Böcker utgivna av New York Review Books

The first-ever collection of comics and assorted artwork by Michael McMillan—not only a legendary underground cartoonist, but also a sculptor, painter, printmaker, filmmaker, animator, poster designer, and an avid rock climber.Michael McMillan has said he’s “not really a cartoonist,” but the evidence suggests otherwise. Born and raised in California, he studied architecture and design before a visit in 1969 to an exhibition of Chicago’s Hairy Who and encounters with the bourgeoning San Francisco underground comix scene convinced McMillan to make his own comics.He plunged in, drawing for legendary publications like Weirdo, Young Lust, Lemme Out Here, Arcade, and eventually his own one-issue wonder, Terminal. Over the following decades, McMillian kept playing with the form of comics. He reimagined the kind of stories single-panel, two-panel, and many-panel strips could tell, blending favorite genres from his childhood (horror, swords and sandals, science fiction) with more mature themes (autobiography, dating, sex) into new and striking forms.In Terminal Exposure, McMillan’s comics are collected for the first time, alongside a selection of his electrifying sculptures, eye-popping paintings, and stunning pages from the journals he kept during his years rock climbing in California’s Sierra Nevada. With an introduction by Dan Nadel, this volume offers a first-time portrait of the great “not really a cartoonist” cartoonist.

"Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters. The White Bear and The Rearguard are two of Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan's most acclaimed novellas: tales of personal, political, and religious strife, full of keen psychological insight, set amid the sweeping changes of late nineteenth-century Danish society. Pontoppidan's prose is spellbinding in its taut, unvarnished grace, a quality translator Paul Larkin masterfully captures in this stunning new translation. The White Bear is the odyssey of the priest Thorkild Mèuller, who becomes minister to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland and is slowly integrated within the community. After spending much of his adult life in Greenland, he returns to Denmark, where his popularity among his parishioners brings the ire of the Church upon his head. Newlyweds J²rgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, J²rgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism. Ursula, on the other hand, comes from an upper-middle-class family and is politically conservative. Though each strives to change the other's worldview as they start their new life in Rome, tensions rise, and misunderstandings abound. A searching examination of art and individuality, this version of The Rearguard is the never-before-translated 1905 edition, which elucidates with greater complexity Jorgen's character as well as Ursula's resolve to temper him with love"--

"In Misery of Love, a spiritual sequel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, Yvan Alagbâe continues his interrogation of race and family in modern France. The book focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, who is spending time with her family for her grandfather's funeral. Alagbâe shifts between narratives of the family, all haunted by the legacy of France's colonial subjugation of Africa. Alagbâe works in stormy grayscale washes, using comics, as he puts it, as "a sacred dimension which celebrates, questions and perpetuates life.... I believe that life is not damnation but grace.""--

"Roberta Leem a lovely Berkeley student of unusual promise, went running one November Sunday in 1984 with her lover, Bradley Page. He came back alone. Roberta, sometimes volatile and moody, had run off on her own, he said. When she failed to return, one of the largest missing-person searches in California history was launched. Five weeks later, her battered body was found on a bed of branches in a shallow grave. Within hours, Page had confessed to the murder of Roberta Lee- and then recanted. The story of the dead girl had begun. Melanie Thernstrom, a brilliant young writer and poet, was Roberta's closest friend. IN this stunning debut, she has written a heartbreaking tribute, both elegy and celebration, to her lost friend. IN a haunting, many-layered work of striking originality, we experience the horrifying crime at its center, the agonizing search for the body, the trial and its wrenching, explosive climax, the sinister and deceptively bland defendant. Through the filter of memory, Roberta herself- gifted, fiercly intelligent, yearning for love- is intensely alive. Even in a time of numbing violence, every reader will mourn the loss of this one spirited young girl"--

"Stephen Rodefer was one of the most innovative and singular of American poets, a student of Charles Olson's often associated with the Language poets but whose eclectic, energetic verse defies categorization and embraces a worldly lyricism uniquely his own. Four Lectures is widely considered to be his masterpiece, a book of four long poems that explore the radical possibilities of language through a generous, intimate collage of the sights and sounds, the words and images that form the poet's world. Making freewheeling reference to Shakespeare and Sappho, Looney Tunes and Ethel Waters, among others, Rodefer boldly reimagines the modern philosophical poem, exemplified by Four Quartets and Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, for a new and fragmentary age. First published in 1982 by Geoffrey Young's legendary press The Figures and long beloved by readers, these witty, playful poems have been unavailable in a single volume for nearly half a century. This new edition will reproduce the layout of the original, in which the material presentation of words on the page is integral to the meaning of the poem. Of Four Lectures, Ron Silliman writes: "Philosopher-harlequin, the poet speaks plainly, having just now invented the line. What other writer can give us this much of the real.""--

