• Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño  / Fiction PB – $13.95

From Publishers Weekly:
The title chosen by Bolaño (1953–2003) for this slim, fake encyclopedia is not wholly tongue-in-cheek: given the very real presence of former (and not-so-former) Nazis in Latin America following WWII, this book, despite being fiction, still had j’accuse-like power when first published in 1996. The poets described herein, though invented, seem—even at their most absurd—plausible, which is the secret to this sly book’s devastating effect. And as one proceeds from an entry on Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce (In high spirits, Edelmira asked for the Führer’s advice: which would be the most appropriate school for her sons?) to one on Carlos Ramírez Hoffman (His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several questions posed by a mute), it becomes clear that there is a single witness to all of these terrible figures, one who has spent time in one of Pinochet’s prisons and is bent on coolly totting up the crimes of fascism’s literary perpetrators. Some readers will recognize figures and episodes from Bolaño’s other books (including The Savage Detectives and Distant Star). The wild inventiveness of Bolaño’s evocations places them squarely in the realm of Borges—another writer who draws enormous power from the movement between the fictive and the real.

• The Winter Vault
  

  by Anne Michaels / Fiction HC – $25.00 – 10%

From Publishers Weekly:
Profound loss, desolation and rebuilding are the literal and metaphoric themes of Michaels’s exquisite second novel (after Fugitive Pieces). Avery Escher is a Canadian engineer recently moved to a houseboat on the Nile with his new wife, Jean, in 1964. Avery’s part of a team of engineers trying to salvage Abu Simbel, which is about to be flooded by the new Aswan dam. His wife, Jean, meanwhile, carries with her childhood memories of flooded villages and the heavy absence of her mother, who died when she was young. Now, the sight of the entire Nubian nation being evacuated from their native land before it’s flooded affects both Avery and Jean intensely. Jean’s pregnancy seems a possible redemption, but their daughter is stillborn, and Jean falls into despair, shunning the former intimacy of her marriage. When the couple returns to Canada, they set up separate lives and another man enters the picture. Michaels is especially impressive at making a rundown of construction materials or the contents of a market as evocative as the shared moments between two young lovers. A tender love story set against an intriguing bit of history is handled with uncommon skill.

• Dear Husband,: Stories
  

  by Joyce Carol Oates / Fiction HC – $24.99- 10%

From Publishers Weekly:
The family ties that bind (and choke) are the overarching theme of Oates’s grim but incisive collection. The title story takes the form of a rambling letter from an Andrea Yates–like mother after her infanticide is completed, detailing her belief that God has instructed her to drown her five little children who have not turned out right. A Princeton Idyll gives us a series of letters between a chipper children’s author, granddaughter of a famous physicist, now deceased, and his sometimes sentimental, sometimes-bitter former maid; the result, in true Oatesian fashion, is dark family secrets and a good deal of denial. In Vigilante a son, struggling with his recovery from substance abuse, helps his unknowing mom by exacting revenge on his estranged dad. Special is told from the perspective of an elementary-school girl who moves toward desperate action watching her autistic older sister strain her parents’ marriage and, worse, garner all their attention. Throughout the collection, Oates seamlessly enters the minds of disparate characters to find both the exalted and depraved aspects of real American families.

• Shadow and Light: A Novel
  

  by Jonathan Rabb – Fiction HC – $26.00 – 10%

From Publishers Weekly:
Starred Review. Set in 1927 Germany, Rabb’s superb sequel to Rosa correlates the advent of talking movies with the rise of Nazism. When Kriminal-Oberkommisar Nikolai Hoffner investigates the apparent suicide of an Ufa film studio executive, the trail leads the Berlin policeman to the sex and drug trade as well as to the National Socialist German Workers Party’s local leader, Joseph Goebbels. Working with Helen Coyle, an attractive American talent agent for MGM, Hoffner learns how cutthroat the picture business is. Rumors of films with sound threaten to change the industry. Without sound, all you have is shadow and light, an inventor tells Hoffner. With sound, movies can do a lot more than entertain, as soon to be shown by Nazi propaganda films and newsreels. Rabb’s meticulous research brings to life a corrupt society vulnerable to extremism. Well-conceived cameos by director Fritz Lang and actor Peter Lorre add to the intrigue.

