Meet Vi Asplund, a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. Meet her brother, Jens, who is poised to make a fortune on Big If, a nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. View American society as Vi sees it in the crowds, in her brother and in her fellow agents.
At the opening of this masterful debut novel, Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits while his neighbors the Pathaks and the Asranis argue over who will pay for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of the apartment building we are pulled into the drama of the residents' lives: Mr. Jalal's obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja's longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie.Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence. As Vishnu closes in on the riddle of his own mortality, we wonder whether he might not be the god Vishnu, guardian not only of the fate of the building and its occupants, but of the entire universe.
An electrifying collection of the finest, most entertaining, and illuminating writing on and from the rock and roll scene--from its earliest days to the present, from the brightest moments of the biggest stars to obscure but compellingly significant treasures. The crazy, exhilarating, endlessly creative world of rock and roll has fascinated us--and some of our best writers--since the earliest days of the genre. William McKeen has assembled in this book the writing of those who played the music and pushed it to new limits, as well as those who were on the scene to witness and celebrate its magic. The story of rock and roll music and the rock and roll life lifts from these pages with marvelous immediacy, in selections ranging from Bruce Springsteen on his experience of backing up Chuck Berry, to Joan Didion sitting in on a Doors recording session, to Henry Rollins on Madonna, to Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. Tom Wolfe, Patti Smith, Don DeLillo, John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Nick Hornby, and many others contribute to this portrait of the music and its culture from its ancestors in the blues to its latest variants beyond grunge and rap. The book is organized into sections that create provocative and eye-opening juxtapositions, from "Superstardom" to "Weirdness," from "Present at the Creation" to "Soul." A section on rock critics shows how these writers matched the music with their own sharp rhythm, while "Tributes" rounds off the volume by remembering in their glory some of the greats who are making noise in the hereafter.
The stories collected in this anthology are among Highsmith's most mature, psychologically penetrating works. The warm familiarities of middle-class life become the eerie setting for Highsmith's portrayals of violence, secrecy and madness.
Delmore Schwartz, the most influential critic in postwar America, wrote of Patrick O'Brian's first novel Testimonies: "A triumph...drawn forward by lyric eloquence and the story's fascination, [the reader] discovers in the end that he has encountered in a new way the sphinx and the riddle of existence itself." Schwartz' imagination was fired by this sinister tale of love and death set in Wales, a timeless story with echoes of Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb.Joseph Pugh, sick of Oxford and of teaching, decides to take some time off to live in a wild and beautiful Welsh farm valley. There he falls physically ill and is nursed back to health by Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of a neighboring farmer. Slowly, unwillingly, Bronwen and Pugh fall in love;' and while that word is never spoken between them, their story is as passionate and as tragic as that of Vronsky and Anna Karenina.
Alan Turing helped break the Nazis' Enigma code and became a champion of artificial intelligence. An openly gay man, he was sentenced to chemical castration and committed suicide. Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity--his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor.
For 6,000 years, irrigation has ranked among the most powerful tools of human advancement. The story of settled agriculture, the growth of cities, and the rise of early empires is, to no small degree, a story of controlling water to make the land more prosperous and habitable. Pillar of Sand examines the history, challenges, and pitfalls of irrigated agriculture - from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to twentieth-century India and the United States. By unmasking the risks faced by irrigation-based societies - including water scarcity, soil salinization, and conflicts over rivers - water specialist Sandra Postel connects the lessons of the past with the challenge of making irrigation thrive into the twenty-first century and beyond. Protecting rivers and vital ecosystems as the world aims to feed 8 billion people will require a doubling of water productivity - getting twice as much benefit from each gallon removed from rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Pillar of Sand points the way toward managing the growing competition for scarce water. And it lays out a strategy for correcting a startling flaw of the modern irrigation age - its failure to better the lives of the majority of the world's poorest farmers.
Ezra Pound is destined to rank as one of the great translators of all time. Ranging through many languages, he chose for translation writers whose work marked a significant turning point in the development of world literature, or key poems which exemplify what is most vital in a given period or genre. This new enlarged edition, devoted chiefly to poetry, includes some forty pages of previously uncollected material. Anglo-Saxon: The Seafarer. Chinese: (Cathay) Rihaku (Li Po). Bunno, Mei Sheng, T'ao Yuan Ming. Egyptian: Conversations in Courtship. French: du Bellay, de Boufflers, D'Orléans, Lalorgue, Lubicz-Milosz, Rimbaud, Tailhade. Prose: de Gourmont. Hindi: Kabir. Italian: Cavalcanti, St. Francis, Guinicelli, Leopardi, Montanari, Orlandi. Japanese Noh Plays: 15 plays with Fenollosa's commentary. Latin: Catullus, Horace, Navagero, Rutilius. Provençal: Bertrand de Born, Cercalmon, Daniel, Folquet de Romans, Li Viniers, Ventadorn.
New Directions has long published poet William Carlos Williams' entire body of short fiction as The Farmers' Daughters (1961). This new edition of The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic (1938) with the later collection Make Light of It (1950) and the great long story, "The Farmers' Daughters" (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams' immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams' portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.
"Men have monopolized human experience, leaving women unable to imagine themselves as both ambitious and female. If I imagine myself (woman has always asked) whole, active, a self, will I not cease, in some profound way, to be a woman? The answer must be: imagine, and the old idea of womanhood be damned. . . . Let us imagine ourselves as selves, as at once striving and female. Womanhood can be what we say it is, not what they have always told us it was."
