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.
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