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Zeno’s (established 1983) is an online used and out-of-print bookstore specializing in the categories of: literature in translation, modern first editions, and hard-to-find books. We started as a mail order business. In 1992 we moved into a storefront, and then to a bigger location a couple of years later. Eventually we closed the physical store to go online as zenosbooks.com. We have been selling our own hand-picked eclectic selection of used, hard-to-find, and even rare books via the internet ever since.

 

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Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac. Baltimore. 1971. Penguin Books. Penguin Classic Paperback Edition. Translated from the French & With An Introduction by Herbert J. Hunt. 682 pages. paperback. The cover, designed by Germano Facetti, shows a detail from ‘Souvenir of Mortefontaine’ by J.B. Corot, in the Louvre.

 

   

London. 2009. Folio Society. In Hardcover and Slipcase. 585 pages. hardcover. Translated from the French by Herbert J, Hunt. Introduction by Graham Robb. Illustrated by Francis Mosley. keywords: France Literature Translated 19th Century.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

 

LOST ILLUSIONS is the story of Lucien Chardon, the young provincial poet making his ruthless way in Parisian society (who appears later in A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW), and of the printer David Sechard. As often in Balzac, the brilliance, elegance and cynicism of Paris are contrasted with the boredom, narrowness and decency of provincial life. Balzac’s superb narrative powers and his fascination with technical expertise are mingled in this ‘study of manners’ with a delicate ambiguity of attitude towards city and country, aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The tale ends with the appearance of the mysterious ‘Carlos Herrera’ and a new departure in the rich procession of Balzac’s ‘Human Comedy.’

 

Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later.

 

 

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Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley & The CIA's Crusades by David Corn. New York. 1994. Simon & Schuster. 509 pages. October 1994. hardcover. Cover: Marc J. Cohen/FPG International. keywords: CIA History America Biography. 0671695258.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

   Based on once-secret government records and interviews with over 100 ex-CIA officers, Blond Ghost offers a fascinating portrait of Ted Shackley - a real-life George Smiley. It exposes the inner workings of the CIA and details the failure of the Agency's most important covert enterprises. It reveals dozens of top-secret operations: how the CIA recruited children as agents in Vietnam: how it encouraged perjury before Congress; how it paid off a suspected drug dealer; how it tried to use sex to blackmail communist officials; how it uncovered a Soviet-bloc spy in the German parliament; and more. Washington journalist David Corn discloses that for decades, the CIA's commitment to dirty tricks and secret wars compromised its ability to gather intelligence. Blond Ghost probes the CIA's Cold War record and shows that the Agency's efforts to penetrate the Iron Curtain in the 1950s were utterly unsuccessful, with an appalling and pointless loss of life: that the CIA tried to foment rebellion in Cuba, despite intelligence asserting no uprising was likely; that the CIA foisted on its Laotian allies unrealistic military operations that led to the death and displacement of tens of thousands of Laotians; that the CIA bungled miserably in Vietnam-ignoring intelligence collection for years and then suppressing information on the corruption and ineptness of the Saigon regime. Blond Ghost tells the tale of an important, decorated, and controversial spymaster, unveils the nitty-gritty of life in the Agency, and reveals the real job the CIA did in the Cold War.

David Corn (born February 1959) is an American political journalist and author and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones. He has been Washington editor for The Nation and appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BloggingHeads.tv opposite James Pinkerton or other media personalities. In February 2013, he was named winner of the 2012 George Polk Award in journalism in the political reporting category for his video and reporting of the ‘47 percent story,’ Republican nominee Mitt Romney's surreptitiously videoed meeting with donors during the 2012 presidential campaign. As an author, Corn's output includes nonfiction and fiction and generally deals with government and politics. Corn has also been a book reviewer. On one occasion, he criticized his own organization when Nation Books published the translation of a controversial French book on Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. FORBIDDEN TRUTH: US-TALIBAN SECRET OIL DIPLOMACY AND THE FAILED HUNT FOR BIN LADEN by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié suggests that the attacks resulted from a breakdown in talks between the Taliban and the United States to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Corn argued that publishing ‘contrived conspiracy theories’ undermined the ability to expose actual governmental misbehavior.

