National Bestseller Featuring a new postscript including five new photos from Patti Smith From the National Book Awardwinning author of Just Kids : an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as a roadmap to my life. M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlos Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New Yorks Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writers craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smiths life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.
In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms their life into a work of art. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young queer artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, laughter, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of how one young writer managed to shrug off the imposition of a rigid cultural identity. Told in Myles's audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate by their lyrical language, Chelsea Girls weaves together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, their volatile adolescence, their unabashed "lesbianity," and their riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s and 80s New York.
A new horror stalks the kingdom of the Danes. Grendel has crawled from hell to lay waste to the country and devour its people. Mighty Beowulf comes forward to fight this demonic enemy. But Grendel has a powerful and deadly ally. Can Beowulf survive the rage of a fiendish mother who will destroy anyone who harms her child?
The former director of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm makes his literary debut with this dramatic and riveting novel of book publishing, emigres, spies, and diplomats in World War II Sweden based on his grandfather''s life
In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons. Living as a refugee in Stockholm, Immanuel continues to write, contributing articles to a liberal Swiss newspaper under the name Dr. B. He becomes increasingly entangled with British intelligence agents who plan several acts of sabotage on the orders of Winston Churchill. But when the Swedish postal service picks up a letter written in invisible ink, clearly by Dr. B. himself, the Allied plotters are exposed. But could a Jew living in exile and targeted for death by the Nazis have wanted to tip them off?
Illuminated by the wartime experiences of the author''s grandfather, Dr. B. is a riveting story of emigres, spies and diplomats that shines a light on a forgotten corner of World War II history.
''A superb thriller, a cross between Tom Stoppard''s Travesties and The Thirty-Nine Steps ... You can''t put it down. This is an astonishing debut and Daniel Birnbaum is clearly a talent to look out for'' The Jewish Chronicle
''If you''re looking for a ridiculously brilliant story, you can stop looking ... He''s got the world''s best story - he''s got Dr B'' Svenska Dagbladet
''An astonishing thriller-novel ... reminiscent of both Hjalmar Soderberg''s Doctor Glass as well as the dreamy melancholy in The Rings of Saturn by W.G Sebald'' Aftonbladet
''A moving evocation of a life beset by conflicts in a troubled time'' Kirkus Reviews
This collection contains stories about the sport of love - Don Juanism, ageing, male and female power and seductions undertaken for all kinds of intriguing motives. Milan Kundera is author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting".
''A hugely entertaining and well-written tour of the links between math and literature. Hart''s lightness of touch and passion for both subjects make this book a delight to read. Bookworms and number-lovers alike will discover much they didn''t know about the creative interplay between stories, structure and sums.'' - Alex Bellos
''This exuberant book will educate, amuse and surprise. It might even add another dimension to the way you read.'' - The Sunday Times
We often think of mathematics and literature as polar opposites. But what if, instead, they were fundamentally linked? In this insightful, laugh-out-loud funny book, Once Upon a Prime, Professor Sarah Hart shows us the myriad connections between maths and literature, and how understanding those connections can enhance our enjoyment of both.
Did you know, for instance, that Moby-Dick is full of sophisticated geometry? That James Joyce''s stream-of-consciousness novels are deliberately checkered with mathematical references? That George Eliot was obsessed with statistics? That Jurassic Park is undergirded by fractal patterns? That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote mathematician characters?
From sonnets to fairytales to experimental French literature, Once Upon a Prime takes us on an unforgettable journey through the books we thought we knew, revealing new layers of beauty and wonder. Professor Hart shows how maths and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe.
To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write. In the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself. On some lines of Virgil opens out into a frank discussion of sexuality and males a revolutionary case for the equamoyu of the sexes. In On Experience Montaigne superbly propounds his thoughts on the right way to live, while other essays touch on issues of an age struggling with religious and intellectual strife, with France torn apart by civil war. These diverse subjects are united by Montaigne's distinctive voice - that of a tolerant man, sceptical, humane, often humorous and utterly honest in his pursuit of the truth.
M. A. Screech's distinguished translation fully retains the light-hearted and inquiring nature of the essays. In his introduction, he examines Montaigne's life and tome, and the remarkable self-portrait that emerges from his works.
"Wicked and provocative...Vidal's purview of Hollywood in one of its golden ages is fascinating." -- Chicago Tribune In his brilliant and dazzling new novel, Gore Vidal sweeps us into one of the most fascinating periods of American political and social change. The time is 1917. In Washington, President Wilson is about to lead the United States into the Great War. In California, a new industry is born that will transform America: moving pictures. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics, from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the author's own grandfather, the blind Senator Gore. With Hollywood , Vidal once again proves himself a superb storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of human nature's endless deceptions.
Le présent ouvrage est le compagnon du deuxième tome de l 'Histoire de La littérature .franco-ontarienne des origines à nos jours. Ce tome II traite de «La littérature des fonctionnaires (1865-1910)», titre adopté parce que la plupart des écrivains des années 1865 à 1910 sont fonctionnaires, attachés au Parlement du Canada qui siège à Ottawa depuis 1865.
Chacun des dix-huit auteurs étudiés dans le volume historique est présenté dans l'anthologie par une biographie et un choix de textes.
Winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Oscar Wilde is the definitive biography of the tortured poet and playwright and the last book by renowned biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann. Ellmann dedicated two decades to the research and writing of this biography, resulting in a complex and richly detailed portrait of Oscar Wilde. Ellman captures the wit, creativity, and charm of the psychologically and sexually complicated writer, as well as the darker aspects of his personality and life. Covering everything from Wilde's rise as a young literary talent to his eventual imprisonment and death in exile with exquisite detail, Ellmann's fascinating account of Wilde's life and work is a resounding triumph.
For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates have been proposed as their true author. This title unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays.
Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognise a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of the novel. In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Profound, sad and disquieting but above all a love story, Identity provides further proof of Kundera's astonishing gifts as a novelist.
