Search results for ""New York Review Books""

In The Glass Bees the celebrated German writer Ernst Jünger presents a disconcerting vision of the future. Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology and his strategic command of the information and entertainment industries into a discrete form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might sell his secrets. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero, is ready for the job. However, when he arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses....

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First published in 1959, Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature. Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called 'the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out.'

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Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati’s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti’s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized “Seven Floors,” an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; “Panic at La Scala,” in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and “Appointment with Einstein,” where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.

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A collection of essays by the winner and the five finalists of the prestigious Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize 2017Covering an array of subjects, from the meaning of art to supermarket shopping, these pieces were chosen for their originality, literary style, and above all, their ability to persuade. The judges awarded the first prize to “Five Ways of Being a Painting” by William Max Nelson for “its curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, that makes it a real essay.”The biennial Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize is open to all essays written in English of between 2,000 and 8,000 words, on any subject. The first prize is £20,000 and five runners up each receive £1,000, making it the richest non-fiction prize in the world. The judges of the 2017 prize were: Kirsty Gunn, essayist and novelist; Daniel Mendelsohn, essayist, memoirist and critic; Sameer Rahim, Arts & Book

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Ron Padgett is one of America's best-known and most acclaimed poets. Admired by John Ashbury, Jim Jarmusch, and Anne Waldman, his poems have moved and delighted generations of readers with their inventiveness, their gentle humor, and above all their ability to elicit wonder. These qualities are as evident as ever in Pink Dust, whose title refers to the residue from all the author's erasors, swept away or blown into the air. Like that dust, this is a book of memories rubbing up against the present. Its poignant reflections on old age shimmer with all the insouciance of youth.

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A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette's deadpan irony will appreciate Command Performance, Echenoz's vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays like The Big Lebowski on the Seine. — Publishers Weekly Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then coopted by one of the party’s less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party’s own leader—and that’s when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems. In his latest outing, Jean Echenoz, one of France’s most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature, displaying the twists of plot and turns of phrase that have become his signature, and that have made him, in the words of The Washington Post, “the most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.”

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A Nobel laureate's later poetry, perfect for existing fans of the Italian master and the uninitiated alike. Now in a sparkling new translation for English-language audiences.Late Montale presents a generous selection of the intimate, elusive, and trenchant poems that the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale wrote in the last several years of his life. Translated by the prize-winning poet George Bradley (Yale Younger Poet, 1985), the work chosen for this volume includes fifty-six poems that were previously unavailable in English and now form an important addition to the Montale œuvre. Bradley’s idiomatic, accurate, and graceful versions bring Montale’s Italian to the anglophone audience with a new immediacy, and the extensive notes he provides offer valuable information, much of it newly uncovered, regarding the many people and places referenced. Both readers coming to Montale for the first time and those familiar with his earlier work will find these t

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This heartfelt gay memoir about an adult son uncovering his father’s secrets is “a cross between Dickens’s David Copperfield, Rousseau’s Confessions, and the new pornography” (Donald Windham).   When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self—making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.

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"This slim volume is Peter’s sexiest self-portrait. Read it and weep if you didn’t know him. Or read it and weep if you did that we lost him." –Nan Goldin On December 18, 1974, the author Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did on that day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th Street the following day, where she asked him about it in detail and tape-recorded their conversation. Peter Hujar’s Day is a full transcript of that exchange, published here for the first time since it was recorded 47 years ago. The book features an introduction by Stephen Koch, director of the Peter Hujar Estate. Linda Rosenkrantz (born 1934) is a Los Angeles–based, Bronx-born writer and the author of the "repellently raunchy" novel Talk (1969, republished as a New York Review Books Classic in 2015), Telegram! (2003), a history of telegraphic communication, and her memoir, My Life as a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood (1999). She is the coauthor of Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony in the Golden Age (1979). She is also the founding editor of Auction magazine, the coauthor of 10 bestselling books on baby names, and the cocreator of the popular baby-naming site nameberry.com.

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