 

 

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Ousmane Sembene: the Making of a Militant Artist by Samba Gadjigo. Bloomington. 2010. Indiana University Press. 189 pages. paperback. Cover photos: front, courtesy of Thomas Jacob and back (top), courtesy of Ousmane Sembene: back (bottom). Translated by Moustapha Diop. Foreword by Danny Glover. keywords: Literature Senegal Africa Biography Literary Criticism. 9780253221513.

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

   Samba Gadjigo presents a unique personal portrait and intellectual history of novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Though Sembène has persistently deflected attention away from his personality, his life, and his past, Gadjigo has had unprecedented access to the artist and his family. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Sembène and contributes a critical appraisal of his life and art in the context of the political and social influences on his work. Beginning with Sembènes life in Casamance, Senegal, and ending with his militant career as a dockworker in Marseilles, Gadjigo places Sembéne into the context of African colonial and postcolonial culture and charts his achievements in film and literature. This landmark book reveals the inner workings of one of Africa’s most distinguished and controversial figures.

Samba Gadjigo is Professor of French at Mount Holyoke College.

 

 

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The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. New York. 1953. Simon & Schuster. 343 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Sam Fischer. keywords: Economics Philosophy History.

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

   ‘Madmen in authority,’ wrote the late Lord Keynes, ‘who hear voices in the air, are  distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler o£ a few years back.’ This is the story of those academic scribblers – from Adam Smith through Malthus and Ricardo, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Lord Keynes himself, to the economists now wrestling with the problems of our contemporary world. Their subject – economics - has been called the dismal science, but their private lives were full of strange and curious events, and the private worlds of ideas they built around themselves make fascinating reading. This is a scholarly book about the thinkers whose ideas about business and society have become the causes for which men work and fight and die.

 

 

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Keynes: The Rise, Fall, & Return Of The 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke. New York. 2009. Bloomsbury Press. 215 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Scott Russo. keywords: Biography England Economics History. 9781608190232.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   John Maynard Keynes has enjoyed a roller-coaster reputation. His ideas helped inspire the New Deal as America struggled out of the Great Depression, yet were ignored in his home country, Britain, until the Second World War. They were subsequently hailed as the basis of a so-called Keynesian consensus - in the 1960s, even Milton Friedman said, ‘We are all Keynesians now’ - that lasted until it was swept away by Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganomics in the United States. Then came the great meltdown of 2008. Market forces that the world relied upon suddenly failed to self-correct - and Keynes’s doctrine of remedial action in an imperfect world became more relevant than ever. Pundits and politicians alike returned to Keynes’s work seeking wisdom for a new and tumultuous time. Keynes was no conventional economist: He was a polemicist, a public intellectual, a peer of the realm, and an adroit political operative. In his youth he was openly homosexual but later had a successful marriage with the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group whose friends included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster; like them he was a gifted writer, and his influence was in no small part founded on his eloquence. In KEYNES, acclaimed historian Peter Clarke provides a masterful and timely account of Keynes’s life and work, bringing his provocative insights alive for an era fraught with economic difficulties that he surely would have relished solving.

PETER CLARKE was Professor of Modern British History and Master of Trinity Hall at Cambridge. His many books include THE LAST THOUSAND DAYS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE; THE KEYNESIAN REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING, 1924-1936; and the widely admired final volume of the Penguin History of Britain, HOPE AND GLORY: BRITAIN 1900-2000. He lives with his wife, the Canadian writer Maria Tippett, in Suffolk, England, and Pender Island, British Columbia.

 

 

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Burmese Days  by George Orwell. New York. 1934. Harpers. 369 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature England Burma.

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

   The product of intimate personal knowledge, BURMESE DAYS, George Orwell's first novel, offers a scathing indictment of British Imperial rule. Against a brilliantly rendered exotic background, the author presents a bitter and satiric picture of the corruption spawned by absolute power, a corruption all - pervading and inescapable, infecting white man and native alike. His theme is given sharp focus in the struggle of. John Flory, the novel's English hero, to maintain some measure of integrity in a debilitating moral climate. As Flory is inexorably driven to final tragic defeat, the reader encounters a vividly delineated cross section of Anglo - Indian society and was an unsurpassed portrayal of an era of history whose effects still profoundly trouble the modern world. Burmese Days is a superb example of Orwell's literary skill and of the fierce and uncompromising vision that made him, in the words of V. S. Pritchett, 'the conscience of his generation.'

