Book of the Week Archive « ReadySteadyBook

Monday, January 16, 2012

After the Future by Franco Bifo Berardi
After the Future explores our century-long obsession with the concept of "the future." Beginning with F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and the worldwide race toward a new and highly mechanized society that defined the Century of Progress, Franco Berardi traces the genesis of future-oriented thought through the punk movement of the early '70s and into the media revolution of the '90s. Cyberculture, the last truly utopian vision of the future, has ended in a clash, and left behind an ever-growing system of virtual life and actual death, of virtual knowledge and actual war.Our future, Berardi argues, has come and gone; the concept has lost its usefulness. Now it's our responsibility to decide what comes next. Drawing on his own involvement with the Autonomia movement in Italy and his collaboration and friendship with leading thinkers of the European political left, including Guattari and Negri, Berardi presents a highly nuanced analysis of the state of the contemporary working class, and charts a course out of the modern dystopian moment.

Monday, January 09, 2012

Communization and its Discontents by Benjamin Noys
Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth-century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present? "Communization" is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Southern California, and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the "human strike," autonomous communes, occupation, and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure. Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats Communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorisations of Communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Theorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.

Monday, January 02, 2012

The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini
For a brief but explosive period in the mid-seventies, the young, the unemployed and the homeless of Italy's cities came together in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy. Against the austerity programmes and social discipline of the ruling Christian Democrats and their would-be partners in the Communist Party, the movement developed a politics of refusal expressed in school occupations and factory sabotage, mass shoplifting and violent street protest, combined with carnivalesque creativity. But the movement was soon divided, especially over the issue of armed struggle, while its opponents united behind the most repressive measures ever seen in postwar Italy. Nanni Balestrini, himself a victim of that repression, follows in spare but vivid unpunctuated prose Autonomy's trajectory through the eyes of one working-class protagonist from high-school rebellion, squatting and attempts to set up a free radio station, to arrest and the brutalities of imprisonment. This is a powerful and gripping novel: a rare evocation of the intensity of commitment, the passion of politics.

Monday, December 19, 2011

A Public Intimacy by Paul Buck

A Public Intimacy (A Life Through Scrapbooks) is a way of reviewing an archive. Cuttings, clippings and comments, the stuff of scrapbooks, started in 1964, make up part of the author’s archive, the information that threads through the library, events and life explored. The book does not fit easily into any genre or category, blurring notions of essay or biography, or ideas employed in fiction writing and other art forms. Traversing paths pursued in visual art is a key factor, even outside the more obvious image pages. Collage is part of the process, with cuttings scrolling vertically alongside the text, forming an adjacent narrative. In part an account of the times, the counter-currents and counter-culture of the last four decades, in part an exploration of the nature of scrapbooks and of collections, the book forms as much a counter-intellectual narrative of the times, as counter-biography, revealing as much as the writer wants, playing into the hands of fiction as much as any novel. Paul Buck works as a poet, writer, playwright, artist, performer, translator and teacher in the visual arts. As well as founding the seminal magazine Curtains, which blasted French contemporary writing into British culture, he is the author, editor and translator of numerous published and unpublished works, appended in this book as Selected Context.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfeld
Jew Boy is a novel about poverty and politics in the tumultuous world of London’s Jewish East End in the 1930s, where boxers mixed with anarchist and communists, and Yiddish actors and poets rubbed shoulders with gamblers and gangsters. All were united in their hatred of fascism and prepared to use force when necessary to defeat it. Yet of equal interest for the contemporary reader is the novel’s exploration of the personal lives and thwarted aspirations of young people at this time, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The world portrayed here is truly unremitting. The factory scenes are brilliantly done, bringing to life the reality of sweatshops and sweated labour, and vividly portraying the exhaustion produced by long hours, unforgiving deadlines and cut-throat competition. It was the authenticity of these scenes which won the praise of reviewers when first published. ‘The reality of the thing is incontestable,’ Marie Crosbie wrote in John O’London’s Weekly. In the Daily Telegraph, James Hilton reviewed it ahead of the latest novel by Graham Greene, England Made Me, clearly preferring Blumenfeld’s keen intelligence, sense of humour and ‘flashing anger’. Time And Tide noted that, ‘Jew Boy does for Whitechapel what Love On The Dole has done for Manchester and Salford, and moreover does it as well, if not even better.’

Monday, December 05, 2011

The Book of Common Prayer by Brian Cummings
'In the midst of life we are in death' The words of the Book of Common Prayer have permeated deep into the English language all over the world. For nearly 500 years, and for countless people, it has provided a background fanfare for a marriage or a funeral march at a burial. Yet this familiarity also hides a violent and controversial history. When it was first produced the Book of Common Prayer provoked riots and rebellion, and it was banned before being translated into a host of global languages and adopted as the basis for worship in the USA and elsewhere to the present day. This edition presents the work in three different states: the first edition of 1549, which brought the Reformation into people's homes; the Elizabethan prayer book of 1559, familiar to Shakespeare and Milton; and the edition of 1662, which embodies the religious temper of the nation down to modern times. Far from being a book for the religious only, the Book of Common Prayer is one of the seminal texts of human experience and a manual of everyday ritual: a book to live, love, and die to.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Glorious Nemesis by Ladislav Klima
Klima's intense inner life and complex mental state is reflected in his peculiar writings. The eccentricity of style and occasional violence found in his prose were intended to convey the deep conflicts attending his thought processes, and this is perhaps best exemplified in the novella Glorious Nemesis. Set in the Tyrol (inspired by Klima's extended stay in Landeck), it is a balladic tale that explores the metaphysics of love and death, crime and reincarnation. Sider, a man of twenty-eight, is confronted by a giant mountain named Stag's Head and an ancient hovel standing under a high, black cliff. Out one day on a hike, he encounters two women who will mark his fate: the elder Errata and the younger Orea, dressed in blue. From this point on Sider is on a quest for the All, the Absolute, and to achieve eternity through divine retribution for the misdeeds of a past life. Willing to risk his entire fortune and sanity, he succumbs to his dreams and hallucinations as Orea, or her doppelganger, becomes for him a representation of the goddess Nemesis, the apotheosis of the Feminine who initiates him into the mysteries of life and death. Written around 1919 and last revised by Klima in 1926, Glorious Nemesis was published posthumously in 1932. This is the first English translation.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement and the Sacred by Douglas Hedley
This book is an original exploration of the idea of sacrifice by one of the world's pre-eminent philosophers of religion. Sacrifice Imagined is an original exploration of the idea of sacrifice by one of the world's preeminent philosophers of religion. Despisers of religion have poured scorn upon the idea of sacrifice as an index of the irrational and wicked in religious practice. Nor does its secularised form seem much more appealing. One need only think of the appalling cult of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet sacrifice remains a part of our cultural and intellectual 'imaginary'. Hedley proposes good reasons to think that issues of global conflict and the ecological crisis highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of sacrifice for contemporary culture. The subject of sacrifice has been decisively influenced by two books: Girard's The Violence and the Sacred and Burkert's Homo Necans. Both of these are theories of sacrifice as violence. Hedley's book challenges both of these highly influential theories and presents a theory of sacrifice as renunciation of the will. His guiding influences in this are the much misunderstood Joseph de Maistre and the Cambridge Platonists.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Lives on the Left: Interviews with New Left Review by Francis Mulhern
Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. These recollections span the one hundred years from the eve of the Great War to the present, ranging across Europe East and West, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel past and future, geography, and the theory and philosophy of language are among the associated areas of intellectual exchange. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and interpretation, reflection and affirmation, is a critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx. The extended critical interview is perhaps uniquely flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom usually denied to its subjects in conventional articles and books. This volume brings together fifteen such interviews from New Left Review to illuminate the record of intellectual engagement on the Left in the twentieth century and since. Lives on the Left brings the voices of the intellectual left to a new generation of readers. Included here are Georg Lukacs, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Joao Pedro Stedile, Wang Hui, Giovanni Arrighi and others.

Monday, November 07, 2011

Continental Divide by Peter E. Gordon
In the spring of 1929, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer met for a public conversation in Davos, Switzerland. They were arguably the most important thinkers in Europe, and their exchange touched upon the most urgent questions in the history of philosophy: What is human finitude? What is objectivity? What is culture? What is truth? Over the last eighty years the Davos encounter has acquired an allegorical significance, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in twentieth-century Continental thought. Here, in a reconstruction at once historical and philosophical, Peter Gordon re-examines the conversation, its origins and its aftermath, resuscitating an event that has become entombed in its own mythology. Through a close and painstaking analysis, Gordon dissects the exchange itself to reveal that it was at core a philosophical disagreement over what it means to be human. But Gordon also shows how the life and work of these two philosophers remained closely intertwined. Their disagreement can be understood only if we appreciate their common point of departure as thinkers of the German interwar crisis, an era of rebellion that touched all of the major philosophical movements of the day - life-philosophy, philosophical anthropology, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism. As Gordon explains, the Davos debate would continue to both inspire and provoke well after the two men had gone their separate ways. It remains, even today, a touchstone of philosophical memory. This clear, riveting book will be of great interest not only to philosophers and to historians of philosophy but also to anyone interested in the great intellectual ferment of Europe's interwar years.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Nine Lives of William Shakespeare by Graham Holderness
Who was Shakespeare and how did he live? Combining fact, tradition and imagination, Shakespeare's many lives are told in 9 possible ways. We know relatively little about Shakespeare's life, and yet it continues to fascinate us. This new biography of Shakespeare identifies and expounds the many possible 'lives' that can reasonably be drawn around the basic facts, traditions and literary remains of his legacy. Graham Holderness takes a hard and fresh look at the facts, the traditions, and the possible relations between a life and the works that life created. He offers nine possible short 'lives' of Shakespeare, each based on specific facts and traditions, drawn from the documentary record and from biographical interpretation and each supported by a body of critical and biographical work. Each section includes a critical essay detailing the biographical facts and showing how they have been interpreted, paired with a fictional narrative based on those facts. The fictional narratives use various styles, short stories, bogus historical documents, magic-realist fables. Each engages with the key facts, traditions and interpretative consensus, and creates an imaginary space in which the dry bones of historical record can be made to live.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe by Caroline Walker Bynum
In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects – among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers – allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounter with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond cultural study of "the body" – a field she helped to establish – Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.

Monday, October 10, 2011

An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought by Stefanos Geroulanos
French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.

Monday, October 03, 2011

Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie
When Alfred Jarry died in 1907 at the age of thirty-four, he was a legendary figure in Paris, but this had more to do with his bohemian lifestyle and scandalous behavior than his literary achievements. A century later, Jarry is firmly established as one of the leading figures of the artistic avant-garde. Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Philip K. Dick, Paul McCartney, DJ Spooky, Peter Greenaway, and J.G. Ballard are among his many admirers. A community of scholars and artists maintain a posthumous dialogue with Jarry's ideas through the College de 'Pataphysique in Paris (named after the "science of imaginary solutions" he conceived), while a steady stream of books on twentieth-century drama pay tribute to his absurd and grotesque play, Ubu Roi. Even so, most people today tend to think of Jarry only as the author of that play, and of his life as a string of outlandish "ubuesque" anecdotes, often recounted with wild inaccuracy. In this first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English, Alastair Brotchie reconstructs the life of a man intent on inventing (and destroying) himself, not to mention his world, and the "philosophy" that defined their relation. In short, Brotchie gives us the narrative version of what Jarry himself produced – a pataphysical life. Drawing on a wealth of new material, Brotchie alternates chapters of biographical narrative with chapters that connect themes, obsessions, and undercurrents that relate to the life. The anecdotes remain, and are even augmented: Jarry's assumption of the "ubuesque," his inversions of everyday behavior (such as eating backwards, from cheese to soup), his exploits with gun and bicycle, and his herculean feats of drinking. But Brotchie distinguishes between Jarry's purposely playing the fool and deeper nonconformities that appear essential to his writing and his thought, both of which remain a vital subterranean influence to this day.

Monday, September 26, 2011

A Theology of Love by Werner G. Jeanrond
This book explores the different dimensions of Christian love. It argues that all expressions of love are wrestling with the challenge of otherness and hence with the experience of transcendence. The development of Christian concepts of love is discussed with particular reference to the different horizons and the variety of approaches to love in the Bible, Augustine, medieval theology, Protestant agapetheology, Catholic approaches to desire, and contemporary philosophy and sociology. The discussion of the rich and often problematic heritage of expressions of personal, communal and religious love enables this study to develop a critical and constructive theology of Christian love for our time. This book demonstrates the diversity in the Christian tradition of love and thus offers a critical perspective on previous and present impositions of homogenous concepts of love. The book invites the reader to an in-depth examination of the potential of Christian love and its particular institutions for the development of personal and communal forms of Christian discipleship. The traditional separation between agape love and eroticism is overcome in favour of an integrated model of love that acknowledges both God's gift of love and the potential of every woman, man and child to contribute to the transformative praxis of love in church and society.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces by Derek Attridge
What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues that the challenge of Derrida's work for our understanding of literature and its value has still not been fully met, and in this book, which traces a close engagement with Derrida's writing over two decades and reflects an interest in that work going back a further two decades, shows how that work can illuminate a variety of topics. Chapters include an overview of deconstruction as a critical practice today, discussions of the secret, postcolonialism, ethics, literary criticism, jargon, fiction, and photography, and responses to the theoretical writing of Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes, and J. Hillis Miller. Also included is a discussion of the recent reading of Derrida's philosophy as 'radical atheism', and the book ends with a conversation on deconstruction and place with the theorist and critic Jean-Michel Rabate. Running throughout is a concern with the question of responsibility, as exemplified in Derrida's own readings of literary and philosophical texts: responsibility to the work being read, responsibility to the protocols of rational argument, and responsibility to the reader.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones
In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain's Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs. In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone "from salt of the earth to scum of the earth." Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, one based on the media's inexhaustible obsession with an indigent white underclass, he portrays a far more complex reality. Moving through Westminster's lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones reveals the increasing poverty and desperation of communities made precarious by wrenching social and industrial change, and all but abandoned by the aspirational, society-fragmenting policies of Thatcherism and New Labour. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems, and to justify widening inequality. Based on a wealth of original research, and wide-ranging interviews with media figures, political opinion-formers and workers, Chavs is a damning indictment of the media and political establishment, and an illuminating, disturbing portrait of inequality and class hatred in modern Britain.

Monday, August 22, 2011

The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark
Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, they continue to influence activists, artists and theorists. From the Invisible Committee's bestselling The Coming Insurrection to Iain Sinclair's psychogeographic explorations, their work is still found to be rich with possibilities, yet its breadth and diversity is still unexplored. In the first account since Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces (1989), McKenzie Wark traces the Situationist International's beginnings in 1950s bohemian Paris up to the explosive days of May 1968. This account puts the legendary figure of Guy Debord back into the context of the other fascinating figures who made up the movement, including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michele Bernstein and Jacqueline De Jong. It treats them as an international movement of conflicting passions rather than as a Paris coterie. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, Wark reconnects their work to new practices in communication, built form, and everyday life.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Works of Love by Soren Kierkegaard
The various kinds and conditions of love are a common theme for Kierkegaard, beginning with his early Either/Or, through The Diary of the Seducer and Judge William's eulogy on married love, to his last work, on the changelessness of God's love. Works of Love, the midpoint in the series, is also the monumental high point, because of its penetrating, illuminating analysis of the forms and sources of love. Love as feeling and mood is distinguished from works of love, love of the lovable from love of the unlovely, preferential love from love as the royal law, love as mutual egotism from triangular love, and erotic love from self-giving love. This work is marked by Kierkegaard's Socratic awareness of the reader, both as the center of awakened understanding and as the initiator of action. Written to be read aloud, the book conveys a keenness of thought and an insightful, poetic imagination that make such an attentive approach richly rewarding. "Works of Love" not only serves as an excellent place to begin exploring the writings of Kierkegaard, but also rewards many rereadings.

Monday, August 08, 2011

Spinoza Now by Christopher Norris
What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates. Engaging with Spinoza’s insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this collection critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. Spinoza Now pursues Spinoza’s challenge to abandon the temptation to think through the prism of death in order to arrive at a truly liberatory notion of freedom. In this bold endeavor, the essays gathered here extend the Spinozan project beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to encompass all forms of life-affirming activity, including the arts and literature. The essays, taken together, suggest that Spinoza now is not so much a statement about a “truth” that Spinoza’s writings can reveal to us in our present situation. It is, rather, the injunction to adhere to the attitude that affirms both necessity and impossibility.

Monday, August 01, 2011

Playing Gods: Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction by Andrew Feldherr
This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, The Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts. Andrew Feldherr argues that a key to the political as well as literary power of The Metamorphoses is the way it manipulates its readers' awareness that its stories cannot possibly be true. By continually juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, Ovid shows how a poem made up of fictions can and cannot acquire the authority and presence of other discursive forms. One important way that the poem does this is through narratives that create a 'double vision' by casting characters as both mythical figures and enduring presences in the physical landscapes of its readers. This narrative device creates the kind of tensions between identification and distance that Augustan Romans would have felt when experiencing imperial spectacle and other contemporary cultural forms.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity by Iain D. Thomson
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy by Arthur Bradley
This book provides a significant and insightful exploration of the so-called 'theological turn' in contemporary French thought. The philosopher Jacques Derrida speaks of a deeply ambiguous desire to 'save the name' of God in his work on negative theology, and this desire resonates in different ways in the work of his contemporaries. This turn to religion within the work of a group of thinkers who have been stereotypically identified as relativists or nihilists prompts a series of questions which form the background to this study. Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy advance a reading of negative theology as an ancient name for something that is essential, not simply to modern French thought, but to all responsible thought and action whatsoever. It will be of essential interest to theologians and philosophers and will also interest those concerned with the work of Derrida and his contemporaries.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution by Rebecca Comay
This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the upheaval in German philosophy inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. Many thinkers reasoned that a political revolution would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual "revolution" had preempted it. Having already been through its own cataclysm, Germany would be able to extract the energy of the Revolution and channel its radicalism into thought. Hegel comes close to making such an argument too. But he also offers a powerful analysis of how this kind of secondhand history gets generated in the first place, and shows what is stake. This is what makes him uniquely interesting among his contemporaries: he demonstrates how a fantasy can be simultaneously deconstructed and enjoyed. Mourning Sickness provides a new reading of Hegel in the light of contemporary theories of historical trauma. It explores the ways in which major historical events are experienced vicariously, and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Comay brings Hegel into relation with the most burning contemporary discussions around catastrophe, witness, memory, and the role of culture in shaping political experience.

Monday, July 04, 2011

The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture by Arthur Bradley
This collection explores the phenomenon of the messianic in contemporary philosophy, religion and culture. From the later Derrida's work on Marx and Benjamin to Agamben and Badiou's recent texts on St Paul, it is becoming possible to detect a marked 'messianic turn' in contemporary continental thought. However, despite the plethora of work in the field there has not been any sustained attempt to think through the larger philosophical, theological and cultural implications of this phenomenon. What, then, characterises our contemporary messianic moment? Where does it come from? And why speak of the messianic now? In The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture, a group of internationally-known figures and rising stars within the fields of continental philosophy, religious studies and cultural studies come together to consider what the messianic might mean at the beginning of the 21st century. (This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Research.)

Monday, June 27, 2011

The Straw Sandals by Pierre-Albert Jourdan
Jourdan wrote down notes, thoughts, observations and diary entries so sensitively as to remove the distinctions between prose, poetry and aphorism. This is a book of quiet meditation, marvel at the beauties of nature and keen awareness of the fleeting moments of life.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Darwin's Pious Idea by Conor Cunningham
According to British scholar Conor Cunningham, the debate today between religion and evolution has been hijacked by extremists: on one side stand fundamentalist believers who reject evolution outright, and opposing them are fundamentalist atheists who claim that Darwin's theory rules out the possibility of God. Both sides are dead wrong, argues Cunningham, who is at once a Christian and a firm believer in the theory of evolution. In Darwin's Pious Idea Cunningham puts forth a trenchant, compelling case for both creation and evolution, drawing skillfully on an array of philosophical, theological, historical, and scientific sources to buttress his arguments. Rowan Williams wrote: "Here is someone who is not afraid to immerse himself in the literature of scientific controversy, to raise some of the essential philosophical questions that both scientists and theologians often shirk, and to carry the battle behind the opponents' lines... This is certainly the most interesting and invigorating book on the science-religion frontier that I have encountered... there is no denying either the intellectual depth or the abundant, infectious energy that Conor Cunningham brings to his work."

Monday, June 13, 2011

The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism by Levi Bryant
What will happen to the tradition formerly known as continental philosophy? This exciting new anthology sketches an answer by bringing together the most prominent established and emerging authors in the field, all of them taking a more speculative turn than was found in the textually oriented continental philosophies of the past. The diverse positions outlined in this book include such old and new approaches as transcendental materialism, speculative realism, actor-network theory, object-oriented philosophy, non-philosophy, cosmopolitics, eliminative materialism, and even new-wave deconstruction. The book also has a highly international flavour, with its 19 authors hailing from 12 different countries on 5 continents.

Monday, May 30, 2011

The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time by Peter Fenves
The Messianic Reduction is a groundbreaking study of Walter Benjamin's thought. Peter Fenves places Benjamin's early writings in the context of contemporaneous philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Bergson, Cohen, Husserl, Frege, and Heidegger. By concentrating on a neglected dimension of Benjamin's friendship with Gershom Scholem, who was a student of mathematics before he became a scholar of Jewish mysticism, Fenves shows how mathematical research informs Benjamin's reflections on the problem of historical time. In order to capture the character of Benjamin's "entrance" into the phenomenological school, the book includes a thorough analysis of two early texts he wrote under the title of The Rainbow, translated here for the first time. In its final chapters, the book works out Benjamin's deep and abiding engagement with Kantian critique, including Benjamin's discovery of the political counterpart to the categorical imperative in the idea of "pure violence."

