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We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975
Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven
This new selection, the first in English to draw on Sartre’s entire Collected Essays as well as unpublished work, includes appreciations of Faulkner, Bataille, and Giacometti; sketches of the US from his visit in the 1940s; reflections on politics; portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning with his own career.
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The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage
edited by Robert B. Silvers, with prologues by Ian Buruma
Fifty years of the best international reportage published in The New York Review of Books. Includes entries from Susan Sontag, Alma Guillermoprieto, Mark Danner, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and others. Each essay includes a prologue by Ian Buruma that provides context and brings the story into the present day.
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Turtle Diary
Russell Hoban, introduction by Ed Park
A man and a woman, each isolated, desperate and despairing—and utter strangers to the other—are simultaneously seized with the desire to liberate turtles from the London Zoo. Hoban confronts the dangers of modern life, its disconnect from nature and solipsistic atomization, with a dark eye and a generous spirit.
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The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories
Saki, illustrated by Edward Gorey
“Weird, but in a good way” is how The Guardian describes Saki’s fantastical stories, set in Edwardian drawing rooms and garden parties. The same words might be used to describe the illustrations Edward Gorey drew for this selection of Saki’s work, originally commissioned by a Swiss publisher, and never before widely available in an English-language edition.
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Junket Is Nice
Pat the Bunny author Dorothy Kunhardt’s first book is as simple and lovable as the ones for which she is most famous. No one can guess what the old man eating his bowl of junket (a kind of custard) can possibly be thinking. The speculation becomes increasingly absurd until a little boy bicycles up and gets it right on his first try.
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Frederick the Great
Nancy Mitford, introduction by Liesl Schillinger
While writing Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford found herself drawn to the wit and humanity of his often misunderstood patron and friend, Frederick of Prussia. The result was her only biography of a non-French subject, and the one she considered her finest. “Vivid, detailed, and highly personal.”—Kate Williams
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In Love
Alfred Hayes, introduction by Frederic Raphael
If Indecent Proposal had been written by Jean Rhys and shot by Edward Hopper, the result might have been something like In Love, in which lonely, searching strangers strive to make connections that will outlive last call at the local dive. “Hayes addresses the human condition and its heartbreaks with brevity and brutal honesty.”—The Guardian
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My Face for the World to See
Alfred Hayes, introduction by David Thomson
In Hayes’s hypnotically intense reckoning with self-deception and desolation, a disillusioned screenwriter falls into an affair with an actress who, like him, has missed the big time. Nelson Algren called My Face for the World to See “the most vivid picture of Hollywood since Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust.”
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The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays
“Simon Leys is living proof of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that a cultured individual should be a jack of all trades.” (Sydney Morning Herald). Here the eminent sinologist and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books turns his attention to such subjects as the Cultural Revolution, Nabokov, Hitchens, Orwell, Simenon, Confucius, and the fate of the university.
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Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II
There is no better guide through the exciting and bewildering world of modern architecture than Martin Filler: he is learned, opinionated, and witty. Here he addresses such venerable figures as Buckminster Fuller and Edward Durell Stone as well as recent projects in Beijing, Athens, and at Ground Zero. “Filler’s razor-sharp mind and sharper tongue set him apart. We gobble up what he thinks, as well as how he serves it up.” —Architectural Record
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The Bridge of Beyond
Simone Schwarz-Bart, introduction by Jamaica Kincaid, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
A multi-generational tale of love and madness, mothers and daughters, folkloric wisdom and the grim legacy of slavery, set on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. “There’s magic, madness, glory, tenderness, above all abundant hope.”—Financial Times
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A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories
Robert Walser, introduction by Ben Lerner, translated from the German by Damion Searls
Walser is the champion of the small, the insignificant, and the overlooked. This original collection shows just how much breadth, though, he brought to his characteristic subject, ranging from some of his very first works, the “Fritz Kocher” sequence—the “collected works” of a boy who died young—to tales of the Swiss countryside, love triangles, and memoirs of his WWI–era military service.
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The Skin
Curzio Malaparte, introduction by Rachel Kushner, translated from the Italian by David Moore
This sequel of sorts to Malaparte’s disconcerting and beguiling Kaputt shares its predecessor’s uncanny vision of a world at war. Here Malaparte accompanies the American forces as they liberate Naples, Rome, Florence, and Milan. But as Malapate shows, liberation brings with it its own set of horrors. “A skilled guide to the lowest depths of Europe’s inferno.”—TLS
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No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State
Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern
In No Ordinary Men, the story of two of the Nazi regime’s most courageous opponents—theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi—Sifton and Stern demonstrate that resistance to the Nazi regime was larger and more complicated than usually depicted. In bringing to light this often overlooked chapter of history, the authors expand our understanding of the ways morality can endure in the face of depravity and horror.
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Proper Doctoring: A Book for Patients and their Doctors
David Mendel, introduction by Jerome Groopman
A book about what it means (and takes) to be a good doctor, and for that reason very much a book for patients as well as doctors—which is to say a book for everyone. “A gem for physicians, future physicians, and clinicians of all types…. It presents advice to practitioners…and contains many brief examples and aphorisms.” —American Psychological Association
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One Fat Englishman
Kingsley Amis, introduction by David Lodge
Amis sent Roger Micheldene, the titular hero of One Fat Englishman to America (he is a visiting professor at Budweiser College) as a fictional emissary, avenging the wrongs done to the Old World by the vulgar, consumerist New. But the joke is on Roger, obese, bumbling, and outsmarted at every turn by unobliging housewives, clever novelists, and even neighborhood deer. “Very funny…splendidly slapstick…and serious too.”—TLS
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Girl, 20
Kingsley Amis, introduction by Howard Jacobson
Sir Roy Vandervane (a Leonard Bernstein-esque, but very British, conductor) has been known to indulge in dalliances with younger women, but in the highborn hippie Sylvia, he might have met his match. In Girl, 20, famous curmudgeon and wit Kingsley Amis deals a double-punch to radical chic and Flower Power. “Sir Roy is a first-class character, possibly Amis’s best.”—Anatole Broyard
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Now Open the Box
Of course everyone in the circus loves Peewee the dog—he is cute and so tiny! But what happens when little Peetwee stops being so little? Dorothy Kunhardt, author of Pat the Bunny, addresses children’s fears with wonderfully reassuring directness even while making magic out of the simplest things.
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Fighting for Life
S. Josephine Baker, introduction by Helen Epstein
In 1918, Dr. S. Josephine Baker made the shocking assertion that front-line soldiers enjoyed better survival rates than infants born in NYC. And then she did something about it, developing hygiene programs that turned the city into one of the safest places to be born and in the process creating the discipline of preventive medicine. Here she recounts her many crusades, including her successful identification of Typhoid Mary and work as a suffragist.
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In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist
This novel, set in Jerusalem, is the story of two expatriate Americans—a kabbalist’s assistant and a beautiful motorcycle-riding woman—and an Arab janitor, whose lives become intertwined in a variety of ways in the courtyard of an elderly kabbalist and his wife.
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Pierre Reverdy
Pierre Reverdy, edited by Mary Ann Caws
As Frank O’Hara once wrote in a poem, ‘My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.’ A Catholic who lived much of his life in quasi-monasticism after an intense relationship with Coco Chanel, Reverdy has remained one of the most singular poets of his generation, and was described by André Breton as “The greatest poet of the time.” Here is a life-spanning selection of the French modernist’s work by the most revered translators of the language.
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Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Leigh Fermor was not only one of the masters of travel writing in English—his multi-volume memoir of his teen-aged trek across Europe is a classic of the genre—but his WWII exploits marked him as a genuine hero. In preparing this prize-winning biography, Artemis Cooper spent years in conversation with Leigh Fermor and his closest friends and enjoyed unlimited access to his papers.
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The Black Spider
Jeremias Gotthelf, a new translation from the German by Susan Bernofsky
In this unforgettably creepy story admired by the likes of Robert Walser and Thomas Mann, a bold peasant woman believes she has outwitted the devil until a horrible spider’s egg develops on the site of the kiss he gives her to seal the deal. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or at large in society, or as a Lovecraftian vision of the cosmic horror that underpins all life on Earth.
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The Gray Notebook
Josep Pla, new translation from the Catalan by Peter Bush
This great work of 20th-century personal exploration and revelation was suppressed—as was all work written in the author’s native Catalan—during the Franco regime. When it was finally published, its delightful depiction of youth culture and family life at the turn of the century, set in a just-flowering Barcelona and the unspoilt beach and countryside, was recognized as an instant classic. It is now available in English for the first time.
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1941: The Year That Keeps Returning
Slavko Goldstein, introduction by Charles Simic, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Michael Gable
“This perfectly successful combination of childhood memoir and historical analysis has few peers in European writing about the Second World War. All who read it will find their knowledge of the continent extended by Goldsteins’s erudite depiction of Yugoslavia, and their consciences nourished by his humane understanding of the experience of atrocity.”—Timothy Snyder
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Autobiography of a Corpse
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, introduction by Adam Thirlwell, a new translation from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull
These eleven newly translated tales from a playful Soviet master of the unlikely and the uncanny ask you to take a second look at the cracks in everyday reality. “Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space…. It is a method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear.”—Adam Thirlwell
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A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising
Miron Białoszewski, translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine
Białoszewski, the great Polish poet, memorializes the heroic two-month uprising of the Polish population against their Nazi oppressors in 1944—an operation which saw the slaughter of 200,000 civilians. His memoir rescues a lost story of World War II even as it pays tribute to his and his comrades’ vanished youths. Personal and profound, this memoir brings those harrowing days to vivid life.
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The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems
Edited and translated from the Tamil by A. K. Ramanujan
A classic collection of love poems from the Tamil selected and translated by the legendary poet and scholar, A.K. Ramanujan. The perfect gift for a lover or a loved one.
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The Human Comedy: Selected Stories
Honoré de Balzac, edited and with an introduction by Peter Brooks, a new translation from the French by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman and Jordan M. Stump
These vivid stories—of crime, sexuality, and artistic creation—demolish the idea that Balzac’s best work is to be found in his long, elaborate novels. In these new translations we see Balzac drawing on the tradition of oral storytelling, and the results are fresh, startling and delightful.
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