Tractor Mac is hard at work in the field one day when his engine starts to make a funny noise. It doesn't sound good, and it doesn't feel very good, either. Tractor Mac is scared that he has to take a trip to Dr. Lou at the tractor hospital, but with the help of his animal friends and some other machines who have stopped in for a tune-up, he learns that going to the doctor doesn't have to be scary at all.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in PoetryOnly for you do the two mute girls on stagewho falter at first, erratic as staticin the synaptic gap between each image,imperceptibly jolt to life-grinning, tap-dancing, morphing into footage,their arms like immaculate pistons, their legs like knives . . .It lasts a minute, their having-been-written onto light.-from "The Mutoscope"Sinéad Morrissey is one of the most fascinating talents in international poetry. Recently appointed as Belfast's first poet laureate, she creates poems known for their combination of keen intelligence and whispered intimacy. In Parallax, which won the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize, Morrissey explores what is captured, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia"), are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a particular perspective. Assured and disquieting, Morrisey's poems explore the paradoxes that result when we attempt to freeze our passing experience through art.This edition of Parallax also includes Morrissey's own selection of her favorite poems from her previous collections, published for the first time in the United States. In their variety of subjects and styles they trace the evolution of a poet, showcasing the formal mastery and tenderness that define her work.
Winner of the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry PrizeA profound new collection from one of poetry's rising stars"Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ' . . . He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.' . . . And, yes, as we embark on the third millennium of our so-called Common Era, she is indeed the one by whom the language lives." -Michael Hofmann, London Review of BooksA sublime singer of existential bewilderment, Karen Solie is one of contemporary poetry's most direct and haunting voices. A poet of the in-between places-the purgatory of wayside motels and junkyards, the abandoned Calgary ski jump and the eternal noon of Walmart-her poems stake out startlingly new territory and are songs for our emerging world, an age of uncertainty and melting icebergs. In Solie's new collection, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, she restlessly excavates our civilization, the moments of tough luck, casual violence, naked desire, and inchoate menace, pursuing "Beauty and terror / in equal measure" and fixing on the "Intrigue of a boarded-up building. / We want to get in there and find out what's the matter with it." Amplifying the elegant recklessness of her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Pigeon, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.
The seriously, seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence that Aleksandar Hemon has long promisedScript idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancée of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek.Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: The Righteous Love.Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain.Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL classes in Chicago. His laptop is full of ideas, but the only one to really take root is Zombie Wars. When Josh comes home to discover his landlord, an unhinged army vet, rifling through his dirty laundry, he decides to move in with his girlfriend, Kimmy. It's domestic bliss for a moment, but Josh becomes entangled with a student, a Bosnian woman named Ana, whose husband is jealous and violent. Disaster ensues, and as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence.
A powerfully moving meditation on life and the beyond, from one of our finest American poetsCharles Wright's truth-the truth of nature, of man's yearning for the divine, of aging-is at the heart of the renowned poet's latest collection, Caribou. This is an elegy to transient beauty, a song for the "stepchild hour, / belonging to neither the light nor dark, / The hour of disappearing things," and an expression of Wright's restless questing for a reality beyond the one before our eyes ("We are all going into a world of dark . . . It's okay. That's where the secrets are, / The big ones, the ones too tall to tell"). Caribou's strength is in its quiet, wry profundity. "It's good to be here," Wright tells us. "It's good to be where the world's quiescent, and reminiscent." And to be here-in the pages of this stirring collection-is more than good; Caribou is another remarkable gift from the poet around whose influence "the whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle" (Poetry).
A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader.The story revolves around Iván Cárdenas Maturell, who in his youth was the great hope of modern Cuban literature-until he dared to write a story that was deemed counterrevolutionary. When we meet him years later in Havana, Iván is a loser: a humbled and defeated man with a quiet, unremarkable life who earns his modest living as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine. One afternoon, he meets a mysterious foreigner in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. This is "the man who loved dogs," and as the pair grow closer, Iván begins to understand that his new friend is hiding a terrible secret. Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Ramón's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. This is a story about political ideals tested and characters broken, a multilayered epic that effortlessly weaves together three different plot threads- Trotsky in exile, Ramón in pursuit, Iván in frustrated stasis-to bring emotional truth to historical fact. A novel whose reach is matched only by its astonishing successes on the page, The Man Who Loved Dogs lays bare the human cost of abstract ideals and the insidious, corrosive effects of life under a repressive political regime.
