Edith Wharton
by Hermione Lee
Paperback $18.95
The definitive biography of one of America’s greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf.
Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction.
Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton’s life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here.
With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her far to be more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
You Don’t Love Me Yet
by Jonathan Lethem
Paperback $13.95
From the incomparable Jonathan Lethem, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art.
Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. Most of the time, the work is excruciatingly tedious. But one frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminations and opaque self-reflections. In blatant defiance of the rules, Lucinda and the Complainer arrange a face-to-face meeting — and fall desperately in love.
Consumed by passion, Lucinda manages only to tear herself away from the Complainer to practice with the alternative band in which she plays bass. The lead singer of the band is Matthew, a confused young man who works at the zoo and has kidnapped a kangaroo to save it from ennui. Denise, the drummer, works at No Shame, a masturbation boutique. The band’s talented lyricist, Bedwin, conflicted about the group’s as-yet-nonexistent fame, is suffering from writer’s block. Hoping to recharge the band’s creative energy, Lucinda “suggests” some of the Complainer’s philosophical musings to Bedwin. When Bedwin transforms them into brilliant songs, the band gets its big break, including an invitation to appear on L.A.’s premiere alternative radio show. The only problem is the Complainer. He insists on joining the band, with disastrous consequences for all.
Brimming with satire and sex, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a funny and affectionate send-up of the alternative band scene, the city of Los Angeles, and the entire genre of romantic comedy, but remains unmistakably the work of the inimitable Jonathan Lethem.
Still Life with Husband
by Lauren Fox
Paperback $13.95
Meet Emily Ross, thirty years old, a freelance writer, and personal advocate for cake at breakfast time. With ringlets of shoulder-length hair prone to frizz and pretty brown eyes, Emily has been described in the following ways: “dramatic-looking,†“striking,†“interesting,†and once, “Venezuelan.†(She is not.)
Meet Emily’s husband, Kevin, a sweet technical writer with a passion for small appliances. Kevin once cried during Little Women, is secretly afraid of raisins because they look like mouse droppings, and is slowly driving Emily completely insane with his daily pleas for procreation.
Enter David, a sexy young reporter for the local alternative newspaper. With his longish floppy hair and rough unshaven cheeks, David smells like air and wind, and Emily kind of wants to lick him.
In this generous, heartfelt, and often hilarious novel of marriage and friendship, Lauren Fox explores the baffling human heart and the dangers of getting what you wish for.
Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays
by William Styron
Hardcover $23.00 - 10%
After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.
Styron’s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction–racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust–but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects.
These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters.
Playing With the Grown-ups: A Novel
by Sophie Dahl
Hardcover $24.00 - 10%
To Kitty, growing up at Hay House, surrounded by doting relations, is heaven. But for Marina, Kitty’s silver-eyed mother, younger and more beautiful than other mothers, it is simply boredom. Though a string of suitors keeps the phone ringing all day long, she craves novelty, excitement, parties.
Swami-ji, Marina’s guru, sees her future in New York and so the family is scooped up and relocated, leaving Kitty exiled in boarding school hell. Reprieve comes in the form of the guru’s summons to the ashram, but then, just as Kitty is approaching enlightenment, they are off again, leaving everything behind to come back to London. And this time, no man, drug or cocktail can staunch Marina’s hunger for a happiness that proves all too elusive. And Kitty, turning fourteen, must choose: whether to play dangerous games with the grown ups or to finally put herself first.
The Architecture of Happiness
by Alain De Botton
Paperback $16.95
From Publishers Weekly
With this entertaining and stimulating book, de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life) examines the ways architecture speaks to us, evoking associations that, if we are alive to them, can put us in touch with our true selves and influence how we conduct our lives. Because of this, he contends, it’s the architect’s task to design buildings that contribute to happiness by embodying ennobling values. While he makes no claim to be able to define true beauty in architecture, he suggests some of the virtues a building should have (illustrated by pictures on almost every spread): order combined with complexity; balance between contrasting elements; elegance that appears effortless; a coherent relationship among the parts; and self-knowledge, which entails an understanding of human psychology, something that architects all too often overlook. To underscore his argument, de Botton includes many apt examples of buildings that either incorporate or ignore these qualities, discussing them in ways that make obvious their virtues or failings. The strength of his book is that it encourages us to open our eyes and really look at the buildings in which we live and work.
