Zenos Books - the Last Name in Used Books

ZenosBook Blog - Books worth a look!

(09/05/2010) Brand by Henrik Ibsen

Brand by Henrik Ibsen. New York. 1996. Penguin Books. Translated From The Norwegian & Adapted for the stage by Geoffret Hill. keywords: Literature Drama Norway Translated. 161 pages. The cover shows a detail from 'Wide Vistas' by Maria Froberg. 0140446761. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Brand was Ibsen's first masterpiece, a poetic drama composed in 1865 and published to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. - The unsparing vision of a priest driven by faith to risk and witness the deaths of his wife and child gives Brand its icy ferocity. When he was writing it in Italy, Ibsen declared: 'It is blessedly peaceful out here; no one I know; I read nothing but the Bible. ' Geoffrey Hill provides a new Preface to this third and...

(09/04/2010) Vietnam 1946: How The War Began by Stein Tonnesson

Vietnam 1946: How The War Began by Stein Tonnesson. Berkeley. 2009. University Of California Press. keywords: History Vietnam America. 362 pages. 9780520256026. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Based on multiarchival research conducted over almost three decades, this landmark account tells how a few men set off a war that would lead to tragedy for millions. Stein Tønnesson was one of the first historians to delve into scores of secret French, British, and American political, military, and intelligence documents. In this fascinating account of an unfolding tragedy, he brings this research to bear to disentangle the complex web of events, actions, and mentalities that led to thirty years of war in Indochina. As the story unfolds, Tønnesson challenges some widespread misconceptions, arguing that French general Leclerc fell...

(09/03/2010) The Conference Of The Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar

The Conference Of The Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar. New York. 1984. Penguin Books. Translated From The Persian & With An Introduction By Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis. keywords: Mythology Literature Translated Persia Poetry Religion. 234 pages. The cover shows 'The Concourse of the Birds' from a manuscript of The Conference of the Birds, painted by Habib Allah. 0140444343. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Attar's great mystical poem opens when all the birds of the world gather together to begin the search for an ideal king. What follows is a marvellous allegorical rendering of Sufism - the secretive and paradoxical form of Islamic mysticism. Like THE CANTERBURY TALES, THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS consists of a group of stories bound together by a pilgrimage. The Way...

(09/02/2010) American Supernatural Tales by S.T. Joshi (editor).

American Supernatural Tales by S.T. Joshi (editor). New York. 2007. Penguin Books. keywords: Anthology Supernatural Horror Literature America. 477 pages. Cover art by Hans neleman. 9780143105046. FROM THE PUBLISHER - As Stephen King will attest , the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation's brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course— Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good addition to Penguin Classics. Buy a new copy of this book from zenosbooks.com

(09/01/2010) Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy

Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. New York. 2009. Knopf. Translated From The Greek, With An Introduction and Commentary By Daniel Mendelsohn. keywords: Poetry Greece Literature Translated Alexandria. 553 pages. Jacket design by Jason Booher. March 2009. 9780375400964. FROM THE PUBLISHER - An extraordinary literary event: the simultaneous publication of a brilliant and vivid new rendering of C. P. Cavafy’s COLLECTED POEMS and the first-ever English translation of the poet’s thirty UNFINISHED POEMS, both featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English—by the acclaimed critic, scholar, and award-winning author of THE LOST. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or...

(08/31/2010) Hrafnkel's Saga & Other Stories by Hermann Palsson (translator & editor)

Hrafnkel's Saga & Other Stories by Hermann Palsson (translator & editor). Baltimore. 1971. Penguin Books. Translated From The Icelandic & With An Introduction By Hermann Palsson. keywords: Penguin Classic Paperback Translated Iceland Scandinavia Literature Mythology History. 137 pages. The cover shows a detail from a fourteenth-century ICELANDIC illumination in the Royal Library, Copenhagen. It depicts St Olaf, the Norwegian King, suffering martyrdom in the battle of Stiklestad, 1030. 0140442383. FROM THE PUBLISHER - All seven stories in this volume date from the thirteenth century, and exemplify the outstanding qualities of realistic fiction in medieval Iceland. Falling into two distinctive groups, three of the stories – HRAFNKEL’S SAGA, THORSTEIN THE STAFF-STRUCK and ALE HOOD — are set in the pastoral society of native Iceland, tire homely...

(08/30/2010) Notes From Underground & The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes From Underground & The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. New York. 2009. Penguin Books. Translated From The Russian By Ronald Wilks.& With An introduction by Robert Louis Jackson. keywords: Literature Russia Translated 19th Century. 291 pages. Cover - 'Self-portrait with Masks' by Leon Spilliaert (1903). 9780140455120. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky’s groundbreaking NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ‘anthill’ of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence ‘underground.’ The seemingly ordinary world of St. Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in THE DOUBLE when a government clerk encounters a man who...

