these just in … 29 July, 2008
Tom Friedman 1989-2008: Essays
by Arthur C. Danto & Ralph Rugoff
Hardcover $85.00 - 10% Gagosian Gallery Art
How to Read Chinese Paintings
by Maxwell K. Hearn
Paperback $25.00 Metropolitan Museum of Art Art
The Chinese often use the expression du hua, “to read a painting,” in connection with their study and appreciation of such works. This volume closely “reads” thirty-six masterpieces of Chinese painting from the encyclopedic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to reveal the major characteristics and themes of this rich pictorial tradition. The book examines multiple layers of meaning—style, technique, symbolism, past traditions, and the artist’s personal circumstances—through accessible texts and numerous large color details. A dynastic chronology, map, and list of further readings supplement the text.
Spanning a thousand years of Chinese art, these landscapes, flowers, birds, figures, religious subjects, and calligraphies illuminate the main goal of every Chinese artist: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but also its inner essence.
Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000
Europe is, in world terms, a relatively minor peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass. Yet it became one of the most innovative regions on the planet, generating restless adventurers who traversed the globe to trade, to explore, and often to settle. By the fifteenth century Europe was a driving world force, but the origins of its success have until now remained obscured in prehistory.
In this magnificent book, distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe views Europe not in terms of states and shifting political land boundaries but as a geographical niche particularly favored in facing many seas. These seas, and Europe’s great transpeninsular rivers, ensured a rich diversity of natural resources while also encouraging the dynamic interaction of peoples across networks of communication and exchange. The development of these early Europeans is rooted in complex interplays, shifting balances, and geographic and demographic fluidity.
Weaving together titanic concepts while remaining sensitive to specifics, Cunliffe has produced an interdisciplinary tour de force. His is a bold book of exceptional scholarship, erudite and engaging, and it heralds an entirely new understanding of Old Europe.
Demian
Meadowlands
Just two miles west of Manhattan lies the Meadowlands, a 32-square-mile stretch of sweeping wilderness that evokes morbid fantasies of Mafia hits and buried remains. Development has claimed two-thirds of the region, making way for scores of landfills, motels, and gas stations. The growth of poorly planned communities and the impending construction of Xanadu, a five million-square-foot entertainment and retail complex, threaten to change these lands forever.
Under the pretext of searching for Jimmy Hoffa, photographer Joshua Lutz began exploring these lonesome wetlands ten years ago; what started as a strict documentary project soon evolved into something else entirely. Meadowlands, Lutz’s first monograph, is a compelling portrait of this vast and stunning landscape, whose unspoiled area is quickly dwindling. The Meadowlands are a place of solitude, a place you pass through on your way somewhere more inviting—and yet, within it all resides a quiet beauty, a glimmer of hope, a hidden potential for renewal and rebirth.
Vegan Lunch Box: 130 Amazing, Animal-Free Lunches Kids and Grown-Ups Will Love!
Leningrad: State of Siege
Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine
Review Of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 2008
Paperback $8.00 Dalkey Archive Press Literary Journals
Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
Thomas has been the fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris for 12 years and writes about style for the New York Times Magazine and other well-known publications. She traces the origins of luxury from the mid–nineteenth century, when Louis Vuitton made his first steamer trunks and custom-made clothing was strictly the province of European aristocracy, through the fashion boom of the 1920s, when names such as Dior, Gucci, and Yves Saint Laurent came into prominence, and buyers with expendable income could afford exquisite clothing and perfume. Sadly, today most of the well-known names are owned by multinational groups, and luxury items have become commodities, where buyers crave name brands for what they represent rather than their inherent quality of manufacture and design. Thomas takes us into the streets of New York, where counterfeit items are sold that look so much like the real thing that it takes an expert to tell them apart, to the Guangzhou region in China, where children make knockoff goods under appalling conditions. She manages to remove the veil from the fashion industry with a blend of history, culture, and investigative journalism.
The War for All the Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napoleon at Waterloo
Husband and wife Roy Adkins (Nelson’s Trafalgar) and Lesley Adkins (Empires of the Plain) team up for this vivid account of the naval campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars (1798–1815). Contending that the wars were won at sea, the authors trace the nautical action from the Battle of the Nile (1798), where a British fleet destroyed the French fleet and stranded Napoleon’s army in Egypt, to the decisive Battle of Trafalgar (1805), where the British overwhelmed a combined French and Spanish fleet supporting an invasion of Britain. The narrative concludes with an account of the protracted war of attrition that followed Trafalgar and ended with Bonaparte’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. This low-grade conflict—coastal blockades and shipping raids—caught neutral nations like the United States in the middle and ultimately led the Americans to declare war on England in 1812—a conflict that was never more than a sideshow for the British. This rollicking saga ranges from the Mediterranean to the Indies, East and West, and ends with Britain in control of the world’s sea lanes—the foundation for her future empire. Meticulously researched—drawing on extensive and intimate eyewitness accounts from contemporary journals, letters and memoirs—this lively narrative will delight students and fans of nautical history.
Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire
The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York
Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them.
As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
–Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author The Black Swan“Fascinating, illuminating, and endlessly entertaining as well. Vanderbilt shows how a sophisticated understanding of human behavior can illuminate one of the modern world’s most basic and most mysterious endeavors. You’ll learn a lot; and the life you save may be your own.”
–Cass R. Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
“Everyone who drives–and many people who don’t–should read this book. It is a psychology book, a popular science book, and a how-to-save-your-life manual, all rolled into one. I found it gripping and fascinating from the very beginning to the very end.”
–Tyler Cowen, author of Discover Your Inner Economist
“Fresh and timely . . . Vanderbilt investigates how human nature has shaped traffic, and vice versa, finally answering drivers’ most familiar and frustrating questions.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Fluently written and oddly entertaining, full of points to ponder while stuck at the on-ramp meter or an endless red light.”–Kirkus
“This may be the most insightful and comprehensive study ever done of driving behavior and how it reveals truths about the types of people we are.”–Booklist
“Tom Vanderbilt uncovers a raft of counterintuitive facts about what happens when we get behind the wheel, and why.”–BusinessWeek
“Fascinating . . . Could not come at a better time.”
–Library Journal
“Brisk . . . Smart . . . Delivers a wealth of automotive insights both curious and counterintuitive.”
–Details
“A literate, sobering look at our roadways that explains why the other lane is moving faster and why you should never drive at 1 p.m. on Saturday.”
–GQ
“An engaging, informative, psychologically savvy account of the conscious and unconscious assumptions of individual drivers–and the variations in ‘car culture’ around the world . . . Full of fascinating facts and provocative propositions.”
–Glenn Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“An engrossing tour through the neuroscience of highway illusions, the psychology of late merging, and other existential driving dilemmas.”