 

 

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Finding George Orwell In Burma by Emma Larkin. New York. 2005. Penguin Press. 294 pages. June 2005. hardcover. Jacket design by Darren Haggar. Jacket photograph by Carl Rosenstein. keywords: George Orwell Travel Burma Literature England. 1594200521. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   A brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world’s grimmest and most shuttered police states, using as its compass the life and work of George Orwell, the man many in Burma call simply ‘the prophet’ Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she’s come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as ‘Orwellian.’ The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma’s connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell’s mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell’s work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country - his first novel, BURMESE DAys - but in fact he wrote three, the ‘trilogy’ that included ANIMAL FARM and NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, ‘Ah, you mean the prophet!’ In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma’s far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell’s moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author’s compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book - the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written.

Emma Larkin is the pseudonym for an American journalist who was born and raised in Asia, studied the Burmese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and covers Asia widely in her journalism from her base in Bangkok. She has been visiting Burma since the mid-1990s.

 

 

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Outrage: An Inspector Erlendur Novel by Arnaldur Indridason. 2012. New York. Minotaur/St Martin’s. 281 pages. September 2012. hardcover. Jacket design by Keith Hayes. Translated from the Icelandic by Anna Yates. keywords: Mystery Iceland Literature Translated. 9780312659110.  

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

   Arnaldur Indridason has proven himself to be a master of the mystery genre with his critically acclaimed Inspector Erlendur series, which has sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. Now, in OUTRAGE, this superlative crime writer author has written his best book to date, with exceptional prose, heart pounding suspense, and a mystery that is not solved until the last page. Haunted by personal demons, Detective Erlendur decides to take a short leave of absence, putting a female detective, Elínborg, in charge while he is gone. When a troubling case lands on Elínborg’s desk, she’s quickly thrust into a violent and volatile situation with extremely high stakes. Soon, her investigation uncovers a twisted tale of double lives that may be connected to the unsolved disappearance of a young girl. The clock is ticking to solve the case before a serial rapist strikes again. Reviewers everywhere rave about Indridason’s smart and fast-paced Reykjavík thrillers, which exemplify the very best in international crime fiction. Perfect for the many devoted fans of this series as well as for the reader who’s never visited Iceland through Indridason’s books, OUTRAGE will lead you down a trail of hidden violence, psychological brutality, and wrongs that may never fully be righted.

 

Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. (The film of Jar City, now available on DVD, was Iceland’s entry for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.) Indridason lives in Iceland.

 

 

 

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Two very different versions of Horacio Quiroga’s Cuentos de la Selva:

 

   Jungle Tales by Horacio Quiroga. New York. 2012. Self-Published by Jeff Zorilla and Natalia Cortesi. 88 pages. Paperback. Cover illustration by Bert van Wijk. Translated from the Spanish by Jeff Zorrilla. Illustrations by Bert van Wijk. keywords: Literature Uruguay Latin America South America Translated Folktales. 9780615708072  

 

 

 

and

 

 

 

 

   South American Jungle Tales by Horacio Quiroga. New York. 1922. Duffield & Company. 166 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated by A. L. Ripley. Translated from the Spanish by Arthur Livingston. keywords: Literature Translated Latin America.

 

 

JUNGLE TALES (Cuentos de la Selva - published originally in 1918) is a collection of eight short stories in which Quiroga captures the magic of the Misiones rainforest of Argentina, which is the scene of exciting adventures illuminated by nature in all it’s splendor. A place where snakes throw glamorous parties with flamingos, stingrays join forces to fight off man-eating jaguars, and a giant tortoise carries a wounded man on its shell for hundreds of kilometers to bring him to safety. Horacio Quiroga dedicated this book to his children, who accompanied him during that rough period of poverty in a damp basement 

Journalist, teacher, carpenter, cotton farmer, justice of the peace, film critic and one of Latin America’s best short story writers, Horacio Quiroga (born on December 31, 1878 in Salto, Uruguay – died on February 19, 1937 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer, and is one of the most fascinating characters in Latin American literature. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. Some of his most famous works include Cuentos de la selva (1918; Jungle Tales), Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (1917; Stories of love madness and death) and Anaconda (1921). He’s written over 200 pieces of fiction and has often been compared to Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and Edgar Allan Poe. Roberto Bolaño mentions Quiroga as one of the must-read authors in his famous ‘Consejos sobre el arte de escribir cuentos’ (‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’). His influence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar.

