expertly picks through the murky details to shed new light on the historical significance. A compelling study." -- Kirkus Reviews"In his well-crafted study… Jonathan Kirsch manages to put some meat on the skinny frame of his protagonist and also to put a human face on his victim. In so doing, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Kristallnacht, whose 75th anniversary falls this year." -- David Clay Large - Los Angeles Times"No novelist could invent a story with as many twists of history and character as the one Jonathan Kirsch tells about Herschel Grynszpan…The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan illuminates the countless short and tragic lives of eastern European Jews running for shelter in the terrible days leading up to World War II." -- Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator and Dreaming in French"With a storyteller’s touch and a lawyer’s insight, Kirsch elevates this tragic tale and makes it read like a legal and moral thriller." -- Thane Rosenbaum, author of Payback: The Case for Revenge and The Myth of Moral Justice"Herschel Grynszpan wanted nothing more than to be remembered for his rash, heroic actions. In Kirsch, he has finally found an objective, yet passionate, chronicler." -- Ronald C. Rosbottom, professor of French and European studies, Amherst College"On Nov. 7, 1938, a troubled Jewish teenager walked into an embassy in Paris, got in to see a low-level Nazi attache and shot him dead—a killing that gave Hitler a pretext for the savage, anti-Semitic orgy of Kristallnacht." -- Scott Martelle - Washington Post
£20.89
WW Norton & Co Why We Are Here
Book SynopsisFrom this historic collaboration between a beloved naturalist and a great American photographer emerges a South we’ve never encountered before.Trade Review"Pulitzer Prize–winning naturalist and Harvard professor Wilson (On Human Nature) and acclaimed photographer and Duke University professor Harris (River of Traps) team up to convey the spirit of Mobile, Ala., through text and images. Wilson writes of his childhood in Mobile and recounts the complicated heritage of his hometown in a sprawling essay that weaves personal, social, economic, political, and natural history.... Harris’s intimate pictures beautifully capture quotidian moments, offering a context for the diverse characters, lush landscapes, and events, traumatic and joyful, that define Mobile today: a high school football team marches arm-in-arm; a tiger swallowtail hesitates in a verdant meadow; a Civil War re-enactor poses with Confederate memorabilia; two outstretched arms, one black and one white, point toward the infinity of the Gulf of Mexico’s horizon. A hybrid document meant to be as much about “the meaning of place as it is about a place itself,” the book is a thoughtful meditation on community and storytelling that reminds us we will never understand ourselves until we know where we come from." -- Publishers Weekly"The great naturalist E. O. Wilson, who grew up in Mobile, and the photographer Alex Harris evoke and explore that exceptional city and its surroundings… The upshot, revealed in this uncommonly effective marriage of photographs and text, is a place at once deeply southern and more than a bit foreign." -- Atlantic Monthly"Delightful… The Mobile Bay area is a distinctive and special place, as anyone who lives here knows. E. O. Wilson, world-renowned scientist and author; and Alex Harris, appreciative outsider with a gifted eye, get this in their bones, and in Why We Are Here proclaim it from the rooftops." -- John S. Sledge - Mobile Bay Magazine"Excellent… Mr. Harris’s photographs are inquisitive, and Mr. Wilson’s prose is similarly vivid." -- Dwight Garner - New York Times
£27.50
WW Norton & Co The Late Parade Poems
Book SynopsisA debut collection that welcomes a new modernist aesthetic for the twenty-first century.Trade Review"Fitzgerald’s voice is a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry… His is a third way, a poetry that is neither sealed off from human ears nor bent solely on pleasing them. In a word, his poems are drunk on both word and allusion and are therefore doubly tipsy… The result is a poetry as lush as any of Keat’s odes, as textured as a corridor in the Louvre… No wonder this was the first debut collection acquired by W.W. Norton’s resurrected Liveright division, which helped define modernism in America in the 1920s… Reading ‘The Late Parade’ wasn’t like listening to a mountain speak. It was more like listening to the earth laugh." -- David Kirby - New York Times Book Review"In The Late Parade, Adam Fitzgerald is a master of defeating expectations so as to fulfill them farther along. One has the feeling of climbing higher along a path that is giving way under one’s feet, in pursuit always of ‘a waltz on our breath.’ Yet the rhythmic and consonant commotion of these poems ends in joy. This is a dazzling debut." -- John Ashbery"Adam Fitzgerald’s The Late Parade is wildly alive with the grit and glue of broken objects and the noise of lost things. You can count on the immense care he takes in putting music back into the world. You can count on the fact this is a book we will read for years to come." -- Dorothea Lasky"Released from the plod of workaday logics and handed over to the flow of their own becoming, the poems in The Late Parade shudder with exhilarating assurance and nonstop invention, never fully breaking it off with the familiar, but incapable of leaving it untransformed. We’ve been waiting too long for a book like this to arrive. Wake up—it’s finally here." -- Timothy Donnelly"The Late Parade by Adam Fitzgerald may be the beginning of a great career." -- Harold Bloom
£18.04
WW Norton & Co Time and Tide in Acadia Seasons on Mount Desert
Book SynopsisCamuto delivers insights on Mount Desert Island, a place of stunning beauty and natural wonders.
£12.99
Persea Books Inc The Murderer
Book Synopsis
£9.45
Persea Books Inc Rememberance of Crimes Past
Book Synopsis
£9.45