–Michael Mason, Discover
Songs Without Words
(Reviewed by Carrie Brown)Ann Packer has been looking in our windows. The majority of readers of contemporary literary fiction in America — especially fiction written by women — are women themselves, and in her new novel, Songs Without Words, Packer has tapped into the things that worry many of these readers: love and satisfaction in their relationships, the emotional and psychological health of their offspring, the terrible possibility of spiritual and familial dissolution. Songs Without Words describes a childhood friendship tested by the challenges of adult lives that bear the friends along separate paths. Packer solidifies the reputation she established in the enormously successful The Dive from Clausen’s Pier as an uncannily observant chronicler of contemporary American domestic life. Songs Without Words touches every nerve exposed by the solidly middle-class dilemmas of today’s parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. There are no wars or plagues here, no suicide bombers or political turmoil. Instead, there is the fraught landscape of suburban life with its troubling questions about marriage, parenthood, friendship and fulfillment.Packer is no ironist; she is not Claire Messud or Zadie Smith, whose most recent novels unspool under the cool panoramic gaze of a social critic. The characters in Packer’s novels are not so much exposed as they are understood — understood and seen, in all the psychological sense of that word. Packer is devoted to her characters, and it is her pleasure as a novelist — and ours as her readers — to watch these people move through the intensely familiar and intimate hours of their days and nights, spooning coffee into the Krups, taking a bath, crawling into bed. Packer follows them from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom (and to the car and the grocery store and Starbucks and the mall), and her pursuit is so unnervingly attentive that it becomes revelatory. Middle-of-the-night readers — and there will be lots of them — who cannot put down Songs Without Words will surely look up at the darkest hour with the sense that they are being watched.
The first paragraph of the novel is one of those lovely moments in fiction when a writer conjures in just a few sentences, with just a few images, the entire universe of the story that is about to unfold. The scene feels both like a presage of things to come and, in its quiet, painterly composition, like a metaphor — of what, at first, we are not exactly sure, of course, but the world Packer evokes here is the familiar beauty-crossed-with-loneliness of the suburban evening. (Countless writers have been drawn to this moment, most famously perhaps James Agee in the opening scene of his novel A Death in the Family). Here is Packer’s beginning:
“Each evening, the streetlights came on at dusk, and the view out the window changed, from barely glowing kitchens and TV rooms to the houses that contained them, and to the trees that sheltered the houses. It seemed to Sarabeth that for a little while there was a kind of balance out there, an equilibrium. But then, quickly, darkness came down from the sky, and soon the lit rooms returned to prominence, and finally everything else was black, and the world seemed limited to a few bright windows on a street in Palo Alto.”
Sarabeth and Liz grew up across the street from each other, their girlhood friendship deepened by the tragedy of Sarabeth’s mother’s suicide when the girls were in high school. Packer offers their history in a brief prologue, and the first chapter of the novel finds Liz married with two teenaged children and contentedly immersed in her roles as wife and mother.
Sarabeth, on the other hand, is still single, uncertain about her life and pursuing a career as a house stager, someone who creates the ambiance of cozy domesticity in homes people are trying to sell, a job that seems like a painful destiny for someone whose own childhood was interrupted by domestic tragedy.
Of the two, Liz appears to have it all, but when her 15-year-old daughter, Lauren — the novel’s most heartbreaking portrait — falls into the grip of adolescent depression, Liz’s world falls apart. And so does Sarabeth’s; Lauren’s unhappiness brings Sarabeth dangerously near to the memory of her own mother, and her retreat from Liz is both cowardly and — this is Packer’s generosity at work — completely understandable. The only thing that can drive old friends apart more surely than death is unhappiness, and it seems that Liz and Sarabeth’s estrangement will separate them permanently. “They all seemed irrevocably distant, the people she knew,” Sarabeth thinks, “as far away as Earth was from the moon.” There are some novels that show us the “other,” and in doing so expand our ideas about humanity. Songs Without Words is a novel that shows us — tenderly, and with a full awareness of the precious dignity and indignity of human experience — ourselves.
Black and White and Dead All Over
She teams up with Jude Hurley, a clever, rebellious reporter, and together they navigate the ink-infested waters whose denizens include the paper’s resentful old guard, scheming careerists, a bumbling publisher, a steely executive editor, and a rival newspaper tycoon named Lester Moloch. But the waters thicken considerably when more bodies turn up, dead all over.
Armed with the firsthand knowledge he has acquired through forty years in journalism, John Darnton conjures up the cynicism and romanticism of the profession and gives us a cunning, pitch-perfect portrait of the declining—if not yet murderous—newspaper industry. Black and White and Dead All Over is a satirical mystery that entertains from first to last.
Beyond the Dunes: A Portrait of the Hamptons
by Paul Goldberger & Jake Rajs
Hardcover $60.00 - 10% Monacelli / Random House Local Interest / Photography
The South Fork of Long Island extends only forty miles, stretching east into the Atlantic Ocean from the Shinnecock Canal to the majestic bluffs at Montauk Point. Dotting the coastline are the stylish Hamptons—Southampton, East Hampton, Westhampton Beach, and Bridgehampton—and villages of Sag Harbor, Amagansett, Watermill, and Sagaponack.
The landscape in which these towns sit is unique in the United States. It is not one landscape but a collection of them—dune, farmland, woods, bays, swamps, ponds, marshes, pine barrens, and a high ridge, the moraine left by the glacier that long ago swept across the continent. All is bathed in an extraordinary silvery light that, at once warm and crisp, washes over both land and sea.
Acclaimed photographer Jake Rajs has created a compelling portrait of the Hamptons, juxtaposing privet hedges and pumpkin fields, crashing surf and serene coves, fishermen and polo players, contemporary houses and modest shingled cottages. Most important, he has captured the light throughout the day, from misty dawn to the vivid colors of sunset.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows have written a wondrous, delightful, poignant book— part Jane Austen, part history lesson. The letters in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society aren’t addressed to you, but they are meant for you. It’s a book everyone should read. An absolute treasure.”—Sarah Addison Allen, author of Garden Spells
“Here’s who will love this book: anyone who nods in profound agreement with the statement, “Reading keeps you from going gaga.” The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a delight. Tart, insightful and fun.”—Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow, A Thread of Grace and Dreamers of the Day
“Charming…. [Heroine] Juliet finds in the letters not just inspiration for her next work, but also for her life—as readers will.”—Publishers Weekly
“A sure winner…. Elizabeth and Juliet are appealingly reminiscent of game but gutsy ’40s movie heroines.”—Kirkus Reviews
The 13 Clocks
“It’s one of the great kids’ books of the last century. It may be the best thing Thurber ever wrote. It’s certainly the most fun that anybody can have reading anything aloud.” -Neil Gaiman
“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…It all makes for a rousing concoction of adventure, humor and satire that defies any conventional classification.” -LA Times
“My exemplary Thurber fairy tale is The 13 Clocks…a small masterpiece of respectful travesty honors the whole spectrum of the traditions.” -The Hudson Review
“The 13 Clocks is especially wonderful.” -The Washington Post
“Rich with ogres and oligarchs, riddles and wit. What distinguishes [The 13 Clocks] is not just quixotic imagination but Thurber’s inimitable delight in language. The stories beg to be read aloud…Thurber captivates the ear and captures the heart.” -Newsweek
“For true modern fairy tales we leave you with James Thurber…who wrote a tale…with charm and grace in The Thirteen Clocks. These I recommend if you are tired of Grimm.” -ABC Radio
Thurber’s stories are “for children to dream through and for adults to read as parables” -Guardian
“Everyone who reads to their children knows…to read the stuff that you love, or that you love to roll off your tongue…I’d put in a personal endorsement for James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks here…” -Guardian
“Gothic, gruesome, and written with the wit of the master wordsmith.If you saw my copy, you’d believe me when I say I’ve read it more than 13 times.” -Nicola Morgan, The Scotsman
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and takes us to places ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a panorama of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back.
By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in running.