"Best known as a master novelist, Henry James was also an incisive critic whose essays on the novel had as profound an influence on its development as did his fiction. Here, Pulitzer-finalist Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, gathers some of the most virtuosic essays from across fifty years of James's career. From his landmark essay "The Art of Fiction," an exhilarating treatise on the complexity of literary form, to "The Lesson of Balzac," a tender portrait of one of James's greatest touchstones, to career-defining assessments of writers such as George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev, James reveals himself as a passionate and sensitive reader, one whose unerring ability to locate the currents within Anglophone literature was matched only by his uncommon prescience regarding its future. Slyly humorous and unabashedly opinionated, On Writers and Writing is a compelling artistic biography of a writer at his cogent and stylish best"--

A new collection of short fiction and nonfiction by a Russian master of bittersweet humor, dramatic irony, and poignant insights into contemporary life.The town of Tarusa lies 101 kilometers outside Moscow, far enough to have served, under Soviet rule, as a place where former political prisoners and other “undesirables” could legally settle. Lying between the center of power and the provinces, between the modern urban capital and the countryside, Tarusa is the perfect place from which to observe a Russia that, in Maxim Osipov’s words, “changes a lot [in the course of a decade], but in two centuries—not at all.” The stories and essays in this volume—a follow-up to his debut in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors—tackle major questions of modern life in and beyond Russia with Osipov’s trademark blend of daring and subtlety. Deceit, political pressure, ethnic discrimination, the urge to emigrate, and the fear of abandoning one’s home, as well as myriad generational debts and conflicts, are as complexly woven through these pieces as they are through the lives of Osipov’s fellow Russians and through our own. What binds the prose in this volume is not only a set of concerns, however, but also Osipov’s penetrating insights and fearless realism. “Dreams fall away, one after another,” he writes in the opening essay, “some because they come true, but most because they prove pointless.” Yet, as he reminds us in the final essay, when viewed from ground level, “life tends not towards depletion, towards zero, but, on the contrary, towards repletion, fullness.”

The experiences of womanhood are heightened and transformed in these eerie, fairy tale-like comics by a gifted artist-writer duo.Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West German-born Katrin de Vries read a magazine featuring the drawings of the East German-born Anke Feuchtenberger. De Vries wrote to ask Feuchtenberger if she might want to collaborate, and together they've produced some of the most striking German comics of the last thirty years, most notably W the Whore.Collected here in English for the first time, W the Whore, W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, and W the Whore Throws the Glove present the shared vision of de Vries and Feuchtenberger at its most ambitious. The titular heroine, W the Whore, drawn in a shifting guise by Feuchtenberger, navigates the tedious rituals of womanhood, the unsettling mysteries of male desire, and the strangeness of motherhood, all while moving through a familiar but hostile everyday landscape of houses, factories, rail yards, and other ominous structures. An intimate and captivating work of comics, W the Whore is a testament to the challenges of existing in the bodies that we have been fated to inhabit, and what we do to persevere.

Colette''s celebrated novels about an older courtesan and her young lover, now in a new translation and published in one volume.Colette’s Chéri (1920) and its sequel, The End of Chéri (1926), are widely considered her masterpieces. In sensuous, elegant prose, the two novels explore the evolving inner lives and the intimate relationship of an unlikely couple: Léa de Lonval, a middle-aged former courtesan, and Fred Peloux, twenty-five years her junior, known as Chéri. The two have been involved for years, and it is time for Chéri to get on with life, to make something of himself, but he, the personification of male beauty and vanity, doesn’t know how to go about it. It is time, too, for Léa to let go ofChéri and the sensual life that has been hers, and yet this is more easily resolved than done. Chéri marries, but once married he is restless and is inevitably drawn back to his mistress, as she is to him. And yet to reprise their relationship is only to realize even more the inevitability of its end. That end will come when Chéri, back from World War I, encounters a world that the war has changed through and through. Lost in his memories of time past, he is irremediably lost to the busy present. Paul Eprile’s new translation of these two celebrated novels brings out a vivid sensuality and acute intelligence that past translations have failed to capture.