(08/29/2010) Descent Into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid

Descent Into Chaos: The United States & The Failure Of Nation Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan, & Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid. New York. 2008. Viking Press. keywords: History Central Asia Afghanistan Pakistan. 484 pages. Jacket design - J. Wang. 9780670019700. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Ahmed Rashid is ‘Pakistan's best and bravest reporter’ (Christopher Hitchens). His unique knowledge of this vast and complex region allows him a panoramic vision and nuance that no Western writer can emulate. His book Taliban first introduced American readers to the brutal regime that hijacked Afghanistan and harbored the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Now, Rashid examines the region and the corridors of power in Washington and Europe to see how the promised nation building in these countries has...

(08/28/2010) Portfolios of the Poor: How The World's Poor Live On $2 A Day by Daryl Collins & others

Portfolios of the Poor: How The World's Poor Live On $2 A Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, & Orlanda Ruthven. Princeton. 2009. Princeton University Press. keywords: Economics The Poor. 320 pages. June 2009. 9780691141480. FROM THE PUBLISHER - About forty percent of the world's people live on incomes of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to explain systematically how the poor find solutions....

(08/27/2010) The Operated Jew: Two Tales Of Anti-Semitism by Jack Zipes (editor & translator)

The Operated Jew: Two Tales Of Anti-Semitism by Jack Zipes (editor & translator). New York. 1991. Routledge. Translated & With Commentary by Jack Zipes. keywords: Germany Mythology Jewish Anti-Semitism Anthology Translated. 137 pages. 0415904609. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A turn-of-the-century Jew undergoes a series of disfiguring operations that transform him into a ‘European’. Oskar Panizza's chilling story ‘The Operated Jew’ (1893) mingles loathing with compassion for its title character. Thirty years later, Panizza's tale was answered by ‘Mynona’, (Salomo Friedlaender) an urban German Jew who turned the story's tables in ‘The Operated Goy’ (1922). Jack Zipes translates these two stories into English and provides an extensive introduction as well as bibliographic essays that recover these two writers, placing their often bizarre tales within the history of modern...

(08/26/2010) The Unfinished Poems by C. P. Cavafy

The Unfinished Poems by C. P. Cavafy. New York. 2009. Knopf. Translated From The Greek, With An Introduction and Commentary By Daniel Mendelsohn. keywords: Poetry Greece Literature Translated Alexandria. 124 pages. Jacket design by Jason Booher. March 2009. 9780307265463. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A remarkable discovery, an extraordinary literary event: the never-before translated UNFINISHED POEMS of the great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, published for the first time in English alongside a revelatory new rendering of the COLLECTED POEMS—translated and annotated by the renowned critic, classicist, and award-winning author of The Lost. When he died in 1933 at the age of seventy, C. P. Cavafy left the drafts of thirty poems among his papers—some of them masterly, nearly completed verses, others less finished texts, all...

(08/25/2010) The Palace Of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The Palace Of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. New York. 2008. Doubleday. keywords: Literature Women India America. 360 pages. Jacket design by Rex Bonoanelli. 9780385515993. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A reimagining of the world-famous Indian epic, the mahabharat-told from the point of view of an amazing woman. Relevant to today's war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth and wholly magical. Narrated by Panamali, the wife of the legendary Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale. The Palace of Illusions traces the princess Panchaali's life, beginning with her birth in fire and following her spirited balancing act as a woman with five husbands who have been...

(08/24/2010) Outfoxing Fear: Folktales Around The World by Kathleen Ragan (editor)

Outfoxing Fear: Folktales Around The World by Kathleen Ragan (editor). New York. 2006. Norton. Introduction by Jack Zipes. keywords: Folklore Fear Mythology. 259 pages. Jacket design & illustration by Marty Blake. 0393060365. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A multicultural collection of hopeful, engaging, inspirational folktales for all ages that tackle our most elemental human scourge—fear. Humans of all eras and cultures have lived with fear—whether fear of becoming jaguar prey, of being besieged by Vikings, or of nuclear holocaust. For millennia, huddled around campfires and in cottages, we have created folktales to help us transform this fear into action, into a solution, into hope. Inspired by the residual fear and the need for stories of resilience following September ll, Kathleen Ragan, editor of Fearless Girls, Wise...

(08/23/2010) The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez. New York. 2006. Bloomsbury Books. Translated From The Spanish By Anne McLean. keywords: Literature Latin America Argentina Translated. 248 pages. May 2006. 1582346011. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A hypnotic novel in which an American student’s quest to find the greatest living tango singer leads him deep into the labyrinth of Argentina’s past. It is 2001, and inflation is spiraling out of control in Argentina as Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student specializing in Borges, arrives in Buenos Aires. Cadogan is on the trail of Julio Martel, an elusive tango singer rumored to be even better than Carlos Gardel, the greatest singer of the 1920s and ‘30s. Martel has never recorded and his strange, powerful performances, at seemingly arbitrary...

(08/22/2010) The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano

The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano. New York. 2009. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Translated From The Spanish Chris Andrews. keywords: Latin America South America Literature Chile Translated. 208 pages. Cover design by Semadar Megged. 08/09/2009. 9780811217132. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A hair-raising book that delivers Bolano’s signature mix of mordant wit and romantic tenderness, The Skating Rink is both a crime and a love story. The story starts off with Gaspar Heredia - writer, Mexican, illegal immigrant, and stand-in for Bolano himself -who meets Remo Moran, a businessman who pulled himself up to wealth from his inauspicious beginnings as a stall vendor of cheap tourist souvenirs. Moran hires Heredia as night watchman for a campground Moran runs as a stopping ground for many illegal immigrants....

