Search results for ""atlantic monthly press""

In 1741, an enterprising Dutch sea captain transported a young, female Indian rhinoceros from Assam to Europe where she was displayed before everyone from peasants to princes. In an age before railways and modern roads, the three-ton Clara traveled in an enormous coach drawn by eight horses. She journeyed across mainland Europe and Britain for 17 years, becoming a favorite of Frederick the Great and Louis XV. She modeled for scientific portraits and etchings; she inspired poems, songs, and fashions; and she was duly immortalized in everything from tin coins to the finest porcelain. Awarded the prestigious Institute of Historical Research Prize, Glynis Ridley's sparkling history brings Clara's tragicomic story vividly to life. Clara's Grand Tour is also a portrait of an era that saw the rhinoceros as both an object of marvel and a challenge to fundamental philosophical and theological beliefs.

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Neil Azevedo has published poems in The Paris Review, The New Criterion, Prairie Schooner, and Image. His first collection, Ocean, introduces a shadowy world populated with dogs and snakes, suicide and children, sickness and satire, Satan and Christ, yet one doesn't feel soggy with introspection. Instead, wisdom emerges from these often personal and well-articulated lyrics; the reader is moved by the juxtaposition of savagery of subject and delicacy of touch. The verbal and often gothic brilliance of the language is stunning. It's not often that a young poet successfully embraces meter, finding a refined, velvet-toned style, and creates such a stellar debut.

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In his critically acclaimed New York Times Notable Book, Michael Ignatieff tells a story of striking contemporary relevance that has drawn comparisons to the novels of Graham Greene and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working for a British news agency somewhere in the Balkans. He believes that over the course of a long career he has seen everything, but suddenly he finds himself more than simply a witness. A woman who has been sheltering Charlie and his crew is doused in gasoline and set on fire by a retreating Serbian colonel. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding, throws her down rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her death. Something snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel and kill him.

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An award-winning historian critically examines the role of leadership in the twenty-first century, outlining a program of "Transforming Leadership," through which leaders can become agents of positive social change. Reprint.

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Suzanne Finnamore's universally applauded Otherwise Engaged followed one woman's whirlwind ride from diamond ring to altar. The Zygote Chronicles is her singular take on the next leg of the journey -- a riotous and poignant novel in journal form that takes us from conception to delivery room. Through the voice of a whip-smart, sass-talking everywoman Zygote reveals the unsettling and uproarious truth about pregnancy and the prospect of motherhood. The Zygote Chronicles will resonate for any woman who has even briefly considered motherhood. The strange purgatory of pregnancy has been a fact of life since Eve ate the apple, but never has it been recounted in such brilliant, hilarious detail.

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Literature is full of lyrical odes to the glory of falling in love. But what of its opposite -- the moment when it becomes clear that things are indisputably over? Dumped is a survey of every type of romantic crack-up, a group of stories full of the hilarity, wisdom, insight, and sometimes, yes, fierce revenges of some of the most memorable broken hearts in recent literature. Dumped sheds light on what can be the toughest part of human relations -- whether newly elucidating the misery we've all endured, or merely reminding us that others have had it far worse -- from the mother in Elizabeth Berg's Open House absurdly attempting to tell her son his father has left, to the betrayed wife in Roald Dahl's "Lamb to Slaughter," who beats her husband to death with a leg of lamb, then cooks it for the police. With contributions from such notable authors as Will Self, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Dorothy Parker, Andre Dubus, and Tobias Wolff, as well as rising stars like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Steve Almond, Dumped spans every variety of romantic catastrophe and every possible response to it; from the wise to the hilarious, the bitter to the bittersweet. This book is the panacea for problems of the heart.

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Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler's enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company's charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with Amy as she closes an auction with "fair warning," that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, "[Fair Warning] is as frank and sassy as its heroine." -- Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "Engaging ... fascinating ... accompanied by the wealth of evocative detail one might expect from a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize." -- Les Standiford, The Miami Herald "Once again, [Butler's] language is right on the money in this alternately witty and moving meditation on value and values." -- Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor "Butler has created one of the more fascinating female protagonists in recent history." -- Kirkus Reviews "Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility." -- Todd Kliman, The Washington Post

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Sarah Lindsay's poems have been hailed as "dark-edged ... with a buoying sense of respect-for the different, the unexpected and the challenging." (Publishers Weekly) Lindsay's new collection, Mount Clutter, is the product of an immensely original and exhilarating poetic sensibility, ranging wide across a highly distinctive imaginary landscape. In a voice that is distinctly her own, Lindsay probes the uncharted territories of history's curious little corners, reanimating obscure accounts of strange discoveries and bizarre scientific findings. A stunning sequence on the discovery of the Bufo Islands imagines what it means to encounter something as yet unnamed, unknown to human history, but bursting with possibilities. Lindsay similarly breathes new life into literary classics and ancient Greek myths, taking, for example, the well-known motif of Orpheus's descent into the underworld and transforming it into a hauntingly resonant portrait of the vicissitudes of loss. Lindsay's poems exude an extraordinary ability of fusing the outlandish and the little-known historical minutiae with the unmistakably familiar markers of the human experience. Mount Clutter is a remarkably sustained and self-assured performance -- stirring new poetry from the acclaimed 1997 national Book Award finalist. "[A] vision that beckons the reader after it into unexpected recognitions." -- W. S. Merwin

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The Guardian (London) has called comic-thriller writer Christopher Brookmyre "the next star of the genre". His American debut, Not the End of the World, is a fast and furious novel set in Los Angeles at the near side of the millennium, at a point when the world is about to spin out of control -- and maybe out of existence. When an oceanic research vessel is discovered with all of its crew vanished, it sets off a chain of events that pulls Lt. Larry Freeman of the LAPD out of the ho-hum assignment of overseeing the security for a B-movie film festival and headlong into a frenzied race to stop a terrorist plot. Along the way he must contend with aging porn stars, rabid evangelical Christians, a mysterious Glaswegian photographer, and an unknown agenda, all in a frenzied -- and ultimately hysterical-race against time. "Imagine Day of the Locust updated and rewritten by Carl Hiaasen. ... Good solid fun." -- Kirkus Reviews "Perpetually in-your-face: sassy, irreverent, and stylish ... [with] a high-octane sense of the absurd." -- The Times (London) "Very violent, very funny ... comedy with a political edge, which you take gleefully in one gulp." -- Literary Review

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Michael Tolkin's acclaimed second novel, Among the Dead, is an arresting examination of public and private grief in the wake of unspeakable disaster, a slow-burning tour de force of psychological fiction. When Frank Gale writes a passionate letter to his wife confessing an affair, he hopes all can be forgiven on the warm beaches of Mexico. But the farewell kiss of his girlfriend causes him to miss the flight carrying his wife and daughter, and when he learns that their plane has crashed in a crowded city, his life changes in the course of seconds. Soon Frank's letter is discovered among the dead, and suddenly one man's struggle to comprehend his loss and grief becomes consumed in a media circus of legal drama, family quarrels, and public scandal.

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