The author chronicles her efforts to regain her health after having suffered a stroke at the age of seventy-three, describes her self-proclaimed life of solitude, and offers keen observations on the natural world surrounding her.
First published in 1962, this novel is one of the most lyrical and authentic portraits of a jazz musician ever published. Born into violence, in the midst of a destructive tornado that flattens sections of East St. Louis, Raymond Douglas overcomes obstacles of family and race to become a jazz trumpeter whose music touches greatness. Rave praise for the Old School Books Series: "One of the most exciting literary revival series since the rediscovery of Jim Thompson's novels..." --Digby Diehl, Playboy "If you can't get enough of Shaft, Foxy Brown (the original one) or Dolemite, then check Old School Books' new series of pulp novels featuring the boldest African-American authors of our time. These new cultural artifacts are fast-paced and hard. They take the brutality and ruin of the urban Black landscape and transform them into art. Each character in the series is searching for "old school" wisdom and never loses sight of the racial, political, and emotional context from which they came."--The Source "My endorsement of Old School Books is a hundred percent. This is the kind of publishing program that shows serious readers that publishing can still be more than just a business. This is a cultural service of the highest order. W.W. Norton and Company deserves a standing ovation. Congratulations."--Clarence Major, University of California, Davis "Glad to see that at least one publisher isn't afflicted with the bottom-line fever, the republishing of these old time classics proves that Norton is devoted to quality publishing. I'm especially glad to see John A. Williams' The Angry Ones used. It's as fresh as the day it was written."--Ishmael Reed, University of California, Berkeley "As of late, members of the pulp pantheon are finding themselves being revised by Hollywood, scrutinized by serious academics, and canonized by the Library of America, though they never completely went out of fashion. But a little-known subgenre of pulp that faded from public view will soon be getting its second chance when Norton's Old School Books, a series of paperback reprint by black pulp novelists, hit bookstores."--Village Voice Literary Supplement
This book details the steps you need to take to turn your idea--whether it's a song or a rocket engine--into an income.
Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991, Joyce Carol Oates's The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy's violent childhood-shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder-and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.
Growing evidence suggests that the global economy, rooted in ideas and assumptions that were progressive two hundred years ago, is now destroying its own ecological base and offering little to billions of impoverished people. In response, pioneers are creating the architecture of sustainable economies, one innovation at a time. State of the World 2008 describes these innovations-from microfinance to closed-loop manufacturing and the use of trusts to protect common resources-as well as identifying the obstacles that prevent a critical mass of people and organizations from moving toward sustainability, and rallying coalitions of stakeholders that can produce win-win solutions and strategies for achieving specific sustainability goals.
Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past-guided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their lives-gradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a slow decline from English nobility on one side, a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry on the other. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir, "part multiple biography, part autobiography, but principally an oblique investigation of the biographer's art" (New York Times Book Review). "[A] perfect example of a memoir that entrances me."-Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe "[O]ne of the few [biographers] who can convey what makes ordinary as well as extraordinary mortals live in our minds."-Los Angeles Times
His ideas have influenced the diverse psychoanalytic schools of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Hans Kohut. But his reach extends far beyond professional circles: his talks to general audiences over the years won him enormous numbers of followers among parents and teachers who have found his observations rich in penetrating insight.This collection brings together many of Winnicott's most important pieces, including previously unpublished talks and several essays from books and journals now difficult to obtain. They range widely in topic-from "The Concept of a Healthy Individual" and "The Value of Depression" to "Delinquency as a Sign of Hope"-and elucidate some of Winnicott's seminal ideas, such as the "transitional object" and the concept of false self. All convey Winnicott's vision of the ways in which the developing self interacts with the family and the larger society.
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.
Lacan dedicates this seventh year of his famous seminar to the problematic role of ethics in psychoanalysis. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions and "the attraction of transgression," Lacan illuminates Freud's psychoanalytic work and its continued influence. Lacan explores the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy (a reading of Sophocle's Antigone), and the tragic dimension of analytic experience. His exploration leads us to startling insights on "the consequence of man's relationship to desire" and the conflicting judgments of ethics and analysis.
Greenblatt interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. Readers see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world.
In 1941, 23-year-old Helen Bynum leaves rural New York to find her Aunt Lulu, an ageing actress in New Orleans. There Helen finds a life of passion and adventure, possibilities and choices. Falling in with a group of intellectuals, she discovers romance and sex, and friendship and risk.
Through their lives and their writings, Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. She provides a commentary to the poems in "Birthday Letters", showing the events that shaped them and showing how they draw upon Plath's own work.
Under the pharoah Cheops, the great pyramids at Giza were built, and according to Herodotus, Egypt was "plunged into all manner of wickedness." This book takes Herodotus back in time to see the dying Cheops and the intrigues of his court, rife with murder, incest and rebellion.
Based on the latest research, this book is filled with pain-saving advice. It also contains instructional facts such as: so many adults suffer bouts of back pain that many doctors consider them normal occurrences, like a cold or flu.
Textual notes illuminate the novel's historical background, regional references, and the non-translated Creole and French phrases necessary to fully understand this powerful story. Backgrounds includes a wealth of material on the novel's long evolution, it connections to Jane Eyre, and Rhys's biographical impressions of growing up in Dominica. Criticism introduces readers to the critical debates inspired by the novel with a Derek Walcott poem and eleven essays.
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