Monday, May 16, 2011

The Problem with Grace by Vincent W. Lloyd
This book develops a post-secular, post-sectarian political theology, taking that burgeoning field in a new direction. With his bold suggestion that political philosophy must begin with political theology, Vincent Lloyd investigates a series of religious concepts such as love, faith, liturgy, and revelation and explores their political relevance by extracting them from their Christian theological context while refusing to reduce them to secular terms. He assembles an unusual canon of thinkers "too Jewish to be Christian and too Christian to be Jewish" — Simone Weil, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and Gillian Rose — to aid him in his explorations. Unique in its serious attention to both theological writing about politics and the work of academic philosophers and theorists, The Problem with Grace deepens our understanding of political theological vocabulary as a way back to the everyday world. Politics is not about redemption, but about grappling with the ever-present difficulties, tragedies, and comedies of ordinary life.

Monday, May 09, 2011

Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 by Mark Nixon
This book sheds new light on the development of crucial aspects of Beckett's post-war writing by drawing on exclusive access to his unpublished German diaries. Six diary notebooks kept by Samuel Beckett during his 1936-7 trip through Nazi Germany were discovered in 1989. Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 is the first study to explore the relevance of these diaries to Beckett's development as a writer. Using the diaries as the central point of focus, Nixon draws on unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, reading notes from the 1930s to reflect on both Beckett's creative evolution prior to 1936 and the direction his writing took after his return to Dublin in April 1937. As well as gaining an insight into Beckett's reading of classical German literature, Nixon shows how the pared-down style of writing, the self-examination and the importance of the visual arts that govern Beckett's post-war works traces back to the pages of these notebooks. By illuminating how Beckett's writing and aesthetics underwent a far-reaching change during the 1930s, Nixon's study is crucial to our understanding of the emergence of Beckett as a radical writer in the post-war years.

Monday, May 02, 2011

Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love by John Keller
This study presents a comprehensive and original argument about the fundamental literary value and the underlying psychological meaning of Beckett's work. John Keller explores Beckett's work, not only for its importance on a personal, human level for many readers, but its place in elaborating the origins of human emotional life, and of creative fiction. He explores the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing, which he argues is primarily about love. Keller believes that Beckettian texts embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness founded on early experience with the mother. He suggests that Beckett's greatest achievement as an artist was to document a universal struggle that allows for the birth of mind, and to connect this struggle to the origin, and possibility of the creative act.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic by Slavoj Žižek
Catherine Malabou, Antonio Negri, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj Žižek join seven others – including William Desmond, Katrin Pahl, Adrian Johnston, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas A. Lewis – to apply Hegel's thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel's innovations against irrelevance and, importantly, reset the distinction of secular and sacred.These original contributions focus on Hegelian analysis and the transformative value of the philosopher's thought in relation to our current "turn to religion." Malabou develops Hegel's motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; Negri writes of Hegel's philosophy of right; Caputo reaffirms the radical theology made possible by Hegel; and Bosteels critiques fashionable readings of the philosopher and argues against the reducibility of his dialectic. Taylor reclaims Hegel's absolute as a process of infinite restlessness, and eiuek revisits the religious implications of Hegel's concept of letting go. Mirroring the philosopher's own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways in which Hegel inhabits them.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Modernism as a Philosophical Problem by Robert B. Pippin
Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture presents an interpretation of the negative and critical self-understanding characteristic of culture since romanticism and especially since Nietzsche, and answers the question of why the issue of modernity became a philosophical problem in European tradition.Pippin defends an original re-narration of the development of modern philosophy, substantially different from that common in orthodox, postmodernist and critical theory discussions, and one much more sensitive to the radicality of the most complete expression and defense of a modernist self-understanding - the classical German Idealist tradition, especially the position defended by Hegel. This interpretation is the basis for the claim that no paradigm shift, ideology critique, or new way of thinking can dispense with or overcome such modernist aspirations. In fact, the author argues, one can still detect the persistence of such aspirations and commitments in some of the harshest modernity critics, in Nietzsche and in Heidegger especially.

Monday, April 11, 2011

The Anatomy of Influence by Harold Bloom
'Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it', writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, 'is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate'. For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is 'a critical self-portrait', a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life? Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets - Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane - as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, yeats, Ashbery, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters.

Monday, April 04, 2011

Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces by Subha Mukherji
Why does the position of the threshold exert such a compelling hold on our imaginative lives? Why is it a resonant space, and so urgently the place of writing – the place where one may remain, avoid speaking or naming, yet speak from? Through a combination of case studies and theoretical investigations, this book addresses these questions and speaks to the imaginative power of the threshold as a productive space in literature and art. The first volume to draw together a significant range of the applications of the ‘threshold’, the book is located naturally on the threshold between disciplines, and alive to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of education and scholarship. But its particular intervention is mainly literary, whether through an address of literary narratives, or through the use of literary critical analysis, or indeed through acts of criticism that become creative acts. Of this line of enquiry, Thinking on Thresholds is a pioneering volume. Its broader remit is to examine the functions of transitive spaces in poetic language and mimesis. This includes ways in which narrative and mimetic art address the material and imaginative realities of such spaces; how they are drawn to threshold experience in life, society, and historical practice; and the affinity between the artistic process and the spatial idea of the threshold.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Democracy in What State? by Giorgio Agamben
"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaïd ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Ranciere highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Spurious by Lars Iyer
In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Show comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a 'slightly more successful' friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences where they serve better gin. Another reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no-one seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as 'Why?') and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it is too late. Or, he has to move.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Augustine's "Confessions": A Biography by Garry Wills
In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions - what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills' biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. 'We have to read Augustine as we do Dante', Wills writes, 'alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism'. Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic.

Monday, March 07, 2011

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Letters and Papers from Prison": A Biography by Martin E Marty
For fascination, influence, inspiration, and controversy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison is unmatched by any other book of Christian reflection written in the twentieth century. A Lutheran pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer spent two years in Nazi prisons before being executed at age thirty-nine, just a month before the German surrender, for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. The posthumous Letters and Papers from Prison has had a tremendous impact on both Christian and secular thought since it was first published in 1951, and has helped establish Bonhoeffer's reputation as one of the most important Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century. In this, the first history of the book's remarkable global career, Martin Marty tells how and why Letters and Papers from Prison has been read and used in such dramatically different ways, from the cold war to today. In his late letters, Bonhoeffer raised tantalizing questions about the role of Christianity and the church in an increasingly secular world. Marty tells the story of how, in the 1960s and the following decades, these provocative ideas stirred a wide range of thinkers and activists, including civil rights and antiapartheid campaigners, 'death-of-God' theologians, and East German Marxists. In the process of tracing the eventful and contested history of Bonhoeffer's book, Marty provides a compelling new perspective on religious and secular life in the postwar era.

Monday, March 07, 2011

Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? by Jean Baudrillard
'Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination,' writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? In this, one of the last texts written before his death in 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical 'subject,' whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a 'pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality'. Interspersed throughout the text are photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard's argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen - some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms - yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a 'vital dimension' of the existence of things.

Monday, February 21, 2011

When Miss Emmie Was in Russia by Harvey Pitcher
A Russian Upstairs, Downstairs, but one scented with the cordite and fear of revolution, and with a cast of devotedly loyal and capable British governesses. Miss Emmie is an intimate and revealing portrait of pre-Revolutionary Russian society which, contrary to received wisdoms, reveals a complex, liberal and humane society, full of enormous potential and past achievement. It is also the biography of five intrepid women who, by travelling abroad and working as governesses in Russia, achieved an intellectual dignity, a purpose and an authority which was denied them in their homeland. The extraordinary personal adventures of these women, as they negotiate the turmoil and terrifying anarchy of Revolution and Civil War, turns the book into a page-turning thriller.

Monday, February 21, 2011

The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir
'One is not born, but rather becomes, woman'. First published in Paris in 1949, "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beavoir was a groundbreaking, risque book that became a runaway success. Selling 20,000 copies in its first week, the book earned its author both notoriety and admiration. Since then, The Second Sex has been translated into forty languages and has become a landmark in the history of feminism. Required reading for anyone who believes in the equality of the sexes, the central messages of The Second Sex are as important today as they were for the housewives of the forties.

Monday, January 24, 2011

My Teaching by Jacques Lacan
Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst. Drawing on examples from popular culture and common sense, this lively book explores a range of Lacan's most important ideas, including his debt to Freud, linguistic unconsciousness and sexuality in its relation to psychoanalytic truth.

Monday, January 24, 2011

The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject by Paul Virilio
With around 645 million people expected to be displaced – by wars and other catastrophes – by 2050, Virilio begins The Futurism of the Instant by looking at the future of human settlement and migration through the evolution of the city. What he finds is an accelerating exodus from the city as we have known it, an exodus that reverses the desertion of the countryside for the city in the past. This exodus creates a circulating city of transients on the move that will remove us further and further from our native lands en route to the ultimate exile, beyond planet Earth itself – something the world's mad scientists have already been planning for some time. Exploring the shifts in scale involved in such population flows and the fraught and complex relationship between sedentary settlement and globalization, Virilio considers what the resultant loss of identity might mean, not only in terms of the exhaustion of biodiversity, but also in terms of the catastrophic elimination of temporal diversity, with the compression and fragmentation of time enabled by the nanotechnologies in an ever increasing acceleration of reality. This previously unimaginable prospect is brought closer by the accident of an instant that wipes out all distinction between past, present and future within the black hole of globalized interconnectivity.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive by Jodi Dean
Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system. In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges – from blog posts to text messages – have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

Monday, January 10, 2011

The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey
During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. The Unofficial Countryside is a timely reminder of how nature flourishes against the odds, surviving in the most obscure and surprising places.

Monday, January 10, 2011

The Passages of Herman Melville by Jay Parini
'Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man...' Herman Melville. In his new novel, Jay Parini recreates the adventure-filled life and ignominious death of Herman Melville. Partly told from the perspective of his wife, Lizzie, the story opens with an aging, angry and drunken Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his unhappy New York home. From there it takes in the full span of a life that produced Moby-Dick and Billy Budd: shipping off to sea on a merchant vessel as an impoverished young aristocrat, a fateful voyage on a whaling ship, desertion in the Marquesas Islands and a sojourn with cannibals, instant fame as a novelist and the disappointments of his twilight years trudging the docks as a Customs Inspector. Along the way Parini navigates the torrid personal relationships and barely suppressed desires that defined Melville's life. He creates a Melville who is at once sympathetic and maddening, in a novel which pays tribute to the great works of the nineteenth century, and delivers a gripping historical drama.

Monday, January 03, 2011

Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language by David Crystal
What do the following have in common? Let there be light - A fly in the ointment - A rod of iron - New wine in old bottles Lick the dust - How are the mighty fallen - Kick against the pricks - Wheels within wheels. They are all in the King James Bible. This astonishing book "has contributed far more to English in the way of idiomatic or quasi-proverbial expressions than any other literary source." So wrote David Crystal in 2004. In Begat he returns to the subject not only to consider how a work published in 1611 could have had such influence on the language, but how it can still do so when few regularly hear the Bible and fewer still hear it in the language of Stuart England. No other version of the Bible however popular (such as the Good News Bible) or imposed upon the church (like the New English Bible) has had anything like the same influence. David Crystal shows how its words and phrases have over the centuries found independent life in the work of poets, playwrights, novelists, politicians, and journalists, and how more recently they have been taken up with enthusiasm by advertisers, Hollywood, and hip-hop. Yet the King James Bible owes much to earlier English versions, notably those by John Wycliffe in in the fourteenth century and William Tyndale in the sixteenth. David Crystal reveals how much that is memorable in the King James Bible stems from its forebears. At the same time he shows how crucial were the revisions made by King James's team of translators and editors. "A person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the Bible at his finger's ends," Lord Macaulay advised Lady Holland in 1831. Begat shows how true that remains. It will be a revelation to all who read it.

Monday, January 03, 2011

Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 by Gordon Campbell
This is a history of the King James Version of the Bible over the four hundred years from its remote beginnings to the present day. Gordon Campbell, expert in Renaissance literatures, tells the fascinating and complex story of how this translation came to be commissioned, of who the translators were, and of how the translation was accomplished. The story does not end with the printing of that first edition, but introduces the subsequent generations who edited and interacted with the text. The present text of the King James Version differs in thousands of small details from the original edition. Campbell traces the textual history from 1611 to the establishment of the modern text by Oxford University Press in 1769. Attitudes to the King James Version have shifted through time and territory, ranging from adulation to deprecation and attracting the attention of a wide variety of adherents. It is more widely read in America today than in any other country, and its particular history in there is given due attention. Generously illustrated with reproductions taken from early editions, this volume helps to explain the enduring popularity of the King James Version throughout the world today.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Introduction to Civil War by Tiqqun
"Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which they hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which they prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion." The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides – these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms – absolute, liberal, welfare – has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Jean Follain: 130 Poems by Jean Follain
The poetry of Jean Follain (1903-1971) is increasingly seen, by poets and critics in France and by his foreign admirers, as central to French poetry's change of course after Surrealism. The writer Henri Thomas spoke of Follain as a poet qui parle d'autre 'chose', who speaks of things outside himself; he admired his freedom from rhetoric. Follain's short, down-to-earth, subtle poems, many of which set out to preserve the lost rural world of his pre-war Norman childhood, have influenced a new generation of French poets. To anyone who still believes that modern French poetry is abstruse and over-cerebral, Follain's memorable poems are the answer. Christopher Middleton, the distinguished poet and translator, has chosen poems spanning Follain's entire writing life, and has written an illuminating introduction to his elegant translations.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Wartime Notebooks and Other Texts by Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras was one the leading intellectuals and novelists of post-war France. She kept four notebooks in a cupboard in her country home in France, but until recently the importance of the material she wrote between 1943 and 1949 was not recognized. These notebooks retrace the formative experiences in Duras' life - her difficult childhood in Indochina; her harrowing wait for her husband's return from concentration camp - and reveal the personal history behind her bestselling novels The Lover and La Douleur. These are intimate documents, chronicling each hope and disappointment with a spontaneity and authenticity that make for an unparalleled sense of closeness with the reader. As an insight into the life and work of a major European writer this is an utterly absorbing volume.

Monday, December 13, 2010

The Tables of the Law by Thomas Mann
The Tables of the Law recounts the early life of Moses, his preparations for leading his people out of Egypt, the exodus itself and the incidents at the oasis Kadesh, and the engraving of the stone tables of the law at Sinai. In Thomas Mann's ironic and telling style, this most dramatic and significant story in the Hebrew Bible takes on a new (and at times, witty) life and meaning. Like Joseph and His Brothers, it represents Mann's art at its best. He who dares to retell the story of the exodus must be bold, but to succeed he must be inspired as well. Here one would say Mann was inspired.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Žižek and the Media by Paul A. Taylor
Slavoj Žižek reaches the parts of the media that other theorists cannot. With sources ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Quentin Tarantino and Desperate Housewives to Dostoyevsky, Žižek mixes high theory with low culture more engagingly than any other thinker alive today. His prolific output includes such media friendly content as a TV series (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema) a documentary movie (Žižek!) and a wealth of YouTube clips. A celebrity academic, he walks the media talk. Žižek and the Media provides a systematic and approachable introduction to the main concepts and themes of Zizek's work, and their particular implications for the study of the media. The book describes the radical nature of Zizek's media politics; uses Žižekian insights to expose the profound intellectual limitations of conventional approaches to the media; explores the psychoanalytical and philosophical roots of Žižek's work; provides the reader with Žižekian tools to uncover the hidden ideologies of everyday media content; and explains the ultimate seriousness that underlies his numerous jokes. As likely to discuss Homer's Springfield as Ithaca, Žižek is shown to be the ideal guide for today's mediascape.

Monday, November 22, 2010

The Box by Gunter Grass
'Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters - four, five, six, eight in number - and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they are sitting around a table and begin to talk'. In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory - they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass' assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God?

Monday, November 15, 2010

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
Judith Schalansky was born in 1980 on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets wouldn't let anyone travel so everything she learnt about the world came from her parents' battered old atlas. An acclaimed novelist and award-winning graphic designer, she has spent years creating this, her own imaginative atlas of the world's loneliest places. These islands are so difficult to reach that until the late 1990s more people had set foot on the moon than on Peter I Island in the Antarctic. On one page are perfect maps, on the other unfold bizarre stories from the history of the islands themselves. Rare animals and strange people abound: from marooned slaves to lonely scientists, lost explorers to confused lighthouse keepers, mutinous sailors to forgotten castaways; a collection of Robinson Crusoes of all kinds. Recently awarded the prize of Germany's most beautiful book, the Atlas of Remote: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will Islands is a intricately designed masterpiece that will delight maplovers everywhere. Judith Schalansky lures us across all the oceans of the world to fifty remote islands - from St Kilda to Easter Island and from Tristan da Cunha to Disappointment Island - and proves that some of the most memorable journeys can be taken by armchair travellers.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett
A hundred years ago in November 1910 Count Leo Tolstoy died on a remote Russian railway station, attended by the world’s media, taken ill as he was finally attempting to escape his decadent (as he saw it), aristocratic family life. Tolstoy has been universally recognised as a colossus of world literature whether by his contemporaries or critics. In this exceptional biography Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on the many fascinating new sources which have been published about Tolstoy since the collapse of Communism to write about one of the most compelling, maddening, brilliant and contrary people who has ever lived. She and we discover a remarkable and long life in one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods of Russian history, straddling the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tolstoy spent that life rebelling – not only against conventional ideas about literature and art but against traditional education and eventually against family life, organised religion and the state.

Monday, November 08, 2010

Collected Poems 1956-1987 by John Ashbery
John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987 contains the complete text of the poet's first twelve books, from Some Trees" (1956), selected for publication by W.H. Auden, to April Galleons (1987), and including The Vermont Notebook (1975) with the original artwork by Joe Brainard, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1976), which won the Pulitzer Prize, together with a selection of more than sixty previously uncollected poems. To read Ashbery's work in sequence is to experience the magnitude of his presence in American poetry over these four decades, as innovator and influence. His poetry, 'an exuberant script for survival' (Marina Warner), 'light-footed and delectably irresponsible' (Alfred Brendel), fascinates with virtuosic complexity and delights with wry humour. A restless explorer of the modern world, alive to language and impression, Ashbery enlarges the possibilities of poetry. With a detailed chronology and notes on the poems, Collected Poems 1956-1987 is an indispensable compilation of the work of one of the essential poets of our time.

Monday, November 08, 2010

The Complete Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault
'Oh grandmama, what great big teeth you have!' Charles Perrault's versions gave classic status to the humble fairy tale, and it is in his telling that the stories of Little Red Riding-Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and the rest have been passed down from the seventeenth century to the present day. Perrault's tales were enjoyed in the salons of Louis XIV as much as they were loved in the nursery, and it is their wit, humour, and lively detail that capture the imagination of adult and child alike. They transmute into vivid fantasies the hidden fears and conflicts by which children are affected: fears of abandonment, or worse, conflicts with siblings and parents, and the trials of growing up. In addition to the familiar stories, this edition also includes the three verse tales - the troubling account of patient Griselda, the comic Three Silly Wishes, and the notorious Donkey-Skin. This new translation by Christopher Betts captures the tone and flavour of Perrault's world, and the delightful spirit of the originals.

Monday, November 01, 2010

A Short History of the Jews by Michael Brenner
A Short History of the Jews is the story of the Jewish people told in a sweeping and powerful historical narrative. Michael Brenner chronicles the Jewish experience from Biblical times to today, tracing what is at heart a drama of migration and change, yet one that is also deeply rooted in tradition. He surveys the latest scholarly perspectives in Jewish history, making this short history the most learned yet broadly accessible book available on the subject. Brenner takes readers from the mythic wanderings of Moses to the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust; from the Babylonian exile to the founding of the modern state of Israel; and from the Sephardic communities under medieval Islam to the shtetls of eastern Europe and the Hasidic enclaves of modern-day Brooklyn. This richly illustrated book is full of fascinating and often personal stories of exodus and return, from that told about Abraham, who brought his newfound faith into the land of Canaan, to that of Holocaust survivor Esther Barkai, who lived on a kibbutz established on a German estate seized from the Nazi Julius Streicher as she awaited resettlement in Israel. Brenner traces the major events, developments, and personalities that have shaped Jewish history down through the centuries, and highlights the important contributions Jews have made to the arts, politics, religion, and science.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi
Dr. Peirera, an editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, wants nothing to do with European politics. He's happy to translate 19th-century French stories. His closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife. All this changes when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, an oddly charismatic young man. Pereira gives Rossi work, and continues to pay him, even after discovering that he is using the money to recruit for the anti-Franco International Brigade. Pereira Maintains chronicles Pereira's ascent to consciousness, culminating in a devastating and reckless act of rebellion.

Monday, October 25, 2010

The Case for Books by Robert Darnton
Renowned historian Robert Darnton - a pioneering scholar in the history of the book, and a leading voice in the debate about the digital future of books and knowledge - distils his experience and insight. The era of the book as the unrivalled source and vehicle for knowledge is coming to an end. Digitisation makes the physical properties of books disposable; e-book readers and mobile phones render them portable and accessible almost everywhere. Google and Amazon could command near monopolistic positions as sellers and dispensers of digital information relatively unfiltered by the traditional caucus of book experts: editors, proof-readers, and expert retailers. This is the moment when books could both spring free of the limitations of production processes that have constrained them for 500 years and could also shatter into smithereens, shards of scattered knowledge no longer bound and made meaningful by context, cover and care. Robert Darnton is a unique authority, whose work on this subject for more than a decade has helped invent the discipline of the History of the Book. An essayist, expert witness and commentator, he is a leading voice on the significance of the changes that are taking place in the world of books and digitization. As the Librarian at Harvard (the world's most prestigious book collection), he is intellectually responsible for the status and functioning of the world's largest university library. He is the author of many books, monographs and contributions to public knowledge. This timely book assembles the writings Darnton has done on this subject for a range of publications including the New York Review of Books, where he is a regular contributor.