Best Sellers … 28 July, 2008
BookCourt Best Sellers
July 28, 2008 20% off list price
Hardcover Fiction
- HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HERE. Amy Shearn. Random House. $23. Our Price $18.40.
- BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. James Frey. HarperCollins. $26.95. Our Price $21.56.
- UNACCUSTOMED EARTH. Jhumpa Lahiri. Random House. $25. Our Price $20.
- NETHERLAND. Joseph O’Neil. Random House. $23.95. Our Price $18.40.
- BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. Junot Diaz. Riverhead. $24.95. Our Price $19.96.
- SPIES OF WARSAW. Alan Furst. Random House. $25. Our Price $20.
- STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE. David Wroblewski. HarperCollins. $25.95. Our Price $20.76.
- ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN. Keith Gessen. Penguin. $24.95. Our Price $19.96.
- DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES. Jonathan Miles. Houghton Mifflin. $22. Our Price $17.60.
- MOSCOW RULES. Daniel Silva. Putnam. $26.95. Our Price $21.56.
Hardcover Nonfiction
- WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES. David Sedaris. Little, Brown. $25.99. Our Price $20.79.
- DARK SIDE. Jane Mayer. Doubleday. $27.50. Our Price $22.
- ART OF SIMPLE FOOD. Alice Waters. Random House. $35. Our Price $28.
- BROOKLYN MODERN. Diana Lind. Rizzoli. $45. Our Price $36.
- BROOKLYN STREET ART. Jamie Rojo. Preste;. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- CARBON AGE. Eric Roston. Walker. $25.99. Our Price $20.79.
- IN DEFENSE OF FOOD. Michael Pollen. Penguin. $21.95. Our Price $17.56.
- 101 THINGS I LEARNED IN ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL. Matthew Frederick. MIT Press. $12.95. Our Price $10.36.
- SWEET MELISSA BAKING BOOK. Melissa Murphy.Penguin.$27.Our Price $21.60.
- BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR. Joseph Mitchell. Random House. $23. Our Price $18.40.
Paperback Fiction
- GREAT MAN. Kate Christensen. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- ON CHESIL BEACH. Ian McEwan. Random House. $13.95.Our Price $11.16.
- NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU. Miranda July. Simon & Schuster. $14. Our Price $11.20.
- THEN WE CAME TO THE END. Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown. $13.99. Our Price $11.19.
- WHAT IS THE WHAT. Dave Eggers. Random House. $14. Our Price $11.20.
- THE ROAD. Cormac McCarthy. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. Michael Chabon. HarperCollins. $15.95. Our Price $12.76.
- DIVISADERO. Michael Ondaatje. Random House. $13.95. Our Price $11.16.
- OUT STEALING HORSES. Per Petterson. St. Martin’s Press. $14. Our Price $11.20.
10 AFTER DARK. Haruki Murakami. Random House. $13.95. Our Price $11.16.
Paperback Nonfiction
- ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS. Alain de Botton. Random House. $16.95. Our Price $13.56.
- ANIMAL VEGETABLE MIRACLE. Barbara Kingsolver. HarperCollins. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA. Michael Pollen. Penguin. $16. Our Price $12.80.
- MILLION LITTLE PIECES. James Frey. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $12.76.
- DREAMS FROM MY FATHER. Barack Obama. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS. Ryszard Kapusciniski. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- LEGACY OF ASHES. Tim Weiner. Random House. $16.95. Our Price $13.56.
- HUDSON VALLEY & CATSKILL MOUNTAINS. Joanne Michaels. Countrymen Press. $19.95. Our Price $15.96.
- SHOCK DOCTRINE. Naomi Klein. St. Martin’s Press. $16. Our Price $12.80.
- BROOKLYN WAS MINE. Chris Knutsen (editor). Riverhead. $15. Our Price $12.
Children’s Hardcover & Paperback
- WALL E: All Systems Go Sticker Book. Disney. $6.99. Our Price $5.59.
- KNUFFLE BUNNY. Mo Willems. Hyperion. $15.99. Our Price $12.76.
- SUBWAY Board Book. Anastasia Suen. Penguin. $6.99. Our Price $5.59.
- WAVE. Suzie Lee. Chronicle. $15.99. Our Price $12.79.
- GALLOP. Rufus Seder. Workmen. $12.95. Our Price $10.36.
- DREAM GIRL. Lauren Mechling. Doubleday. $15.99. Our Price $12.76.
- MAX’S ABC. Rosemary Wells. Penguin. $6.99. Our Price $5.59.
- VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR Board Book. Eric Carle. Putnam. $10.99. Our Price $8.79.
- FANCY NANCY AT THE MUSEUM. Jane O’Connor. HarperCollins. $3.99. Our Price $3.19.
- GOODNIGHT MOON Board Book. Margaret Wise Brown. HarperCollins. $6.99. Our Price $5.59.
these just in … 22 July, 2008
Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
by Scott Mccloud
Paperback $24.95 Harper Paperbacks Graphic Novels
Long before manga took the American comics market by storm, Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, Making Comics) combined the best ideas from manga, alternative comics, and superheroes into Zot!—a frenetic and innovative exploration of comics’ potential that helped set the stage for McCloud’s later groundbreaking theoretical work.
Zachary T. Paleozogt lives in “the far-flung future of 1965,” a utopian Earth of world peace, robot butlers, and flying cars. Jenny Weaver lives in an imperfect world of disappointment and broken promises—the Earth we live in. Stepping across the portals to each other’s worlds, Zot and Jenny’s lives will never be the same again.
Now, for the first time since its original publication more than twenty years ago, every one of McCloud’s pages from the black and white series has been collected in this must-have commemorative edition for aficionados to treasure and new fans to discover.
Includes never-before-seen artwork and extensive commentary by Scott McCloud
Being and Time
by Martin Heidegger
Paperback $19.95 Harper Perennial Modern Classics Philosophy
“What is the meaning of being?” This is the central question of Martin Heidegger’s profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism—as well as existentialism and much of postmodern thought—Being and Time forever changed the intellectual map of the modern world. As Richard Rorty wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “You cannot read most of the important thinkers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account.”
This first paperback edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s definitive translation also features a new foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman.
History of Advertising
by Stephane Pincas & Marc Loiseau
Paperback $ 39.99 Taschen Design & Architecture
The history of western advertising is a long one, starting as early as the 1630s, when Frenchman Théophraste Renaudot placed the first advertising notes in La Gazette de France, or in 1786, when William Tayler began to offer his services as “Agent to the Country’s Printers, Booksellers, etc.,” but the first time that the term “advertising agency” was used dates back to 1842, when Volney B. Palmer created his agency in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Widely considered to represent the birth of modern advertising, this date marks the beginning of a creative industry that has transformed many commercial works into cultural icons.
Divided into sections by decades, this book explores the legendary campaigns and brands of advertising’s modern history, with specific anecdotes and comments on the importance of every campaign. You will find the picture of the camel that originated the Camel pack, the first Coca Cola ad, and even how artworks by masters such as Picasso and Magritte have been used in advertising.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Hardcover $28.00 - 10% Houghton Mifflin New HC Non-Fiction / Travelogue
Thirty years after his classic The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux revisits Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Siberia.
Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America unleashed on it the last time Theroux passed through. And no one is better able to capture the texture, sights, smells, and sounds of that changing landscape than Paul Theroux.