 

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Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte. New York. 1946. Dutton. Translated from the Italian by Cesare Foligno. keywords: Literature Translated Italy. 407 pages.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   KAPUTT is an overwhelming reading experience. Its pages are thronged with brilliant people, the flower and the dregs of a once grand and noble civilization. In this powerful, dramatic book, the reader hears the heartbeats of beautiful, anguished Europe. From the opening scene of luxury and magnificence in Prince Eugene’s palace at Stockholm to the final picture of complete degradation of human values in Naples, here is a remarkable panorama of the moral and physical disintegration of modern Europe. All phases of life in decadent society under the impact of Nazi domination are vividly illuminated – from the highest military and diplomatic circles living in feudal splendor and debauchery, to the dregs of humanity living in poverty and filth. With a tremendous sweep and scope, KAPUTT has as its setting all of Europe as Malaparte moves back and forth across the continent among the people of Sweden France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Romania, Poland, Finland. With compelling power, Curzio Malaparte has written a book filled with bitterness, beauty as resurgent hope. KAPUTT may well remain one of the great books to come out of Europe in this generation.

Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat. His chosen surname, which he used from 1925, means ‘evil/wrong side’ and is a play on Napoleon's family name ‘Bonaparte‘ which means, in Italian, ‘good side’. Born in Prato, Tuscany, to a Lombard mother and a German father, he was educated at Collegio Cicognini and at the La Sapienza University of Rome. In 1918 he started his career as a journalist. Malaparte fought in World War I, earning a captaincy in the Fifth Alpine Regiment and several decorations for valor, and in 1922 took part in Benito Mussolini's March on Rome. In 1924, he founded the Roman periodical La Conquista dello Stato As a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, he founded several periodicals and contributed essays and articles to others, as well as writing numerous books, starting from the early 1920s, and directing two metropolitan newspapers. In 1926 he founded with Massimo Bontempelli the literary quarterly ‘900’. Later he became a co-editor of Fiera Letteraria, and an editor of La Stampa in Turin. His polemical war novel-essay, Viva Caporetto!, criticized corrupt Rome and the Italian upper classes as the real enemy In Tecnica del Colpo di Stato Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This led to Malaparte being stripped of his National Fascist Party membership and sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari. He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail Regina Coeli. During that time he built a house, known as the Casa Malaparte, on Capo Massullo, on the Isle of Capri. Shortly after his time in jail he published books of magical realist autobiographical short stories, which culminated in the stylistic prose of Donna Come Me His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his experience as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service. In 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. The articles he sent back from the Ukrainian Fronts, many of which were suppressed, were collected in 1943 and brought out under the title Il Volga nasce in Europa Also, this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, KAPUTT and THE SKIN KAPUTT, his novelistic account of the war, surreptitiously written, presents the conflict from the point of view of those doomed to lose it. From November 1943 to March 1946 he was attached to the American High Command in Italy as an Italian Liaison Officer. Articles by Curzio Malaparte have appeared in many literary periodicals of note in France, the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States. After the war, Malaparte's political sympathies veered to the left, and he became member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1947 Malaparte settled in Paris and wrote dramas without much success. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Malaparte became interested in the Maoist version of Communism, but his journey to China was cut short by illness, and he was flown back to Rome. Io in Russia e in Cina, his journal of the events, was published posthumously in 1958. Malaparte's final book, Maledetti Toscani, his attack on bourgeois culture, appeared in 1956. Shortly after the publication of this book, he became a Catholic. He died from lung cancer on 19 July 1957.