Monday, October 25, 2010

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying by Simon Critchley
The question of how to lead a happy and meaningful life has been at the heart of philosophical debate since time immemorial. Today, however, these questions seem to be addressed not by philosophers but self-help gurus, who frantically champion the individual's quest for self-expression and self-realization; the desire to become authentic. Against these new age sophistries, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying tackles the question of 'how to live' by forcing us to explore our troubling relationship with death. For Critchley, philosophy begins with the question of finitude and with his understanding of a key classical theme - that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Learning how to accept both our own and others' mortality as a part of life also raises the question of how to love. Critchley argues that the act of love requires us to give up something of ourselves, to lose control so as to be open to the demands of love. We will never be equal to this demand and so we are brought face to face with our own limitations - one form of which is what Critchley calls our 'originary inauthenticity'. By scrutinizing the very nature of humour, Critchley explores what we need to laugh at ourselves and presents the need to confront the inescapable ridiculousness of life. Reflecting on the work of over 20 years, this book provides a unique, witty and erudite introduction to the thought of Simon Critchley. It includes a revealing biographical conversation with Critchley and a fascinating debate with the critically acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy about the nature of authenticity. Taken together the conversations give an intimate portrait of one of the most lucid, provocative and engaging philosophers writing today.

Monday, October 18, 2010

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the “infraordinary”: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday — “what happens,” as he put it, “when nothing happens.” His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

Monday, October 18, 2010

A Sick Planet by Guy Debord
"All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles." Guy Debord is one of the 20th Century's most prophetic critics. His bestselling work, Society of the Spectacle, decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life. Since his suicide in 1994, the accuracy and pertinence of his writings on those troubled times is ever more apparent. A Sick Planet brings together three of his key essays. The Rise and Fall of the "Spectacular" Commodity-Economy is an analysis of the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, when much of the city's black population fought thousands of police and National Guard for several days. The Explosion Point of Ideology in China examines and celebrates the decomposition of bureaucratic power and its ideology in China. A Sick Planet presents an extremely prescient polemic on global environmental degradation.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson
The world of book publishing is going through turbulent times. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the 21st century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the book in the digital age. In this book -- the first major study of trade publishing for more than 30 years -- Thompson situates the current challenges facing the industry in an historical context, analyzing the transformation of trade publishing in the United States and Britain since the 1960s. He gives a detailed account of how the world of trade publishing really works, dissecting the roles of publishers, agents and booksellers and showing how their practices are shaped by a field that has a distinctive structure and dynamic. Against this backdrop Thompson analyzes the impact of the digital revolution on book publishing and examines the pressures that are reshaping the field of trade publishing today.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Prose by Thomas Bernhard
The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as one of the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision - often compared to Kafka and Musil - commenting on a corrupted world. First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmers' outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the writing. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory - and the mere words, the never-ending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, yet, as Bernhard writes, 'not completely crazy'.

Monday, October 04, 2010

Words and Money by Andre Schiffrin
Ten years after the publication of The Business of Books, his groundbreaking critique of conglomeration in the book industry, Andre Schiffrin turns his attention to the broader crisis in the media. Just as corporatization and the lowest-common-denominator pursuit of the bottom line have had a parlous effect on publishing, media consolidation has contributed to the ongoing demise of serious journalism in newspapers, magazines, serious broadcast news, and online journalism. Schiffrin compares the media crisis in the United States to the situation in Europe and across the globe, and he demonstrates how the American corporate model has extended its reach. But he also describes and considers a range of alternative policies culled from many countries that, if pursued, could help to save journalism and the media in the US. This is a superlative essay that will make everyone seriously interested in the media and publishing think again.

Monday, October 04, 2010

True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound by Christopher Ricks
True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century - Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell - through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound. 'Opposition is true Friendship'. So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions - like other, wider forms of influence - are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
In a remote part of Iceland, a boy and his friend Barethur join a boat to fish for cod. A winter storm surprises them out at sea and Barethur who has forgotten his waterproof as he was too absorbed in Paradise Lost, succumbs to the ferocious cold and dies. Appalled by the death and by the fishermen's callous ability to set about gutting the fatal catch, the boy leaves the village, intending to return the book to its owner. The extreme hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence to him he has already resolved to join his friend in death. But once in the town he immerses himself in the stories and lives of its inhabitants, and decides that he cannot be with his friend just yet. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Heaven and Hell is a perfectly formed, vivid and timeless story, lyrical in style, and as intense a reading experience as the forces of the Icelandic landscape themselves.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera
With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon's paintings, Leos Janacek's music, the films of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoyevsky, and Garcia Marquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to their rightful place the work of major writers like Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte who have fallen into obscurity. Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and his spirited championing of modernist art mark these essays. Art, he argues, is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries by Emily Dickinson
Helen Vendler, one of the most attentive readers of poetry, turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, 'from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.' Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler's selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called 'the history and science of feeling.' In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, 'the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.' All of Dickinson's preoccupations - death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought - are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as 'a master' of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power.

Monday, September 20, 2010

On Balance by Adam Phillips
In this absorbing and provocative new book from one of Britain's most elegant and original prose stylists, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips addresses a variety of urgent concerns - many centred around the idea of balance. When might we know that enough is enough? Does the road of excess ever lead to the palace of wisdom? What is the role of the parent, the teacher and of psychoanalysis itself in the development of children's minds? Should we be happy, or is there something better we can be? And what can we learn from the tales of Jack and the Beanstalk or Cinderella? With his trademark combination of open-minded enquiry and exhilarating argument, drawing primarily on the twin worlds of literature and psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips will delight readers in this much anticipated new book.

Monday, May 17, 2010

The Politics of Postanarchism by Saul Newman
What is the relevance of anarchism for politics and political theory today? While many have in the past dismissed anarchism, the author contends that anarchism's heretical critique of authority, and its insistence on full equality and liberty, places it at the forefront of the radical political imagination today. With the unprecedented expansion of state power in the name of security, the current 'crisis of capitalism', and the terminal decline of Marxist and social democratic projects, it is time to reconsider anarchism as a form of politics. This book seeks to renew anarchist thought through the concept of postanarchism. This innovative theoretical approach, drawing upon classical anarchist theory, poststructuralism, post-Marxism, critical theory and psychoanalytic approaches, allows for a new engagement with contemporary debates about future directions in radical politics relating to political subjectivity and identity, political organisation, the State, globalisation, liberty and equality today, and the political 'event'.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Death-drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art by Robert Rowland Smith
Robert Rowland Smith takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death - Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. He also applies it in a new way to literature and art - to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. He asks whether artworks are dead or alive, if artistic creativity isn't actually a form of destruction, and whether our ability to be seduced by fine words means we don't put our selves at risk of death. In doing so, he proposes a new theory of aesthetics in which artworks and literary texts have a death-drive of their own, not least by their defining ability to turn away from all that is real, and where the effects of the death-drive mean that we are constantly living in imaginary, rhetorical or 'artistic' worlds. The book also provides a valuable introduction to the rich tradition of work on the death-drive since Freud.

Monday, May 10, 2010

On Evil by Terry Eagleton
For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, and for most on the political left, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgements and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artefact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?

Monday, May 10, 2010

Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation, and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, 'My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented'. For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: 'Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable'. Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman's belief in the crucial significance of the translator's work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

Monday, May 03, 2010

The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
This is the first complete English translation of Nietzsche's poetry. The Peacock and the Buffalo presents the first complete English translation of the poetry of the celebrated and hugely influential German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). From his first poems, written at the age of fourteen, to his last extant writings, this definitive bi-lingual edition includes all his 275 poems and aphorisms. Nietzsche's interest in poetry is no secret, as evidenced in his literary and philosophical masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, not to mention the poetry included in his published philosophical works. This important collection shows that Nietzsche's commitment to poetry was in fact longstanding and integral to his articulation of the truth and lies of human existence. The Peacock and the Buffalo is a must-read for anyone with an interest in German literature or European philosophy.

Monday, May 03, 2010

A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel
In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called 'the Casanova of reading', argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. 'We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything', writes Manguel, 'landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create'. Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those 'numinous memory palaces we call libraries', also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us 'a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink', to grant us roof and board in our passage.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Tombeau of Ibn Arabi and White Traverses by Abdelwahab Meddeb
Abdelwahab Meddeb crosses boundaries in unusual and important ways. Born in Tunis, he is now a French national. In his academic and literary work, he is concerned with the roots and history of Islam and with crossings, like his own, between Islam and Europe. He is an author of extraordinarily beautiful French; this is the first book to represent this lyrical aspect of his work in English translation. White Traverses is a poetic memoir of growing up in Tunisia, and the contrasts between Islamic and European influences. The intense colors and blinding whites of the Maghreb interweave with the rich traditions of French poetic discourse. "Tombeau of Ibn Arabi" is a series of prose poems that draw their inspiration from the great Sufi poet of mediaeval Andalusia, Ibn Arabi, whose fervent love poetry both scandalized and transformed Islamic culture, and from Dante, who learned from Ibn Arabi a poetry of sensual love as initiation into spiritual experience.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion by David Lewis-Williams
At once polemical, insightful and thought-provoking, Conceiving God is essential reading for all those interested in the origins of religious thought, and the respective roles of science and religion in contemporary society. Building on the insights and discoveries of his two earlier books, The Mind in the Cave and Inside the Neolithic Mind, cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams explores how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in the supernatural realm.

Monday, April 05, 2010

Who Was Jacques Derrida?: by David Mikics
Who Was Jacques Derrida? is the first intellectual biography of Derrida, the first full-scale appraisal of his career, his influence, and his philosophical roots. It is also the first attempt to define his crucial importance as the ambassador of 'theory', the phenomenon that has had a profound influence on academic life in the humanities. Mikics lucidly and sensitively describes for the general reader Derrida's deep connection to his Jewish roots. He succinctly defines his vision of philosophy as a discipline that resists psychology. While pointing out the flaws of that vision and Derrida's betrayal of his most adamantly expounded beliefs, Mikics ultimately concludes that 'Derrida was neither so brilliantly right nor so badly wrong as his enthusiasts and critics, respectively, claimed'.

Monday, April 05, 2010

London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City by Steve Roud
In which part of North London were wild beasts once thought to roam the sewers? Why did 1920s working-class Londoners wear necklaces of blue beads? Who was the original inspiration for the 'pearly king' costume? And did Spring-heeled Jack, scourge of Victorian London, ever really exist? Exploring everything from local superstitions and ghost stories to annual customs, this is an enchanting guide to the ancient legends and deep-rooted beliefs that can be found the length and breadth of the city.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Everybody's Shakespeare by Maynard Mack
Everybody's Shakespeare brings the insights and wisdom of one of the finest Shakespearean scholars of our century to the task of surveying why the Bard continues to flourish in modern times. Mack treats individually seven plays -- Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar, and Antony and Cleopatra -- and demonstrates in each case how the play has retained its vitality, complexity, and appeal.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Against Atheism: Why Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are Fundamentally Wrong by Ian S. Markham
In this new book, Ian Markham analyzes the atheistic world view, opposing the arguments given by renowned authors of books on atheism, such as Richard Dawkins. Unlike other responses to the new atheism, Markham challenges these authors on their own ground by questioning their understanding of belief and of atheism itself. The result is a transforming introduction to Christianity that will appeal to anyone interested in this debate. This title offers a fascinating challenge to the recent spate of successful books written by high-profile atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. It tackles these authors on their own ground, arguing that they do not understand the nature of atheism, let alone theology and ethics. It draws on ideas from Nietzsche, cosmology, and art to construct a powerful response that allows for a faith that is grounded, yet one that recognizes the reality of uncertainty.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Small Lives by Pierre Michon
Small Lives (Vies miniscules), Pierre Michon's first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it "to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis." Le Monde calls it "his chef d'ouevre. A bolt of lightning." In Small Lives, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo
An internationally acclaimed political thriller by one of Latin America's most important and exciting young writers, the winner of Spain's coveted Alfaguara Prize. Translated by one of our most celebrated literary translators, Edith Grossman, Red April is quite simply a must read for anyone who loved Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666. Red April evokes Holy Week during a cruel, bloody, and terrifying time in Peru's history, shocking for its corrosive mix of assassination, bribery, intrigue, torture, and enforced disappearance - a war between grim, ideologically driven terrorism and morally bankrupt government counterinsurgence. Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. Until now he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him. But, inexplicably, he has been put in charge of a bizarre and horrible murder investigation. As it unfolds by propulsive twists and turns - full of paradoxes and surprises - Saldivar is compelled to confront what happens to a man and society when death becomes the only certainty. Remarkable for its self-assured and nimble clarity of style, Red April is at once riveting and profound.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Storytelling by Christian Salmon
Ever since its emergence, humanity has cultivated the art of telling stories, an art that is everywhere at the heart of the social bond. But since the 1990s, first in the US and then in Europe, this art has been colonized by the domain of public relations and triumphant capitalism, and relabelled with the anodyne name of storytelling. This has become a weapon in the hands of marketing, management and political gurus, so as to better format the minds of consumers and citizens. Behind the advertising campaigns, but also in the shadows of victorious electoral campaigns from Bush to Sarkozy and Obama hide sophisticated storytelling management or digital storytelling technicians. It is this incredible hold-up of human imagination that Christian Salmon reveals here, after an enquiry into the ever greater number of applications for which storytelling has been mobilized. Marketing now depends more on the history of brands than on their images, managers have to tell stories to motivate their employees, soldiers in Iraq train themselves on computer games conceived in Hollywood, and spin doctors construct a political life as if it were a narrative. Salmon unveils here the mechanics of a storytelling machine, far more effective than Orwellian visions of totalitarian society. The subject that it wants to create is a bewitched individual, immersed in a fictive universe that filters perceptions, stimulates feelings and frames behavior and ideas.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Eating Animals is a riveting exposé which presents the gut-wrenching truth about the price paid by the environment, the government, the Third World and the animals themselves in order to put meat on our tables more quickly and conveniently than ever before. Interweaving a variety of monologues and balancing humour and suspense with informed rationalism, Eating Animals is as much a novelistic account of an intellectual journey as it is a fresh and open look at the ethical debate around meat-eating. Unlike most other books on the subject, Eating Animals also explores the possibilites for those who do eat meat to do so more responsibly, making this an important book not just for vegetarians, but for anyone who is concerned about the ramifications and significance of their chosen lifestyle.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Philosophy in the Present by Alain Badiou
In this title, two controversial thinkers discuss a timeless but nonetheless urgent question: should philosophy interfere in the world? Nothing less than philosophy is at stake because, according to Badiou, philosophy is nothing but interference and commitment and will not be restrained by academic discipline. Philosophy is strange and new, and yet speaks in the name of all - as Badiou shows with his theory of universality. Similarly, Zizek believes that the philosopher must intervene, contrary to all expectations, in the key issues of the time. He can offer no direction, but this only shows that the question has been posed incorrectly: it is valid to change the terms of the debate and settle on philosophy as abnormality and excess. At once an invitation to philosophy and an introduction to the thinking of two of the most topical and controversial philosophers writing today, this concise volume will be of great interest to students and general readers alike.

Monday, February 15, 2010

The Crimes of Empire by Carl Boggs
Imperial Nations advance their own interests by exploiting other societies. To those on the receiving end this is obvious, while inside the empire, a powerful ideological system of justification tends to hide all but the worst excess. Carl Boggs argues, that the USA began life two centuries ago as a nascent colonialist regime plundering and conquering the Native Tribes. The Indian wars were followed by perpetual militarism and warfare fuelled by a deep sense of national exceptionalism. The Crimes of Empire: The History and Politics of an Outlaw Nation examines several trends in this process, and illustrates the new depths plumbed since 9/11. Violation of international agreements, treaties and laws and the use of prohibited weapons, support for death squads and torture are just some of the practices that Boggs highlights as he shows how technical superiority and media control prolong the American nightmare.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss
First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria by Dominic Fox
To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of 'depressive' black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of 'militant dysphoria' via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction's activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the 'cold world' of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W. Ryback
He was, of course, a man better known for burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died, aged 56, Adolf Hitler owned an estimated 16,000 volumes - the works of historians, philosophers, poets, playwrights and novelists. A passionate reader, his worldview was largely formed by the books he read. For more than fifty years the remnants of Hitler's private library occupied shelf-space in climate-controlled obscurity in the rare book division of the Library of Congress in Washington. Timothy Ryback is the first to systematically explore this remarkable collection, as well as several other caches which he subsequently discovered in Europe and elsewhere. The volumes in Hitler's library are fascinating in themselves but it is the marginalia - the comments, the exclamation marks, the questions and underlinings - even the dirty thumbprints on the pages of a book he read in the trenches of the First World War - which are so revealing. Together they take us closer to the man and his thinking than ever seemed possible. Hitler's Private Library provides us with a remarkable view of Hitler's evolution - and unparalleled insights into his emotional and intellectual world.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks...

Monday, January 11, 2010

One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power
Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and adverts, and many don't. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women's liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper's paradise of 'naughty' self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn't seem too concerned about this coincidence. This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today's positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Taking Wittgenstein at His Word by Robert J. Fogelin
Taking Wittgenstein at His Word is an experiment in reading organized around a central question: What kind of interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy emerges if we adhere strictly to his claims that he is not in the business of presenting and defending philosophical theses and that his only aim is to expose persistent conceptual misunderstandings that lead to deep philosophical perplexities? Robert Fogelin draws out the therapeutic aspects of Wittgenstein's later work by closely examining his account of rule-following and how he applies the idea in the philosophy of mathematics. The first of the book's two parts focuses on rule-following, Wittgenstein's 'paradox of interpretation', and his naturalistic response to this paradox, all of which are persistent and crucial features of his later philosophy. Fogelin offers a corrective to the frequent misunderstanding that the paradox of interpretation is a paradox about meaning, and he emphasizes the importance of Wittgenstein's often undervalued appeals to natural responses. The second half of the book examines how Wittgenstein applies his reflections on rule-following to the status of mathematical propositions, proofs, and objects, leading to remarkable, demystifying results. Taking Wittgenstein at His Word shows that what Wittgenstein claims to be doing and what he actually does are much closer than is often recognized. In doing so, the book underscores fundamental - but frequently underappreciated - insights about Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom's compelling attempt to uncover the mystery of both Prince Hamlet and the play, how both prince and drama are able to break through the conventions of theatrical mimesis and the representation of character, making us question the very nature of theatrical illusion.

Monday, December 28, 2009

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love - such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them, he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. "The Essays" was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. This book - the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years - relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boetie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay.

Monday, November 09, 2009

The Eurasian Miracle by Jack Goody
The idea of long-term European dominance is characteristic of most evolutionary theories of human culture and society in the nineteenth century. It was commonly believed that there was a natural progression from Antiquity through Feudalism to Capitalism which could not have taken place elsewhere. Today there are many who still believe that this progression was part of a European miracle that underlay the rise to global supremacy of the West. In this short book Jack Goody systematically dismantles this Eurocentric view of the world. He argues that we need to look, not for a European miracle, but rather for a Eurasian miracle that went back to the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, that affected the Near East, India and China well before Europe and that was much advanced by the adoption of writing. Under these conditions we find a long-term exchange of information between East and West, and the dominance of one followed by the dominance of the other - in other words, alternation rather than dominance. There were measures during the Renaissance in Europe that made for continuous growth, especially the secularization of learning, but it appears that the period of Western supremacy is now coming to an end and that we are about to experience a further alternation in favour of the East.

Monday, November 09, 2009

The Defence of the Enlightenment by Tzvetan Todorov
This brilliant and concise book from internationally renowned historian Tzvetan Todorov establishes the Enlightenment as the philosophical cornerstone of the modern world and argues that the wisdom of those times is just as relevant today. Although our liberal democracies are the offspring of the Enlightenment, they also illustrate the ways in which its ideas can be distorted and perverted. People living in these democracies today are often baffled by a host of phenomena which they don't know how to judge: globalisation and media omnipotence, state-sponsored torture and lies, moralism and the right of intervention, the domination of economics and the triumph of technology. Is it possible to distinguish between the Enlightenment's legitimate and illegitimate heirs? We cannot learn lessons from the past unless we know how to relate them to the present. In this brilliant and concise book, internationally renowned historian TT shows that what remains relevant to us today of the 18th-century debates is their spirit, as expressed in a number of crucial principles and values. "It is by criticizing the Enlightenment that we remain faithful to it."

Monday, November 02, 2009

Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? by Jean Baudrillard
"Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination," writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? In this, one of the last texts written before his death in 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical 'subject,' whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a 'pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality'. Interspersed throughout the text are photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard's argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen - some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms - yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a 'vital dimension' of the existence of things.