• Enclave
  

  by Kit Reed / Fiction HC – $25.95 – 10%

From Publishers Weekly:

In this gripping dystopian satire, ex-marine Sargent Whitmore has a plan to make millions while protecting children from the self-destructing modern world. He turns an old Mediterranean monastery into a combined impenetrable fortress and school, and enrolls 100 filthy-rich children, most of them already well-known for legal troubles, drug problems and paparazzi run-ins. Once there, everyone is cut off from the outside world, fed only canned news stories about wars and natural disasters. When things inevitably go horribly wrong, young hacker “Killer” Stade, physician assistant Cassie, drug and sex-crazed Sylvie and monastery-raised orphan Benny all attempt heroics, but remain deeply flawed. Reed (The Baby Merchant) displays unflinching willingness to explore all the facets of all of the characters, and her refusal to paint anyone as a simple villain makes this far more than a typical disaster novel.

• All the Living: A Novel
  

  by C. E. Morgan / Fiction HC – $23.00 – 10%

From Publishers Weekly:
Morgan’s enchanting debut follows the travails of a young woman who moves to Kentucky with her bereaved lover in 1984. Aloma, herself an orphan from a young age, leaves her job at the mission school where she was raised to help her taciturn boyfriend, Orren, with his family farm after his family is killed in a car accident. Once at the farm, he retreats into himself and working the land, leaving Aloma to wrestle with her desire to pursue her dream of being a concert pianist. As her relationship with Orren becomes more collision than cohabitation, Aloma finds in a local preacher a deep friendship that complicates her feelings for Orren, who drags his feet on marrying her. Young Aloma’s growing understanding of love and devotion in the midst of deep despair is delicately and persuasively rendered through the lens of belief—be it in religion, relationships or music. Morgan’s prose holds the rhythm of the local dialect beautifully, evoking the land, the farming lifestyle and Aloma’s awakening with stirring clarity.

• How It Ended: New and Collected Stories
  

  by Jay McInerney / Fiction HC – $25.95 – 10%

From Booklist:
McInerney’s name is most associated with his splashy first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1985), which helped define contemporary urban-chic fiction. Other novels followed, and it may come as a surprise to readers of such trendy fiction as McInerney’s that he is a splendid short-story writer. He writes about the same people and places as in his novels; on the other hand, he certainly understands the special qualities of the short story, saying in the preface to this career-spanning collection of 26 stories that “a good one requires perfect pitch and a precise sense of form; it has to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.” His stories are reminiscent of those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and Irwin Shaw (in fact, a line from McInerney’s “Smoke” refers to women “in their summer dresses,” and one of Shaw’s most famous stories is entitled “Girls in Their Summer Dresses”). McInerney shares with these predecessors a focus on the appurtenances of his characters: that is, the personal accessories that give away the characters’ social status and intentions (but McInerney contemporizes his stories by detailing what drugs his characters take). A New York slant colors every story, even those not actually set there (as in “The Business,” in which a New York writer transplants himself to L.A. to write screenplays). Another outstanding story is “The Queen and I,” a brief, beautiful instance of self-recognition in the streets of Manhattan’s meatpacking district (“Poised on high heels, undulant with the exaggerated shimmy of courtship, a race of lanky stylized bipeds commands the street corners”). A very compelling collection.

• Bridge of Sand
  

  by Janet Burroway / Fiction HC – $25.00 – 10%

From Booklist:
By strange chance, her Pennsylvania senator husband’s funeral takes place on 9/11 within site of the smoking wreckage of United 93. As the country goes into shock, Dana, 38, sheds her high-profile, low-satisfaction life, takes to the highway, and returns to a small Georgia town where she lived briefly as a teenager and harbored a crush on an African American co-worker. She and Cassius now fall wildly in love, but malevolent forces drive them apart. Fleeing to Florida’s Gulf Coast, Dana soon finds herself tangled up in a web of shameful secrets, schemes, and betrayals. Burroway, known best for her popular creative-writng guides, revels in the beauty and dangers of hurricane country, where racial, class, and sexual conflicts surge and boil. With a possum in the kitchen, a snake in a piano, and a trailer-swallowing sinkhole, Dana, a brilliantly drawn character of conviction and adaptability, forges a surprising new identity. Suspense mingles with insight in this sensuous novel as Burroway reminds us that we can’t extract ourselves from the wider world, that everything is always in flux, and that to survive, one must hold on to kindness, fairness, and love.

2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners and Nominated Finalists

Fiction – Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

Drama – Ruined by Lynn Nottage

History – The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)

Biography – American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)

Poetry – The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)

General Nonfiction – Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)

He wanted to burn “Lolita” too. Vladimir Nabokov instructed that his final unfinished manuscript be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, decided last year to defy his father’s wishes and publish it instead.

