Zenosbooks

Favorites

General book blog.

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1656

City of Glass by Paul Auster. Los Angeles. 1985. Sun & Moon Press. 203 pages. Cover by Katie Messborn. 0940650533. hardcover.

0940650533 DESCRIPTION - Described by Sulfur magazine as the most singular prose stylist of his generation. Paul Auster has created in CITY OF GLASS a haunting and mysterious tale that moves at the breathless pace of a good thriller. Receiving a phone call from a stranger in the middle of the night, a writer of detective stories becomes embroiled in a case more puzzling and complex than any book he might have written. Who is Peter Stillman? And why is his father trying to kill him? Or is the father really someone else? And if so, who is the person about to he murdered? For Quinn, who goes out in search of the answers to these questions, the city becomes an inexhaustible space. a labyrinth of endless steps. ’ as ordinary clues lead to extraordinary coincidences in the universe and the simple act of trailing a man ends in a startling investigation of what it means to be human. Written with an hallucinatory clarity, this first volume of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY combines a dark Kafka-like humor with the suspense of a Hitchcock film. CITY OF GLASS represents the most ambitious work to date by a uniquely gifted American writer.

Auster Paul Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1878

The Swell Season by Josef Skvorecky. Toronto. 1982. Lester & Orpen Dennys. Translated From The Czech By Paul Wilson. keywords: Literature Translated Czech Eastern Europe. 226 pages. Jacket illustration by Buddy Beiderbecke. Jacket photo: Merrin Associates. 088619038x.

088619038x DESCRIPTION - Josef Skvorecky’s THE BASS SAXOPHONE was hailed as ‘poignant, satirical, funny,’ and ‘the finest fiction ever written about jazz,’ ; it was named Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and Book of the Year by The Guardian. Now, in the six tales of THE SWELL SEASON, Skvorecky traces the libidinous ardours of young Danny, a teenager growing up in the forties. Danny boasts of his ‘conquests’ with fine bravado, and longs to turn his fantasies into reality; but no matter how smoothly he woos, it seems he is always to be foiled. Golden-haired Marie, brown-eyed Irena, bewitching Karla-Marie - Danny is rejected by them all. Fortunately his elusive love life is balanced by his friendship with ‘the guys’, who share his physical yearnings and - perhaps more important - his consuming passion for jazz. These are wonderful tales, full of wry humour and unexpected plot twists, and they add up to a fond portrait of a seemingly more innocent era. But this is more than entertaining nostalgia - for Danny’s home is in wartime Czechoslovakia, and his fragile world of adolescent schemes exists under the shadow of the ruthless Nazi presence.

Skvorecky Josef AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Skvorecky was Professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He emigrated to Canada after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and he and his wife, novelist Zdena Salivarova, continue to keep Czech literature alive through their Czech- language publishing house, 68 Publishers. Skvorecky’s novels include The Cowards and Miss Silver’s Past, and the internationally acclaimed THE BASS SAXOPHONE. He has also written many short stories and film scripts, and is the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

TRANSLATOR - Paul Wilson moved to Czechoslovakia in 1967 and spent ten years working as a translator and English teacher, and playing in an underground rock band, before he was expelled for his activities. His translations include many novels and essays, by such writers as Vaclav Havel and Ladislav Klima.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1799

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. New York. 1959. Grove Press. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp. Very Scarce In Hardcover. PEDRO PARAMO was published in four editions - A paperback Evergreen Book (E-149); A cloth bound edition; A specially bound and signed edition of 26 copies, lettered A to Z; A specially. 123 pages. hardcover. Jacket Design by Roy Kuhlman.

pedro paramo grove press 1959 DESCRIPTION - This first novel by a new Mexican writer is unlike anything in contemporary fiction. Juan Rulfo, the author of this book that has already been translated and published in several European languages, is considered in Mexico to be the nation's most promising writer. This story is set in the primitive village life of the harsh, Mexican mountain world. Pedro Paramo is a powerful land owner who dominates the world of Media Luna like a feudal lord, Lascivious, cruel, destructive, he is the incarnation of the most essential forces of life: hate, love, and power. lie evokes the holiness and dark side of life that exalts and destroys his tenants. Paramo tyrannizes the local villagers at will, yet he himself is the victim of an overwhelming love that becomes his torment. Rulfo takes the reader through the normal barriers of existence into a world that is deathless because it is already dead, The life of the village is no longer a dull progression of calendar events, It is an amazing montage of the living and dead: people emerge with the intense and unique quality of the figures that accosted Dante in the Inferno. Through his unique suspension of time, Rulfo creates a new vision of human experience. His mystic quality of intense perception illuminates a people and the land that is part of its bloodstream.

