Download or read book The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales written by Ferit Edgü and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Turkey's most celebrated writers explores themes of violence, otherness, and exile through a thrilling hybrid of poetry and prose that paints a vivid picture of Turkey's conflict-torn lands. In the two books paired here, translated into English for the first time, the great Turkish writer Ferit Edgü represents complex social and political realities with startling lyricism. The Wounded Age features a newspaper reporter from Istanbul, assigned to write about ethno-national violence in the mountains of eastern Turkey. Like the narrators in Eastern Tales, he is a stranger in a region where a buried history—the state’s violence against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—continues uninterrupted with the subjugation of the Kurds. Language in this place, especially the language of outsiders, cannot be trusted. In the story “Interview,” an old villager tells the narrator, “Make our photograph,” and adds, “Send us the pictures. No need to write us letters.” The minimal tales Edgü tells are vivid pictures of life in the East—a house in ruins, an empty crib, wolves howling in the hills—and transcriptions of living voices. The reporter in The Wounded Age has no illusions that his story will stop the bloodletting; instead, he goes east because he knows he must open his eyes and unstop his ears.
Download or read book The Story of a Life written by Konstantin Paustovsky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most famous works of Russian literature, a memoir about a writer's coming of age during World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the rise of the Soviet era. This is the first unabridged translation of the first three books of Konstantin Paustovsky's magnum opus. In 1943, the Soviet author Konstantin Paustovsky started out on what would prove a masterwork, The Story of a Life, a grand, novelistic memoir of a life spent on the ravaged frontier of Russian history. Eventually expanding to fill six volumes, this extraordinary work of a lifetime would establish Paustovsky as one of Russia’s great writers and lead to a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography—long unavailable in English—appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a journalist covering Russia’s violent spiral into revolution, this vivid and suspenseful story of coming-of-age in a time of troubles is lifted by the energy and lyricism of Paustovsky’s prose and marked throughout by his deep love of the natural world. The Story of a Life is a dazzling achievement of modern literature.
Download or read book The Old Devils written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
Download or read book Written on Water written by Eileen Chang and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.
Download or read book My Death written by Lisa Tuttle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy. The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to her: she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe, and the inspiration for his classic children’s book, Hermine in Cloud-Land. But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most radical painting, My Death, deemed too unsettling—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves an astonishingly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s history and her own. Whose biography is she writing—really?
Download or read book The Child and the River written by Henri Bosco and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of an evocative, Huckleberry Finn–esque French bestseller about a young farmboy, the river where he is forbidden to play, and the adventures that ensue when he disobeys his family’s wishes. The Child and the River tells a simple but haunting tale. Pascalet, a boy growing up on a farm in the south of France, is permitted by his parents to play wherever he likes—only never by the river. Prohibition turns into temptation: Pascalet dreams of nothing so much as heading down to the river, and one day, with his parents away, he does. Wandering along the bank, intoxicated with newfound freedom, he falls asleep in a rowboat and wakes to find himself caught in rapids and run aground on an island where a band of Gypsies has pitched camp together with their trained bear. Hiding in the underbrush, Pascalet observes that the group includes a boy his age, who, after receiving a whipping, has been left tied to a post. This is Gatzo, and as soon as night falls, Pascalet sets him loose. The boys escape in a boat and spend an idyllic week on the river. But then the mysterious “puppeteer of souls” arrives, bringing their adventure to an end, and Pascalet must go back home to face the music. Has he seen the last of his new friend? Long hailed as a sort of French Huckleberry Finn, The Child and the River is, as Henri Bosco himself once wrote in a letter to a friend, “a novel very good, I think, for children, adolescents, and poets.” A beguiling adventure story, it is also beautifully written, full of keenly observed details of the river’s wilds, well captured by Joyce Zonana’s new translation.
Download or read book This Is a Classic written by Regina Galasso and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is a Classic illuminates the overlooked networks that contribute to the making of literary classics through the voices of multiple translators, without whom writers would have a difficult time reaching a global audience. It presents the work of some of today's most accomplished literary translators who translate classics into English or who work closely with translation in the US context and magnifies translators' knowledge, skills, creativity, and relationships with the literary texts they translate, the authors whose works they translate, and the translations they make. The volume presents translators' expertise and insight on how classics get defined according to language pairs and contexts. It advocates for careful attention to the role of translation and translators in reading choices and practices, especially regarding literary classics.
Download or read book Lies and Sorcery written by Elsa Morante and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elsa Morante is one of the titans of twentieth-century literature—Natalia Ginzburg said she was the writer of her own generation that she most admired—and yet her work remains little known in the United States. Written during World War II, Morante’s celebrated first novel, Lies and Sorcery, is in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust, spanning the lives of three generations of wildly eccentric women. The story is set in Sicily and told by Elisa, orphaned young and raised by a “fallen woman.” For years Elisa has lived in an imaginary world of her own; now, however, her guardian has died, and the young woman feels that she must abandon her fantasy life to confront the truth of her family’s tortured and dramatic history. Elisa is a seductive, if less than reliable, spinner of stories, and the reader is drawn into a tale of secrets, intrigue, and treachery, which, as it proceeds, is increasingly revealed to be an exploration of a legacy of political and social injustice. Throughout, Morante’s elegant writing—and her drive to get at the heart of her characters’ complex relationships and all-too self-destructive behavior—holds us spellbound.