Theroux’s odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hung over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, traveling as the locals do—by stifling train, rattletrap bus, illicit taxi, and mud-caked foot—encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). And wherever he goes, from the European Union to the Pacific Rim and back, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.
A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions
by Stefan Jonsson
Hardcover $29.50 - 10% Columbia University Press New Hardcover Non-Fiction / History
Stefan Jonsson uses three monumental works of art to build a provocative history of popular revolt: Jacques-Louis David’s The Tennis Court Oath (1791), James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), and Alfredo Jaar’s They Loved It So Much, the Revolution (1989). Addressing, respectively, the French Revolution of 1789, Belgium’s proletarian messianism in the 1880s, and the worldwide rebellions and revolutions of 1968, these canonical images not only depict an alternative view of history but offer a new understanding of the relationship between art and politics and the revolutionary nature of true democracy.
Drawing on examples from literature, politics, philosophy, and other works of art, Jonsson carefully constructs his portrait, revealing surprising parallels between the political representation of “the people” in government and their aesthetic representation in painting. Both essentially “frame” the people, Jonsson argues, defining them as elites or masses, responsible citizens or angry mobs. Yet in the aesthetic fantasies of David, Ensor, and Jaar, Jonsson finds a different understanding of democracy-one in which human collectives break the frame and enter the picture.
Connecting the achievements and failures of past revolutions to current political issues, Jonsson then situates our present moment in a long historical drama of popular unrest, making his book both a cultural history and a contemporary discussion about the fate of democracy in our globalized world.
Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer
by Tim Stark
Hardcover $24.00 - 10% Broadway Books / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction
Situated beautifully at the intersection of Michael Pollan, Ruth Reichl, and Barbara Kingsolver, Heirloom is an inspiring, elegiac, and gorgeously written memoir about rediscovering an older and still vital way of life.
Fourteen years ago, Tim Stark was living in Brooklyn, working days as a management consultant, and writing unpublished short stories by night. One evening, chancing upon a Dumpster full of discarded lumber, he carried the lumber home and built a germination rack for thousands of heirloom tomato seedlings. His crop soon outgrew the brownstone in which it had sprouted, forcing him to cart the seedlings to his family’s farm in Pennsylvania, where they were transplanted into the ground by hand. When favorable weather brought in a bumper crop, Tim hauled his unusual tomatoes to New York City’s Union Square Greenmarket, at a time when the tomato was unanimously red. The rest is history. Today, Eckerton Hill Farm does a booming trade in heirloom tomatoes and obscure chile peppers. Tim’s tomatoes are featured on the menus of New York City’s most demanding chefs and have even made the cover of Gourmet magazine.
The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage
by Daniel Mark Epstein
Hardcover $28.00 - 10% Ballantine Books / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction / Biography
From Publishers Weekly:
Poet and biographer Epstein (Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington) never explains the rationale for this reliable but familiar account of the Lincolns’ frequently tempestuous marriage. If he had access to previously untapped sources, he does nothing to highlight them, and there’s little reason why this book should supersede either Jean H. Baker’s magisterial Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography or even Ruth Painter Randall’s respected Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage. What Epstein brings is a novelistic, almost lyrical touch, as in this passage, from Mary’s perspective, as her husband lay dying: Slowly the room grows larger with the light. The April days are long. Hold back the light. Let the day never dawn that looks upon his death. Well born, Mary was also highly strung, insecure, jealous and, like Abraham, prone to fits of depression. He suffered her rages silently, tolerated her profligate spending even when it became a political embarrassment and twice consoled her in the midst of his own grief upon the successive losses of two of their four sons. Sadly, in the end, their marriage seems to have been largely a pageant of tragedies: a black lily Epstein need not have attempted to gild.
The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
by Nicholas Dawidoff
Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Pantheon / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction / Sports
From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere–and how baseball helps him find his place in America.
The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy’s coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff’s mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff’s celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it’s like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy’s outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock ‘n’ roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball–the inner game as it has never been described before.
The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature.
In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities
by Dan Rattiner
Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Harmony / Random House New Hardcover Non-Fiction / Biography
Long before the Hamptons became famous for its posh parties, paparazzi, and glitterati, it was a sleepy backwater of fishing villages and potato farms, literary luminaries and local eccentrics. As the editor and publisher of the area’s popular free newspaper, Dan’s Papers, Dan Rattiner, has been covering the daily triumphs, community intrigues, and larger-than-life personalities for nearly fifty years.
A colorful insider’s account of life, love, scandal, and celebrity, In the Hamptons is an intimate portrait of a place and the people who formed and transformed it, from former residents like Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, colorful locals like bar owner Bobby Van and shark fisherman Frank Mundus (who the character Quinn from Jaws was based on), and literary figures like John Steinbeck and Truman Capote, to present-day stars like Bianca Jagger and Billy Joel.
An insider who lived there—as well as a Jewish outsider amid the WASP contingent—Rattiner both revels in and is rattled by all he witnesses and records in one of the world’s most famous places. With dry wit and genuine affection, he shares a story of the Hamptons that few know, one defined by the artists, painters, fishermen, farmers, dreamers, hangers-on, celebrities, and billionaires who live and play there.
Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean
by Douglas WolkPaperback $16.95 Da Capo Press Graphic Novels / Essays & Literary Criticism
From Publishers Weekly:
As the graphic novel flourishes and gains legitimacy as an art form, serious comics criticism is an inevitable byproduct, and PW contributing editor Wolk’s analytical discourse is a welcome starting point. The volume contains two sections: Theory and History, an explanation of comics as a medium and an overview of its evolution, and Reviews and Commentary, a diverse examination of creators and works. This section spans Will Eisner’s pioneering efforts as well as the groundbreaking modern comics by the Hernandez brothers, Chris Ware and Alison Bechdel. Since there are decades worth of books already focusing on the superhero genre, the raw clay from which the comics industry was built, the relatively short shrift given to the spandex oeuvre’s insular mythologies is a wise choice that allows the nonfan a glimpse into the wider range that comics commands. Wolk’s insightful observations offer much to ponder, perhaps more than can be fully addressed in one volume, but the thoughtful criticism and knowledgeable historical overview give much-needed context for the emerging medium.
Dream Girl
by Lauren Mechling
Hardcover $15.99 - 10% Delacorte Books for Young Readers / Random House New Hardcover Fiction / Middle Reader’s
Claire Voyante has been having strange visions ever since she can remember. But the similarity between her name and her talents is purely coincidental. The name is French, and unlike the psychics on TV, she can’t solve crimes or talk to the dead. Whenever Claire follows her hunches, she comes up empty—or ends up in pretty awkward situations.
But that all changes on Claire’s 15th birthday, when her grandmother, Kiki—former socialite, fashion icon, and permanent fixture at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel—gives her something a little more extraordinary than one of her old cocktail dresses: a strange black-and-white onyx cameo on a gold chain. It’s not long before Claire’s world becomes a whole lot clearer. And a whole lot more dangerous.