 

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God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. New York/Boston. 2007. Twelve. 307 pages. hardcover. keywords: Philosophy Religion Atheism God. 9780446579803. Jacket design by Anne Twomey.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   From the author hailed as ‘one of the A most brilliant journalists of our time’ (London Observer) comes a book that redefines the debate about religion in public life. With his unique brand of erudition and wit, Christopher Hitchens addresses the most urgent issue of our time: the malignant force of religion in the world. In this eloquent argument with the faithful, Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion (and for a more secular approach to life) through a close and learned reading of the major religious texts. Hitchens tells the personal story of his own dangerous encounters with religion and describes his intellectual journey toward a secular view of life based on science and reason, in which the heavens are replaced by the Hubble telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix. ‘God did not make us,’ he writes. ‘We made God.’ Religion, he explains, is a distortion of our origins, our nature, and the cosmos. We damage our children - and endanger our world - by indoctrinating them. Whether lifelong believer, devout atheist, or someone who remains uncertain about the role of religion in our lives, you will want to consider and engage in the arguments within these pages.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and, was a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper’s, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London’s Daily Express, Harper’s, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.

 

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Domestic Work: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Saint Paul. 2000. Graywolf Press. 64 pages. paperback. keywords: Poetry Literature America Black Women. 1555973094. Cover art: Romare Bearden, ‘Evening Guitar.’

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Winner of the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day - and rendered here in graceful and readable verse - reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone. ‘Trethewey's first book, which creates a picture of African-Americans at work, is carefully rendered from old photos, history, and memory with a loving and thoughtful eye. Her work raises one's conscience with the truths inherent in simple word combinations. and the care taken in ordering the pieces leads the reader from one poem to the next in graceful order.’ - Christian Science Monitor. ‘Trethewey's book puts women's work, and, in particular, black women's work, the hard unpretty background music of our survival, in its proper perspective. For all her meticulous control and subtle perception, this is a revolutionary book that cuts right through to the deepest places in the soul.’ - Toi Derricotte. ‘Trethewey's first volume of poems, Domestic Work, marks the addition of a valuable new voice to the varied cacophony of contemporary American poetry.’ - Oxford American. ‘In a voice confident, diverse, and directed, Trethewey's DOMESTIC WORK does what a first book should, and more.’ – Ploughshares. ‘Trethewey's DOMESTIC WORK depicts an arresting psychological landscape. Her mirrors sway light and shadow over sharp portraits of people in a world between worlds. Yet, their rituals and obsessions make them like us. Seemingly straightforward and plainly spoken, woven of what dares to sound everyday, these poignant narratives are deceptive as they throw an emotional cast and the reader is beckoned to a place like no other.’ - Yusef Komunyakaa. ‘Trethewey's first book uses simple details to create an image of a people and the things that shape their world. The world is accessible, but in itself is not simple. It has beauty to it.’ - Mid-American Review. ‘Trethewey's fine first collection functions as near-social documentary. Trethewey evenly takes up the difficult task of preserving, and sometimes speculating upon, the people and conditions of the mostly Southern, mostly black working class.’ - Publishers Weekly. ‘The plain language and surface simplicity of these poems is deceptive. Their insights into the history and experience of black Americans contain a profound message for all of us. [This is] a noteworthy debut by a remarkable young poet.’ - Kirkus Reviews. ‘Selected by former poet laureate Rita Dove for the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, this debut is a marvelously assured collection exploring African-American heritage, civil rights, the work of women, and the sensuous work of the spirit. These exquisite poems are full of individuals who live, hurt, jazz, love, celebrate, sing, and, of course, work with dignity.’ - Herman Fong, The Odyssey Bookshop (South Hadley, MA). Contents - Introduction; Gesture of a Woman-in-Process; At the Owl Club, North Gulfport, Mississippi, 1950; Three Photographs; Domestic Work, 1937; Speculation, 1939; Secular; Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941; Expectant; Tableau; At the Station; Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945; Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956; His Hands; Self-Employment, 1970; Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky; Cameo; Hot Combs; Family Portrait; Mythmaker; Amateur Fighter; Flounder; White Lies; Microscope; Saturday Matinee; History Lesson; Saturday Drive; Accounting; Gathering; Give and Take; Housekeeping; Picture Gallery; Collection Day; Carpenter Bee; Limen.

Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey, author of BELLOCQ'S OPHELIA and DOMESTIC WORK (her first book), has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize. Her work was also included in THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2000. Trethewey now lives in Decatur, Georgia, and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. 