Monday, November 02, 2009

University of Disaster by Paul Virilio
"The world of the future will be a tighter and tighter struggle against the limits of our intelligence," announced Norbert Wiener... On top of such confinement, today we are faced not only with the greenhouse effect of global warming but also that of incarceration within the tighter and tighter limits of an accelerating sphere, a dromosphere, where depletion of the time distances involved in the geodiversity of the Globe rounds off the depletion of the substances produced by biodiversity. An unanticipated victim of this geophysical foreclosure is science - not only biology but also physics, the 'Big Science' now confronted by the space-time contraction of the known world and of knowledge once acquired here below. Whence the threat, still unnoticed, of an accident in knowledge which will double the accident of polluted substances and put paid to this crisis of reason denounced by Husserl, with the extravagant quest for a substitute exoplanet, a new 'Promised Land' to be colonised as swiftly as possible; the climate necessary to the life of our minds, as much as to the life of our bodies, from then on, on this old Earth of ours, being like the fatal consequences of a long illness requiring hospitalisation.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Diary of a Seducer by Soren Kierkegaard
Diary of a Seducer is the disturbing narrative of a man who explores his sense of detachment by deliberately arousing the passion of a young society girl. At the core of the Diary lies the conflict between the narrator's philosophical and intellectual search for aesthetic pleasure and the depth of suffering this ultimately inflicts. Inspired by events in Kierkegaard's own life that are still shrouded in mystery, this story is a vivid exploration of the complex psychology of cruelty and love. Diary of a Seducer is an autonomous part of the philosophical work Either/Or, which was published in 1843 and brought the author immediate fame.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Marshall McLuhan: v. 1: Unbound - A Publishing Adventure by Marshall McLuhan
The essay is for exploring; the book, for explaining. Such was McLuhan’s philosophy about these two forms. The essay is the freer form and one better suited to exploration than the longer meditation, the book. This startling new series puts the reader in the place of colleague and co-researcher. Instead of giving the reader just another collection of articles and interviews, McLuhan Unbound gives you offprints of the original essays. See how the two McLuhans, the literary academic and the public media expert are really one. Some of these articles were written before the subsequent book was envisioned: they are preliminary forays into new territory. Some were written after the book and encapsulate major themes; some set out additional discoveries or matters left out of the book; some present material discovered as a result of writing the book. The McLuhan Unbound offprints series is not the last word in presenting McLuhan’s ideas and discoveries, but the first.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Cool Capitalism by Jim McGuigan
Thomas Frank coined the term 'the conquest of cool'. This book shows how this conquest is at the heart of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Jim McGuigan argues that 'cool capitalism' incorporates disaffection into capitalism itself, absorbing rebellion and thereby neutralising opposition to the present system of culture and society. McGuigan explores a huge variety of cultural examples, from the sleek images of mainstream advertising, to the fringes of artistic production, offering a vigorous critique of our understanding of subversion, resistance and counter-culturalism. Has capitalism really colonised our planet? McGuigan shows that there is still some space left for rebellion against the seductive power of the free market economy. Analysis in the book is dialectically complex yet it is written in a straightforward and accessible style that will give it a strong and lasting appeal for undergraduate students of cultural studies, sociology and economics.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag
"I intend to do everything... I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly ...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early thirties. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Beginners by Raymond Carver
Tim O'Brien once said of Raymond Carver, 'He uses the English language like a whittler's knife, carving stark and unadorned prose-objects, paring away everything but the very core of human emotion'. Beginners is Carver's most famous collection of short stories - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - before this whittling process had begun. It is the unedited version of the masterpiece which would be cut by almost fifty per cent by Carver's editor and mentor, Gordon Lish, before its original publication in 1981 and which would go on to become one of the most influential pieces of modern literature. Carver's preoccupation with the marrow of things is just as present in these longer stories. A young girl, dancing with her lover amidst the debris of an older man's life, has her first forewarning of the dangers of adulthood, and is filled with an 'unbearable happiness'. A man and woman lock themselves in a motel room and slowly, painfully, acknowledge the end of a relationship, while somewhere else in the lonely Midwest a man is photographed over and over again as he attempts to locate himself in a world that seems utterly without focus. But as we move through the manifold little tragedies at the heart of the ordinary - so much at the core of Carver's work - new layers, new nuances, new meanings reveal themselves. Where the Lish / Carver collaboration cut this collection to the 'linguistic bone', these fleshier stories say what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long.

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Case for God: What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong
The enormous popularity of books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others shows that despite the religious revival that is under way in many parts of the world, there is widespread confusion about the nature of religious truth. For the first time in history, a significantly large number of people want nothing to do with God. In the past people went to great lengths to experience a sacred reality that they called God, Brahman, Nirvana or Dao; indeed religion could be said to be the distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens. But now militant atheists preach a gospel of godlessness with the zeal of Christian missionaries in the age of faith and find an eager audience. What has happened? Karen Armstrong argues that historically atheism has rarely been a denial of the sacred itself but has nearly always rejected a particular conception of God. During the modern period, the Christians of the West developed a theology that was radically different from that of the pre-modern age. Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, Armstrong shows that until recently there was no warfare between science and religion. But science has changed the conversation. The meaning of words such as belief, faith, and mystery has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God - and, indeed, reason itself - in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing. Why has the modern God become incredible? Has God a future in this age of aggressive scientific rationalism? Karen Armstrong suggests that if we draw creatively on the insights of the past, we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarized world.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Samuel Johnson: A Life by David Nokes
Johnson, born weak and half-blind, shambolic and poverty-stricken, became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. Thrown out of Oxford for a lack of funds, he rose to celebrity: author of the Dictionary, a friend to the king, companion of Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. David Nokes looks beyond Johnson's remarkable public persona and beyond the Johnson that Boswell to some extent created. Nokes looks at his troubled relationship with his first wife, whom he married for money but felt guilty about for the rest of his life; at his family, who haunted his dreams for years; and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale. He shows a man who gave a quarter of the government pension he received to the poor, filled his home with the blind and destitute, and bequeathed his wealth to Frank Barber, an emancipated black slave brought from Jamaica. Insightful and engaging, Samuel Johnson draws an illuminating portrait of Johnson, his life and world.

Monday, October 05, 2009

The Escape by Adam Thirlwell
Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married? Or Jewish? When was he ever attached? There are so many stories of Haffner: but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all. In a spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, the 78-year-old Haffner is seeking a cure, redress, more women; and ignoring the will of his wife. He is there to claim her inheritance: a villa on the outskirts of a forgotten spa town. But Haffner never does what he is told. On his arrival in the town, he has checked into the spa hotel - and tried to develop two affairs: a mildly successful affair with a younger woman whose breasts are lavish, and a much less successful affair with an even younger woman, whose breasts are the smallest he has ever known. And, intermittently, he has tried to secure the paperwork for the villa he never wanted. But gradually, in the tribulations of bureaucracy, he discovers that he wants this villa, very much. Now that he has to fight for it, he wants it. There are two character notes to Haffner: he is an egotist, and he adores women. A mediocre man, but a man of singular appetite. And so it is that, harried by his family, pursued by his women, menaced by bureaucrats, negotiating with the mafia, riven by his memory of the dead and of the missing, Haffner endures his many humiliations, as he tries to orchestrate his final escape, in the forgotten center of Europe. Through the story of his couplings and uncouplings, emerge the stories of Haffner's Twentieth Century. How can you ever desert from your past, your family, your history? That has been the problem of Haffner's life. How do you remain a libertine?

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl by J. N. Mohanty

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), known as the founder of the phenomenological movement, was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. A prolific scholar, he explored an enormous landscape of philosophical subjects, including philosophy of mathematics, logic, theory of meaning, theory of consciousness and intentionality, and ontology, in addition to phenomenology. This deeply insightful book traces the development of Husserl's thought from his earliest investigations in philosophy - informed by his work as a mathematician - to his publication of Ideas in 1913. Jitendra Mohanty, an internationally renowned Husserl scholar, presents a masterful study that illuminates Husserl's central concerns and provides a definitive assessment of the first phases of the philosopher's career.

Monday, September 28, 2009

On the Death and Life of Languages by Claude Hagege
Twenty-five languages die each year; at this pace, half the world's five thousand languages will disappear within the next century. In this timely book, Claude Hagege seeks to make clear the magnitude of the cultural loss represented by the crisis of language death. By focusing on the relationship of language to culture and the world of ideas, Hagege shows how languages are themselves crucial repositories of culture; the traditions, proverbs, and knowledge of our ancestors reside in the language we use. His wide-ranging examination covers all continents and language families to uncover not only how languages die, but also how they can be revitalized - for example in the remarkable case of Hebrew. In a striking metaphor, Hagege likens languages to bonfires of social behaviour that leave behind sparks even after they die; from these sparks languages can be rekindled and made to live again.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport
Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin in exile. It tells how, for seventeen years, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence outside Russia, working towards the upheaval that in 1917 transformed the political landscape of Europe: the Russian Revolution. Constantly watched by the secret police, the arch conspirator and his cohorts were dependent on the protection of a shadowy network of like-minded friends and supporters. Obsessive, penniless and driven, they took huge risks to publish and smuggle back into Russia the samizdat literature that spread their message. Lenin was always on the move, between the great cities of Europe - Paris, London, Geneva, Brussels and Munich - and the rural backwaters of Finland and Poland. He led an uncertain life, often under assumed names, fleeing lodgings at a moment's notice and frequently short of food. Helen Rappaport's lively account describes Lenin's triumphs and the conflicts, personal and political, with those who shared his exile. She builds up a vivid picture of Russian emigre life and of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks worked to achieve his vision of a Soviet social democracy. She also explores the toll that their extraordinary existence took not just on Lenin but on the loyal group that surrounded him, and particularly on the women in his life: his long-suffering wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, his mother-in-law, and his mistress, Inessa Armand, as well as his mother and sisters back home. This is a book alive with fascinating detail, from Lenin's 1908 visit to the celebrated writer Maxim Gorky in Capri for a restorative holiday, to his trips to the working-men's music halls of Montmartre in Belle Epoque Paris, and the story of the London detective who kept Lenin under surveillance, hiding in a cupboard in a room above a pub in Islington as the fledgling party congress fomented revolution. With much new material from rare and previously overlooked sources, Conspirator puts Lenin's pre-revolutionary struggle for change in Russia into the wider context of the international socialist movement, revealing the human side of this revolutionary figure. It is an unrivalled portrait of Lenin in the making.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
"The profoundest book there is, born from the innermost richness of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up with gold and goodness." Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) was Nietzsche's own favourite among all his books and has proved to be his most popular, having sold millions of copies in many different languages. In it he addresses the problem of how to live a fulfilling life in a world without meaning, in the aftermath of 'the death of God'. Nietzsche's solution lies in the idea of eternal recurrence which he calls 'the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained'. A successful engagement with this profoundly Dionysian idea enables us to choose clearly among the myriad possibilities that existence offers, and thereby to affirm every moment of our lives with others on this 'sacred' earth. This translation of Zarathustra (the first new English version for over forty years, by Graham Parkes who also provides an excellent introduction to the text) conveys the musicality of the original German, and for the first time annotates the abundance of allusions to the Bible and other classic texts with which Nietzsche's masterpiece is in conversation.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Lacan at the Scene by Henry Bond
What if Jacques Lacan -- the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst -- had worked as a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clip starring Peter Sellers in a trench coat, but in Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond makes a serious and provocative claim: that apparently impenetrable events of violent death can be more effectively unraveled with Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools. Bond's exposition on murder expands and develops a resolutely Žižekian approach. Seeking out radical and unexpected readings, Bond unpacks his material utilizing Lacan's neurosis-psychosis-perversion grid. Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s -- the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. Bond takes us inside the perimeter set by police tape, guiding us into a series of explicit, even terrifying, murder scenes. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high-heeled shoe on a kitchen table; carefully folded clothes placed over a chair; a plate of chocolate biscuits on a dinner table; lewd graffiti inscribed on a train carriage door; an arrangement of workman's tools in a forest clearing. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI's standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.

Monday, September 07, 2009

The Infinities by John Banville
One long, languid midsummer’s day, the Godleys gather at the family home of Arden to attend their father’s bedside. Adam, the elder child, and Petra, only nineteen, find that relations with their mother, Ursula, and their dying father, old Adam, are as strained as ever. Adam’s relationship with his wife, Helen, seems too on the brink of collapse and Petra, fragile and deeply troubled, finds deepest relief in her own pain. The gods, those mischievous spirits, watch silently, flitting through this dark ménage. Unable to resist intervening in the mortals’ lives, they spy, tease and seduce, all the while looking upon the antics of their playthings with a mixture of mild bafflement and occasional envy. Old Adam – husband, father and esteemed mathematician – has made his name grappling with the concept of the infinite. His own time on earth seems to be running out, and his mind runs to disquieting memories. Little does he realize, as he lies mute but alert in the Sky room, that the gods are capable of interposing themselves in the action, and even changing time itself when it pleases them.

Monday, September 07, 2009

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called Only Rhyme. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker's editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction by Leland De la Durantaye
Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his Homo Sacer sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to come. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. It attempts to provide readers possessing little or no familiarity with Agamben's writings with points of entry for exploring them. For those already well acquainted with Agamben's thought, it offers a critical analysis of the achievements that have marked it.

Monday, June 29, 2009

The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust
The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people — including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself — to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches — imitations written in the style of other writers — Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon. Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair — written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life—as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Learning to Live Finally by Jacques Derrida
With death looming, Jacques Derrida, the world's most famous philosopher sat down with journalist Jean Birnbaum of the French daily Le Monde. They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a long, surprisingly accessible, and moving final interview. The Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx. The contemporary meaning of Derrida's work is also examined, including a discussion of his many political activities. But, as Derrida says, "To philosophize is to learn to die"; as such, this philosophical discussion turns to the realities of his imminent death — including life with a fatal cancer. In the end, this interview remains a touching final look at a long and distinguished career.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee
The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as "the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality." The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to "spread anarchy and live communism." Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror." Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living by Declan Kiberd
This great modernist masterpiece, which for many readers seems so intimidating, is one of the great books that can teach us how to live better lives. Declan Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people, rooted in their experience and offering a democratic and humane vision of a tolerant, decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. In his apparently banal way he sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible - all sources that Joyce drew on in the writing of his book. Ulysses and Us can also be read as a guide to Joyce, his novel and its context in the history of Ireland, and of Dublin, where the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day. Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it, designed to remove it from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Joyce industry and restore it to its shocking, democratic origins. Kiberd has written a moving and controversial book, free of literary-critical jargon and specialist concerns. With it he confirms his position as one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Diaries, Letters and Recollections by Lynette Roberts
In 1939, following her marriage, the poet Lynette Roberts went to live in a small village in Wales. This experience, both enriching and isolating, became the source of some of her extraordinary poetry. Her diary observes daily life in a Welsh village in wartime with a poetic intensity: communal harvest, the arrival of evacuees, a frozen water pump, the cadences of voices and the effects of light and rain. Seven haunting stories weave modernist myths of Wales, while her magazine articles explore Welsh life with an anthropologist's eye. Roberts's restless intelligence never limits itself to the local. She writes about Picasso and Le Corbusier, about a visit to Spain on the trail of Lorca, the solemn drama of afternoon tea with the Sitwells, the comic disaster of taking her young children to visit T.S. Eliot. Enquiring, unsentimental, wryly humorous, Roberts engages us with her speaking voice. The publication of Lynette Roberts's Collected Poems in 2005 restored her to her place in twentieth-century poetry. This collection of her prose writings, most published here for the first time, accompanied by evocative family photographs, discloses the world that she transformed into poetry.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai
Envy, irritation, paranoia - in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialised affect called "animatedness", and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called "stuplimity". She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-20th Century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Monday, June 08, 2009

The Dark Sahara: America's War on Terror in Africa by Jeremy Keenan
The world is a very big place, so it is easy to take your eye off all of the ball and focus on just one tiny part. Whilst the media decides that at any particular moment our attention should be focussed on Iraq or Iran or North Korea lots of other things are, inevitably, going on in lots of other places. Whilst few of us have the time or energy or intellectual capability to be experts on the entire gamut of global foreign policy, we should at least be aware then when one particular country is nominated for attention as Public Enemy Number One that means that issues in the rest of the world are, simultaneously, being quite deliberately pushed off the news agenda. Whilst the world's attention has recently been focussed on the problems of the Middle East, the administration of George Bush II was building a worryingly substantial military presence in Africa. Ostensibly, this was to "combat the growth of Al-Qaeda in Somalia, Algeria and other countries on the continent." Jeremy Keenan shows, however, in his shocking and excellent book Dark Sahara: America's War on Terror in Africa, that it is a myth to suggest that Africa is a dangerous hot-bed of Islamist terrorism. According to Keenan, the American government -- along with the anti-Islamic government of Algeria -- "were responsible for hostage takings blamed on Islamic militants... allowing the US to establish military bases in the region and pursue multiple imperial objectives in the name of security." This is a disquieting book, but an essential one, showing that it is America's interference in the 'dark continent' that is making it such a dangerous place creating chaos that supports and advances America's own neo-imperialist agenda. Sadly, America is not the world's blameless white knight, and Africa-expert Jeremy Keenan is to be congratulated for showing just how far its actions diverge from its profoundly inaccurate self-image.

Monday, June 08, 2009

Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis
Adrift in Berlin and with no desire to return home to Mexico, Tatiana cultivates solitude while trying to distance herself from the city's past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin - seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea - are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his unyielding and grim reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, Book of Clouds is a haunting, beautifully drawn portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks of games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

Monday, June 01, 2009

Requiem for Communism by Charity Scribner
In Requiem for Communism Charity Scribner examines the politics of memory in post-industrial literature and art. Writers and artists from Europe's second world have responded to the last socialist crisis with works that range from sober description to melancholic fixation. This book is the first survey of this cultural field. For many writers and artists on the left, the fallout of the last century's socialist crisis calls for an elegy. This regret has prompted a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom in museum exhibitions that race to curate the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remnants. The best of these works do not take us back to the factory. Rather they look for something to take out of it: the intractable moments of solidarity among men and women that did not square with the market or the plan. Requiem for Communism explores a selection of signal works. They include John Berger's narrative trilogy Into Their Labors; Documenta, the German platform for contemporary art and ideas; Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema of mourning and Andrzej Wajda's filmed chronicles of the Solidarity movement; the art of Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread; the novels of Christa Wolf; and Leslie Kaplan's antinostalgic memoir of women's material labour in France. Sorting among the ruins of the second world, the critical minds of contemporary Europe aim to salvage both the remains of socialist ideals and the latent feminist potential that attended them.

Monday, June 01, 2009

The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets by Compiled by J. C. Squire
When it was first published in 1927, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets was intended by its compiler, Sir John Collings Squire, to complement the well-known poetry anthologies of Francis Turner Palgrave and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Squire began the task of assembling his anthology by deliberately omitting over one hundred greater poets, giving precedence to Nicholas Breton and John Clare in the place of Shakespeare and Tennyson. Although some familiar names such as Thomas Dekker, John Bunyan, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville appear in the collection, the focus remains on those who lack prominence in the canon, including many medieval poets whose identities are unknown. Drawing together a considerable number of first-rate and undervalued poets, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets is an essential supplement to the traditional anthologies of English verse of the past.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader's card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which only he remains. The only novel by one of the greatest writers of poetry in German, the semi-autobiographical Notebooks is an uneasy, compelling and poetic book that anticipated Sartre and is full of passages of lyrical brilliance. Michael Hulse's new translation perfectly conveys the unsettling beauty of the original and is accompanied by an introduction on Rilke's life and the biographical and literary influences on the Notebooks. This edition also includes suggested further reading, a chronology and notes.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Genesis by Robert Alter
A translation of the Book of Genesis, which attempts to recover the meanings of the ancient Hebrew and convey them in modern English prose. It is accompanied by a commentary and annotations, and aims to illuminate the original work without any touch of the fake antique by the noted Biblical scholar Robert Alter, the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. James Wood declared it a "remarkable translation... a monument of scholarship... Alter brings a kind of sensitivity to bear on moment after moment of his translation..."

Monday, May 18, 2009

Reason, Faith, and Revolution by Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton's witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager to understand the God Debate. On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the 'superstitious' view of God held by most atheists and agnostics, and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity.There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade -- Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular -- nor for many conventional believers. Instead, Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn W. Turner
One of the most important jobs that history can do is to make what we think is familiar strange again. When we become estranged from engrained patterns of thinking we can then begin to think more clearly about a subject. We think we know how Britain was in the Seventies; and we think we know it was rubbish! Rubbish fashion, rubbish politics, rubbish industrial relations and rubbish not being collected because the binmen were on strike because of the rubbish industrial relations again! But Alwyn W. Turner's Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s reminds us there was far more to the Seventies than flares and flock wallpaper. In many ways, the Seventies was a golden decade: it was when much that was started in the vaunted Sixties actually happened. For instance, wealth inequality was "at a record low" and, key for Turner's narrative, it was when popular culture really began to dominate the mainstream. The fascist National Front might have been on the march, inflation might have been on the rise, and power cuts might have been on everyone's mind, but Morecambe & Wise was on the telly, Get Carter was on at the pictures, and glam rock was giving way to the energy and DIY radicalism of punk. Turner never pretends that, for instance, the Troubles in Northern Ireland weren't tragic nor that that shameful racism of an Enoch Powell wasn't unforgiveably troubling, but he does remind us that, for many in Britain, the Seventies was a decade we could do well to remember properly and that means seeing past the cliche that it has become and understanding the past for what it really was.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Searching for Cioran by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E.M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard.In her quest to understand how Cioran and other brilliant young intellectuals could have been attracted to such passionate national revival movements, Zarifopol-Johnston, herself a Romanian emigre, sought out the aging philosopher in Paris in the early 1990s and retraced his steps from his home village of Rasinari and youthful years in Sibiu, through his student years in Bucharest and Berlin, to his early residence in France. Her portrait of Cioran is complemented by an engaging autobiographical account of her rediscovery of her own Romanian past.

Monday, May 11, 2009

In Memory of Jacques Derrida by Nicholas Royle
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of distinctive essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, Royle explores the legacies of Derrida's thinking in the context of philosophy, language, globalisation, war, terrorism, justice, the democracy to come, poetry, literature, memory, mourning, the gift, friendship and dreams. Lucid, inventive and at times funny, Royle allows us to appreciate how much Derrida's work has altered the ways we read and think. Autobiography, children's literature, the Gothic and modernist fiction, for example, figure together with philosophy, queer studies, speech act theory and psychoanalysis. The writings of Horace Walpole, Herman Melville, E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Joe Brainard and David McKee are illuminatingly put in play alongside Shakespeare. Royle's book suggests that one of Derrida's most profound legacies has to do with the combination of responsibility and freedom his work inspires for both reading and writing. In Memory of Jacques Derrida offers an exceptionally clear overview of Derrida's work, while also tracing directions in which it might productively be read in the future.