An edition with photographs from University of Texas Press:

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. Austin. 2002. University of Texas Press. 0292771215. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. Photographs by Josephine Sacabo. 164 pages. hardcover. Cover photograph By Josephine Sacabo.

DESCRIPTION - ‘Octavio Paz has said that Juan Rulfo ‘is the only Mexican novelist who has given us an image - instead of just a description - of our landscape.' By the same token we could that Josephine Sacabo is the only photographer who has given us an image of that most elusive of landscapes conceived by Juan Rulfo - Comala.' - Buenos Aires Herald. ‘The world that Rulfo depicts so allusively is one of a dusty and archaic feudal society with its political and domestic and religious tyrannies, its ineffectual spirituality, its violence and obsession with death. Sacabo has distilled this world and like Juan in the novel has found, as she says, ‘an invisible reality of dreams, memories, and connections.' - Photography Quarterly. DESERTED VILLAGES of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists- writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel PEDRO PARAMO, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed - Susana San Juan. Recognizing that ‘Rulfo was describing a world I already knew' and feeling ‘a very personal response, particularly to Susana San Juan and her dilemma,' Josephine Sacabo used Rulfo's novel as the starting point for a series of evocative photographs she calls ‘The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan: Homage to Juan Rulfo.' This volume brings together Rulfo's novel and Sacabo's photographs to offer a dual artistic vision of the same unforgettable story. Margaret Sayers Peden's superb translation renders the novel as poetic and mysterious in English as it is in Spanish. Josephine Sacabo's photographs tell, in her words, the story of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, death itself.'

In a paperback edition:

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. New York. 1994. Grove Press. 0802133908. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. Foreword by Susan Sontag. Paperback Original. 124 pages. paperback. Cover art by YvesTanguy.

DESCRIPTION - A masterpiece of the surreal, this stunning novel from Mexico depicts a man's strange quest for his heritage. Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Paramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala is a town alive with whispers and shadows - a place seemingly populated only by memory and hallucinations. Built on the tyranny of the Paramo family, its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past. First published to both critical and popular acclaim in 1955, PEDRO PARAMO represented a distinct break with earlier, largely ‘realist' novels from Latin America. Rulfo's entrancing mixture of vivid sensory images, violent passions, and inexplicable sorcery - a style that has come to be known as ‘magical realism' - has exerted a profound influence on subsequent Latin American writers, from Jose Donoso and Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Rulfo Juan AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JUAN RULFO (1918-1986) was one of Mexico's premier authors of the twentieth century and an important precursor of ‘magical realism' in Latin American writing. His other major work is El llano en llamas (THE BURNING PLAIN).

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1827

The Locked Room by Paul Auster. Los Angeles. 1986. Sun & Moon Press. 179 pages. Cover by Katie Messborn. 0940650762. hardcover.

0940650762 DESCRIPTION - THE LOCKED ROOM is the eagerly awaited final volume of THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, Paul Mister's remarkable series of interconnecting novels that began with CITY OF GLASS and GHOSTS. As with the previous novels, The Locked Room begins with a mystery, but this time it is told in the first person—in a brilliant, searching prose that carries all of the urgency of someone trying to reconstruct a dream. What has happened to Fanshawe, and why has his wife suddenly called upon the narrator to decide the fate of his missing childhood friend? Bit by bit, the nameless hero is lured into Fanshawe's past, all the while struggling to keep himself free of its entanglements. But it is a losing battle, and as he undertakes the demands of an inescapable journey into the unknown, the narrator discovers the strange and terrible secret that is hidden behind the door of every locked ROOM. In this extraordinary conclusion to THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, Paul Auster reinforces his reputation as one of the most original and exciting novelists in the United States today.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1925

Ghosts by Paul Auster. Los Angeles. 1986. Sun & Moon Press. 96 pages. Cover by Katie Messborn. 0940650703. hardcover.

