Rock Crystal
By Adalbert Stifter
Introduction by W.H. Auden
Translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer
and Marianne Moore
Stifter's rapturous and enigmatic tale of village life begins with a small anecdote—one Christmas eve, a brother and sister lose their way amid snowdrifts while crossing the Alps—and opens onto vast questions of faith and destiny.
|
Don't Look Now
By Daphne du Maurier
Selected and with an introduction by Patrick McGrath
Novelist Patrick McGrath (Asylum, Trauma) selects eight of his favorite stories—including "The Birds" and "The Blue Lenses"—by du Maurier, a writer who excelled at the art of the psychologically telling horror tale.
|
|
Ringolevio
A Life Played For Keeps
By Emmett Grogan
Introduction by Peter Coyote
Grogan went from street punk to teenage junkie to countercultural icon in a few years. As the leader of the San Francisco Diggers in the '60s he set the tone—puckish, anarchic, radical—for a movement that was to alter the social fabric. He was also a great self-mythologizer. As Paul Krassner put it, "The leader of the Diggers doesn't exist, and his name is Emmett Grogan."
|
Defeat
Napoleon's Russian Campaign
By Philippe-Paul de Ségur
Introduction by Mark Danner
Ségur's eye-witness account of what remains one of the greatest military disasters of all time is a masterpiece of military history and was an essential source for Tolstoy's War and Peace. It is also a reminder of the risks of imperial hubris.
|
|
The Liberal Imagination
By Lionel Trilling
Introduction by Louis Menand
The great critic's masterwork makes a case for the necessity of the imaginative works in a society ever more worshipful of the liberal ideals of rationality and progress. "Trilling...shows how criticism, written with grace, style, and a self-questioning cast of mind, can itself become a form of literature, as well as a valuable contribution to how we think about society.—Morris Dickstein
|
The Queue
By Vladimir Sorokin
Translated from the Russian by Sally Laird
An average day in the Soviet Union, hundreds of people are lined up for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Sorokin's most approachable novel is told in snatches of dialogue that are in turn poignant and uproarious.
|
|
In Hazard
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by John Crowley
The author of A High Wind in Jamaica is at his best on the high seas, where man's furious nature is matched—perhaps outpaced—by the intensity of the natural world. "A small masterpiece of lyric terror about a cargo ship that runs into a hurricane, but also about the rest of life." —Simon Schama
|
The 13 Clocks
By James Thurber
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
Illustrations by Marc Simont
Satirist Thurber takes on the fairy tale and the results are captivating. "There are spys, monsters, betrayals, hair's-breadth escapes, spells to be broken and all the usual accouterments, but Thurber gives the proceedings his own particular deadpan spin." —Los Angeles Times
|
|
Victorine
By Maude Hutchins
Introduction by Terry Castle
A sexual awakening novel like none other, mixing elements of Adleran psychology, surrealism, and the American pastoral. "Maude Hutchins writes like a lascivious Ivy Compton-Burnett.... Somehow she manages to remain irreverent and even lighthearted about the transgressions she describes." —Time
|
The Scientist as Rebel
By Freeman Dyson
New in paperback. Dyson profiles scientists—Newton Einstein, Teller, Feynman—whose independent thought allowed them to make great conceptual leaps. Dyson also puts forth some heterodox ideas of his own on topics like space colonization and the paranormal, living up to his reputation as "one of the world's most original minds."—Times (London)
|
|
Grief Lessons
Four Plays by Euripides
By Euripides
Translated and with introductory essays by Anne Carson
"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief." Celebrated contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson presents new translations of four plays by Euripides.
|
The Military Error
Baghdad and Beyond in America's War of Choice
By Thomas Powers
Why did George W. Bush invade Iraq? Thomas Powers uses a broad perspective to examine the American tendency to respond to political crises with military force. An expert on CIA intelligence, Powers explains how the Bush administration made its case for war, using faulty intelligence to argue that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a mounting threat to the Middle East.
|