Monday, May 04, 2009

Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen by David Stubbs
Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media. This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?

Monday, May 04, 2009

Moose by Kevin Jackson
The moose, or 'elk' in Europe, is generally found in the temperate to subarctic forests of the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, that includes almost all of Canada, most of central and western Alaska, much of New England, the upper Rocky Mountains, Northeastern Minnesota, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Small but present moose populations have been verified as far south as the mountains of Colorado. Moose have been hunted for food since the Stone Age, are considered the national animal of Sweden and Norway, and the moose occurs frequently in the popular culture of the Northern Hemisphere, from the logo of Abercrombie and Fitch to Bullwinkle, of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Kevin Jackson's Moose describes and discusses moose evolution, diet, behaviour and environment, as well as every major aspect of the interactions between man and moose, from Julius Caesar's first mention of 'alces' in his history of the Gallic Wars to the planned construction of a 45-metre-high wooden moose in Sweden. Among the leading human figures in this story are Thomas Jefferson and Buffon, the great English painter George Stubbs, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull moose party and the poets Ted Hughes and Anne Sexton.The book also includes much colourful moose lore, such as the belief that moose hoof could cure epilepsy; an explanation of why Roosevelt called his breakaway political movement the Bull Moose Party; a fascinating digression on the Enlightenment controversy over moose and the Irish Elk; and why the moose is really an elk, and the elk is really a wapiti. Containing many illustrations of moose from nature and culture, and full of little-known fact and anecdote about this familiar and much-loved animal, Moose will appeal to cultural historians, literati, moose lovers, naturalists, zoologists and eccentrics everywhere.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley
This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat. Militant Modernism argues for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology. It features new readings of some familiar names - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, Vladimir Mayakovsky - and much more on the lesser known, quotidian modernists of the 20th century. The chapters range from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen. Against the world of 'there is no alternative', this book tries to excavate Modernism’s other futures.

Monday, April 27, 2009

The Frock-coated Communist by Tristram Hunt
Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels' era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes - it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal.

Monday, April 13, 2009

The Resistance by Matthew Cobb
The French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II was a struggle in which ordinary people fought for their liberty, despite terrible odds and horrifying repression. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and women carried out an armed struggle against the Nazis, producing underground anti-fascist publications and supplying the Allies with vital intelligence. Based on hundreds of French eye-witness accounts and including recently-released archival material, The Resistance uses dramatic personal stories to take the reader on one of the great adventures of the 20th century. The tale begins with the catastrophic Fall of France in 1940, and shatters the myth of a unified Resistance created by General de Gaulle. In fact, De Gaulle never understood the Resistance, and sought to use, dominate and channel it to his own ends. Brave men and women set up organisations, only to be betrayed or hunted down by the Nazis, and to die in front of the firing squad or in the concentration camps. Over time, the true story of the Resistance got blurred and distorted, its heroes and conflicts were forgotten as the movement became a myth. By turns exciting, tragic and insightful, The Resistance reveals how one of the most powerful modern myths came to be forged and provides a gripping account of one of the most striking events in the 20th century.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Making the Known World New by Kenneth Steven
In the summer of 2008, Kenneth Steven moved house, leaving behind the small square of ground that had been his garden for many years: a place of solitude, contemplation, observance and simple relaxation - a place for the mind to wander as the seasons pass. In Making the Known World New, this small oasis inspires reflections full of wonder at the variety, beauty, determination and sheer audacity of nature in a confined space. Acting as a microcosm, the garden also kindles thoughts of the wider world and the threat it faces. Each chapter is accompanied by poetry, complimenting and contextualizing the prose, making the know world new...

Monday, April 06, 2009

Beckett, Technology and the Body by Ulrika Maude
Critics have often focused on interiority in Beckett's works, privileging the mind over the body. In this new approach, the first sustained analysis of embodiment in Beckett's prose, drama and media works, Ulrika Maude argues that physical and sensory experience is in fact central to the understanding of Beckett's writing. In innovative readings of sight, hearing, touch and movement in the full range of Beckett's works, Ulrika Maude uncovers the author's effort to shed light on embodied experience, paying attention to Beckett’s interests in medicine and body-altering technologies such as prostheses. Through these material, bodily, concerns Beckett explores wider themes of subjectivity and experience, interiority and exteriority, foregrounding the inextricable relationship between the body, the senses and the self. This important new study offers a novel approach to Beckett, one in which the body takes its rightful place alongside the mind.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Jane Austen's Textual Lives by Kathryn Sutherland
Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status at the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen has occupied a position within English-speaking culture that is both popular and canonical, accessible and complexly inaccessible, fixed and certain yet wonderfully amenable to shifts of sensibility and cultural assumptions. The implied contradiction was represented in the early twentieth century by, on the one hand, the Austen family's continued management, censorship, and sentimental marketing of the sweet lady novelist of the Hampshire countryside; and on the other, by R. W. Chapman's 1923 Clarendon Press edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, which subjected her texts to the kind of scholarly probing reserved till then for classical Greek and Roman authors obscured by centuries of attrition. It was to be almost fifty years before the Clarendon Press considered it necessary to recalibrate the reputation of another popular English novelist in this way. Beginning with specific encounters with three kinds of textual work and the problems, clues, or challenges to interpretation they continue to present, Kathryn Sutherland goes on to consider the absence of a satisfactory critical theory of biography that can help us address the partial life, and ends with a discussion of the screen adaptations through which the texts continue to live on. Throughout, Jane Austen's textual identities provide a means to explore the wider issue of what text is and to argue the importance of understanding textual space as itself a powerful agent established only by recourse to further interpretations and fictions.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800 by Paul Glennie
Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. Yet what seems so ordinary today is actually the extraordinary outcome of centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time. Shaping the Day is a pathbreaking study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800. Drawing on many unique historical sources, ranging from personal diaries to housekeeping manuals, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period. Many remarkable figures make their appearance, ranging from the well-known, such as Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, to less familiar characters, including sailors, gamblers, and burglars. Overturning many common perceptions of the past-for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related-this unique historical study will engage all readers interested in how 'telling the time' has come to dominate our way of life.

Monday, March 30, 2009

For the Love of God by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Quoting King Solomon's famous prayer to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, "Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded," Alicia Suskin Ostriker posits a God who cannot be contained by dogma and doctrine. Troubled by the way the Bible has become identified in our culture with a monolithic authoritarianism, Ostriker focuses instead on the extraordinary variability of Biblical writing. For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book is a provocative and inspiring re-interpretation of six essential Biblical texts: The Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, and Job. In prose that is personal and probing, analytically acute and compellingly readable, Ostriker sees these writings as "counter-texts," deviating from convention yet deepening and enriching the Bible, our images of God, and our own potential spiritual lives. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," she shows how the Bible embraces sexuality and skepticism, boundary crossing and challenges to authority, how it illuminates the human psyche and mirrors our own violent times, and how it asks us to make difficult choices in the quest for justice. For better or worse, our society is wedded to the Bible. But according to Talmud, "There is always another interpretation." Ostriker demonstrates that the Bible, unlike its reputation, offers a plenitude of surprises.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Strangers by Anita Brookner
Paul Sturgis is a retired banker manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone and dines alone, seeking out and taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers: the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the drycleaners. His only relative, and only acquaintance, is a widowed cousin by marriage - herself a virtual stranger - to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon. Trying to make sense of his current solitary state, and fearing that his destiny may be to die among strangers, Sturgis trawls through memories of his failed relationships and finds himself longing for companionship, or at the very least a conversation. But then a chance encounter with a stranger - a recently divorced and demanding younger woman - shakes up his routine and when an old girlfriend appears on the scene, Sturgis is forced to make a decision about how (and with whom) he wants to spend the rest of his days...

Monday, March 23, 2009

A Childhood Memory by Piero Della Francesca by Hubert Damisch
Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is highly unusual in its iconography. Hubert Damisch undertakes an anthropological and historical analysis of an artwork he constructs as a childhood dream of one of humanity’s oldest preoccupations, the mysteries of our origins, of our conception and birth. At once parodying and paying homage to Freud’s seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Damisch uses Piero’s enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories. He shows that we must return to Freud because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed: in the triangle of author, work, and audience, where is the psychoanalytic component located?

Monday, March 16, 2009

Romanticism After Auschwitz by Sara Guyer
Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how post-Holocaust testimony remains romantic, and shows why romanticism must therefore be rethought. The book argues that what literary historians have traditionally called “romanticism,” and characterized as a literary movement stretching roughly between 1785 and 1832, should be redescribed in light of two circumstances. The first is the specific inadequacy of literary-historical models before “romantic” works. The second is the particular function that these unsettling aspects of “romantic” works have after Auschwitz. The book demonstrates that certain figures (of speech, writing, and argument) central to normative accounts of “romanticism,” serve in their most radical—most genuinely “romantic”—form as vehicles for posing a conception of life (and death) revealed in the camps. In these pages, Agamben meets Wordsworth, Shakespeare meets Celan, film meets lyric poetry, survivors’ accounts meet fiction, de Man encounters Nancy. The book offers new readings of highly canonical works—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog—and introduces unfamiliar texts. It elaborates a fascinating account of the rhetoric of ethical dispositions and gives its readers an attentive, moving way of understanding the condition of human survival after the Holocaust.

Monday, March 16, 2009

French Laughter by Walter Redfern
The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humour in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humour. In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humourlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Vallès and la blague; exaggeration in Vallès and Céline (Mort à credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Météores). Five interleaved 'riffs' on laughter, dreams, black humour, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humour outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

Monday, March 09, 2009

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction by Álvaro Uribe
Sixteen of Mexico’s finest fiction writers born after 1945 are collected in this compelling bilingual anthology, offering a glimpse of the rich tapestry of Mexican fiction, from small-town dramas to tales of urban savagery. Many of these writers, and most of these stories, have never before appeared in English. Readers will meet an embalmed man positioned in front of the TV, a mariachi singer suffering from mediocrity, a man’s lifelong imaginary friend, and the town prostitute whose funeral draws a crowd from the highest rungs of the social ladder. The writers that Mexican editor Álvaro Uribe selected for this volume are deeply engaged in the literary life of Mexico and include prominent editors, translators, columnists, professors, and even the young founder of a new publishing collective. Between them they have received dozens of prizes, from the Xavier Villaurrutia prize to Guggenheim fellowships and other international awards.

Monday, March 09, 2009

AntiMatter by Frank Close
Antimatter explores a strange mirror world, where particles have identical yet opposite properties to those that make up the familiar matter we encounter everyday; where left becomes right, positive becomes negative; and where, should matter and antimatter meet, the two annihilate in a blinding flash of energy that makes even thermonuclear explosions look feeble by comparison. It is an idea long beloved of science-fiction stories - but here, renowned science writer Frank Close shows that the reality of antimatter is even more fascinating than the fiction itself. We know that once, antimatter and matter existed in perfect counterbalance, and that antimatter then perpetrated a vanishing act on a cosmic scale that remains one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. Today, antimatter does not exist normally, at least on Earth, but we know that it is real for scientists are now able to make small pieces of it in particle accelerators, such as that at CERN in Geneva. Looking at the remarkable prediction of antimatter and how it grew from the meeting point of relativity and quantum theory in the early 20th century, at the discovery of the first antiparticles, at cosmic rays, annihilation, antimatter bombs, and antiworlds, Close separates the facts from the fiction about antimatter, and explains how its existence can give us profound clues about the origins and structure of the universe.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters by Philip Davis
Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature's enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking. This title explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author's unique insight into why it is still important today. It provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close reading of important texts. It argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alike. It seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis.

Monday, March 02, 2009

How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic
Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl Lewis's record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. However when the shadow of war spreads to Visegrad, the world as he knows it stops. Suddenly it is not important how heavy a spider's life weighs, or why Marko's horse is related to Superman. Suddenly it is important to have the right name and to pretend that the little Muslim girl Asija is his sister. Then Aleksandar's parents decide to flee to Germany and he must leave his new friend behind.

Monday, February 23, 2009

A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann
Isak Lovenstad is a pioneering obstetrician - and a powerful, charismatic womanizer. Every summer he gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarso. Here Erika, Molly and Laura know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of other children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none is comparable to Erika's bond with Ragnar, a rebellious misfit whose intensity makes them inseparable. But when they turn fourteen, and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar's outcast state, she turns away suddenly - a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to alter forever each sister's life. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarso to see their father - now eighty-four and in year-round exile there - the three women confront, finally, the spectre of that awful summer whose mark each has since carried.

Monday, February 23, 2009

The Director by Alexander Ahndoril
A portrait of an artist capturing the late, great Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman at a crucial moment in his life, in 1961 when he was making the second film in his celebrated faith trilogy, Winter Light. Fighting to finish his film about a priest who loses his religion (which nobody wanted him to make), and struggling with his stern Lutheran minister father (who wanted his son to enter the church), Bergman is presented in a complex if not flattering light; he initially praised the book and subsequently damned it shortly before he died. If Alexander Ahndoril’s psychological portrait isn’t black and white, his evocation of time and place is. Careful employment of his spare prose style — "[he] walks through a shadow the size of himself" — recreates the bleak, eerie world of Bergman’s monochromatic films.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s by Markley
The binary opposition of Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin by scholars has led to mischaracterization of 1790s novels and this book advances new scholarship to correct this. Conversion and Reform analyzes the work of those British reformists writing in the 1790s who reshaped the conventions of fiction to reposition the novel as a progressive political tool. It includes new readings of key figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft.

Monday, February 09, 2009

The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe by John Richetti
Daniel Defoe had an eventful and adventurous life as a merchant, politician, spy and literary hack. He is one of the eighteenth century’s most lively, innovative and important authors, famous not only for his novels, including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, but for his extensive work in journalism, political polemic and conduct guides, and for his pioneering 'Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain'. This volume surveys the wide range of Defoe's fiction and non-fiction, and assesses his importance as writer and thinker. Leading scholars discuss key issues in Defoe's novels, and show how the man who was once pilloried for his writings emerges now as a key figure in the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century.

Monday, February 09, 2009

The Grounds of English Literature by Christopher Cannon
The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware of the existence of other English writing. In a series of detailed readings of the more important early Middle English works, Cannon shows how the many and varied texts of the period laid the foundations for the project of English literature. This richness is for the first time given credit in these readings by means of an innovative theory of literary form that accepts every written shape as itself a unique contribution to the history of ideas. This theory also suggests that the impoverished understanding of literature we now commonly employ is itself a legacy of this early period, an attribute of the single form we have learned to call 'romance'. A number of reading methods have lately taught us to be more generous in our understandings of what literature might be, but this book shows us that the very variety we now strive to embrace anew actually formed the grounds of English literature - a richness we only lost when we forgot how to recognize it.

Monday, February 02, 2009

History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe by Robert Mayer
This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only ‘history’ in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and marvels. Mayer thus explains why Defoe’s narratives were initially read as history. It is the acceptance of the claims to historicity, the study argues, that differentiates Defoe’s fictions from those of writers like Thomas Deloney and Aphra Behn, important writers who nevertheless have figured less prominently than Defoe in discussions of the novel. Mayer ends by exploring the theoretical implications of the history-fiction connection. His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.

Monday, February 02, 2009

The Cult of Statistical Significance by Stephen Thomas Ziliak
The Cult of Statistical Significance shows, field by field, how "statistical significance," a technique that dominates many sciences, has been a huge mistake. The authors find that researchers in a broad spectrum of fields, from agronomy to zoology, employ "testing" that doesn't test and "estimating" that doesn't estimate. The facts will startle the outside reader: how could a group of brilliant scientists wander so far from scientific magnitudes? This study will encourage scientists who want to know how to get the statistical sciences back on track and fulfill their quantitative promise. The book shows for the first time how wide the disaster is, and how bad for science, and it traces the problem to its historical, sociological, and philosophical roots.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Loneliness as a Way of Life by Thomas Dumm
“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s Experience, to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

Monday, January 26, 2009

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 2, 1100 - 1400 by Nigel Morgan
This is the first history of the book in Britain from the Norman Conquest until the early fifteenth century. The twenty-six expert contributors to this volume discuss the manuscript book from a variety of angles: as physical object (manufacture, format, writing and decoration); its purpose and readership (books for monasteries, for the Church's liturgy, for elementary and advanced instruction, for courtly entertainment); and as the vehicle for particular types of text (history, sermons, medical treatises, law and administration, music). In all of this, the broader, changing social and cultural context is kept in mind, and so are the various connections with continental Europe. The volume includes a full bibliography and 80 black and white plates.

Monday, January 19, 2009

In Praise of the Common by Cesare Casarino
Antonio Negri has inspired anti-empire movements around the world through his writings and personal example. Born in 1933, he was imprisoned in Italy in 1979 and convicted, nearly five years later, on questionable charges of “association and insurrection against the state,” whereupon he left the country to teach in France. In 1997, he voluntarily returned to Italy to serve out his seventeen-year prison sentence. He was freed in 2003. In Praise of the Common, which began as a conversation between Negri and literary critic Cesare Casarino, is the most complete review of the philosopher’s work ever published. It includes five exchanges in which the two intellectuals discuss Negri’s evolution as a thinker from 1950 to the present, detailing for the first time the genealogy of his concepts. In Praise of the Common contains two essays by Casarino that expand Negri’s most recent work by relating it to the work of other prominent thinkers. This is at once a book by Negri and on Negri. It presents, for the first time in English, a major essay by Negri on the “monster” as a political figure in the history of Western thought, engaging with discourses of biopolitics, eugenics, and genetic engineering. More candid and self-critical than ever before, Negri provides his wide audience with a rich and revelatory assessment of his controversial, highly influential thought.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Isaac Rosenberg by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's 'genius' and T.S. Eliot called him the 'most extraordinary' of the Great War poets. Yet it is over thirty years since there has been a full-length biography of Isaac Rosenberg. This major reappraisal of his life and work by one of the First World War literature's leading authorities, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, is long overdue. Rosenberg dies on the Western Front in 1918 aged only twenty-seven, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect - race, class, education, upbringing, experience and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets, allowing the voice of the "poor bloody Tommy" to be eloquently heard. Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work - his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer; his visit to Cape Town, where he was staying when war broke out in August 1914 and where he fell in love with the divorced wife of South Africa's future Prime Minister; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army. This monumental new life is published to mark the 90th anniversary of his death. Based on all known Rosenberg material and a mass of important new discoveries, Dr Wilson's biography has been authorised by Rosenberg's family and written with their blessing and help. It is also beautifully illustrated, including some hitherto unseen self-portraits, bringing together for the first time all that is known of this outstanding poet-painter.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Isaac Rosenberg by Vivien Noakes
This volume presents all of the surviving writings of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918): poetry, plays, prose works, and letters. The book also provides a commentary giving details of the composition and publication of the poems and plays and throws light on the people, places, and incidents described in both these and the letters. An introduction places the collection in context and a chronological table describes the main events of his life. There are also examples of his paintings and drawings. Although best known as a war poet, most of Rosenberg's work pre-dates the war. The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he grew up in London's East End. Financially impoverished, he nevertheless lived in a society that valued artistic creativity - among his friends were Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. He was a painter as well as a poet, and studied at the Slade School of Art. He knew many of the leading poets of the day, and his letters, in particular those to Edward Marsh and Gordon Bottomley, throw fascinating light on his own poetic creativitiy and the response to his work of those around him. In both his letters and prose works we find an insightful commentator on both poetry and painting. Though never a member of any movement, he was aware of the issues that preoccupied the artistic circles of his day. His artistic independence gives both power and insight to his work.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody
Jean-Luc Godard is one the most influential film-makers of the last fifty years. Scorsese, Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai and Lars von Trier are but a few of the directors who have fallen under the spell of his free-wheeling style. In his 1960s heyday Godard - always in dark shades, cigarette in hand - epitomised European cool. But he subsequently grew into one of the most formidable artists the cinema has produced. Writer and film-maker Richard Brody, one of the few to have interviewed Godard in his Swiss retreat, here offers an accessible account of this extraordinary and fascinating artist.

Monday, January 05, 2009

Tranquility by Attila Bartis
Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a small apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then Andor meets the beautiful and nurturing Eszter, a woman who seems to have no past, and they fall wildly in love at first sight. With a fulfilling life seemingly within reach for the first time, Andor decides that he is ready to bring Eszter home to meet Mother. Though Bartis’s characters are unrepentantly neurotic and dressed in the blackest humor, his empathy for them is profound. A political farce of the highest ironic order, concluding that “freedom is a condition unsuited to humans,” Tranquility is ultimately, at its splanchnic core, a complex psychodrama turned inside out, revealing with visceral splendor the grotesque ideal that there’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.

Monday, January 05, 2009

The Pets by Bragi Olafsson
Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he’s just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friend—Havard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institution—on his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away. Havard won’t be so easily put off, however, and he breaks into Emil’s apartment and decides to wait for his return—Emil couldn’t have gone far; the pot of coffee is still warming on the stove. While Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unable to show himself with each passing moment, Havard discovers the booze, and he ends up hosting a bizarre party for Emil's friends, and Greta. An alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, an assumed identity, the breezy and straightforward style of The Pets belies its narrative depth, and disguises a complexity that grows with every page.

Monday, December 29, 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald by Penelope Fitzgerald

Acclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels – including the Booker Prize-winning Offshore – and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most admired authors in Britain during the last century. The prizewinning author of nine novels, three biographies, and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000. So I Have Thought Of You, a generous selection of essays, reviews, introductions and other occasional writings, is an invaluable addition her distinguished oeuvre.