Ai Weiwei
by Karen Smith, Sue-an van der Zijpp, and Ai Weiwei
Paperback $30.00 NAi Publishers Art
Born in 1957, Beijing-based Ai Weiwei is perhaps the most internationally visible contemporary Chinese artist. Philip Tinari has described his practice as a, “multitasking sprawl–encompassing artmaking, curating, publishing and architectural design–[that] threatens to answer the vaguely unsettling question, What would Andy Warhol’s career have looked like if it had played out in turn-of-the-millennium China? (For one thing, architecture might have stood in for film; where Warhol created an alter-Hollywood, Ai is a self-invented starchitect).” After spending the early 1980s in New York, Ai moved back to Beijing in 1994. Already an important member of the Stars group, a socially critical movement that borrowed heavily from western art and culture, he established the famed China Art Archives and Warehouse in 1997. In 2000, on the occasion of the Shanghai Biennale, he organized the attention-grabbing group exhibition Fuck Off in collaboration with curator Feng Boyi. More recently, he was involved in the design of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing by Herzog & de Meuron. This publication takes an in-depth look at Ai’s under-explored engagement with ceramics, and is published on the occasion of a solo exhibition of his recent ceramic work at Holland’s Groningen Museum.
Architecture in the Netherlands
Edited by Daan Bakker, Allard Jolles, Michelle Provoost, and Cor Wagenaar
Paperback $60.00 NAi Publishers Architecture
Once again, Architecture in the Netherlands selects the most remarkable architectural projects realized on Dutch soil over the preceding year. With projects by Arons & Gelauf, Burobeb, Claus en Kaan, Dynamo Architecten, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and many others.
Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920
by Augustus Sherman
Paperback $24.95 Aperture Photography
Throughout his tenure as a registry clerk with the Immigration Division of Ellis Island, Augustus F. Sherman systematically photographed more than 200 families, groups, and individuals while they were being held by customs for special investigations. This volume collects and provides an essential revaluation of Sherman’s striking portraits, which predate August Sander’s cataloging efforts by several years. A historical document of unprecedented worth, Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits includes almost one-hundred portraits taken from 1904 through 1920. The subjects are frequently dressed in elaborate national costumes or folk dress, emphasizing the variety and richness of the cultural heritage that came together to form the United States. Romanian shepherds, German stowaways, Russian vegetarians, Greek priests, and Ghanaian women in elaborately patterned dresses, are treated with equal gravitas. The resulting body of work presents a unique and powerful picture of the stream of immigrants who came through Ellis Island.
In its time, the material contributed to the larger project of ethnographic categorization and typology typical of the early twentieth century, much as Edward S. Curtis’s portraits romanticized the “last Indians” or John Thomson’s “Street Life in London” identified and codified social class in the late 1800s. Though originally taken for his own personal study, Sherman’s work appeared in the public eye as illustrations for publications with titles such as “Alien or American,” and hung on the walls of the custom offices as cautionary or exemplary models of the new American species.
Bill Wood’s Business
by Bill Wood
Hardcover $75.00 - 10% Photography
Bill Wood’s business was photography—and he produced tens of thousands of images over the course of his career. From 1937 (the tail end of the Great Depression) through the boom years that followed World War II and until his death in 1973, the Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers with cameras, flash bulbs, accessories, and quality photo finishing.
The variety of subjects and situations he captured provide an in-depth photographic record of life in Fort Worth, Texas, a post-World War II American city just hitting its stride.
Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan is the first major U.S, presentation of contemporary photo-based artwork from Japan in over ten years. The exhibition will include both photographs and video, many of which are large and dramatic pieces.
Changing Roles
by Liam Gillick, Johanna Billing, Henning Bohl, Martin Boyce, Jason Dodge, Matias Faldbakken, Ryan Gander, Brian Jungen, Jesper Just, Germaine Kruip, Erik van Lieshout, Sarah Morris, Marcel Odenbach, Robin Rhode, and Margaret Salmon
Paperback $25.00 Witte de With Art
How are you involved in the art world? Are you related to any specific scene? What would be the most productive place to present your work? What kind of curators do you like to work with, and why? What does the art market mean for your work? These are some of the questions that have been presented to every artist who has worked with Witte de With, the respected Rotterdam contemporary art center, over the past two years. This publication reflects on the ideas behind the works that the center has shown, and allows artists to voice concerns that are rarely discussed as part of a public initiative. The participants’ answers serve as a model, suggesting what roles they need institutions, curators and programs to play. Contributors include Jesper Just, Erik van Lieshout, Sarah Morris and Robin Rhode.
Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections (Hardcover)
Edited by Goetz Adriani
Hardcover $45.00 - 10% Hatje Cantz Art
Curator Robert Storr has said of the iconic, inscrutable German painter Gerhard Richter, “He’s not playing hard to get, he’s doing something that is hard to get.'’ The difficulty arises from a Conceptualist oeuvre that style-jumps from Photorealism to large, abstract compositions. Martha Schwendener has summed up Richter’s contribution by stating, “Seeing Gerhard’s abstraction and Photorealism together, you realize that this dual body of work is the perfect expression of what it means to paint today–and what a contemporary master might be.” Whatever the style, Richter’s subject is always painting itself. Because it features more than 80 works from important private collections, including the artist’s own, this monograph provides a unique contextualization of the artist’s incredibly influential career, which, spanning more than 40 years, mirrors not only the history of postwar Germany, but also the medium of painting.
Hedi Slimane: Rock Diary
by Vince Aletti, Jon Savage, and Hedi Slimane
Paperback $95.00 JRP|RINGier Fashion
This beautifully designed three volume boxed set presents new photographic work by Hedi Slimane, the iconic fashion designer who, during tenures at Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, has infused men’s fashion with an androgynous, rock n’ roll swerve. The first volume is an album of Slimane’s photographs of the Lollapalooza-esque three-day Festival Internacional de Benicassim on the East coast of Spain, the second is devoted to images of the new British and American rock scenes and the third contains essays on Slimane’s work by art critic Vince Aletti and music critic Jon Savage. In a 2003 conversation with Interview’s Ingrid Sischy, Slimane discussed his beginnings as a photographer: “I started taking pictures before I even began in fashion. I didn’t start with clothes until I was 16, but I had my first camera when I was 11. I’ve always taken pictures, almost like some people take notes or write down their thoughts.” As this collection reveals, Slimane’s photographs of the international music scene are as fresh and intrinsic as his paradigm-shifting work in fashion.
Hardcover $29.95 - 10% Spertus Press Art
Imaginary Coordinates, published on the occasion of an exhibition originating at Chicago’s Spertus Museum, juxtaposes the museum’s extensive collection of antique Holy Land maps with contemporary artwork by Israeli and Palestinian women (including Ayreen Anastas, Yael Bartana, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Sigalit Landau, Enas Mutthafar, Michal Rovner and Shirley Shor) to explore issues of national identity, borders and the critical disparity between maps and lived experience. With their elaborate cartouches, fabulous sea animals and charming footsteps marking the people of Israel’s wanderings in the desert, the maps clearly do not correspond with the natural landscape; they are filled with human intention. Some maps speak not of landscape, but of the desires and intentions of mapmakers and their audiences. It is toward these emotions that Imaginary Coordinates turns.
Jasper Johns: Drawings: 1997-2007
Edited by Thomas Crow
Hardcover $60.00 - 10% Matthew Marks Gallery Art
Best Sellers … 21 July, 2008
BookCourt Best Sellers
July 21, 2008 20% off list price
Hardcover Fiction
- ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES. Rivka Galchen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. Our Price $19.20.
- NETHERLAND. Joseph O’Neil. Random House. $23.95. Our Price $19.16.
- UNACCUSTOMED EARTH. Jhumpa Lahiri. Random House. $25. Our Price $20.
- BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. Junot Diaz. Riverhead. $24.95. Our Price $19.96.
- SPIES OF WARSAW. Alan Furst. Random House. $25. Our Price $20.
- STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE. David Wroblewski. HarperCollins. $25.95. Our Price $20.76.
- SELECTED POEMS. Frank O’Hara. Random House. $30. Our Price $24.
- SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM. Uwem Akpan. Little, Brown. $23.99. Our Price $19.19.
- BOAT. Nam Le. Random House. $22.95. Our Price $24.
- MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU. Darin Strauss. Dutton. $24.95. Our Price $18.36.
Hardcover Nonfiction
- WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES. David Sedaris. Little, Brown. $25.99. Our Price $20.79.
- BROOKLYN MODERN. Diana Lind. Rizzoli. $45. Our Price $36.
- 101 THINGS I LEARNED IN ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL. Matthew Frederick. MIT Press. $12.95. Our Price $10.36.
- ART OF SIMPLE FOOD. Alice Waters. Random House. $35. Our Price $28.
- HERE IS NEW YORK. E.B. White. Little Bookroom. $16.95. Our Price $13.56.
- DARK SIDE. Jane Mayer. Doubleday. $27.50. Our Price $22.
- IN DEFENSE OF FOOD. Michael Pollen. Penguin. $21.95. Our Price $17.56.
- WHAT IT IS. Lynda Barry. Drawn & Quarterly. $24.95. Our Price $19.96.
- BROOKLYN STREET ART. Jamie Rojo. Prestel. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- DRUNKARD’S WALK. Leonard Mlodinow. Random House. $24.95. Our Price $19.96..
Paperback Fiction
- YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. Michael Chabon. HarperCollins. $15.95. Our Price $12.76.
- GREAT MAN. Kate Christensen. Random House. $14.95.Our Price $11.96.
- THE ROAD. Cormac McCarthy. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU. Miranda July. Simon & Schuster. $14. Our Price $11.20.
- ON CHESIL BEACH. Ian McEwan. Random House. $13.95. Our Price $11.16.
- OUT STEALING HORSES. Per Petterson. St. Martin’s Press. $14. Our Price $11.20.
- THE LEOPARD. Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. Jonathan Lethem. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- THEN WE CAME TO THE END. Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown. $13.99. Our Price $11.19.
10 WHAT IS THE WHAT. Dave Eggers. Random House. $14. Our Price $11.20.
Paperback Nonfiction
- HOW TO FIT A CAR SEAT ON A CAMEL. Sarah Franklin. Seal Press. $15.95. Our Price $12.76.
- ANIMAL VEGETABLE MIRACLE. Barbara Kingsolver. HarperCollins. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA. Michael Pollen. Penguin. $16. Our Price $12.80.
- EAT PRAY LOVE. Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin. $15. Our Price $12.
- TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- WHERE I LIVED & WHAT I LIVED FOR. Henry David Thoreau. Penguin (Great Ideas Series). $8.95. Our Price $7.16.
- ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS. Alain de Botton. Random House. $16.95. Our Price $13.56.
- FODOR’S WHERE TO WEEKEND AROUND NEW YORK CITY. Random House. $16.95. Our Price $13.56.
- KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. Anthony Bourdain. HarperCollins. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
- DREAMS FROM MY FATHER. Barack Obama. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $11.96.
Children’s Hardcover & Paperback
- WALL E: All Systems Go Sticker Book. Disney. $6.99. Our Price $5.59.
- SUBWAY Board Book. Anastasia Suen. Penguin. $6.99. Our Price $5.59.
- KNUFFLE BUNNY. Mo Willems. Hyperion. $15.95. Our Price $12.76.
- NEW MOON. Stephanie Meyer. Little, Brown. $10.99. Our Price $8.79.
- THIS IS NEW YORK. M. Sasek. Universe. $17.95. Our Price $14.36.
- VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR Board Book. Eric Carle. Putnam. $10.99. Our Price $8.79.
- GOODNIGHT MOON Board Book. Margaret Wise Brown. HarperCollins. $8.99. Our Price $7.19.
- GOOD NIGHT GORILLA Board Book. Peggy Rathman. Putnam. $7.99. Our Price $6.39.
- BATMAN. Ralph Cosentino. Penguin. $15.99. Our Price $12.79.
- MERMAIDS ON PARADE. Melanie Hope Greenberg. Putnam. $16.99. Our Price $13.59.
these just in … 18 July, 2008
The Dancer from Khiva: One Muslim Woman’s Quest for Freedom
by Bibish, translated by Andrew Bromfield
Paperback $14.00 Grove Press, Black Cat Memoir
In a narrative that flows like a late-night confession, Bibish recounts her story. Born to an impoverished family in a deeply religious village in Uzbekistan, Bibish was named “Hadjarbibi” in honor of her grandfather’s hadj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. But the holy name did not protect her from being gang-raped at the age of eight and left for dead in the desert. Bibish’s tenacity helped her survive, but in the coming years, that same tough-spiritedness caused her to be beaten, victimized, and ostracized from her family and community. Despite the seeming hopelessness of being a woman in such a cruelly patriarchal society, Bibish secretly cultivated her own dreams–of dancing, of raising a family, and of telling her story to the world.
The product of incredible resilience and spirit, The Dancer from Khiva is a harrowing, clear-eyed dispatch from a land where thousands of such stories have been silenced. It is a testament to Bibish’s fierce will and courage: the searing, fast-paced tale of a woman who risked everything.
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
Each of the 23 interviews in this exquisite collection-diplomatically arranged in interviewee alphabetical order-begins with a pithy introduction by the interviewer, noting something anecdotal of the subject’s life and work, suggesting thematic commitments that drew interviewer to interviewee and noting the location as well as the interview method employed, from “via the U.S. postal system-I would send him questions on separate pieces of paper, and he would type the answers and send them back,” to “The following conversation took place on an old Toshiba calculator.” The project’s formal structure ends there; what follows is a book in which writers chat uninhibited and present the “writing life” with deep, measured enthusiasm (”Here I am starting a new book,” says John Banville. “This is the absolute best stage of it… you might actually get it right this time”), self-deprecating absurdity (”Gaining in gravitas?” Adam Thirlwell asks Tom Stoppard on the subject of weight-gain), or unexpected poignancy (as when Jamaica Kincaid gushes “oh gosh” when asked about her aspirations). The volume is at its strongest when fledgling literati interrogate well-established literary giants-like Nell Freudenberger’s sisterly conversation with Grace Paley, or Dave Eggers’s respectfully warm tête-à-tête with Joan Didion-and when strong-voiced writers with distinctly different projects (Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, or ZZ Packer and Edward P. Jones) pair off to explore what drives their work.
Timeless Wisdom: Passages for Meditation from the World’s Saints and Sages
Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life
Father Knows Less: One Dad’s Quest to Answer His Son’s Most Baffling Questions
The Bottom of the Harbor
All of the pieces here are connected in one way or another–some directly, some with a kind of mysterious circuitousness–to New York’s fabled waterfront, the terrain that Mitchell brilliantly made his own. They tell of a life that has passed–of vacant hotel rooms, deserted communities, once-thriving fishing areas that are now polluted and studded with wrecks. Included are “Up in the Old Hotel,” a portrait of Louis Morino, the proprietor of a restaurant called (to his disgust) Sloppy Louie’s; “The Rats on the Waterfront,” which has inspired countless writers to attempt portraits of these most demonized New Yorkers; and “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” widely considered to be the finest single piece of nonfiction to have ever appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.