The Sorrows of an American: A Novel
by Siri Hustvedt
Hardcover $25.00 - 10%
From Publishers Weekly
In her fourth novel (following the acclaimed What I Loved), Hustvedt continues, with grace and aplomb, her exploration of family connectedness, loss, grief and art. Narrator and New York psychoanalyst Erik Davidsen returns to his Minnesota hometown to sort through his recently deceased father Lars’s papers. Erik’s writer sister, Inga, soon discovers a letter from someone named Lisa that hints at a death that their father was involved in. Over the course of the book, the siblings track down people who might be able to provide information on the letter writer’s identity. The two also contend with other looming ghosts. Erik immerses himself in the text of his father’s diary as he develops an infatuation with Miranda, a Jamaican artist who lives downstairs with her daughter. Meanwhile, Inga, herself recently widowed, is reeling from potentially damaging secrets being revealed about the personal life of her dead husband, a well-known novelist and screenplay writer. Hustvedt gives great breaths of authenticity to Erik’s counseling practice, life in Minnesota and Miranda’s Jamaican heritage, and the anticlimax she creates is calming and justified; there’s a terrific real-world twist revealed in the acknowledgments.
Metro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light
by Gregor Dallas
Hardcover $24.99 - 10%
Métro Stop Paris recounts the extraordinary and colorful history of the City of Light, by way of twelve Métro stops—a voyage across both space and time. At each stop a Parisian building, or street, or tomb or landmark sparks a story that holds particular significance for that area of the city.
by David Ambrose
Based on the “many worlds” theory of quantum physics, which posits the existence of parallel universes, The Man Who Turned Into Himself is a suspenseful, mind-bending mystery that addresses our deepest questions about reality, death, identity, and the mind.
The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris
by Edmund White
Paperback $12.99
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, esthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. Entering the Marais evokes the history of Jews in France, just as a visit to the Haynes Grill recalls the presence-festive, troubled-of black Americans in Paris for a century and a half. Gays, Decadents, even Royalists past and present are all subjected to the flaneur’s scrutiny.
Edmund White’s The Flaneur is opinionated, personal, subjective. As he conducts us through the bookshops and boutiques, past the monuments and palaces, filling us in on the gossip and background of each site, he allows us to see through the blank walls and past the proud edifices and to glimpse the inner, human drama. Along the way he recounts everything from the latest debates among French law-makers to the juicy details of Colette’s life in the Palais Royal, even summoning up the hothouse atmosphere of Gustave Moreau’s atelier.
Landsman: A Novel
by Peter Charles Melman
Paperback $14.95
Peter Charles Melman’s debut novel, Landsman, is a boisterous, sometimes brutal, and full-hearted tale of a Jewish hoodlum turned Confederate soldier in the Civil War. Elias Abrams is the son of an indentured servant in New Orleans who escapes a robbery gone awry-and the wrath of his old underworld gang, the Cypress Stump Boys-by enlisting in the Third Louisiana Regiment. Amid the deprivations and sudden violence of the war, and thanks in part to a lady correspondent looking to raise a soldier’s spirits, he develops a surprising moral sense, knowing that he’ll have to reckon with the crimes, and the criminals, he left behind.
The Ministry of Special Cases
by Nathan Englander
Paperback $14.95
From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, Nathan Englander’s debut novel The Ministry of Special Cases casts a powerful spell. In the heart of Argentina’s Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won’t accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.