Monday, December 29, 2008

The Essential Chomsky by Noam Chomsky
For the past forty years Noam Chomsky’s writings on politics and language have established him as a preeminent public intellectual and as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. Among the seminal figures in linguistic theory over the past century, since the 1960s Chomsky has also secured a place as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States. Chomsky’s many bestselling works — including Manufacturing Consent, Hegemony or Survival, Understanding Power, and Failed States — have served as essential touchstones for dissidents, activists, scholars, and concerned citizens on subjects ranging from the media to human rights to intellectual freedom. In particular, Chomsky’s scathing critiques of the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East have furnished a widely accepted intellectual inspiration for antiwar movements over nearly four decades. The Essential Chomsky assembles the core of his most important writings, including excerpts from his most influential texts over the past forty years. Here is an unprecedented, comprehensive overview of Chomsky’s thought.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Working Knowledge by Petr Kràl
In Working Knowledge, over the course of one hundred brief and evanescent texts, Kràl brings together, as his compatriot Milan Kundera writes in his introduction, “this strange and beautiful existential encyclopaedia of the everyday”. Whether describing twilight, a toothpick, the ritual of shaving or the act of going upstairs, his gaze is ingenuous, humble, amazed. Mute objects, fleeting gestures, changeless passions: Kràl forces us to look at them anew. Each limpid, graceful essay is a brief voyage of discovery in which lowly objects and everyday actions, so often unobserved, are transfigured. Petr Kràl has the unerring ability to perceive, to catch the commonplace by surprise and with the unsettling clarity see beyond the everyday to the fabric of life beneath. Translated from the French by prize winning translator Frank Wynne.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Tarkovsky by Nathan Dunne
Tarkovsky provides a collection of accessible academic essays by leading film studies professionals. A challenging, broadly illustrated book that fully captures the essence of this cinematic pioneer. The book pays tribute to the substantial legacy of Andrei Tarkovsky, the most important Soviet filmmaker of the post-war era, and one of the world’s most renowned cinematic geniuses. His reputation has grown significantly since his death twenty years ago in Paris. Tarkovsky created spiritual, existential films of incredible beauty, repeatedly returning to themes of memory, dreams, childhood and Christianity. Hugely influential on directors such as David Lynch, Steven Soderburgh and Lars Von Trier, he is particularly known for his re-imagining of the science fiction genre in films such as Solaris and Stalker. All aspects of Tarkovsky's films are explored including their sociological and psychological dimensions, their cinematic language and their rich symbolism. Contributions include the first ever English translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous essay on the film Ivan’s Childhood, along with pieces by Harvard professor Stephanie Sandler, film critic and curator James Quandt and Evgeny Tsymbal, assistant director to Tarkovsky on Stalker. Illustrated with original stills along with studio shots, lobby cards, posters and other rare ephemera and containing a wealth of previously unseen material from Soviet archives, Tarkovsky is the definitive text on Tarkovsky’s singularly complex body of work.

Monday, December 15, 2008

The Men in My Life by Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort. Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that "ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright." Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: "Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop." Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers — talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known — she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H.G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

Monday, December 15, 2008

What Should We Do with Our Brain? by Catherine Malabou
Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized “plasticity,” the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a thin line between the organization of the nervous system and the political and social organization that both conditions and is conditioned by human experience. Looking carefully at contemporary neuroscience, it is hard not to notice that the new way of talking about the brain mirrors the management discourse of the neo-liberal capitalist world in which we now live, with its talk of decentralization, networks, and flexibility. Consciously or unconsciously, science cannot but echo the world in which it takes place. In the neo-liberal world, “plasticity” can be equated with “flexibility”—a term that has become a buzzword in economics and management theory. The plastic brain would thus represent just another style of power, which, although less centralized, is still a means of control. In this book, Catherine Malabou develops a second, more radical meaning for plasticity. Not only does plasticity allow our brains to adapt to existing circumstances, it opens a margin of freedom to intervene, to change those very circumstances. Such an understanding opens up a newly transformative aspect of the neurosciences. In insisting on this proximity between the neurosciences and the social sciences, Malabou applies to the brain Marx’s well-known phrase about history: people make their own brains, but they do not know it. This book is a summons to such knowledge.

Monday, December 08, 2008

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell by Thomas J. Travisano
When first introduced to Robert Lowell in 1947, Elizabeth Bishop wrote that "he was living in a basement room on Third Avenue ... and was rather untidy. He was wearing a rumpled dark blue suit; I remember the sad state of his shoes; he needed a haircut ... I took to him at once." Lowell was equally taken by Bishop, and thought she had "more to offer, I think, than anyone writing poems in English." The candid, affectionate, constrained and loving friendship of two American poets is recorded in letters written over three decades, collected here for the first time in their entirety. It begins after the publication of their first books and ends only with Lowell’s death. Their discussions of books, articles and the literary scene; their agreements and disagreements about T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Mary McCarthy, William Empson and other writers; their arguments about each other’s work; and their observations of Brazilian and American political life are set alongside Bishop’s descriptions of her years with her lover on a mountainside near Rio, her wit and keen attention turning equally to soldiers and politicians, architectural projects and toucans in rainstorms; and Lowell’s sketches of his family life in New York, London, Maine and Boston, with an eye for physical and emotional detail that seems directly wired into his prose. The letters also record the complications of each other’s lives - Lowell’s mental illness, Bishop’s struggles with alcohol, their mutually crossed love affairs. In their now celebrated correspondences, they performed best for one another, as the drama of their public and private lives unfolded.

Monday, December 08, 2008

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll
Widely regarded as the finest poet of his generation, Seamus Heaney is the subject of numerous critical studies; but no book-length portrait has appeared until now. Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, Stepping Stones retraces the poet’s steps from his first exploratory testing of the ground as an infant to what he called his ‘moon-walk’ to the podium at which he received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also fascinatingly charts his post-Nobel life and is supplemented with a large number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O’Driscoll, Seamus Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced during the dark years of the Ulster "Troubles". Combining the spontaneity of animated conversation with the considered qualities of the best autobiographical writing, Stepping Stones provides an original, diverting and absorbing store of reflections, opinions and recollections.

Monday, December 01, 2008

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad
Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to dabble in amateur dramatics. In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjørn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life for ever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjørn carry his preposterous and dangerous plan through to its logical conclusion. However, the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjørn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he's tangled up in a game or reality. Novel 11, Book 18 is an uncompromising and concentrated existential novel that accommodates all of Dag Solstad’s fundamental themes, and for which he received the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature for the second time.

Monday, December 01, 2008

A Time to Speak Out by Anne Karpf (editor)
In A Time to Speak Out, a collection of strong Jewish voices, drawing on an established tradition of Jewish dissidence, come together to explore some of the most challenging issues facing diaspora Jews, notably in relation to the ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine. Nearly all contributors were associated with the Independent Jewish Voices declaration which, when launched in Britain in 2007, opened a floodgate of responses. This book bears witness to the urgency of that continuing debate. With articles on such topics as international law, the Holocaust, varieties of Zionism, self-hatred, the multiplicity of Jewish identities, and human rights, these essays provide powerful evidence of the vitality of independent Jewish opinion as well as demonstrating that criticism of Israel has a crucial role to play in the continuing history of a Jewish concern for social justice. At once sober and radical, A Time To Speak Out reclaims an often intemperate debate for those both inside and outside Israel who prefer to confront uncomfortable "truths."

Monday, November 24, 2008

Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones
"I’m not sure that I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh letter. I’m more like a specialised piece of punctuation, a cedilla, umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer or typewriter. Pilcrow is the prettiest of the bunch, assessed purely as a word. And at least it stands on its own. It doesn’t perch or dangle. Pilcrow it is." That’s the reader’s introduction to John Cromer, one of the most unusual heroes in all literature. If the minority is always right, John must be practically infallible. He experiences his 1950s childhood as a sort of ramshackle isolation tank, screening out sensation and adventure. Of course, as he points out, time passed slowly for everyone in the fifties, it wasn’t just him, but it’s hard to deny him the status of a special case. From that point on, John’s epic task becomes clear. He must climb out of the tank and make his way somehow on land. Pilcrow is an exploration of a rich but marginal life, an engrossing story with a vibrant supporting cast of ghouls, matrons and sexual adventurers.

Monday, November 24, 2008

The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski
The Bruise is a novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M-deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one which has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not go away, forcing M-- to confront her own existential fears. M--’s wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination is that of the writer, breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. With rhythmic language and allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski reclaims the university bildugsroman as an intelligent and moving form.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Let Me Tell You by Paul Griffiths
RSB-contributor Paul Griffiths's novel is haunting and funny. In it the Ophelia of Hamlet tells her story and speaks her thoughts, using only the words allotted her in the play. She is confined to this small vocabulary — and her confinement makes itself felt. Yet, despite her meagre resources, she can talk about the people with whom she finds herself and can also express her increasing sense of awaiting danger. Her language proves broad enough to encompass a fairytale and a play, nursery rhymes and songs, letters from Polonius and a pornographic monologue from her mother. At the same time, the use of such a restricted vocabulary provides a highly unusual reading experience. Ophelia’s voice, while passionate, direct and versatile, gains musical qualities as words keep recurring in perpetually changing contexts. "I found let me tell you a beautiful and enthralling work, as well as a great success in Oulipian terms" -- Harry Mathews. (Read an extract in Golden Handcuffs Review.)

Monday, November 17, 2008

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century by Thomas N. Bisson
Medieval civilization came of age in thunderous events like the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. Power fell into the hands of men around castles who imposed coercive new lordships in quest of nobility, heedless of the old public order. In The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, acclaimed historian Thomas Bisson asks what it was like to live in a Europe without government, and he asks how people experienced power, and suffered. Rethinking a familiar history as a problem of origins, he explores the circumstances that impelled knights, emperors, nobles, and churchmen to infuse lordship with social purpose. Bisson traces the origins of European government to a crisis of lordship and its resolution. King John of England was only the latest and most conspicuous in a gallery of bad lords who dominated the populace instead of ruling it. Men like him had been all too commonplace in the twelfth century. More and more knights pretended to powers and status, encroached on clerical domains and exploited peasants, and came to seem threatening to social order and peace. Yet as Bisson shows, it was not so much the oppressed people as their tormentors who were in crisis. Covering all of Western Christendom, this book suggests what these violent people -- and the outcries they provoked -- contributed to the making of governments in kingdoms, principalities, and towns.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar
Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence -- rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should -- they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view -- that it is always wrong to have children -- and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Voice Over by Celine Curiol
A young woman works in Paris at the Gare du Nord. She spends every day talking into a microphone, announcing platform numbers and timetables, essentially invisible to the world. She falls in love with a man who, in turn, is in love with another. Our heroine considers her rival to be physically stunning, as beautiful ‘as an angel’. She decides not to pursue the man. Rather, she is prepared to wait, alone - that is, until one night a male friend of the ‘angel’ asks her what she does for a living and she answers, ‘Prostitute’. Céline Curiol’s debut novel is a remarkable vision of love and relationships in all their ambiguities, shot through with the poignancy of urban existence.

Monday, November 03, 2008

War Without End by Michael Schwartz
In this razor-sharp analysis, TomDispatch.com commentator Michael Schwartz demolishes the myths used to sell the U.S. public the idea of an endless "war on terror" centered in Iraq. In a popular style, reminiscent of the best writing against the Vietnam war, he shows how the real U.S. interests in Iraq have been rooted in the geopolitics of oil and the expansion of a neoliberal economic model in the Middle East.

Monday, November 03, 2008

Magnus by Sylvie Germain
Magnus is a deeply moving and enigmatic novel about the Holocaust, which has been Sylvie Germain most commercially successful novel in France. Magnus is a man searching for his own identity, who pieces together the complex puzzle of his life, which turns out to be closer to a painting by Edward Munch than the romantic tale of family heroism and self-sacrifice on which he was nurtured by the woman he believed was his mother. Sylvie Germain in Magnus uses imagination and intuition to unlock the enigma of human life and confer on history the power of myth and fable.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Of Kids & Parents by Emil Hakl
In Europe, taking a walk is a cultural phenomenon having an almost mystical import. It connects physical activity with meditation, inner silence with the outer tumult of the world. Taking its cue both from Joyce's Ulysses and Hrabal's freely associating stream of anecdote, Of Kids & Parents is about a father and son taking a walk through Prague, over the course of which, and in the pubs and bars they stop into, their personal lives are revealed as entwined with the past sixty years of upheaval in their corner of Europe. One's "small history" is shown to be inseparable from the large history played out on the world's stage: families are uprooted, relationships fail, jobs are gained or lost, and still life goes on. Hakl's genius is his ability to mesh the two into a seamless flow of dialogue. The father tells his son: "Nothing's been new in this world for more than two billion years, it's all just variations on the same theme of carbon, hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen." Which raises the question: though Prague has witnessed various forms of government, wars, putsches, and revolutions come and go over the course of a century, what really has changed? On the personal level, the same mistakes are repeated over and over, a never-ending freak show.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Guantanamo: A Novel by Dorothea Dieckmann
Guantanamo is the meticulously researched story of a young German man of mixed Muslim Indian and German heritage, whose journey to his father's country to claim his inheritance leads to a tragic twist of fate, when he is captured and deported to Guantanamo, the notorious US base in Cuba. Travelling to India shortly after the Afghan war in order to claim an inheritance, 20-year-old Rashid befriends a young Afghan and continues his voyage to Peshawar. There he finds himself in the middle of an anti-American demonstration and is arrested, handed over to the Americans and deported to Guantanamo. In a remarkable literary experiment, Rashid's story is told in six scenes, with an introspective voice that is both sensitive yet utterly without sentimentality. Guantanamo explores the existential consequences for an isolated prisoner coping with suppression and uncertainty, including paralysing fear, psychotic delusions, the manic identification with fellow Muslim prisoners, and eventually, resignation.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Death and the Author by David Ellis
At the heart of Death and the Author is a dramatic account of D.H. Lawrence's desperate struggle against tuberculosis during his last days, and of certain, often bizarre events which followed his death. Around this narrative David Ellis offers a series of reflections about what it is like to have a disease for which there is no cure, the appeal of alternative medicine, the temptation of suicide for the terminally ill, the diminishing role of religion in modern life, the institution of famous last words, the consequences of dying intestate, and so on. These are clearly not the most immediately appealing of topics but they have an obvious significance for everyone and the treatment of them here is by no means lugubrious (even if, in the nature of the case, most of the jokes fall into the category of gallows humour). Lawrence is the main focus throughout but there are extended references to a number of other famous literary consumptives such as Keats, Katherine Mansfield, Kafka, Chekhov or George Orwell. Death and the author is divided into three parts called Dying, Death and Remembrance and is made up of twenty-two short sections. Although it incorporates a good deal of original material, the annotation has been kept deliberately light. The aim has been to combine the drama of events - a good story - with a consideration of matters which must eventually concern us all, and to present the material in a lively and accessible form.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Five Fictions in Search of Truth by Myra Jehlen
Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbô, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass.In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption -- that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth. Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about the world but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through this form, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that is equally concrete. Writers write -- and readers read -- to discover an incarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basic concurrence between literature and science.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Reading Boyishly by Carol Mavor
An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood—nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied — Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy — J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue — Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading. To “read boyishly” is to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nosos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. The writers and the photographer that Mavor lovingly considers are boyish readers par excellence: Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up; Barthes, the “professor of desire” who lived with or near his mother until her death; Proust, the modernist master of nostalgia; Winnicott, therapist to “good enough” mothers; and Lartigue, the child photographer whose images invoke ghostlike memories of a past that is at once comforting and painful.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Journal of Jules Renard by Jules Renard
Spanning from 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, The Journal of Jules Renard is a unique autobiographical masterpiece that, though celebrated abroad and cited as a principle influence by writers as varying as Somerset Maugham and Donald Barthelme, remains largely undiscovered in the United States. Throughout his journal, Renard develops not only his artistic convictions but also his humanity, as he reflects on the nineteenth-century French literary and art scene and the emergence of his position as an important novelist and playwright in that world, provides aphorisms and quips, and portrays the details of his personal life — his love interests, his position as a socialist mayor of Chitry, the suicide of his father — that often appear in his work.

Monday, October 06, 2008

On Poetry and Politics by Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan was a legendary editorial figure of twentieth-century French literature, assisting and publishing many of the most important writers of his lifetime. He was also the author of several volumes of fiction and numerous essays dealing with literature, art, rhetoric, and language. Yet he published his own work in a manner that deliberately kept it inconspicuous, or as Maurice Blanchot put it, "in the margins." A critics' critic, he gave his texts the same scrupulous attention he gave to others, and was recognized as a discreet master. But when he was sufficiently upset or angry, as he was when French politics endangered the intellectual freedom of French writers and writing, he published ferociously. This volume is the first English translation of these major essays, presenting in one book the development of his thinking on his most studied subject: how language works, or, to echo Blanchot again, how literature is possible. Much of contemporary literary theory finds its modern antecedents in Paulhan's essays. He reflected on large questions such as the philosophy and psychology of literature, while at the same time showing a concern for detail and aesthetic accomplishment. He constantly emphasized the act of reading as an activity and literature as the engagement and provocation of such activity. Beloved by writers because he took the problems of writing with the utmost seriousness, his own personal style was marked by self-effacement and irony.

Monday, October 06, 2008

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux
The remarkable debut of a former student of Alain Badiou, this work makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of Continental philosophy. Quentin Meillassoux is considered to be one of the most talented and exciting new voices in contemporary French philosophy. Meillassoux’s remarkable debut makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of Continental philosophy. Written in a style that marries great clarity of expression with argumentative rigour, After Finitude provides bold readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a devastating critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy. The author introduces a startlingly novel philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. After Finitude proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
"We were never born to read," says Maryanne Wolf. "No specific genes ever dictated reading's development. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we changed the very organisation of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species." In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf explores our brains' near-miraculous ability to arrange and re-arrange themselves in response to external circumstances. She examines how this "open architecture", the elasticity of our brains, helps and hinders humans in their attempts to learn to read, and to process the written language. She also investigates what happens to people whose brains make it difficult to acquire these skills, such as those with dyslexia. Wolf, a world expert on the reading brain, brings both a personal passion and deft style to this, the story of the reading brain.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike’s deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News’ Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? For this collection, David Foster Wallace immersed himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolled from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risked life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedled his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good on the radio.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Pets by Erica Fudge
Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one is living with when one chooses to share a home with an animal. Fudge argues that our capacity for compassion and ability to live alongside others is evident in our relationships with our pets, those paradoxical creatures who give us a sense of comfort and security while simultaneously troubling the categories human and animal. For what is a pet if it isn’t a fully-fledged member of the human family? This book proposes that by crossing over these boundaries pets help construct who it is we think we are. Drawing on the works of modern writers, such as J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Jacques Derrida, Fudge shows how pets have been used to think with and to undermine our easy conceptions of human, animal and home. Indeed, Pets shows our obsession with domestic animals reveals many of the paradoxes, contradictions and ambiguities of life. Living with pets provides thought-provoking perspectives on our notions of possession and mastery, mutuality and cohabitation, love and dominance. We might think of pets as simply happy, loved additions to human homes but as this Fudge reveals perhaps it is the pets that make the home and without pets perhaps we might not be the humans we think we are.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill
This is the first book to approach Stonehenge without any theoretical position. It describes what is known and believed about the monument’s construction from c. 3000 BCE onwards. The Middle Ages were content with the story of it having been brought by Merlin from Ireland. The post Reformation antiquaries gave us the conception of Stonehenge as a historical monument. It played a significant role in the imagination of writers and artists. Then the Victorians invented prehistory and Darwin himself came to measure it. In 1918 it passed into public ownership and 1926 saw the first forced entry by Druids. The Earth Mysteries Movement now sees the stones as part of a greater web of ley lines and other phenomena. Archaeologists, united in their disdain for that, remain divided on many other points. And perhaps the most fraught issue now is conservation as the henge stands between two thundering main roads. This rich and provocative book explores all this in presenting a monument whose history is as fascinating as its secret.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist by Fredric Jameson
The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work of the great modernists – Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats – who were his sometime friends and collaborators. Lewis’s originality, however, is born of the fact that, unlike these writers, he was in essence a political novelist. Fredric Jameson proposes a framework in which Lewis’s explosive language practice can be grasped as a symbolic and political act. Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy.

Monday, September 01, 2008

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident. Plagued by insomnia, he tries to push back thoughts of things he would prefer to forget - his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus - by telling himself stories. He imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union, and a bloody civil war ensued. Brill gradually opens up to his granddaughter, recounting the story of his marriage and confronting the grim reality of Titus’s death.

Monday, September 01, 2008

Citizens to Lords by Ellen Meiksins Wood
In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood lays out her innovative approach to the history of political theory and traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Her “social history” is a significant departure from other contextual interpretations. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato and Aristotle, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Citizens to Lord offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Lenz by Georg Büchner
Lenz, Georg Büchner’s visionary exploration of an 18th-century playwright’s descent into madness, has been called the inception of European modernist prose. Elias Canetti considered this short novella to be one of the seminal reading experiences of his entire life, and writers as various as Paul Celan, Christa Wolff and Peter Schneider have paid homage to it in their works. Published posthumously in 1839, Lenz is a taut case study of three weeks in the life of a schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the “inside” of insanity. Partially based on the memoir of an Alsatian pastor describing Lenz’s stay with him in 1778 (translated here in its entirety for the first time), Büchner’s text moves well beyond its source by the rapt and virtually autistic attention it brings to the details of the natural world, whose landscapes prefigure those of Cézanne or Van Gogh. Printed here in the original German and flanked by a fresh English translation based on best recent philological readings of the text, this edition will allow readers to discover why Heiner Müller has pronounced Lenz the finest example of “21st-century prose.”