Here is the essential work of a legendary writer.
these just in … 16 July, 2008
Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters, 1891-1910
by Giovanna Ginex, Vivien Greene, & Aurora Scotti Tosini
Hardcover $65.00 - 10% National Gallery London Art
This book features many first-generation Divisionists, including Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Giovanni Segantini, and Gaetano Previati, together with Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and others who later launched the Futurist movement, yet were profoundly influenced by Divisionism.
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
by Maurice Isserman & Stewart Weaver
Hardcover $39.95 - 10% Yale University Press Sports
The first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa teammate Tenzing Norgay is a familiar saga, but less well known are the tales of many other adventurers who also came to test their skills and courage against the world’s highest and most dangerous mountains. In this lively and generously illustrated book, historians Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver present the first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering in fifty years. They offer detailed, original accounts of the most significant climbs since the 1890s, and they compellingly evoke the social and cultural worlds that gave rise to those expeditions.
The book recounts the adventures of such figures as Martin Conway, who led the first authentic Himalayan climbing expedition in 1892; Fanny Bullock Workman, the pioneer explorer of the Karakoram range; George Mallory, the romantic martyr of Mount Everest fame; Charlie Houston, who led American expeditions to K2 in the 1930s and 1950s; Ang Tharkay, the legendary Sherpa, and many others. Throughout, the authors discuss the effects of political and social change on the world of mountaineering, and they offer a penetrating analysis of a culture that once emphasized teamwork and fellowship among climbers, but now has been eclipsed by a scramble for individual fame and glory.
Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology
by Michel Foucault, edited by Roberto Nigro, introduction by Dominique Séglard & Sylvère Lotringer, translated by Kate Briggs
Paperback $14.95 Semiotext(e) Philosophy
This introduction and commentary to Kant’s least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now.
In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology and anthropology, and how they are affected by time. Through a Kantian “critique of the anthropological slumber,” Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant’s suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence.
This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant’s work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault’s own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault’s relation to Kant as well as Foucault’s relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things.
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years
by Vaclav SmilHardcover $29.95 - 10% The MIT Press Science
Fundamental change occurs most often in one of two ways: as a “fatal discontinuity,” a sudden catastrophic event that is potentially world changing, or as a persistent, gradual trend. Global catastrophes include volcanic eruptions, viral pandemics, wars, and large-scale terrorist attacks; trends are demographic, environmental, economic, and political shifts that unfold over time. In this provocative book, scientist Vaclav Smil takes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at the catastrophes and trends the next fifty years may bring. This is not a book of forecasts or scenarios but one that reminds us to pay attention to, and plan for, the consequences of apparently unpredictable events and the ultimate direction of long-term trends.
Smil first looks at rare but cataclysmic events, both natural and human-produced, then at trends of global importance: the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources; demographic and political shifts in Europe, Japan, Russia, China, the United States, and Islamic nations; the battle for global primacy; and growing economic and social inequality. He also considers environmental change–in some ways an amalgam of sudden discontinuities and gradual change–and assesses the often misunderstood complexities of global warming.
Global Catastrophes and Trends does not come down on the side of either doom-and-gloom scenarios or techno-euphoria. Instead, relying on long-term historical perspectives and a distaste for the rigid compartmentalization of knowledge, Smil argues that understanding change will help us reverse negative trends and minimize the risk of catastrophe.
these just in … 14 July, 2008
Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
by Chris Anderson
Paperback $15.95 Hyperion Non Fiction
In the most important business book since The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson shows how the future of commerce and culture isn’t in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses–the endlessly long tail of that same curve.
“It belongs on the shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics.”
–Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix
“Anderson’s insights . . . continue to influence Google’s strategic thinking in a profound way.”
–Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
“Anyone who cares about media . . . must read this book.”
–Rob Glaser, CEO, RealNetworks
Nat Turner
by Kyle Baker
Paperback $12.95 Abrams Graphic Novel
The story of Nat Turner and his slave rebellion—which began on August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia—is known among school children and adults. To some he is a hero, a symbol of Black resistance and a precursor to the civil rights movement; to others he is monster—a murderer whose name is never uttered.
In Nat Turner, acclaimed author and illustrator Kyle Baker depicts the evils of slavery in this moving and historically accurate story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Told nearly wordlessly, every image resonates with the reader as the brutal story unfolds.
This graphic novel collects all four issues of Kyle Baker’s critically acclaimed miniseries together for the first time in hardcover and paperback. The book also includes a new afterword by Baker.
“A hauntingly beautiful historical spotlight. A-” —Entertainment Weekly
“Baker’s storytelling is magnificent.” —Variety
“Intricately expressive faces and trenchant dramatic pacing evoke the diabolic slave trade’s real horrors.” —The Washington Post
“Baker’s drawings are worthy of a critic’s attention.”—Los Angeles Times
“Baker’s suspenseful and violent work documents the slave trade’s atrocities as no textbook can, with an emotional power approaching that of Maus.”—Library Journal, starred review
The Collected Stories
by Leonard Michaels
Paperback $15.00 Farrar, Straus and Giroux Fiction
From Publishers Weekly:
Though Michaels, who died in 2003 at the age of 70, is probably best known for his novel The Men’s Club (1981), these 38 stories attest to his skill as a short story writer. Readers coming to Michaels’s work for the first time will find the early, pointed stories from his noteworthy collections, Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could as well as some of his later works that have never been collected. Michaels’s early stories are written with a frantic sexuality that displays his distinctive dark humor. In “Fingers and Toes,” recurring characters Henry and Phillip weigh the value of their friendship against their encounters with the same woman through a set of urban hallucinations characteristic of the early stories. Raphael Nachman, the icon of Michaels’s later fiction, is an aging mathematician at UCLA and a surprising foil to Michaels’s usual kinetic energy. In the first Nachman story, the professor takes a guest lectureship in his ancestral Poland and tries to reconcile his analytical yet peaceful view of the world with his family’s history. Fans of the author should be thrilled at having such a wide body of work between two covers.
The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
by Joyce Carol Oates
Paperback $14.00 Harvest Books Fiction
From Publishers Weekly:
The words gothic and macabre rather than mystery and suspense might better describe the 10 beautifully told stories in this superb collection from the prolific Oates (The Female of the Species). In the startling opening tale, Hi! Howya Doin!, an overly friendly jogger encounters someone with a less rosy outlook on life. In the horrifying Valentine, July Heat Wave, an estranged wife finds a very unpleasant surprise in the home she once shared with her academic husband. In the haunting Feral, a near-death experience transforms a much-loved only child into something wild and unknowable. The title story concerns a horrific exhibit in the home of an aging coroner in upstate New York (whose behavior is even more troubling). The book’s best story, The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza, about an aging boxer in a bout that will make or end his career, happens to be the least gruesome. Powerful narratives, a singular imagination and exquisite prose make this a collection to relish.