Ten Days in the Hills
by Jane Smiley
Paperback $14.95
From Publishers Weekly
Smiley (A Thousand Acres) goes Hollywood in this scintillating tale of an extended Decameron-esque L.A. house party. Gathering at the home of washed-up director Max the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards are his Iraq-obsessed girlfriend, Elena; his movie-diva ex-wife Zoe and her yoga instructor–cum–therapist–cum– boyfriend Paul; Max’s insufferably PC daughter, Isabel, and his feckless agent, Stoney, who are conducting a secret affair; Zoe’s oracular mother, Delphine; and Max’s boyhood friend and token Republican irritant Charlie. They watch movies, negotiate their clashing diets and health regimens, indulge in a roundelay of lasciviously detailed sexual encounters and, most of all, talk—holding absurd, meandering, beguiling conversation about movies, Hollywood, relationships, the war and the state of the world. Through it all, they compulsively reimagine daily life as art: Max dreams of making My Lovemaking with Elena, an all-nude, sexually explicit indie talk-fest inspired by My Dinner with Andre, but Stoney wants him to remake the Cossack epic Taras Bulba. Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters, their concern with compelling surfaces and their perpetual quest to capture reality through artifice, with warmth and seriousness. In their shallowness, she finds a kind of profundity.
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beau
by Paul Hawken
Paperback $16.00
A leading environmentalist and social activist’s examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change
Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.
Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world’s fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity’s collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.
The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes
by the editors at McSweeney’s, intro by John Hodgman
Paperback $12.95
As John Hodgman says in this book’s introduction, “We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.†With that in mind, the McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes collects the best book-related humor from the humor-laden archives of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Open it and be regaled by such sketches, lists, letters, and spoofs as:
Postcards from James Joyce to his Brother Stan
Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker
Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character?
Popular Children’s Fairy Tales Reimagined Using Members of My Family
The Very Unauthorized Biography of Steven Seagal
Chuck Norris Erotica
John Updike, Television Writer
Jane Eyre Runs for President
Cormac McCarthy Writes to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican
Holden Caulfield Gives the Commencement Speech to a High School
Letters from Odysseus’s College Roommate
And many dozens more.
The Adventures of Darius and Downey: and other true tales of street art, as told to Ed Zipco
by Leon Reid & Brad Downey, illustrated and with an intro by Swoon
Hardcover $29.95 - 10%
Through a series of true stories, this unique book reveals the tight-knit, exciting world of street art. Darius (aka Leon Reid) and Downey (aka Brad Downey) did their first piece together in Brooklyn in 2000—a life-changing experience marking the birth of a partnership that would go on to revolutionize street art.
Ed Zipco, an acute and empathetic commentator on urban graffiti art, relates their most memorable experiences, from their early exploits and brushes with the law to their work internationally in London and Berlin. Along the way, we witness their artistic evolution from conventional graffiti tagging to ambitious street installations that are both wittily entertaining and startlingly subversive.
The introduction is by renowned street artist Swoon, famed for her intricate paper cutouts.
The Fourth Wall
photography by Amy Arbus
Hardcover $50.00 - 10%
What happens when a performing actor leaves behind his lines, staging, sets, and lighting, and steps beyond the fourth wall? For three years, Amy Arbus has been exploring this question in a series of dramatic portraits of celebrated actors, both on and off Broadway. Fully costumed but stripped of their context, Arbus’s actors remain in character as they step outside the fiction of theater into the reality of the world beyond. Staged in anonymous public spaces-in theater lobbies, on city streets, in parks, and in stage door alleys-Arbus’s images achieve an unexpected blend of spectacle and high art; formality and sontaneity; vulnerability and pretense.
Collected in The Fourth Wall are some of the modern stage’s most gifted actors, including Alan Cumming in Cabaret, John Malkovitch in Lost Land, Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio, Ed Harris in Wrecks, Cherry Jones in Doubt, Christine Ebersol in Grey Gardens, and Ethan Hawke and Martha Plimpton in The Coast of Utopia. Actors are included from such successful and ambitioud productions as Wicked, The Light in the Piazza, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Color Purple, to name but a few. Portraits are accompanied by synopses of the plays as well as quotes from a number of the actors portrayed.
