Search Results

ENGLISH

Favourite Of The Gods And A Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

22,53€ + 10% CARD

 A Favourite of the Gods is the story of two generations of a single family, united by a strong matrilineal bond but divided by the customs of their differing nationalities. Anna Howland, the matriarch and American heiress, born in the 1870s to a prominent, liberal New England family marries an Italian prince and makes her home in Rome; her daughter Constanza, the favorite of the title, inherits her mother’s beauty, intelligence, and wealth, along with her father’s Catholicism, which she soon rejects. When disaster strikes, Anna and the prince fall back on the standards of behavior of their disparate cultures; Constanza, with her European upbringing, is free to plot her own course, and she does so with daring, making an unconventional life for herself in England and on the continent during and after the First World War. Her own daughter Flavia is the heroine of A Compass Error, which begins where the first novel concludes. Flavia too is a brilliant young woman, though both more brash and more faltering than her mother, studying for her entrance exam to Oxford when she becomes involved with a mysterious woman whose arrival at a sensitive moment in Flavia’s adolescence will alter both her and her mother’s lives forever.
ENGLISH

History Is Our Mother: Three Libretti - Nixon In China, The Death Of Klinghoffer, The Magic Flute

by Alice Goodman

13,25€ + 10% CARD

 An NYRB Classics Original Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer played a crucial role in bringing opera back to life as a contemporary art form, and they have been popular—and, in the case of Klinghoffer, highly controversial—ever since they were first staged by the director Peter Sellars in the eighties and nineties. Both operas were conceived from the start as collaborations between composer and writer, and their power is due as much to the dazzlingly constructed and deeply felt libretti of the poet Alice Goodman as they are to John Adams’s music. Nixon in China is a story, at once heroic, comic, and unnerving, of men and women making history and of their different conceptions of what history is and what it means to makes it. Klinghoffer, by contrast, has at its center the tragedy of an innocent man condemned at the cost of his life to play a part in history. History Is Our Mother, which takes its title from a line sung by the title character in Nixon in China, brings Goodman’s two libretti together for the first time in book form. Included alongside Goodman’s no less inspired translation of Emanuel Schikaneder’s famous libretto to The Magic Flute, these vivid dramas of character and searching meditations on fate are here revealed as among the most original, ambitious, and accomplished poetic achievements of our time.
ENGLISH

Arabia Felix - The Danish Expedition Of 1761-1767

by Thorkild Hansen

15,90€ + 10% CARD

 An NYRB Classics Original Arabia Felix is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously astray. On a winter morning in 1761 six men leave Copenhagen by sea—a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their manservant—an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the first Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first organized foray into a corner of the world unknown to Europeans, an enterprise that had the support of the Danish Crown and was keenly followed throughout Europe. The expedition made its way to Turkey and Egypt, by which time its members were already actively seeking to undercut and even kill one another, before disappearing into the harsh desert that was their destination. Nearly seven years later a single survivor returned to Denmark to find himself a forgotten man and all the specimens that had been sent back ruined by neglect. Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, Arabia Felix is both a comedy of intellectual rivalry and very bad manners and an utterly absorbing tale of high adventure.
ENGLISH

Communist

by Guido Morselli

13,25€ + 10% CARD

 An NYRB Classics Original The Communist is the story of a life lived in the service of a faith and what happens when that faith is lost. Walter Ferranini, a child of Italy’s agricultural heartland, begins as an earnest autodidact who works as a labor organizer before being driven, under Mussolini, into exile in the United States, the belly of the capitalist beast. After World War II, he returns to Italy and enters parliament as a communist MP. Then Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s crimes leads to a crisis in Walter’s life. He has come to question that most basic communist belief, that human life finds its fulfillment in labor, and he writes an article expressing his doubts. It is a scandal, as, in the eyes of the prudish party elders, is his new relationship with Nuccia, a journalist who is a married woman. Under these circumstances, Walter is invited for the first time to visit the Soviet Union, and there he finds himself bewildered beyond words. In The Communist, Guido Morselli portrays a man of conviction cast adrift with deep and compelling sympathy.
ENGLISH

Farm In The Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

18,55€ + 10% CARD

 The Farm in the Green Mountains is the story of a family finding home—halfway across the world from their homeland. Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. After Carl’s work fell afoul of the Nazis, however, the couple and their two daughters were forced to flee Europe. Los Angeles didn’t suit them and neither did New York, but then a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm, the eighteenth-century house where they would live for the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves joyfully building chicken coops and refereeing fights between unruly ducks. Despite the endless work a new farm required and brutal winters that triggered bouts of melancholy, Alice discovered that in America she had found her "native land." And her generous, surprising, and witty memoir, a bestseller in postwar Germany, has all the charm of a love story with a happy ending.
ENGLISH