Brida: A Novel
by Paulo Coelho
Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Harper Collins Fiction
This is the story of Brida, a young Irish girl, and her quest for knowledge. She has long been interested in various aspects of magic but is searching for something more. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom, who begin to teach Brida about the spiritual world. She meets a wise man who dwells in a forest, who teaches her about overcoming her fears and trusting in the goodness of the world; and a woman who teaches her how to dance to the music of the world, and how to pray to the moon. As Brida seeks her destiny, she struggles to find a balance between her relationships and her desire to become a witch. This enthralling novel incorporates themes that fans of Paulo Coelho will recognize and treasure—it is a tale of love, passion, mystery, and spirituality from the master storyteller.
Cost: A Novel
by Roxana Robinson
Hardcover $25.00 - 10% Farrar, Straus and Giroux Fiction
From Publishers Weekly:
Julia Lambert is a New York art professor spending the summer in Maine with her elderly father, a domineering neurosurgeon, and mother, a gentle soul succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Julia’s oldest son, Steven, joins the clan as tragic news surfaces: her second son, Jack, is addicted to heroin. Ex-husband Wendell, Julia’s distant sister Harriet and Jack himself soon arrive, and intervention is on the agenda. Jack refuses to go quietly, and Robinson, who has worked in multiple genres (including penning a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe), engulfs the clan in a sea of resentment and repressed hostility, spiked with the intermittent need to feel close. Her unrelenting look at the deep physical and mental distress involved in heroin abuse is not for the faint of heart, with key portions of the drama unfolding through descriptions of Jack’s perpetually itching skin, twitching muscles, heaving stomach, needle-tracked arms and addled brain. While the omniscient narration sometimes loses focus, Robinson offers adept closeups of family trauma.
Requiem, Mass.: A Novel
by John Dufresne
Hardcover $24.95 - 10% W. W. Norton Fiction
John Dufresne takes us to Requiem, Mass., heart of the Commonwealth, where Johnny’s mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again. She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she’s sure of it, and she’s pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn’t need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean Naté Après Bain. Dad, truck driver and pathological liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life. And Audrey, when she’s not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet telling herself stories. Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself.
In his “truly original voice” (Miami Herald) and with the “miraculous beauty of his tale-telling” (New York Times Book Review), Dufresne brings his unparalleled eye for the tragic and the absurd to the dysfunctions and joys of family in this powerful new novel.
Real World
by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Philip Gabriel
Hardcover $23.95 - 10% Knopf Fiction
A stunning new work of the feminist noir that Natsuo Kirino defined and made her own in her novels Out and Grotesque.
In a crowded residential suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls indifferently wade their way through a hot, smoggy summer and endless “cram school” sessions meant to ensure entry into good colleges. There’s Toshi, the dependable one; Terauchi, the great student; Yuzan, the sad one, grieving over the death of her mother—and trying to hide her sexual orientation from her friends; and Kirarin, the sweet one, whose late nights and reckless behavior remain a secret from those around her. When Toshi’s next-door neighbor is found brutally murdered, the girls suspect the killer is the neighbor’s son, a high school boy they nickname Worm. But when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers—dangers they never could have even imagined—that rises from within them as well as from the world around them.
Psychologically intricate and astute, dark and unflinching, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.
Missy: A Novel
by Chris Hannan
Hardcover $24.00 Farrar, Straus and Giroux Fiction
From Publishers Weekly:
This wildly entertaining first novel from Scottish playwright Hannan takes place in the down and dirty Wild West and features one of the most bombastic, fantastic heroines in recent memory. Nineteen-year-old Dol McQueen is an intelligent, strong-willed hooker with a weakness for liquid opium, or “missy.” “Sometimes when I’m gonged,” says Dol, “I have an immense feeling inside me that I can govern Chaos.” And chaos is just what she gets when a crate of choice opium lands under her bed, stashed there by a grisly pimp called Pontius who warns her to keep quiet. Dol carries on with her business and gets increasingly attached to that fortune beneath her bed. The real pandemonium is unleashed when a spooky, brutal gang enlisted by the rightful owners of the opium arrives in town bringing mayhem. Dol-along with her mother, Pontius and the opium-flees into the desert, the escape slowed by lack of water, mule-pinching Indians and Dol’s withdrawal from her missy, an experience that leaves her clearheaded but vulnerable to the truth about what she has become. Hannan nails the setting, crafts a sizzling plot and, with Dol, gives readers a lovable, larger-than-life star.
Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life
by Neil Steinberg
Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Dutton Memoir
Neil Steinberg loves his wife. He loves his two young sons. He loves his job and his ramshackle old farmhouse in the suburbs. But he also loves to drink, a passion that rolls merrily along for twenty-five years until one terrible night when his two worlds collide and shatter.
Drunkard is the story of one man’s fall down the rabbit hole of alcoholism, and his slow crawl back out. Sentenced to an outpatient rehab program, Steinberg discovers that twenty-eight days of therapy cannot reverse the toll decades of vigorous drinking take on one’s soul. In clear, distinctive, honest, and funny prose, Steinberg comes to grips with his actions, rebuilds his marriage, and reclaims his life.
Unlike outlandish tales of addiction’s extremes, Steinberg’s story is a regular person’s account of the stark-yet-common realities of a problem faced by millions around the world. Drunkard is an important addition to the pantheon of critically acclaimed, bestselling memoirs such as The Tender Bar, Drinking: A Love Story, and Smashed.
Tuna: A Love Story
by Richard Ellis
Hardcover $24.95 - 10% Knopf Nature
Know Your Tuna
- Tuna is the most popular food fish in the world. It is eaten raw, cooked, in sandwiches, in salads, and in catfood.
- The total worldwide tuna harvest is four million tons.
- In the past, tuna fishermen in the eastern tropical Pacific set their nets around dolphins, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of dolphins.
- There are many kinds of tuna, but the most popular for the Japanese sashimi market is the bluefin, one of the largest of all fishes.
- The largest bluefin tuna ever caught weighed 1,496 pounds.
- The most expensive bluefin tuna was a 440-pounder that sold at the Tsukiji fishmarket in Tokyo for $173,600.
- Almost all of the bluefin tuna caught by commercial fishermen goes to Japan.
- The Japanese import 800,000 tons of tuna every year. (That’s right: eight hundred thousand tons.)
- At the Tsukiji fishmarket in Tokyo, an estimated 1,000 bluefin tunas are auctioned off every day.
- Is there mercury in tuna? Yes. Is it at levels dangerous to humans? Not unless you eat tuna three meals a day.
- Many scientists consider the tuna the most highly-evolved fish in the world.
- Bluefin tunas, along with mako and great white sharks, are the only “warm-blooded” fishes; they can elevate their body temperature as much as 25 degrees above the water they swim in. This makes them particularly effective as predators.
- Bluefin tuna can swim 55 miles an hour. They can migrate across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, then turn around and do it again.
- MIT scientists built a robot tuna in an attempt to replicate the incredibly efficient swimming performance of the living fish. They failed.
- The bluefin tuna, and to a lesser extent, the yellowfin, are among the most sought-after of big-game fishes. Celebrated anglers like Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, and Phillip Wylie wrote ecstatically about their pursuit of giant tuna.
- Aquaculture (”fish farming”) now accounts for 40% of the world’s fish consumption.
- Tuna ranching now takes place in every country on and in the Mediterranean, and in Australia and Mexico as well. It is scheduled to begin in Hawaii and Alaska.
- Because of commercial overfishing, almost exclusively to feed the insatiable Japanese sashimi market, all populations of bluefin tuna are endangered.
- Overfishing in the Mediterranean has caused such a drop in the bluefin tuna population that the World Wildlife Fund has call