Caring for Japanese Art at the Chester Beatty Library is a memoir of Yoshiko Ushioda , looking back at more than five decades of life in Dublin. Both inspiring and heartfelt, Mrs. Ushioda's memoir will be of interest to both lovers of Japanese Art and those interested in Irish-Japanese relations.
The Formality of the Page is a collection of powerfull and meditative poems tracking the emotional histories of ageing, love, family, and the artist's life. Alongside these personal reflections, Roberts looks back on the many writers and artists with a role in shaping his sensibility, including Catullus, Dickinson, Melville, and Wallace Stevens.
Mosley's Rainbow People is a masterful,powerful book about borders, politics, andhope.
The twenty-first century doesn¿t much care for subtlety. Now is the era of the gist, the elevator pitch, the big idea boiled down. This is precisely why Christopher Woodall¿s fiction gives such pleasure. His meticulous stories about love, death, fidelity, friendship, and human solitude do not wave their narrative arms wildly, demanding unwarranted attention. They speak in a calm voice, inviting the reader closer¿inviting him not merely to react but to feel and think. Sweets and Toxins is the first collection of short fiction to be published by this talented novelist (November) and it marks him as a writer whose sharp eye for detail and feeling for people is a rare commodity indeed. He is one of the major English authors writing today.
Caterva (meaning "throng" or "horde") tells the story of seven erudite, homeless, and semi-incompetent radicals traveling from city to city in an attempt to foment a revolution: conspiring with striking workers, setting off bombs, and evading the local authorities. But this is no political thriller. Like his literary "descendant" Julio Cortazar--who mentions this book in Hopscotch--Filloy is far more concerned with his characters' occasionally farcical inner lives than with their radical machinations. With its encyclopedic feel, and its satirical look at both solidarity and nonconformity, Caterva is considered to be among Filloy's greatest achievements.
"Atavisms" is an original and unsettling portrait of Quebec, from the hinterland to the metropolis, from colonial times to the present, and beyond. These thirteen stories, though not linked in the traditional sense, abound in common threads. Like family traits passed down through the generations, the attitudes and actions of a rich cast of characters reverberate, quietly but deeply, over generations. Here is a group portrait of the individual lives that together shape a collective history. "Atavisms" has been shortlisted for the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.
"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.
"Gombrowicz is one of the most original and gifted writers of the twentieth century: he belongs at the very summit, at the side of his kindred spirits, Kafka and Celine." The Washington Post
Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.
Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his wartorn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality, to explicit homages to the works of Thomas Benhard, Without Origin is a remarkable and incisive debut.
American Odysseys is an anthology of twenty-two novelists, poets, and short-story writers drawn from the shortlist for the 2011 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. Including Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu, the recipient of the Prize; Yugoslavian-born Téa Obreht, the youngest author to receive the Orange Prize in Fiction; and Chinese-born Yiyun Li, a MacArthur Genius grantee, what these authors all have in common¿and share with US Poet Laureate Charles Simic, who has contributed a foreword¿is that they are immigrants to the United States, now excelling in their fields and dictating the terms by which future American writing will be judged by the world. Running the gamut from desperate realism to whimsical fantasy¿from Miho Nonakäs poetry, inspired by fourteenth-century Noh theater, to Ismet Prcic¿s wrenching stories set in the aftermath of the Bosnian war¿American Odysseys is proof, if any be needed, that the heterogeneity of American society is its greatest asset.
What happens when a writer throws herself into the service of one of the richest businessmen in the world? Will all the luxuries and corruption of the business world turn her into a complacent drone?
Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant. First published by Random House (1982), most recent paperback by Avon (1996).
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?
Set in the aftermath of the ¿Carnation Revolution¿ of April 25, 1974, Antonio Lobo Antunes¿s Warning to the Crocodiles is a fragmented narrative of the violent tensions resulting from major political changes in Portugal. Told through the memories of four women who spend their days fashioning homemade explosives and participating in the kidnap and torture of communists, the novel details the clandestine activities of an extreme right-wing Salazarist faction resisting the country¿s new embrace of democracy.Warning to the Crocodiles (Exortação aos Crocodilos) has won:- Best Novel by the Portuguese Writers Association (Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores) (1999)- The D. Dinis Prize of the Casa de Mateus Foundation (Prémio D. Dinis da Fundação Casa de Mateus) (1999)- The Austrian State Literature Prize (Prémio de Literatura Europeia do Estado Austríaco) (2000)
"I would consider it scandalous if Hoex's fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road." --Lee Yew Leong, Asymptote Journal
The comforts of ritualized shopping, Greek mythology intersecting with 1980s Polish punk music, poetic string theory and time travel and psychedelic dumpster diving all rolled into one
The book is a moving reminder of a child's perspective; a child who is surrounded by unmagical things; things that are sad, ugly, serious or just ordinary. It is that lens of a child that breathes magic into them.
Anderson's debut novel introduces readers to a writer of lucid, hallucinatory prose worthy of comparison with Roberto Bolano, Cormac McCarthy, and Jose Saramago
It is said that this book reached an important milestone in the study of literature by crystalizing a movement that had been under way for two decades in this country. The movement being to focus literary criticism and literary study in general on literature itself, rather than on the historical backgrounds, the psychological mechanisms, the political and social currents that influence literary creation. It conceives of imaginative literature as a way of knowing, different from but as humanly useful as the method of natural science.It begins with a brilliantly stated set of definitions of the nature and function of literature; and it proceeds through an examination of what goes into the making of a work of literature, to an analysis of the elements of literary composition and a statement of the principles by which we can evaluate the literary work itself.The timeless virtue of this work is that the authors are thoroughly grounded in the traditional methods of literary scholarship, and also thoroughly aware of the impact of the social and psychological sciences on all modern thinking, then and now. Theory of Literature incorporates examples ranging from Aristotle to Coleridge and is written in clear, uncondescending prose, which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today. It was and still will be eagerly sought for by teachers, critics, students, and all other who seek objective standards for judging and further understanding the art of literature.
When Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram Van Velde met in Paris in the 1930s, both were living in abject poverty, and neither could have anticipated that on the other side of World War II and the brutal occupation of France by the Nazis they would each go on to be luminaries in their respective mediums: Beckett winning the Nobel Prize and becoming a bulwark of contemporary Western literature, and Van Velde holding exhibitions all over the world. Thirty years later, a younger author at the start of his career is introduced into the company of these two great pessimists neither of whom make cooperative interview subjects, and each of whom represents, in his own way, a radical rejection of the common languages of his art.Itself a mixture of idolatry, deft characterization, and critical insight, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde is both an entertaining and insightful contribution to our understanding of the lives and thoughts of two masters.
Written when he was only twenty-five, before embarking on the masterpieces that would make him an integral figure in twentieth-century letters, Psalm 44 shows Kis at his most lyrical and unguarded, demonstrating that even in "e;the place of dragons . . . covered with the shadow of death,"e; there can still be poetry. Featuring characters based on actual inmates and warders-including the abominable Dr. Mengele-Psalm 44 is a baring of many of the themes, patterns, and preoccupations Kis would return to in future, albeit never with the same starkness or immediacy.
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