 

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Andrea Camilleri: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Lucia Rinaldi. Jefferson and London. 2012. McFarland & Company. 179 pages. paperback. keywords: Literary Criticism Mystery Sicily Andrea Camilleri Literature Translated Reference. 9780786446704. Front cover images: (inset) Portrait of Andrea Camilleri, pencil on cardboard, 30cm x 50cm, 2009, by Messina artist Pietro Bitto; sailboat - 2012, Shutterstock.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   This is the first comprehensive reference work in English dedicated to the writing of world-famous Italian mystery writer Andrea Camilleri. It includes entries on plots, characters, dates, literary motifs, and themes from the bestselling author’s detective stories and television crime dramas, with special attention given to the serialized policeman Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Camilleri’s most famous character. It also equips the reader with background information on Camilleri’s life and career and provides a guide to the writings of reviewers and critics.

LUCIA RINALDI is a teaching fellow at University College London, Department of Italian. Her main research interests are 20th-century Italian literature and culture, in particular crime fiction. She has published articles on Italian crime writers and is coeditor of ASSASSINATIONS AND MURDER IN MODERN ITALY: TRANSFORMATIONS IN SOCIETY AND CULTURE (2007).

 

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 My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Brooklyn. 2012. Archipelago Books. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 430 pages. paperback Cover art: Anselm Kiefer. Cover design: David Bullen. 9781935744184. 9781935744184.jpg

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

     Winner of the Brage Award, the Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, the P2 Listeners' Prize, and the Norwegian Critics' Prize. Also, nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize. A Norwegian Marcel Proust. This nerve-striking, addictive piece of hyper-realism, by the Norwegian Critics' Prize-winning author of A TIME FOR EVERYTHING, has created a phenomenon throughout Scandinavia. Almost ten years have passed since Karl Ove’s father drank himself to death. Vulnerable and assailed by doubts, he is now embarking on a new novel. With an uncanny eye for detail, Knausgaard breaks down his own story into its elementary particles, reliving memories, reopening wounds, and examining with candor the turbulence and the epiphanies that emerge from his own experience of fatherhood, the fallout in the wake of his father’s death, and his visceral connection to music, art, and literature. Negotiating intimacy, love, and fear lie at the heart of his movements and mind as he moves from self-deprecation to self-absorption, from craving solitude to exposing an insatiable need for love and admiration, from alienation to harmony. Karl Ove’s dilemmas strike nerves that give us raw glimpses of our particular moment in history as we witness what happens to the sensitive and churning mind of a young man trying - as if his very life depended on it - to find his place in the disjointed world around him. This Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today. 

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968 and made his debut with the novel OUT OF THIS WORLD (Ute av verden). A TIME FOR EVERYTHING is his second novel and was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize. It is his first to be translated into English.

 

 

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The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss. New York. 2012. Crown. 414 pages. September 2012. hardcover. keywords: History Biography France Literature. 9780307382467. Jacket design by Eric White. Jacket illustration by Sam Weber.

FROM THE PUBLISHER - 

    THE BLACK COUNT brings to life one of history’s great forgotten heroes: a man almost unknown today yet with a personal story that is strikingly familiar. His swashbuckling exploits appear in THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and his triumphs and trials inspired THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO - both books written by his son. Yet it is for one reason in particular that General Alex Dumas deserves to stand in history’s spotlight: alone among his race, he rose to command vast armies - in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East - and in his triumph and ultimate betrayal we see how dangerous one individual can be to an entire way of life. Born to a black slave mother and a fugitive white French nobleman in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), Alex Dumas was sold into bondage but made his way to Paris, where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. When the Revolution broke out, he joined the army at the lowest rank - yet quickly rose, through a series of legendary feats, to command more than 50,000 men. No matter how high he soared, Dumas continued to live by his blade and his boldness in the face of overwhelming odds. Yet, because of his unwavering principles, he ultimately became a threat to Napoleon himself. Dumas was on his way home from conquering Egypt when his ship nearly sank, and he was captured by a mysterious enemy, thrown into a dungeon, and subjected to slow poisoning But the fate that awaited him when he escaped the dungeon would shock him even more. THE BLACK COUNT is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured journey through the late eighteenth century, and a window into the modern world’s first multiracial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. Drawing on hitherto unknown documents, letters, battlefield reports and Alex Dumas’s handwritten prison diary, THE BLACK COUNT is a groundbreaking masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.

TOM REISS is the author of the celebrated international bestseller THE ORIENTALIST. His biographical pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and other publications. He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.

 

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