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on the decline of intellectual lifeIn the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation-penned by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today. Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot-whose essay "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture" is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished-Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is not content to merely sign a petition; he will not bite his tongue. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.
A lively sampling from the work of one of the most celebrated and daring poets of the twentieth centuryJohn Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century. Best known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of Dream Songs, he wrote passionately: of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one. The Heart Is Strange, a new selection of his poems, along with reissues of Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete Dream Songs, marks the centenary of his birth. The Heart Is Strange includes a generous selection from across Berryman's varied career: from his earliest poems, which show him learning the craft, to his breakthrough masterpiece, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," then to his mature verses, which find the poet looking back upon his lovers and youthful passions, and finally, to his late poems, in which he battles with sobriety and an increasingly religious sensibility. The defiant joy and wild genius of Berryman's work has been obscured by his struggles with mental illness and alcohol, his tempestuous relationships with women, and his suicide. This volume, which includes three previously uncollected poems and an insightful introduction by the editor Daniel Swift, celebrates the whole Berryman: tortured poet and teasing father, passionate lover and melancholy scholar. It is a perfect introduction to one of the finest bodies of work yet produced by an American poet.
"Meticulous . . . [Nagle's] passion for the subject really comes to life." -The New York TimesNew York City produces more than twelve thousand tons of household trash and recyclables a day. As quickly as it accumulates, it's hauled away. But who makes that happen? What's life like for the workers with careers built around garbage? In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle takes us inside New York City's Department of Sanitation, a largely unseen and often unloved army responsible for keeping the city alive. Nagle spent a decade with sanitation people of all ranks to learn what it takes to manage Gotham's garbage. She even took the job herself, driving trucks and plowing snow while enduring the physical aches, public abuse, and risk of injury that are constant realities of the job. Nagle offers an insider's perspective on the complex hierarchies, intricate rules, and obscure language unique to this mostly invisible world. Not just a contemporary account, Picking Up charts New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash. It traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to today's far more vigorous practices, which have made the city cleaner than it's been in decades. Complete with vividly evoked characters and memorable descriptions of the sights and smells of the job, Picking Up reveals the vital role sanitation workers play in every city across the globe.
A powerfully moving meditation on life and the beyond, from one of our finest American poetsCharles Wright's truth-the truth of nature, of man's yearning for the divine, of aging-is at the heart of the renowned poet's latest collection, Caribou. This is an elegy to transient beauty, a song for the "stepchild hour, / belonging to neither the light nor dark, / The hour of disappearing things," and an expression of Wright's restless questing for a reality beyond the one before our eyes ("We are all going into a world of dark . . . It's okay. That's where the secrets are, / The big ones, the ones too tall to tell"). Caribou's strength is in its quiet, wry profundity. "It's good to be here," Wright tells us. "It's good to be where the world's quiescent, and reminiscent." And to be here-in the pages of this stirring collection-is more than good; Caribou is another remarkable gift from the poet around whose influence "the whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle" (Poetry).
The story of a revolution in classical music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian BachIn Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives. As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological frontier-restoring organs, inventing instruments, and perfecting the tuning system still in use today. Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach's music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works to the world beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach's cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with Fantasia, made Bach the sound of children's playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized, technically savvy artist. Reinventing Bach is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion-and a story with special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology.
A warm, funny, and profoundly original novel about a family dealing with disaster, from a rising literary starAll it takes is a quarter to change pediatric psychiatrist Dr. Owen Lerner's life. When the coin he's feeding into a parking meter is struck by lightning, Lerner survives, except that now all he wants to do is barbecue. What will happen to his patients, who rely on him to make sense of their world? More important, what will happen to his family? The bolt of lightning that lifts Lerner into the air sends the entire Lerner clan into free fall. Mary Kay Zuravleff depicts family-on-family pain with generosity and devastating humor as she explores how much we are each allowed to change within a family-and without. Man Alive! captures Owen and Toni Lerner and their nearly grown children so vividly you'll be looking over your shoulder to make sure the author hasn't been watching your own family in action. A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2013
Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew." In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn't omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China's economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.
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