Monday, August 25, 2008

Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben
Winner of the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Our Horses in Egypt tells the story of Philomena, fat and lazy when she is requisitioned from an English field at the start of the First World War, who sails for Egypt with the territorial regiment, the Dorset Yeomanry. She serves faithfully, charging the dervishes in the Western Desert and enduring the privations of Allenby’s great campaign in Palestine. She recovers from wounds to swelter through a summer in the Jordan Valley. She takes part in the triumphant advance on Damascus – only to be sold off in Cairo among the 22,000 horses left behind by the War Office after the Armistice. By 1921, the forceful Griselda Romney, a war widow – in the author's Hound Music she was a child – has discovered that her old hunter, Philomena, could be still alive. With her six-year-old daughter, and of course Nanny, Mrs Romney sets out to Egypt, to find Philomena and to rescue her.

Monday, August 18, 2008

The Landscapist by Pierre Martory
John Ashbery’s translations of Pierre Martory’s poems offer a unique insight into the work of the French poet, and into the creative dialogue between two poets. Ashbery describes Martory’s writing as ‘touched by the gaiety of René Clair’s films and the melancholy of Piaf, echoing the witty surrealism of Pierre Reverdy and Raymond Queneau’; in Ashbery’s translations, the distinctive flavour of Martory’s poetry, ‘located somewhere between Paris and New York’, finds its English voice. The Landscapist gathers Ashbery’s published translations, some with emendations, together with uncollected pieces and facing-page French text. With a definitive introductory biographical essay by Ashbery and bibliographies of both the translations and Martory’s publications, The Landscapist is an indispensable introduction to Martory’s poetry and an illuminating addition to Ashbery’s work.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Dostoevsky's Democracy by Nancy Ruttenburg
Dostoevsky's Democracy offers a major reinterpretation of the life and work of the great Russian writer by closely reexamining the crucial transitional period between the early works of the 1840s and the important novels of the 1860s. Sentenced to death in 1849 for utopian socialist political activity, the 28-year-old Dostoevsky was subjected to a mock execution and then exiled to Siberia for a decade, including four years in a forced labor camp, where he experienced a crisis of belief. It has been influentially argued that the result of this crisis was a conversion to Russian Orthodoxy and reactionary politics. But Dostoevsky's Democracy challenges this view through a close investigation of Dostoevsky's Siberian decade and its most important work, the autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1861). Nancy Ruttenburg argues that Dostoevsky's crisis was set off by his encounter with common Russians in the labor camp, an experience that led to an intense artistic meditation on what he would call Russian "democratism." By tracing the effects of this crisis, Dostoevsky's Democracy presents a new understanding of Dostoevsky's aesthetic and political development and his role in shaping Russian modernity itself, especially in relation to the preeminent political event of his time, peasant emancipation.

Monday, August 11, 2008

The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Creating Equality by Todd May
This is the first single-authored book in any language devoted entirely to the thought of Jacques Rancière. It focuses on his central political idea that a democratic politics emerges from the presupposition of equality. Todd May examines and extends this presupposition, offering a framework for understanding it, placing it in the current political context, and showing how it challenges traditional political philosophy and opens up neglected political paths. May aims to show that Rancière's view offers both hope and perspective for those who seek to think about and engage in progressive political action.

Monday, August 11, 2008

The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa
The only integral collection of the Caeiro heteronym in English, this is accompanied by the introductions of Ricardo Reis and a memoir by Álvaro de Campos, two of Pessoa's other major poetic heteronyms, as well as a poem dedicated to Caeiro by C. Pacheco, thought by many commentators to be another one-off heteronym. Illustrating the complexity of Pessoa's heteronymic project still further, the volume also includes an anonymous introductory note, a further introduction to the 'author's' work by Thomas Crosse (one of Pessoa's English heteronyms), and an 'interview with Caeiro', recorded by Campos. In short, much of Pessoa's heteronymic world is on view in this volume.

Monday, August 04, 2008

Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense by James Williams
This book offers the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze’s most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source for his vital philosophy of the event. Deleuze’s philosophy has always promised a revolution in ethical theories and in our understanding of the relation between language, thought and action. This book develops a critical reading of Deleuze’s work in order to convey the potential and risks of his new approaches to questions of how to live an intense life in response to the excitement and danger of events. This interpretation covers all aspects of Deleuze’s book, including engagements with phenomenology, with analytic philosophy of language, with stoicism, with literary theory and with psychoanalysis. Its aim is to open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze’s work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics and sociology.

Monday, August 04, 2008

Beautiful Image by Marcel Ayme
Translated by our good friend, and RSB contributor, Sophie Lewis, Beautiful Image is the story of Raoul Cerusier, an entirely ordinary man, who seems to have changed his identity somewhere between home and the government office he is visiting to obtain a document. Between blackmailing the secretary of his former self and seducing his own wife, Raoul is confronted with the dark realisation of his true nature... Marcel Aymé was born in Joigny, France in 1902. Following his studies at the Collège de Dole he moved to Paris and worked, most notably, as a journalist. Aymé was able to dedicate himself entirely to literature following the success of The Green Mare, a dark satire on sexuality published in 1933. Following the German occupation and the French resistance, Aymé’s ironic, and often disillusioned perception of the state of affairs in France during this period, produced a body of work that is still placed at the forefront of twentieth century French literature. Marcel Aymé died in Paris in 1967.

Monday, July 28, 2008

Legacies of Paul De Man by Ian Balfour
More than twenty years after his death, Paul de Man remains a haunting presence in the American academy. His name is linked not just with "deconstruction," but with a "deconstruction in America" that continues to disturb the scholarly and pedagogical institution it inhabits. The academy seems driven to characterize "de Manian deconstruction," again and again, as dead. Such reiterated acts of exorcism testify that de Man's ghost has in fact never been laid to rest, and for good reason: a dispassionate survey of recent trends in critical theory and practice reveals that de Man's influence is considerable and ongoing. His name still commands an aura of excitement, even danger: it stands for the pressure of a text and a "theory" that resists easy assimilation or containment. The essays in this volume analyze and evaluate aspects of de Man's strange, powerful legacy. The opening contributions focus on his great theme of "reading"; subsequent chapters explore his complex notions of "history," "materiality," and "aesthetic ideology," and examine his institutional role as a teacher and, more generally, as a charismatic figure associated with the fortunes of "theory."

Monday, July 28, 2008

Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard
Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard's work and his reading of the "radical exoticism" posited by Victor Segalen--ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign "primitive society of the future," America. In a world where no corner is unexplored, the Other remains a challenge to thought, a crack in the shell of universal understanding, impossible to communicate but potentially the linchpin of communication itself. Together, Baudrillard and Guillaume explore the threatened and fatal figures of radical alterity. This collection is no longer available in French, and this English edition includes an additional essay by Baudrillard, "Because Illusion and Reality Are Not Opposed." Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations (1983) instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art. Economist and professor at the Université de Paris-Dauphine, Marc Guillaume has published several works in French rethinking contemporary socioeconomics and has collaborated with such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Attali.

Monday, July 21, 2008

The Porcelain Workshop by Antonio Negri
In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can be described as a "porcelain factory": a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the "short century," Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity (including that of socialism) had lost their relevance. Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Lisbon -- What the Tourist Should See by Fernando Pessoa
In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers in the 1980s. The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city – and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found. A fascinating scrap from the master's table...

Monday, July 14, 2008

Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras
Moderato Cantabile is a carefully woven tapestry of emotion that begins with a jealous lover murdering the woman he loves. Fascinated by the crime, Anne returns several times to the bistro where it took place, drinking through the afternoon with the worker who patiently answers her eager questions, inventing what he does not know. A haunting, oblique love story, which perfectly demonstrates Duras's technique of associating human emotion with locales and landscapes. Marguerite Duras won the Prix Goncourt in 1985 and has won many other prizes. In addition to novels, she has written plays and film scenarios, the most famous of which is Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Born in French Indo-China in 1914, she died in Paris in early 1996.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Aquamarine: Final Tales of the Revolution by Peter Pessl
Aquamarine is the result of two years' musings following the author's long and twisted journey (both in terms of pathways and encounters) to Mexico in 1993. After having been variously reworked, the volume was eventually published in German in 1998. Considered groundbreaking in form and style, the novel is composed of seven intertwining tales whose unsettling, exceptionally ambivalent female protagonists, "Aquamarine" and "Marine," crisscross diverse Mexican landscapes and cities of both external and internal geographies much like a madcap road movie plowing straight through historical episodes into present-day reality. Along the way we encounter the horrific tragedies of private and political worlds as the tales channel into a common stream of storytelling that is so immediate in its presentation it violently impacts the very language itself (and the immanent possibilities or impossibilities in the author's use of language). The reader is thus swept into a swirling dreamscape of words and images, a ramshackle narrative construct where every kind of reality that is, always was, and will continue to be exist simultaneously. Aquamarine explores the unfolding of ideas using a palette of blues, yellows, beiges, or "leg-color," ideas coiled like a garden hose with all its kinks, awkward convolutions, and ungainly twists, each loop having its own radius but belonging to the same — is the same — loop. Revolution in every sense.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Picture Imperfect by Russell Jacoby
Utopianism suffers from an image problem: A recent exhibition on utopias in Paris and New York included photographs of Hitler's Mein Kampf and a Nazi concentration camp. Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues in this salient, polemical, and innovative work, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, iconoclastic utopianism revives society's dormant political imagination and offers hope for a better future. Writing against the grain of history, Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as 1984 and Brave New World and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principle preoccupation, the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other two characters' actions and events as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind. The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic. Alain Robbe-Grillet is one of the best-known post-war French novelists, the principal theoretician and spokesman of the 'noveau roman', the most important school of French contemporary fiction that looks at reality in a new subjective way and has changed our conception of the novel. Contains a foreword by Tom McCarthy.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras
Yann Andrea Steiner (in a new translation from the French by Mark Polizzotti) is a haunting dance between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between the reminiscing Duras and the young, sensitive Yann Andrea, and a seaside romance witnessed—or imagined—by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper: a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister's murder at the hands of a German soldier. Through this mix of memory and desire, the summer of 1980 flows into 1944 in an enigmatic journey through history, creation, and raw emotion.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Fanon by John Edgar Wideman
A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria’s war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin America, the Black Panthers in the States. Wideman’s novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African American novelist, Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit, part screenplay, part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to the ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood and chases the meaning of Fanon’s legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify.

Monday, June 23, 2008

The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz
The $3 Trillion War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict is a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war - quite apart from its tragic human toll - which the Bush administration has estimated at $50 billion, but which Stiglitz and Bilmes show underestimates the real figure by approximately sixty times. The authors expose the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including not only big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans - for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global perspective, the authors investigate the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally. They calculate what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy, in the US and around the world, and in infrastructure building. Stiglitz and Bilmes write in simple language, which makes the details they present, and the sums they add up, all the more disturbing. This book will change forever the way we think about the Iraq war - and about the cost of war generally.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land by Eva Figes
In the spring of 1939, six-year-old Eva Unger (later Figes) came to settle in London. Born in Berlin, her middle-class Jewish family managed to get out of Nazi Germany, leaving behind friends, relatives and their penniless, orphan housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, with Eva assimilated into post-war British society, word arrived from Edith in Palestine, asking for her old job back in the bosom of the only family she ever knew. At the kitchen table, Edith told the curious schoolgirl Eva of her miraculous survival in wartime Berlin, and her post-war life in the city's ruins, until she was persuaded to go to Palestine. Here she found herself treated with bitter contempt as a despised German Jew, and at the centre of another war, between Arab and Jew.Through Edith's story, Figes argues that continuing anti-Semitism at the end of the century's worst catastrophe led to the creation of Israel. Part memoir, part polemic Journey to Nowhere is a highly charged and profoundly moving account of post-war displacement and a fierce attack on America's role in the Middle East.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom
Alma and Almut share a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from Sao Paulo to Sydney, and together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover. In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel.

Monday, June 16, 2008

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer
Does America's pro-Israel lobby wield inappropriate control over US foreign policy? This book has created a storm of controversy by bringing out into the open America's relationship with the Israel lobby: a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape foreign policy in a way that is profoundly damaging both to the United States and Israel itself. Israel is an important, valued American ally, yet Mearsheimer and Walt show that, by encouraging unconditional US financial and diplomatic support for Israel and promoting the use of its power to remake the Middle East, the lobby has jeopardized America's and Israel's long-term security and put other countries - including Britain - at risk.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good by Marek Kohn
Trust -- whether between parents and children, merchants and shoppers, or citizens and their government -- lies at the very heart of our relationships, our society, and our everyday lives. This vividly written compact book reveals how modern thinkers -- scientists, social scientists, and philosophers -- have shed much light on the nature of trust. Beginning with some fascinating evolutionary puzzles about the origins of trust; for instance, how cooperation can evolve among individuals pursuing their own selfish interests, Marek Kohn incorporates many different perspectives from the fields of science, sociology, economics, and politics, to draw out the wider implications for trust in human society today. The book discusses trust in gods and how people have sought to reinvest this trust as religious faith has diminished; the effect of low social trust on economic development; and the loss of trust between mutually antagonistic communities, each warming itself by the flames of its hostility to the other. He shows how Communism relied on distrust, and devoted much of its energy to seeding it among its subjects, and Liberal democracy is also based on distrust, but in the opposite direction: it is founded upon the suspicion that the powerful will be tempted to abuse their power, and so must be subject to checks and balances. Perhaps most important, he shows that if we understand what makes trust possible, and why it matters, then we will live better lives in a fast-moving, fast-changing, global society.

Monday, June 09, 2008

The Hands of Day by Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Recognized during his life as "a people's poet", he is considered one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. The Hands of Day - at long last translated (by William O'Daly) into English in its entirety - pronounces Neruda's desire to take part in the great human making of the day. Moved by the guilt of never having worked with his hands, Neruda opens with the despairing confession, "Why did I not make a broom? / Why was I given hands at all?" The themes of hands and work grow in significance as Neruda celebrates the carpenters, longshoremen, blacksmiths, and bakers-those laborers he admires most - and shares his exuberant adoration for the earth and the people upon it in this handsome bilingual edition.

Monday, June 02, 2008

Hitler's Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism by Kevin P. Spicer
Shaken by military defeat and economic depression after War World I, Germans sought to restore their nation’s dignity and power. In this context the National Socialist Party, with its promise of a revivified Germany, drew supporters. Among the most zealous were a number of Catholic clergymen known as “brown priests” who volunteered as Nazi propagandists. Some brown priests, particularly war veterans, advocated National Socialism because it appealed to their patriotic ardor. Others had less laudatory motives: disaffection with clerical life, conflicts with Church superiors, or ambition for personal power and fame. Whatever their individual motives, they employed their skills as orators, writers, and teachers to proclaim the message of Nazism. Especially during the early 1930s, when the Church forbade membership in the party, these clergymen strove to prove that Catholicism was compatible with National Socialism, thereby justifying their support of Nazi ideology. While a handful of brown priests enjoyed the forbearance of their bishops, others endured reprimand or even dismissal; a few found new vocations with the Third Reich. After the fall of the Reich, the most visible brown priests faced trial for their part in the crimes of National Socialism, a movement they had once so earnestly supported.

Monday, June 02, 2008

Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy
A linguist flying to a conference in Helsinki has landed in a strange city where he can't understand a word anyone says. As one claustrophobic day follows another, he wonders why no one has found him yet, whether his wife has given him up for dead, and how he'll get by in this society that looks so familiar, yet is so strange. In a vision of hell unlike any previously imagined, Budai must learn to survive in a world where words and meaning are unconnected. A suspenseful and haunting Hungarian classic.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Hijacking America by Susan George
George Bush leaves the White House in January 2009 and the United States goes back to "normal", right? Wrong, argues Susan George in this fascinating, thorough and often chilling account of the decades-long transformation of American society and political culture. Using the four "Ms" - money, media, marketing, management - but above all with a keen sense of mission, the American secular and religious right has made its "long march through the institutions" and changed the way Americans think. As the left went about its business in blissful ignorance, convinced that its policies, programmes and projects spoke for themselves and would always prevail; the right's well-oiled machine of foundations, lobbies, think-tanks, publications, political cadres, lawyers and activist organisations slowly and strategically took over. A broad alliance of neo-liberals, neo-conservatives and the religious right successfully manufactured a new common sense, assaulted Enlightenment values and targeted the top of society where culture is created and legitimised, because they knew that ideas have consequences - and not just in the United States. For all those who hope for a different America in the future, the first step is to hold the present one up to the light and understand how it got that way.

Monday, May 26, 2008

The World According to Tomdispatch: America and the Age of Empire by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com has established itself as the go-to blog for contemporary US politics, and the favored web platform for radical commentators from Noam Chomsky to Howard Zinn. Its powerful, no-holds-barred features draw a huge response from the public and resonate throughout the global media, acting as a touchpaper for debates which subsequently become headline news. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to catch up on some of the finest political analysis of our age, including trenchant accounts of the two Bush administrations: catastrophic imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq; Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition and its apologists; and Hurricane Katrina, global warming, black gold and the rise of Hugo Chávez. Introduced, arranged and with additional commentary throughout by the blog’s founder Tom Engelhardt, The World According to Tomdispatch is the essential primer for anyone seeking illumination and guidance along the highways and byways of our post-9/11 world.

Monday, May 19, 2008

A Corkscrew Is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire by Nicholas Murray
At the height of the British Empire, countless travellers set off to explore the globe, at the very same moment that the phenomenon of mass tourism was being launched by a certain Mr Thomas Cook. Their reasons for leaving Britain were many and various. They were searching for knowledge, for adventure, for fame, for exotic animals to kill. Some hoped to be the first to stamp their mark upon a lake, a river source or an unknown inland sea, while others dreamed of finding untold natural riches or ancient works of art. Some were soldiers, sailors, spies, scholars or scientists, and some wished to convert the heathen and spread their religion. And some travelled, as people have always done, for no reason at all except the sheer marvellous enjoyment of it. Drawing on the travellers’ own unique and colourful accounts, from Livingstone and Stanley in Africa, Darwin aboard the Beagle and Richard Francis Burton on the road to Mecca to less well-known but equally intrepid explorers, A Corkscrew is Most Useful is a fascinating odyssey.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Caspar David Friedrich by Werner Hofmann
Caspar David Friedrich, now viewed as the leading German Romantic artist of the nineteenth century, was described by one contemporary as the pioneer of a new genre: ‘the tragedy of landscape.’ Here, Werner Hofmann considers Friedrich’s principal achievement, the invention of ‘landscape as icon’, and vividly demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary ability to reproduce the natural world in faithful detail, while at the same time imbuing it with spiritual and religious significance. Carefully placing the artist in a wider context, Hofmann examines contemporary judgments and influences on Friedrich’s work and his difficult relationship with critics such as Goethe, as well as the way that his religious and political beliefs informed his art, and his unique place within the framework of European Romanticism as a whole. The beautiful illustrations include many of Friedrich’s drawings and watercolours as well as over ninety of his works in oils. Friedrich extended an invitation for others to read multiple meanings into his pictures. Hofmann’s ideas cast a remarkable new light on Friedrich’s work, yet at the same time leave it open to individual interpretation.

Monday, May 12, 2008

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
The logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl (translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg), Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism. Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine's rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same. Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within. Left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl transforms our image of a modern master's achievement.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch by the author himself) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe and a Holocaust survivor, who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
At a time when the West seems ever more eager to call on military aggression as a means of securing international peace, Nicholson Baker's provocative narrative exploring the political misjudgements and personal biases that gave birth to the terrifying consequences of the Second World War could not be more pertinent. With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to war and in so doing challenges some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen. Baker reminds us, for instance, not to forget that it was thanks in great part to Churchill and England that Mussolini ascended to power so quickly, and that, before leading the United States against Nazi Germany, a young FDR spent much of his time lobbying for a restriction in the number of Jews admitted to Harvard.Conversely, Human Smoke also reminds us of those who had the foresight to anticipate the coming bloodshed and the courage to oppose the tide of history, as Gandhi demonstrated when he made his symbolic walk to the ocean -- for which he was immediately imprisoned by the British.

Monday, May 05, 2008

If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew by Mike Marqusee
If I Am Not For Myself is a passionate, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century. It traces the author’s upbringing in 1960s Jewish-American surburbia, his anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism on the British left, and life as a Jew among Muslims in Pakistan, Morocco, and Britain. Interwoven with this are the experiences of his grandfather’s life in Jewish New York of the 1930s and 40s, his struggles with anti-Semitism and the twists and turns that led him from anti-fascism to militant Zionism. In the course of this deeply personal story, Marqusee refutes the claims of Israel and Zionism on Jewish loyalty and laments their impact on the Jewish diaspora. Rather, he argues for a richer, more multi-dimensional understanding of Jewish history and identity, and reclaims vital political and personal space for those castigated as “self-haters” by the Jewish establishment.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori
The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth century's ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator's Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just this relationship that has blinded him to — and makes him complicit in — the terrible realities of his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori's most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Adorno and Heidegger by Iain MacDonald
Adorno and Heidegger explores the conflictual history of two important traditions of twentieth-century European thought: the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and the ontology of Martin Heidegger. As is well known, there has been little productive engagement between these two schools of thought, in large measure due to Adorno’s sustained and unanswered critique of Heidegger. Stemming from this critique, numerous political and philosophical barriers have kept these traditions separate, such that they have rarely been submitted to scrutiny, let alone questioned. The essays making up this collection are fresh and original attempts at coming to terms with the nuances and difficulties that these two towering figures have bequeathed to the history of European thought. The volume’s authors deal with a variety of issues ranging from epistemology to esthetics, to ethics, to intellectual history and modernity, providing the reader with detailed insight into a thorny debate in the history of recent European thought.