Penguin Classics will release “The Original of Laura” simultaneously in the United States and Britain on Nov. 3, BBC News reported. Vladimir Nabokov wrote the work on 138 index cards, which have been stored for the past 30 years in a bank vault in Switzerland, where Nabokov died in 1977. Each of the cards will be reproduced with a transcript of the text on the facing page. Alexis Kirschbaum, an editor at Penguin Classics, said, “It was quite emotional for Dimitri because it was a big decision to publish, which took him decades.”

In 2010 Penguin plans to release a collection of Nabokov’s poems that have not previously appeared in English.

–ny times / julie bloom

The novelist JG Ballard, who conjured up a bleak vision of modern life in a series of powerful novels and short stories published over more than 50 years, died today after a long battle with cancer.

His agent, Margaret Hanbury, said tonight that it was “with great sadness” that the 78-year-old author passed away yesterday morning after years of ill health.

Hanbury, who worked with Ballard for more than 25 years, said he was a “brilliant, powerful” novelist. “JG Ballard has been a giant on the world literary scene for more than 50 years. Following his early novels of the 60s and 70s, his work then reached a wider audience with the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984 which won several prizes and was made in to a film by Steven Spielberg.

“His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels which have been published all over the world and saw Ballard gain cult status.”

Inspired by the popular science fiction magazines he came across while stationed in Canada with the RAF, Ballard began publishing short stories evoking fractured landscapes full of wrecked machinery, deserted beaches and desolate buildings.

Novels of disaster and experimentation, including 1962’s The Drowned World and 1973’s Crash, later made into a film by David Cronenberg, garnered him a growing reputation as an anti-establishment avant garde writer. Crash, in which a couple become sexually aroused through car crashes, was written as a motorway extension was being built past the end of his street in Shepperton, west London.

In 1984, Ballard reached a new level of public recognition with Empire of the Sun, a straightforwardly realist novelisation of his detention as a teenager in a Japanese camp for civilians in Shanghai.

It had taken him 40 years to prepare himself to tackle this formative period of his life – “20 years to forget, and then 20 years to remember,” as he later put it. The novel follows a young English boy who, like many of Ballard’s narrators, shares the author’s name, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Separated from his parents, Jim at first survives on abandoned packets of food in the deserted mansions of the international settlement, before being picked up by the Japanese and interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, where he relishes his unaccustomed freedom amid hunger, disease and death.

Ballard said of his childhood: “I have – I won’t say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!”

Born in Shanghai in 1930, Ballard came to England with his parents after the war, where he became a boarder at the Leys school in Cambridge; stepping, as he put it, “out of one institution, into another.” After studying medicine at Cambridge, which he dismissed as an “academic theme park”, he studied English at the University of London, before taking on a succession of jobs and writing short fiction in his spare time.

His first published story, a tale of singing plants called Prima Belladonna, appeared in the magazine Science Fantasy in 1956, the same year as an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery which marked the birth of pop art. In this and the work of the surrealists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux he found the inspiration for what he later called a “fiction for the present day”.

The young science fiction author “wasn’t interested in the far future, spaceships and all that”, he explained; rather he was interested in “the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here”.

The sudden death of his wife, Mary, while on holiday in 1964 left him to bring up three children single-handedly, but the domesticity of his life in Shepperton let Ballard’s imagination break free, with his work moving towards an unsettling experimental realism which pushed at the boundaries of 1960s Britain.

His later work continued to subject modern life to its own extremes, with a sinister corporate dystopia in 2000’s Super Cannes, a middle-class revolution in 2003’s Millennium People and a descent into consumerist fascism in 2006’s Kingdom Come. But the label of science fiction writer still stuck, much to Ballard’s irritation, partly as a way of “defusing the threat”. “By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don’t think about what it is,” he explained.

He kept the literary world at arm’s length, and refused a CBE in 2003, pouring scorn on the honours system as a “Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy”.

He is survived by his partner Claire Walsh and three children, James, Fay and Beatrice.

SOME PHOTOS:

–guardian.co.uk

hey,

currently working on some site improvements.

we have carried out an upgrade on our site so it looks better and functions nicer.

still working on getting our events page back up and running, so please stay tuned. should be up and running by the end of the day.

… also planning on having a functioning Broadcasts page by the end of the week. we will be posting videos of events there.

… also, L.J. Davis & Jonathan Lethem will be with us tonight beginning at 7PM. A MEANINGFUL LIFE is the book! (NY Times Blog Post) (NY Times Review). We hope to see you tonight!

love,

Z