Notes Of A Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

13,25€ + 10% CARD

 An NYRB Classics Original Set in the post-martial-law era of 1990s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin’s cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman who is alternately hot and cold toward her, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes the devil-may-care, rich-kid-turned-criminal Meng Sheng and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover Chu Kuang, as well as the bored, mischievous overachiever Tun Tun and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend Zhi Rou. Bursting with the optimism of newfound liberation and romantic idealism despite corroding innocence, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant and intimate masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
ENGLISH

Down Below

by Leonora Carrington

10,60€ + 10% CARD

 Leonora Carrington is perhaps the most enchanting of the women Surrealists. The daughter of Anglo Irish privilege, she broke free of her manor-house upbringing and fled, first to art school, and then to the Continent. Though she is best known as a painter of the gothic fantastic, with a cult following and one-woman shows at museums around the world, her writing is no less striking. Down Below describes the events of 1940, when, after her longtime lover, artist Max Ernst was sent to a concentration camp, Carrington was "led across the border of Knowledge" and imprisoned in a sanatorium for the insane. This powerful testament, reminiscent of Carrington’s great novel The Hearing Trumpet, ranks with the work of Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame in its raw evocation of madness.
ENGLISH

Making It

by Norman Podhoretz

21,20€ + 10% CARD

 Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia University on a scholarship, and later received degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Making It is his blistering account of fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally of his induction into the ranks of what he calls "The Family," the small group of left-wing and largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions came to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene in the fifties and sixties. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still pertinent analysis of the tense and more than a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power. The Family responded to Podhoretz’s book with outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he remains to this day. Fifty years after its first publication, this controversial and legendary book remains a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life.
ENGLISH

Primitive Man As Philosopher

by Paul Radin

23,85€ + 10% CARD

 Readers both in and out of the field will appreciate the rich and varied insights of this classic of anthropology. Celebrated anthropologist Neni Panourgia provides a new introduction to this landmark and pioneering work.
ENGLISH

Thus Were Their Faces - Selected Stories

by Silvina Ocampo

23,85€ + 10% CARD

 Thus Were Their Faces collects a wide range of Ocampo's best short fiction and novella-length stories from her whole writing life.
ENGLISH

Midnight In The Century

by Victor Serge

22,53€ + 10% CARD

 In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin's police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century.
ENGLISH

Tristana

by Benito Pérez Galdós

19,88€ + 10% CARD

 The tale of a high-spirited, ambitious young woman or man breaking free from stifling provincial constraints to pursue a life of independence-this is a staple of the novel.
ENGLISH

In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country - And Other Stories

by William H. Gass

21,20€ + 10% CARD

 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is vintage William Gass: two novellas and three short stories, set in the Midwest, exhibiting Gass's characteristic and wholly atypical verbal brilliance and philosophical acuity
ENGLISH

On The Abolition Of All Political Parties

by Simone Weil

18,55€ + 10% CARD

 Simone Weil is one of the most intransigent and taxing of spiritual masters, always willing to push her thinking-and us-one step beyond the apparently reasonable in pursuit of the one truth, the one good.
ENGLISH

Conversations With Beethoven

by Sanford Friedman

19,88€ + 10% CARD

 A delight to read, with a full cast of Dickensian characters ranging from the bibulous hanger-on Holtz, the oleaginous biographer Schindler, and Beethoven's cheapskate country brother, Conversations with Beethoven slowly deepens to make a profound and memorable music of its own.
ENGLISH

Totempole

by Sanford Friedman

19,88€ + 10% CARD

 Totempole is Sanford Friedman's radical coming-of-age novel, featuring Stephen Wolfe, a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City and its environs during the Depression and war years.
ENGLISH

Speedboat

by Renata Adler

19,88€ + 10% CARD

 This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique.
ENGLISH

Notes Of A Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

16,21€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

(1)
ENGLISH

Dreams Of Earth And Sky

by Freeman Dyson

33,48€

free shipping

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE
ENGLISH

Death Of Napoleon

by Simon Leys

16,73€

free shipping

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

DIDN'T FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR?

Browse by the menu categories.

Check the search criteria in help .

Finally, if needed, use the we'll search for you .