Download or read book The Letters of William Gaddis written by William Gaddis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory collection of correspondence by the lauded author of titanic American classics such as The Recognitions and J R, shedding light on his staunchly private life. UPDATED WITH OVER TWO DOZEN NEW LETTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and also reveal the extent to which he drew upon events in his life for his fiction. Here we see him forging his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award–winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to produce A Frolic of His Own (1994). Resuming his lifelong obsession with mechanization and the arts, he finishes a last novel, Agapē Agape (published in 2002), as he lies dying. This newly revised edition includes clarifying notes by Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, as well as an afterword by the author’s daughter, Sarah Gaddis.
Download or read book Blue Lard written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin’s books into an enormous papier-mâché toilet—this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese. There they work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Max Lawton’s translation of Blue Lard, the first into English, captures this key work in all its grotesque, havoc-making, horrifying, visceral intensity.
Download or read book Chevengur written by Andrey Platonov and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chevengur is a revolutionary novel about revolutionary ardor and despair. Zakhar Pavlovich comes from a world of traditional crafts to work as a train mechanic, motivated by his belief in the transformative power of industry. His adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, embraces revolution, which will transform everything: the words we speak and the lives we live, souls and bodies, the soil underfoot and the sun overhead. Seeking communism, Dvanov joins up with Stepan Kopionkin, a warrior for the cause whose steed is the fearsome cart horse Strength of the Proletariat. Together they cross the steppe, encountering counterrevolutionaries, desperados, and visionaries of all kinds. At last they reach the isolated town of Chevengur. There communism is believed to have been achieved because everything that is not communism has been eliminated. And yet even in Chevengur the revolution recedes from sight. Comic, ironic, grotesque, disturbingly poetic in its use of language, and profoundly sorrowful, Chevengur—here published in a new English translation based on the most authoritative Russian text—is the most ambitious of the extraordinary novels that the great Andrey Platonov wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet Russia was moving from revolutionary euphoria to state terror.
Download or read book Eastern tales by many story tellers written by Laura Valentine and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Letters of Gustave Flaubert written by Gustave Flaubert and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life. Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years. Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.
Download or read book Eastern Tales written by L. (Laura) Valentine and published by Hardpress Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Download or read book Instead of a Letter written by Diana Athill and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Diana Athill, nearly forty-three and far from a household name, sat down to write Instead of a Letter, the first in her series of trailblazing memoirs, she was looking for an answer to the question “What have I lived for?” In this searching book, she recalls her child-hood on her grandparents’ magnificent estate, the teenage romance that was certain to lead to marriage, her university days coinciding with the Second World War, and the sudden dissolution of her engagement, a loss that became the defining experience of the next twenty years of her life. Athill is as forthright in confessing her faults as she is in celebrating her triumphs. “From this table, with this white tea-cup, full ashtray, and small glass half full of rum beside me,” she writes, “I see my story, ordinary enough though it has all been and sad though much of it was, as a success story.”
Download or read book Our Philosopher written by Gert Hofmann and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time is the 1930s. Our philosopher is Herr Veilchenfeld, a renowned thinker and distinguished professor, who, after his sudden dismissal from the university, has retired to live quietly in a country town in the east of Germany. Our narrator is Hans, a clever and inquisitive boy. He relates a mix of things he witnesses himself and things he hears about from his father, the town doctor, who sees all sorts of people as he makes his rounds, even Veilchenfeld, with his troubled heart. Veilchenfeld is in decline, it’s true—he keeps ever more to himself—but the town is in ever better shape. After the defeat of the Great War and the subsequent years of poverty, things are looking up. The old, worn people are heart-ened to see it. The young are exhilarated. It is up to them to promote and patrol this new uplifting reality—to make it safe from the likes of Veilchenfeld, whose very existence is an affront to it. And so the doctor listens, and young Hans looks on.
Download or read book A Love Affair written by Dino Buzzati and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accomplished in his career but unaccomplished in love, a middle-aged architect is torn apart by his obsession with an enigmatic young woman in this delicately told story of desire and abjection by a titan of Italian literature. Antonio Dorigi is a successful architect in Milan, nearing fifty, who has always been afraid of women. He has been a regular at an upscale brothel for years, even as he mourns the lack of close female companionship in his life. One afternoon, the madam at the brothel introduces Tonio to “a new girl,” Laide (short for Adelaide). Tonio sees nothing especially remarkable about Laide, though it intrigues him that she dances at La Scala and also at a strip club, and yet in a very short time he becomes completely obssessed with her. Laide draws Antonio on, confounds him, uses and humiliates him, treats him tenderly from time to time, lies to him, makes no apologies to him, and he loves her ever more. This helpless and hopeless love is what he is, he feels, even as it prevents him—we see—from ever seeing Laide for who she is. Because Who is she? is the question at the heart of Buzzati's clear-eyed and often comic tale of infatuation. Laide is a young woman who has never known the bourgeois prosperity Tonio takes for granted, someone in a pickle looking for a main chance. She is a storyteller and someone, too, who knows how stories tell on people and shape their desires and lives. Is A Love Affair a love story or is it a story of anything but love? Buzzati's novel, with its psychological subtleties, its vivid cityscapes, and its compassion, keeps the reader guessing till the end.