0940650703 DESCRIPTION - The fable that stands at the center of Paul Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY, GHOSTS is a story of deception and hidden violence that loops back on itself like a Moebius strip. A private detective named Blue is hired to watch a man named Black, and little by little he is led into an intricate game of hide and seek that culminates in an inevitable but totally unexpected shattering of the case. Set in the 1940s, the narrative of GHOSTS evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of film noir. Lured into the trap of Auster's meticulous present-tense prose, the reader, like Blue, becomes a victim of the plot's irresistible force. GHOSTS is a book of footsteps that continue to echo long after the walker has vanished.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 2711

Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry Of Witness by Carolyn Forche. New York. 1993. Norton. 812 pages. Jacket painting by Fritz Winter, title 'Zerstorung', 1944. Jacket design by Susan Shapiro. 0393033724. hardcover.

0393033724 DESCRIPTION - This landmark anthology, the first of its kind, takes it impulse from the words of Bertolt Brecht: 'In these dark times, will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times. ' Bearing witness to extremity - whether of war, torture, exile, or repression - the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square. 'Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality - thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn Forche's AGAINST FORGETTING is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can - and never should. ' - Nelson Mandela. 'In a class by itself, edited and and introduced with precise passion and Olympian breadth, AGAINST FORGETTING encapsulates both the horrors of our century and the power of musical language to make a place to live, breathe, hope, love. ' - Calvin Bedient. 'From every continent comes the news that our age is an age of murder and repression on a scale unimagined before. And yet I can't peruse this book without marveling at what beauty these writers have made of the calamity called the Twentieth Century. I would not have thought a poetry anthology could be so stirring.' - Arthur Miller.

Forche Carolyn Carolyn Forche, poet, translator, and activist, teaches writing at George Mason University. She has published two award-winning volumes of poetry, GATHERING THE TRIBES and THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US. In 1990 Ms. Forche received a Lannan Literary Award, granted to poets and writers of literary excellence 'whose work promotes a truer understanding of contemporary life.'

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 2436

Waterland by Graham Swift. New York. 1983. Poseidon Press. 310 pages. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino. 0671498630. hardcover.

0671498630 DESCRIPTION - Hailed in England as ‘the best novel of the year’ and nominated for the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, WATERLAND is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopedic richness. It is also a book about beer, eels, the French Revolution, the end of the world, windmills, will-o’-the-wisps, murder, love, incest, education, curiosity, storytelling and - supremely - the malign and merciful element of water. One bright summer morning in 1943 Henry Crick, a lock-keeper, finds young Freddie Parr’s body floating in his lock. Although the death is termed an accident, Henry Crick’s son Tom knows otherwise, and bears the secret for life, Forty years later, Tom, now a history teacher besieged by a bizarre marital crisis and the ‘phasing out’ of history from his school’s curriculum, abandons his formal lessons to tell his students stories of his native Fenland, an ambiguous, amphibious domain where past and present intermingle, where the drama of loss and reclamation is written in the landscape. Tom Crick traces for his listening class the tragedies and changing fortunes of his forebears: how his eighteenth-century ancestor Thomas Atkinson dredged a river, built an empire, then broke his young wife Sarah’s head in a jealous rage and died of grief; how Sarah survived for fifty years, deprived of her senses, to become a local deity; how his grandfather Ernest fell in love with his own daughter and fathered a child he believed would become Saviour of the World, And he tells them of the fateful repercussions of that summer morning in 1943, which still trap the aging Crick in the consequences of events long ago. WATERLAND is a moving meditation on history, on procreation, on destruction, and on our struggles to shore up our small worlds against the onrushing forces of time and nature.