(08/21/2010) Calligrammes by Guillaume Apolliniare

Calligrammes by Guillaume Apolliniare. Berkeley. 1980. University Of California Press. Translated From The French By Anne H. Greet. Introduction by S. I. Lockerbie. keywords: Poetry France Translated Literature. 513 pages. Jacket design by Linda M. Robertson. 0520019687. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A fully annotated, bilingual edition, Calligrammes is a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists. Buy a new copy of this book from zenosbooks.com

(08/20/2010) How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York. 2007 Bloomsbury. 187 pages. Jacket design by Patti Ratchford. keywords: Literature Literary Criticism Reading. 9781596914698. From the publisher - If civilized people are expected to have read all important works of literature, and thousands more books are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those awkward social situations in which we’re forced to talk about books we haven’t read? In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn attention from critics around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that it’s actually more important to know a book’s role in our collective library than its...

(08/19/2010) Selected Poems by Lars Gustafsson

Selected Poems by Lars Gustafsson. New York. 1972. New Rivers Press. Translated From The Swedish By Robin Fulton. Photographs by Arthur Tress. keywords: Poetry Literature Sweden Translated. 106 pages. Cover by Arthur Tress. 0912284285. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘Lars Gustafsson's poetry is a poetry of stark and mysterious contrasts, stark because the combinations of apparently familiar objects can be startling and unexpected, and mysterious because the power of what is not said seems to be all the greater for the clarity with which the variegated details are presented. Witness the strange arrest, the expectancy that will never be fulfilled. .’ – from the introduction by Robin Fulton. See what we have by Lars Gustafsson at zenosbooks.com

(08/18/2010) Road-side Dog by Czeslaw Milosz

Road-side Dog by Czeslaw Milosz. New York. 1998. Farrar Straus Giroux. Translated From The Polish By The Author & Robert Haas. keywords: Poetry Translated Literature Poland. 208 pages. Jacket art by Brian Cronin. Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral. 0374251290. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night—I don't know where it came from—in a pre-dawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog.’ In this memorable collection...

(08/17/2010) Night Mail: Selected Poems by Novica Tadic

(08/17/2010) Night Mail: Selected Poems by Novica Tadic. Oberlin. 1992. Oberlin College Press. Translated From The Serbian by Charles Simic. keywords: Poetry Serbia Yugoslavia Translated Literature. 119 pages. Cover design by Stephen J. Farkas, Jr. from an etching by W.H.W. Bicknell - Painted by Jeanniot. Titled Thenardier's Escape. 0932440592. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘As with those great masters of the grotesque, Bosch and Goya, the world of Novica Tadic is distinct and immediately recognizable. We are in a city of loners, blind alleys, sewers, and unlit streets. Everywhere monsters lurk. We meet baby cyclops, giant hens, inanimate objects who make faces and other fantastic crossbreeds. For Tadic reality is unstable, prone any moment to break into separate and unfamiliar pieces, only to suddenly reassemble itself....

(08/16/2010) Blackboards: Poetry/Artwork by Tomaz Salamun & Metka Krasovec

Blackboards: Poetry/Artwork by Tomaz Salamun & Metka Krasovec. Philadelphia. 2004. Saturnalia Books. Translated From The Slovenian By Michael Biggins with the Author. Introduction By John Yau. keywords: Poetry Literature Slovenia Translated. 79 pages. Cover art by Metka Krasovec. 0975499009. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Tomaz Salamun is a prolific Slovenian poet whose work has been translated into many languages. The eight collections that have appeared in America have influenced many of our best younger poets. All but two of the eight books consist of selections from his many books and wide-ranging oeuvre. The exceptions are POKER, his first book, published by Ugly Duckling Press in 2003, and A BALLAD FOR METKA KRASOVEC, which was published in Slovenia in the early 1980’s, and appeared in its entirety in America...

(08/15/2010) Borges & His Successors:The Borgesian Impact On Literature & The Arts by Edna Aizenberg

Borges & His Successors: The Borgesian Impact On Literature & The Arts by Edna Aizenberg (editor). Columbia. 1990. University Of Missouri Press. keywords: Borges Literary Criticism Essays. 296 pages. Jacket photograph by Julie Mendez Ezcurra. 082620712x. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The centrality of Jorge Luis Borges to the contemporary aesthetic imagination has been widely recognized, but no comprehensive study of his impact on the arts of our time has appeared. In the first book devoted to that topic, Edna Aizenberg brings together specially commissioned and translated essays from a variety of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging assessment of Borges’s influence. Presenting the insights of critics from South America, France, and Germany as well as those from the United States, this collection views Borges as a redefiner of...

(08/14/2010) Seek:Reports From The Edges Of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson

Seek: Reports From The Edges Of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson. New York. 2001. Harper Collins. keywords: Literature America Travel. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world.And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping it, anything at all is possible. Whether traveling through war-ravaged Liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation's militia groups,...

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