Monday, April 21, 2008

A Textual History of the King James Bible by David Norton
David Norton has re-edited the King James Bible for Cambridge University Press, and this book arises from his intensive work on that project. Here he shows how the text of the most important Bible in the English language was made, and how, for better and for worse, it changed in the hands of printers and editors until, in 1769, it became the text we know today. Using evidence as diverse as the manuscript work of the original translators, and the results of extensive computer collation of electronically held texts, Norton has produced a scholarly edition of the King James Bible for the new century that will restore the authority of the 1611 translation. This book describes this fascinating background, explains Norton's editorial principles and provides substantial lists and tables of variant readings. It will be indispensable to scholars of the English Bible, literature, and publishing history.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Robin J. Maconie
The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was arguably the most influential figure of the European postwar avant-garde, and unquestionably the most elusive and enigmatic musical thinker of a generation that includes Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Luciano Berio. His radically new electronic and instrumental music converted Igor Stravinsky to serialism in the 1950s, and has continued to inspire young composers for over fifty years. Other Planets draws on over forty years of the author's close study of Stockhausen and functions as a catalogue raisonee of Stockhausen's complete output. With plentiful citations from the history of radio, film, and sound recording, as well as from contemporary science and technology, the book is laid out in strictly chronological order and contains unusually ample commentary on the composer's sources of inspiration. Each composition is also fully documented within the text, giving full information of each work's publisher, catalogue number, instrumentation, duration, and authorized compact disc.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema by Robert Bird
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia’s novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. This book is a comprehensive, well-illustrated and much-needed account of Tarkovsky’s entire film output. Robert Bird’s analysis is centred around a detailed account of Tarkovsky’s technique, which provides the best interpretive guide to both the director’s films and his theoretical speculations. Integrating his idiosyncratic ideas with his films’ irresistible sensuality, Bird highlights Tarkovsky’s fascination with the elusive correlation between cinematic representation and the more primeval perception of the world. The book examines Tarkovsky’s films elementally, grouping them into four sections: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air. It also discusses Tarkovsky’s works for the radio, theatre and opera, and how he was in addition an accomplished actor, screenwriter, film theorist and diarist. The author’s claim, however, is that Tarkovsky was a filmmaker before all else, and this book examines what Tarkovsky’s cinema reveals about the medium in which he worked.

Monday, April 14, 2008

The City of Words by Alberto Manguel
What is the role of the storyteller in 21st Century society? Do stories possess the power to change the world we live in? In this most original and stimulating study Alberto Manguel, award winning author of A History of Reading, sets out to investigate the ways in which stories can lend an identity to a whole society. From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner, Manguel explores how books can hold the secret to what binds us together. His thesis is argued here in an engrossing and highly personal book that encompasses narratives of autobiography, mythology, history and theology. He also raises concerns that technological developments – the internet, for one – may well fatally undermine the publishing industry and threaten the survival of the individual around whom the entire literary industry was originally constructed: the beleaguered author. Do innovations like CD-Rom replace creative readers with passive viewers? This book is also about the art of reading, at a time when Manguel argues that it is still possible for stories to change us and the world we live in.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Beckett Before Beckett by Brigitte Le Juez
Samuel Beckett lectured on modern French literature at his old university, Trinity College, in 1930-31 but those lectures are not widely known and have rarely been studied. This is one of the least known periods of his life. He had just returned from Paris where he had met James Joyce and had started his literary career but had not yet written his first novel. In 1930, Rachel Burrows studied French at Trinity College and her notes of Beckett's lectures have recently been found in the archives of Trinity College. Brigitte Le Juez is the first writer to fully study these lectures, the most complete record of Beckett the young intellectual, and a valuable guide to the inspirations behind his work and concept of literature. They answer many of the questions about Beckett's work. How did he define the modern novel of his day? What should literature strive to achieve, or more properly, what should it not be? They reveal the writers he studied and was influenced by and the notebooks demonstrate that Racine is the writer most frequently praised by Beckett while Balzac is the target of his fiercest criticism. Other writers studied by Beckett include Proust, Flaubert and Stendhal, Dostoyevsky and Andre Gide. Beckett before Beckett: Samuel Beckett's Lectures on French Literature reveals Beckett's own history of French literature and his understanding of the origins of the modern literature of his time.

Monday, April 07, 2008

A Natural History of Time by Pascal Richet
The quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth is nearly as old as humanity itself. For most of history, people trusted mythology or religion to provide the answer, even though nature abounds with clues to the past of the Earth and the stars. In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of how scientists and philosophers examined those clues and from them built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself. Richet begins his story with mythological traditions, which were heavily influenced by the seasons and almost uniformly viewed time cyclically. The linear history promulgated by Judaism, with its story of creation, was an exception, and it was that tradition that drove early Christian attempts to date the Earth. Until the mid-eighteenth century, such natural timescales derived from biblical chronologies prevailed, but, Richet demonstrates, with the Scientific Revolution geological and astronomical evidence for much longer timescales began to accumulate. Fossils and the developing science of geology provided compelling evidence for periods of millions and millions of years — a scale that even scientists had difficulty grasping. By the end of the twentieth century, new tools such as radiometric dating had demonstrated that the solar system is four and a half billion years old, and the universe itself about twice that, though controversial questions remain.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Shakespeare by Johann Gottfried Herder
Without Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), we simply would not understand Shakespeare in the way we do. In fact, much literature and art besides Shakespeare would neither look the same nor be the same without the influence of Herder's Shakespeare (1773). One of the most important and original works in the history of literary criticism, this passionate essay pioneered a new, historicist approach to cultural artifacts by arguing that they should be judged not by their conformity to a set of conventions imported from another time and place, but by the effectiveness of their response to their own historical and cultural context. Rejecting the authority of a dominant and stifling French neoclassicism that judged eighteenth-century plays by the criteria of Aristotle, Herder's Shakespeare signaled a break with the Enlightenment, the approach of Romanticism, and the arrival of a distinctly modern form of aesthetic appreciation.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann
This new Selected Poems is a retrospective on a poetic career which includes four Faber collections: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), which won the Cholmondeley Award; Acrimony (1986), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Corona, Corona (1993) and Approximately Nowhere (1999). Michael Hofmann's poems have been widely admired, notably for their gift of compressed and vividly pointed reportage, and the collision course of words and dictions that his poetry characteristically provokes. His subject matter has been equally individual, including his remarkable and complex series of 'father-poems', his subtle portraiture of the lives of others, East and West, together with his acerbic impressionism of contemporary England, and his exploration of Adorno's injunction that 'it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home'. Michael Hofmann has written to date some of the boldest, frankest and most searching poetry of our time.

Monday, March 24, 2008

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 9 by Christa Knellwolf
This ninth volume in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism presents a wide-ranging survey of developments in literary criticism and theory during the last century. Drawing on the combined expertise of a large team of specialist scholars, it offers an authoritative account of the various movements of thought that have made the late twentieth century such a richly productive period in the history of criticism. The aim has been to cover developments which have had greatest impact on the academic study of literature, along with background chapters that place those movements in a broader, intellectual, national and socio-cultural perspective. In comparison with Volumes Seven and Eight, also devoted to twentieth-century developments, there is marked emphasis on the rethinking of historical and philosophical approaches, which have emerged, especially during the past two decades, as among the most challenging areas of debate.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Field-Russia by Gennady Aygi
Lifelong Aygi translator and friend Peter France wrote in The Guardian: "Aygi wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century." Field-Russia is a book of poems arranged shortly before Aygi's death, which in his view occupied a central place in his work. The collection opens with an informal conversation about poetry, and is followed by a series of little lyric "books"—Field-Russia, Time of the Ravines, and Final Departure—that form a part of Aygi's "life-book." Like Ahkmatova and Celan before him, Aygi has left us with these most necessary words to dwell in—a quiet, spiritual poetry in a time of uprootedness and despair.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image by Anthony Uhlmann
Beckett often made use of images from the visual arts and readapted them, staging them in his plays, or using them in his fiction. Anthony Uhlmann sets out to explain how an image differs from other terms, like 'metaphor' or 'representation', and, in the process, to analyse Beckett's use of images borrowed from philosophy and aesthetics. This is the first study to carefully examine Beckett's thoughts on the image in his literary works and his extensive notes to the philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Uhlmann considers how images might allow one kind of interaction between philosophy and literature, and how Beckett makes use of images which are borrowed from, or drawn into dialogue with, philosophical images from Geulincx, Berkeley, Bergson, and the ancient Stoics. Uhlmann's reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests provides a revolutionary new reading of the importance of the image in his work.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Listen: A History of Our Ears by Peter Szendy
In this intimate meditation on listening, beautifully translated by Charlotte Mandell, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can we share our actual hearing with others? Along the way, he examines the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we are and aren’t allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Burning to Read by James Simpson
James Simpson focuses on a critical moment in early modern England, specifically the cultural transformation that allowed common folk to read the Bible for the first time. Widely understood and accepted as the grounding moment of liberalism, this was actually, Simpson tells us, the source of fundamentalism, and of different kinds of persecutory violence. His argument overturns a widely held interpretation of sixteenth-century Protestant reading -- and a crucial tenet of the liberal tradition. After exploring the heroism and achievements of sixteenth-century English Lutherans, particularly William Tyndale, Burning to Read turns to the bad news of the Lutheran Bible. Simpson outlines the dark, dynamic, yet demeaning paradoxes of Lutheran reading: its demands that readers hate the biblical text before they can love it; that they be constantly on the lookout for unreadable signs of their own salvation; that evangelical readers be prepared to repudiate friends and all tradition on the basis of their personal reading of Scripture. Such reading practice provoked violence not only against Lutheranism's stated enemies, as Simpson demonstrates; it also prompted psychological violence and permanent schism within its own adherents.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago
On the first day of the New Year, no one dies. This understandably causes great consternation amongst religious leaders – if there’s no death, there can be no resurrection and therefore no reason for religion – and what will be the effect on pensions, the social services, hospitals? Funeral directors are reduced to arranging funerals for dogs, cats, hamsters and parrots. Life insurance policies become meaningless. Amid the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration: flags are hung out on balconies and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity – eternal life. But will death’s disappearance benefit the human race, or will this sudden abeyance backfire? How long can families cope with malingering elderly relatives who scratch at death’s door while the portal remains firmly shut? Then, seven months later, death returns, heralded by purple envelopes informing the recipients that their time is up. Death herself is now writing personal notes giving one week's notice. However, when an envelope is unexpectedly returned to her, death begins to experience strange, almost human emotions.

Monday, March 03, 2008

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert by Joseph Joubert
The elusive French luminary Joseph Joubert is a great explorer of the mind's open spaces. Edited and translated by Paul Auster, this selection from Joubert's notebooks introduces a master of the enigmatic who seeks "to call everything by its true name" while asking us to "remember everything is double." "Joubert speaks in whispers," Auster writes. "One must draw very close to hear what he is saying."

Monday, March 03, 2008

The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader
What happens when we lose someone we love? A death, a separation or the break-up of a relationship are some of the hardest times we have to live through. We may fall into a nightmare of depression, lose the will to live and see no hope for the future. What matters at this crucial point is whether or not we are able to mourn. In this important and groundbreaking book, acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Darian Leader urges us to look beyond the catch-all concept of depression to explore the deeper, unconscious ways in which we respond to the experience of loss. In so doing, we can loosen the grip it may have upon our lives.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Auschwitz by Angela Morgan Cutler
Auschwitz: a place where millions were killed and which thousands now visit each year. A mass grave – and a tourist destination. The focus of this work of autobiographical fiction is on the sightseers – the curious that are drawn to visit. It is a book that questions our need to look: what is there to uncover, other than the difficulty of peering into such a place and into a subject that has been obsessively documented, yet can never really be understood? How to write about Auschwitz in the twenty-first century, in a time when the last generation of survivors is soon to be lost? This is also a book that searches for a personal story. It opens on a local bus that takes Angela, her husband En (whose mother survived the holocaust where most of her family did not) and their two sons to Auschwitz sixty years after the holocaust, and ends in a pine forest outside Minsk where En’s grandparents were shot in May 1942. The backbone of Auschwitz is a series of e-mails between the author and acclaimed American writer Raymond Federman. At the age of 14, Federman (now approaching 80) was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Federman also has spent a lifetime trying to find a language appropriate for the enormity of the holocaust and his part in its legacy, ultimately espousing laughterature – laughter as a means of survival.

Monday, February 25, 2008

The Book Is Dead (Long Live the Book) by Sherman Young
Sometime in the late twentieth century the book died. Sherman Young, passionate book lover and a consumer and producer of digital technology, is on a mission to make book culture matter again. Shirking nostalgia and without apology, The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) investigates the economics and technological demands of publishing, making a case for books and reading all the while. His bold and exciting book will inspire readers, non-readers and publishers to put books centre-stage again, even if they’re not books as we now know them.

Monday, February 18, 2008

A Kind of Testament by Witold Gombrowicz
A Kind of Testament is part autobiography and part justification of the life’s work of one of Poland’s most important novelists and playwrights. Written in France in 1968, this personal testimony is more than just a life history or a critique of his work. A Kind of Testament stands as a testament to how Gombrowicz came to be the person and writer that he was and overlap between the two.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Kafka and Photography by Carolin Duttlinger
Throughout his life, Franz Kafka was fascinated by photography, a medium which for him came to encapsulate both the attractions and the pitfalls of modern life. Kafka's personal engagement with the medium - as a keen viewer and collector of photographs as well as an amateur photographer - is reflected in his writings, which explore photography from a variety of different perspectives. This study not only explores photography's recurrence as a theme within his texts but it is also the first to take systematic account of Kafka's use of photographs as literary source material. Kafka and Photography presents one of the most important modern writers from an entirely new perspective; it sheds new light on familiar works and uncovers unexplored aspects of Kafka's engagement with his time and context. Its detailed textual analyses are set against a richly documented historical context which illustrates Kafka's interest in contemporary culture through a range of visual material taken from public as well as private sources - some of which has only recently become available. As this book demonstrates, photography had a profound impact on Kafka's literary imagination and as such helps to explain the mesmerizing intensity of enigmatic visual detail which is a hallmark of his narratives.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Your Inner Fish tells the extraordinary history of the human body. Why do we look the way we do? When did we first evolve the features that we have? Why are we still able to do all the different things we do? And, finally, why do we fall ill in the way that we do? Neil Shubin draws on the latest genetic research and his huge experience as an expeditionary palaeontologist to show the incredible impact the 3.5 billion year history of life has had on our bodies. It turns out that many of our most distinctive features evolved when we were still swimming in the oceans. Shubin takes readers on a fascinating, unexpected journey and allows us to discover the deep connection to nature in our own bodies.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson
More than any other generation, we seem to believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we’re supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let’s embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. It’s time to throw off the shackles of positivity and relish the blues that make us human.

Monday, February 04, 2008

The Seventh Well by Fred Wander
He grew up on the street, a high school dropout. In 1938 he left his mother and sister behind in Vienna and fled on foot to France, where later he was put on a train to Auschwitz. Transported from camp to camp, Fred Wander was haunted for twenty-five years by the crystalline, episodic stories that chronicle the plight of his fellow inmates. Only after the tragic death of his little daughter did these voices pour forth. The result was this novel, published in East Germany in 1970. Finally it appears in English in this masterful translation, its haunting cadences evoking Levi and Celan, its backstory as heartrending as Suite Française. Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise. The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante’s Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle.

Monday, February 04, 2008

The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth
In this groundbreaking new work, Mark Booth embarks on an enthralling intellectual tour of our world’s secret histories. Starting from a dangerous premise — that everything we’ve been taught about our world’s past is corrupted, and that the stories put forward by the various cults and mystery schools throughout history are true — Booth produces nothing short of an alternate history of the past 3,000 years. History is more than a list of things that have happened; it’s a measure of consciousness and experience. And in The Secret History of the World, Booth’s take on history is relentless, charging through time and space and thought in interdisciplinary fashion; embracing cognitive science, religion, psychology, historiography, and philosophy, a new timeline is drawn, and a huge swath of our cultural heritage that has for long been hidden is restored. From Greek and Egyptian mythology to Jewish folklore, from Christian cults to Freemasons, from Charlemagne to Don Quixote, from George Washington to Hitler-Booth shows without a doubt that history as we know it needs a revolutionary rethink, and he has 3,000 years of hidden wisdom to back it up.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Walter Benjamin by Esther Leslie
The work of Walter Benjamin, critic, essayist, translator, philosopher – one of the twentieth century’s most influential intellectuals – continues to stimulate a profusion of responses in the form of new novels, operas, films and artworks, as well as a never-abating production of academic texts. In this new biography, the first to be written in over a decade, author Esther Leslie uses the recently published entirety of Benjamin’s correspondence, drawing on his numerous diaries and autobiographical works, in order to provide a careful account of his circumstances and thoughts. Benjamin had many interests: he cherished childhood and its trappings; had a passion for the displacement and novelty of travel; toys; cities; trick-books; and ships; all are given due attention as the author weaves Benjamin’s wayward apperceptions into the narrative of a life lived. She follows Benjamin as he travels from Berlin to Capri, Ibiza, Riga, Moscow, Paris, and finally the Spanish border where he died in 1940. The author acknowledges Benjamin’s thesis that personal histories can be traced only in the context of social milieus, economic forces, technological shifts, and historical events, and seamlessly interweaves biographical details with an accessible yet concentrated account of Benjamin’s intellectual development, drawing a colourful portrait of a capacious intellect trapped in increasingly hostile circumstances.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Wartime Notebooks: And Other Texts by Marguerite Duras

The really special thing about this edition or Marguerite Duras's Wartime Notebooks is that understated subtitle and other texts. This truly is a compendious collection of Duras's unpublished writing and publisher Quercus are to be congratulated for producing such a lovely -- and important -- book. Duras -- most famous for her exquisite novel The Lover -- was one of the leading intellectuals and writers of post-war France. Her novels are all very autobiographical, but don't let that make you think that that takes anything away from her skill as a writer. How she uses her life, how she wrote and rewrote and explored all the facts and facets of it, are what make her so exceptional. Wartime Notebooks contains the contents of four notebooks kept "in a blue closet in her country home in France ... until now no one recognised just how important was the material she had written between 1943 and 1949." The Pink Marbled Notebook, devoted to her childhood, includes, amongst much other material, rough drafts of The Sea Wall; the 20th Century Press and Hundred-Page Notebooks contain a rough draft of The War; and the Beige Notebook contains -- again, amongst much other great diary material -- a rough draft of The Sailor from Gibraltar. In addition, the book has fifty pages of additional texts. Essential.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Violence by Slavoj Zizek

The premise of Zizek’s theory is that the subjective violence we see – violence with a clear identifiable agent – is only the tip of an iceberg made up of ‘systemic’ violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. With the help of Marx, Engels, Sartre, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Brecht and many more, Zizek examines the hidden causes of violence, delving into the supposed ‘divine violence’ which propels suicide bombers and the unseen ‘systemic’ violence which lies behind outbursts, from Parisian suburbia to New Orleans. For Zizek, the controversial truth is that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing you can do. He calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today’s democracies – using an unconventional plethora of references: Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud and more.

Monday, January 21, 2008

The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange.

Monday, January 14, 2008

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
Jamie McKendrick new translation of this haunting, elegiac novel which captures the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of the thirties, focusing on an aristocratic Jewish family moving imperceptibly towards its doom. Vittorio De Sica turned the book into a film in 1970, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974.

Monday, January 14, 2008

The Paris Review Interviews: vol. 2 by Philip Gourevitch
A second volume of fascinating interviews from one of the world's best loved literary magazines. The encounters between The Paris Review and the world's leading writers have elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. Entertaining and thought-provoking, it is essential reading for anyone who cares about writers and writing. Includes interviews with Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Larkin, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Detective Story by Irmre Kertesz
As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims' point of view, sympathising with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality. Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalising world of evil and see first-hand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis.

Monday, January 07, 2008

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Giovanni Drogo is a young army officer who is posted to Fort Bastiani, a remote and almost forgotten outpost that looks out over the desert and mountains of the steppe and onto the barren reaches of the Northern Kingdom. There is a vague possibility that acrimonious relations with the Northern Kingdom could, at any time, descend into war. There is an even vaguer chance that if war were to come it would arrive over the inhospitable steppe. Whilst younger officers, like Drogo, keep their spirits up with constant chatter about the possibility of such an attack, the older officers know better. They have spent a lifetime waiting, they've succumbed to many a false hope but, in their hearts, they know that no-one will attack, certainly not over the steppe, and that their chance to prove themselves as valiant soldiers has slowly died over the course of many years pointlessly waiting for something to happen. Drogo is astute enough to see this. As soon as he arrives at the Fort he asks to be posted somewhere else, but is persuaded to stay for a few months. Those months turn into years. The years quickly turn into a lifetime.

Monday, December 31, 2007

Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas
The narrator of Montano's Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolano, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is "the most important living Spanish writer.

Monday, December 31, 2007

Castorp by Pawel Huelle
Picking up on a throwaway line in The Magic Mountain, Castorp tells the story of Hans Castorp’s student years in Gdansk, long before the adventures in Davos described in Thomas Mann’s novel. Pawel Huelle skilfully creates a credible scenario for this influential period in Hans Castorp’s development, imagining what happened when the rational German student was exposed to the Slavonic eastern edge of the Prussian empire. He comes across people, events and ideas that anticipate some of the encounters he will experience in years to come, including an enigmatic Polish woman who becomes his obsession. Set at the dawn of the twentieth century, Castorp faithfully recreates the atmosphere of central Europe as the storm began that would lead to two world wars. Beautifully written, full of humour, mystery and eccentricity, this is a moving tribute to a masterpiece of European literature.

Monday, December 17, 2007

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
In this mischievous and provocative book, already a runaway bestseller in France, Pierre Bayard contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. Drawing on examples from works by Graham Greene, Umberto Eco, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne (who couldn't remember books he himself had written), and many others, he examines the many kinds of 'non-reading' (forgotten books, unknown books, books discussed by others, books we've skimmed briefly) and