Swift Graham Graham Colin Swift (born 4 May 1949) is a English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Last Orders, starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland, starring Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland is set in The Fens; a novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the ‘feeling for magic’ in Waterland during an interview. Swift responds that ‘The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating. I think in general it’s been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside.’ Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself published poetry of note, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1790

Hope Against Hope: A Memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam. New York. 1970. Atheneum. Translated From The Russian By Max Hayward. 432 pages. Jacket design by Jeanyee Wong. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Osip Mandelstam ranks with Boris Pasternak as one of the most admired Russian writers of the twentieth century. Because of the hostility of competing literary groups that threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks, Mandelstam and his followers were marked from the beginning by the new regime. After his first arrest in 1934 for writing an anti-Stalinist poem, Man made a half-hearted attempt to adapt to circumstances, but was subsequently banished from Moscow. Redeemed by the pleadings of Paternak, he was again imprisoned and finally died during the Great Purge of 1937-38. His widow's memoir gives the first authentic account of the tragic confrontation between the poet and the dictator which has long been legend in Moscow literary circles. At the same time she provides an unparalleled wealth of information about the dismal effects of political terror on Russian intellectuals during the dark 1920's and '30's. HOPE AGAINST HOPE has been translated by Max Hayward, Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford whose previous translations include Boris Pasternak's DR. ZHIVAGO Mr. Hayward has also provided an Appendix identifying persons mentioned in Mrs. Mandelstam's text and explaining Russian literary movements and organizations of the twentieth century. The interpretive Introduction is by Clarence Brown, Professor of Russian Literature at Princeton University, author of THE PROSE OF OSIP MANDELSTAM.

Mandelstam Nadezhda Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (30 October 1899 - 29 December 1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia. She wrote two memoirs about their lives together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both first published in the West in English, translated by Max Hayward. Of these books the critic Clive James has 'Hope Against Hope puts her at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis it is mainly the story of the terrible last years of persecution and torment before the poet [her husband Osip] was murdered. The sequel, Hope Abandoned, is about the author's personal fate, and is in some ways even more terrible, because, as the title implies, it is more about horror as a way of life than as an interruption to normal expectancy. [The two books] were key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us.'

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1971

Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form From Pygmalion's Creative Dream by Johann Gottfried Herder. Chicago. 2002. University of Chicago Press. Translated From The German By Jason Gaiger. 141 pages. Cover - 'Gaul Committing Suicide with His Wife', marble. 0226327558. paperback.

0226327558 DESCRIPTION - 'The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching. ' - Johann Gottfried Herder. Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with a wide range of sources - from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible - to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture. Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, SCULPTURE is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory. Jason Gaiger's translation of SCULPTURE includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text.

Herder Johann Gottfried Johann Gottfried von Herder (25 August 1744 - 18 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism..

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1796

Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 by Robert Gildea. Cambridge. 2008. Harvard University Press. 540 pages. Jacket art - Detail, Alfred Roll, 'The 14th of July 1880'. 9780674032095. hardcover.

9780674032095 DESCRIPTION - The dazzling allure of France throughout the nineteenth century made it one of the world's great cultural beacons: in art, technology, literature, and science, it renewed itself over and over again. And yet, behind this facade, France was a country wracked with anxiety, crushed by a sense of national decline and, above all, unable to resolve the chaotic legacy of the Revolution. For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon's final defeat, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789. The process encouraged fresh and often murderous oppositions between those who were for, and those who were against, the Revolution's values. Bearing the scars of their country's bloody struggle, and its legacy of deeply divided loyalties, the French lived the long nineteenth century in the shadow of the revolutionary age. Despite the ghosts raised in this epic tale, Robert Gildea has written a richly engaging and provocative book. His is a strikingly unfamiliar France, a country with an often overwhelming gap between Paris and the provinces, a country torn apart by fratricidal hatreds and a tortured history of feminism, the site of political catastrophes and artistic triumphs, and a. country that managed--despite a pervasive awareness of its own fall from grace--to fix itself squarely at the heart of modernity. Indeed, Gildea reveals how the collective recognition of the great costs of the Revolution galvanized the French to achieve consensus in a new republic and to integrate the tumultuous past into their sense of national identity. It was in this spirit that France's young men went to the front in World War I with a powerful sense of national confidence and purpose.

Gildea Robert

ROBERT GILDEA is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and the author of MARIANNE IN CHAINS, the winner of the Wolfson Prize for history.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

clipboard

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Page 104 of 240

Start
Prev
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
Next
End

Favorites

City of Glass by Paul Auster

The Swell Season by Josef Skvorecky

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

The Locked Room by Paul Auster

Ghosts by Paul Auster

Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness by Carolyn Forche

Waterland by Graham Swift

Hope Against Hope: A Memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam

Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form From Pygmalion's Creative Dream by Johann Gottfried Herder

Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 by Robert Gildea

Search