In 2006′s critically acclaimed book On the Street, Arbus focused her lens on those who dressed to express themselves-now she turns her attention to those who dress to become someone else. The result is a collection of potent photographs that pay remarkable tribute to contemporary theater and the performers who bring fantasy to life.
Pocket Gardens: Contemporary Japanese Miniature Designs
by Michael Freeman & Noriko Sakai
Hardcover $29.95 - 10%
Called tsubo-niwa after a unit of measurement that is two person-sized tatami mats placed side by side, the pocket garden has been a part of the Japanese architectural canon for thousands of years. Undergoing a modernization in the last few decades in which a new generation of architects began experimenting with the concept in imaginative ways, the contemporary garden follows a distinct yet global aesthetic, whether as an urban solution to importing nature, as an individual theme set within a larger garden space, or as a buffer between property lines of a house or apartment. Beautifully illustrated and designed with a reflective, contemplative aesthetic, the book offers a broad array of miniature garden designs, including Keno Kuma’s explorations of materials as diverse as andesite and plastic, Takeshi Nagasaki’s art installation gardens with stepping stones of cast glass and bronze, and Yasuhiro Harada’s mobile cube gardens—plantings in stainless-steel trays on wheels that can be stacked and rearranged at will.
Hiroshige, 100 Views of Edo
edited by Melanie Trede & Lorenz Bichler
$175.00 - 10%
Hiroshige’s Edo: Masterful ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Tokyo in the mid-19th century Literally meaning “pictures of the floating world,” [b]ukiyo-e refers to the famous Japanese woodblock print genre that originated in the 17th century and is practically synonymous with the Western world’s visual characterization of Japan. Because they could be mass produced, ukiyo-e works were often used as designs for fans, New Year’s greeting cards, single prints, and book illustrations, and traditionally they depicted city life, entertainment, beautiful women, kabuki actors, and landscapes. The influence of ukiyo-e in Europe and the USA, often referred to as Japonisme, can be seen in everything from impressionist painting to today’s manga and anime illustration. This reprint is made from one of the finest complete original set of woodprints belonging to the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Ultra Materials: How Materials Innovation Is Changing the World
edited by George M. Beylerian, Michele Caniato, Andrew Dent, and Bradley Quinn
Hardcover $75.00 - 10%
Smart substances, intelligent interfaces, and sensory surfaces are redefining the world we live in, from self-cleaning materials based on the surface morphology of a lotus leaf to outdoor pavilions made from inflatable membrane exteriors to temperature-regulated clothing.
The people at Material ConneXion are uniquely placed to explain these developments:
• the context and key tools for innovation, including biomimicry, nanotechnology, and sustainability;
• the application of new materials in interior, fashion, textiles, product, and vehicle design;
• where current developments are leading, along with the implications for educators, professionals, and society as a whole.
The book includes a classified presentation of the four hundred most recent significant materials; a directory of designers, design conferences, trade shows, and professional organizations; and details of degree programs, grants, scholarships, internships, research labs, and competitions.
Here is an indispensable resource for interior, product, graphic, and fashion designers, and for anyone involved with packaging, design, or architecture. 600+ illustrations and photographs in color and black and white.
Calcutta
by Manish Chakraborty & Florian Hanig, edited by Peter Bialobrzeski
Hardcover $60.00 - 10%
In nineteenth-century Calcutta, a wealthy Indian elite emerged under the rule of the British East India Company. For their homes, they built eclectic Bengali equivalents of industrialist mansions, which blended traditional Mogul architecture with more classical western elements. Today these crumbling villas and palaces retain only a shred of their former splendor, and it seems only a matter of time before they will disappear for good. In this volume, 21 emerging photographers work with Peter Biaolobrzeski to capture the fading grandeur of this rich hybrid structures. In 2007, Germany’s respected daily newspaper Sddeutsche Zeitung commented, “If Calcutta had the appeal of Havana, its palaces would long ago have become the subject of various coffee-table books.” At last, such a book exists.