A fresh, provocative look at the link between poetry and Christianity, both as it relates to the Bible itself as well as to Christian and religious life, by an accomplished scholar. The Bible is full of poems. It includes the Psalms and the Song of Songs of course, but poetry also plays an immense part in the Prophets and shows up in the books of the Old Testament. The New Testament, for its part, reverberates with allusions to the poetry of the Old Testament and concludes with Revelation, a visionary poem, while Jesus, seeking to open his listener's eyes to the kingdom of heaven, describes it with the poetic epithet of "a treasure hid in a field," while the son of God is the "true vine," "the light of the world," "the good shepherd," "the way, the truth, and the life." The Bible, in other words, asks to be read poetically throughout, and yet readers have rarely considered the implications of that, much less heeded its call. In The Bible and Poetry, the poet and scholar Michael Edwards seeks to transform how the Bible and Christianity are understood, arguing that poetry is not an ornamental or accidental feature of the Bible but is central to its meaning. The creative use of words that is poetry is the necessary medium of the Creator's word, and belief emerges not from precepts and propositions but out of the lived experience-this is what the Bible offers above of all-of the power of that word.

Prometheus Bound is the starkest and strangest of the classic Greek tragedies, a play in which god and man are presented as radically, irreconcilably at odds. It begins with the shock of hammer blows as the Titan Prometheus is shackled to a rock in the Caucasus. This is his punishment for giving the gift of fire to humankind and for thwarting Zeus's decision to exterminate the human race. Prometheus's pain is unceasing, but he refuses to recant his commitment to humanity, to whom he has also brought the knowledge of writing, mathematics, medicine, and architecture. He hints that he knows how Zeus will be brought low in the future, but when Hermes demands that Prometheus divulge his secret, he refuses and is sent spinning into the abyss by a divine thunderbolt. To whom does humanity look for guidance: to the supreme deity or to the rebel Titan? What law controls the cosmos? Prometheus Bound, one of the great poetic achievements of the ancient world, appears here in a splendid new translation by Joel Agee that does full justice to the harsh and keening music of the original Greek.

A tale of high adventure and lyrical celebration, tenderness and violence, generosity and ruthlessness, Memed, My Hawk is the defining achievement of one of the greatest and most beloved of living writers, Yashar Kemal. It is reissued here with a new introduction by the author on the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication.Memed, a high-spirited, kindhearted boy, grows up in a desperately poor mountain village whose inhabitants are kept in virtual slavery by the local landlord. Determined to escape from the life of toil and humiliation to which he has been born, he flees but is caught, tortured, and nearly killed. When at last he does get away, it is to set up as a roving brigand, celebrated in song, who could be a liberator to his people—unless, like the thistles that cover the mountain slopes of his native region, his character has taken an irremediably harsh and unforgiving form.

Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury—until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession of unlikely twists and turns. Intimately involved in the mysterious Lockhart affair, a conspiracy which almost brought down the fledgling Soviet state, mistress to Maxim Gorky and then to H.G. Wells, Moura was a woman of enormous energy, intelligence, and charm whose deepest passion was undoubtedly the mythologization of her own life.Recognized as one of the great masters of Russian twentieth-century fiction, Nina Berberova here proves again that she is the unsurpassed chronicler of the lives of Soviet émigrés. In Moura Budberg, a woman who shrouded the facts of her life in fiction, Berberova finds the ideal material from which to craft a triumph of literary portraiture, a book as engaging and as full of life and incident as any one of her celebrated novels.

Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked stories combining the supernatural and the satirical, astute social observation and unusual personal detail. But the heart of the book, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is a starkly realistic novella about New York City, its dance halls and speakeasies and slums. So sexually frank that for years Wilson's book was suppressed, this story is one of the great lost works of twentieth-century American literature: an astringent, comic, ultimately devastating exploration of lust and love, how they do and do not overlap.

For two years before and after the 1948 Communist Revolution, David Kidd lived in Peking, where he married the daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family. "I used to hope," he writes, "that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding into the darkness the wonder that had been our lives." Here Kidd himself brings that wonder to life.

At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."

Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Judas.One of the great books of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In the warring, neo-feudal society of this cross-genre novel for fans of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson, the greatest treasure is a dose of tellurium—a magical drug administered by a spike through the brain.Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere is the appetite for the special substance tellurium. A spike of tellurium, driven into the brain by an expert hand, offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered, it means death.The fifty chapters of Telluria map out this brave new world from fifty different angles, as Vladimir Sorokin, always a virtuoso of the word, introduces us to, among many other figures, partisans and princes, peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. The book is an immense and sumptuous tapestry of the word, carnivalesque and cruel, and Max Lawton, Sorokin’s gifted translator, has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson.