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Ride a Cockhorse
Raymond Kennedy, introduction by Katherine A. Powers
Who knows why meek, middle-aged Frances suddenly gets a libido, a new hairstyle, the desire to take over the bank that employs her—and a serious case of grandiosity. But it’s a hell of a ride. Raymond Kennedy has created in Ride a Cockhorse a rollicking cautionary tale of small-town demagoguery that prefigures both America’s current financial woes and the rise of the likes of Sarah Palin.
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The Expendable Man
Dorothy B. Hughes, afterword by Walter Mosley
Young doctor Hugh Denismore would seem to have everything going for him. Why then is he the first suspect when a hitchhiking teen goes missing? Dorothy B. Hughes was one of the great novelists of the golden age of noir. Here she not only takes up the subject of American social injustice, she delivers a supremely suspenseful story.
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Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield
This tale of an affably cunning con who establishes a thriving trade in “dead souls”—serfs who though no longer alive can still, he finds, be profitably bought and sold—is also a brilliant spoof of a corrupt society, full of the living dead. This new translation captures Gogol’s linguistic invention and the anarchic fun of his writing.
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Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall
Sir Thomas Browne, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff
This new edition of Browne’s two most enduring and beloved works, in which he ponders life, death, religion, and healing, has been assembled by the bestselling author of Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt, and Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff. It includes an extensive introduction and helpful annotations.
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He Was There From the Day We Moved In
Rhoda Levine, illustrated by Edward Gorey
Does the dog want dinner? a lollipop? a stray cat? conversation? No, what the dog wants is—a name! But you can’t just choose any name for a grown-up dog. No, it has to be the right name.
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Tyrant Banderas
Ramón del Valle-Inclán, introduction by Alberto Manguel, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush
The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and an inspiration to García Márquez and Roa Bastos, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American Republic at last revolting against the ruthless monster that has ruled it for so long.
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We Have Only This Life to Live: Selected Essays, 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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Cheerful
Cheerful is a city mouse who spends his days frolicking in the church where he lives with his siblings, Solemnity, Faith, and Hope—but he longs for the country, where mice run free. Palmer Brown’s filigreed drawings turn this sweet, simple story into an instrument of enchantment as glorious as a stained-glass window or the sugar-spun Easter egg that conveys Cheerful to his pastoral home. “Adorable is the word to describe Cheerful.”—Chicago Daily Tribune
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The Water Theatre
A novel that follows war reporter Martin Crowther as he travels to Italy hoping to convince the estranged children of his ailing mentor to visit their father one last time.
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Growing Up Absurd
Paul Goodman, introduction by Casey Nelson Blake, with an essay by Susan Sontag
“Growing Up Absurd, originally commissioned as a study of juvenile delinquency and later a bible of the 1960s student rebellion, remains essential and troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the young.”
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—A.O. Scott, The New York Times -
Young Man with a Horn
Dorothy Baker, introduction by Gary Giddins
This book, loosely inspired by the life of Bix Beiderbecke, is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it courses with the verve and swing of the sound that defined an era. It is the story of Rick Martin, a prodigy whose dedication to music cannot save him from self destruction. “Got a kid who’s into music? This is the book. Interested in the Jazz Age? Ditto. Or just looking for a short novel that you can’t put down? Here you go.”—Jesse Kornbluth
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The Stammering Century
Gilbert Seldes, introduction by Greil Marcus
19th-century America bred fads, cults, and new religions as perhaps no other time or place ever has. Writing without judgement, but with plenty of verve, Seldes profiles the charismatic and often off-kilter leaders of these movements and sketches their hidden histories.
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The Other
Thomas Tryon, afterword by Dan Chaon
The Other, alongside Rosemary’s Baby, is a signal work of midcentury horror. In Tryon’s first novel, everyday life—not monsters or ghouls—is revealed to be the source of the truly terrifying. “A lyrical, impressive horror story that is a cross between The Bad Seed and John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicles.”—LA Times
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Pinocchio
Carlo Collodi, introduction by Umberto Eco, illustrated by Fulvio Testa, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
This edition of Carlo Collodi’s original, madcap tale is accompanied by more than 100 full-page watercolors by acclaimed painter Fulvio Testa. “This translation revives the sardonic wit and black humour of the original.”
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— London Times -
Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir
The story of Zena, a young artist who has fallen under the spell of a city that both attracts and repels her and threatens to engulf her in war, grief, and love affairs.
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Voltaire in Love
Nancy Mitford, introduction by Adam Gopnik
The inimitable Nancy Mitford’s account of Voltaire’s 16-year affair with Émilie du Châtelet—a renowned mathematician and scientist—is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to the French Enlightenment. “Voltaire in Love caps [Mitford’s] career as the nonpareil popular biographer of that era.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
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Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Daniel Mendelsohn—hailed by The Economist as one of the finest critics writing in the English language today—brings together a selection of his recent critical essays.
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Basti
Intizar Husain, translated by Frances W. Pritchett
Basti traces the psychic history of Pakistan through the story of one man. Zakir remembers his idyllic childhood, the disruption of the partition that created Pakistan and separated him from the woman he loved, and the turbulent early years of the newborn country, struggling to define itself. “[Basti] succeeds in capturing the human side of the historic event.” —Frances Prichett
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Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist
Erich Kästner, introduction by Rodney Livingstone, translated from the German by Cyrus Brooks
Berlin, 1929: There’s little hope, but plenty of amusement to be had if you know where to look. Jakob Fabian, 32, “at present an advertising copywriter,” isn’t one to mope; he and his friends prowl the city’s cabarets, exchanging barbs and looking for girls. “Graceful, vivid and distinguished … a little masterpiece of pathos and calamity.”—Michael Sadleir
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Wolf Story
William McCleery, illustrated by Warren Chappell
The Wolf Story is one that never ends—if 5-year-old Michael has his way. This persistent child has an insatiable desire to hear stories about Waldo the wolf and his nemesis Rainbow the hen, and it’s lucky for us that he is so persuasive. Illustrated with stunning pen-and-ink drawings by legendary designer and artist Warren Chappell.
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1948
Yoram Kaniuk, translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris
A haunting, astute, utterly original novel about the Israeli War of Independence, drawn from Yoram Kaniuk’s experience as a 17-year-old solider and filtered through six decades of memory.
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Happy Moscow
Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler
Happy Moscow isn’t a place, but a person, a gifted orphan whose flair for parachuting catapults her into the Soviet elite. Until, that is, she comes in for a great fall and reveals that Stalin’s utopia isn’t quite as happy as it’s made out to be. “A reminder of the unique, paradoxical power of literature to expose the mismatch between rhetoric and reality.”—The Spectator
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Testing the Current
William McPherson, introduction by D. T. Max
A coming-of-age novel set in the American Midwest in the late 1930s. “An extraordinary intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory….There is not one false note, one forced image. It is a novel written with great skill, and with love. It’s what most good first novels aspire to be.”—Russell Banks
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The Gate
Natsume Sōseki, introduction by Pico Iyer, translated from the Japanese by William F. Sibley
The Gate is the story of an unhappily married man, buffeted by the cares and troubles of everyday life, who at last seeks refuge in a remote Zen mountain monastery. At once melancholy and joyous, profound and simple, The Gate shows the Japanese master Sōsuke at the pinnacle of his achievement. This newly revised translation of The Gate is the most accurate English-language edition to appear to date.
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Ravan and Eddie
A delightful comic romp through the misadventures of two boys, Ravan (Hindu) and Eddie (Catholic), whose lives are entwined by chance and circumstance in a sprawling and crowded Mumbai tenement building.
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The Diary of a Man in Despair
Friedrich Reck, translated from the German by Paul Rubens
This astonishing dispatch from Nazi Germany was not published until after the author’s death at Dachau. In it we see a man awakening into political consciousness as he watches his country succumb to its murderous impulses. “One of the most important documents of the Hitler period”—Hannah Arendt
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On the Edge
Markus Werner, translated from the German by Robert E. Goodwin
A gripping psychological thriller, the story of two men, one woman, and many questions: about truth, about reality, about identity.
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