The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine    (Find this book)

Only "The New Yorker" could fetch such an unbelievable roster of talent on the subject of man's best friend. This copious collection, beautifully illustrated in full color, features articles, fiction, humor, poems, cartoons, cover art, drafts, and drawings from the magazine's archives. The roster of contributors includes John Cheever, Susan Orlean, Roddy Doyle, Ian Frazier, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Roald Dahl, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Alexandra Fuller, Jerome Groopman, Jeffrey Toobin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ogden Nash, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Strand, Anne Sexton, and Cathleen Schine. Complete with a Foreword by Malcolm Gladwell and a new essay by Adam Gopnik on the immortal canines of James Thurber, this gorgeous keepsake is a gift to dog lovers everywhere from the greatest magazine in the world. -- Publisher Marketing

Essays in Biography

by Joseph Epstein    (Find this book)

Epstein (former editor of American Scholar and author of Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit) brings an erudite gift for portraiture to the subjects of this volume's 40 essays. Focused primarily on figures from the 19th and 20th centuries (with occasional excursions into Greek antiquity and colonial America), Epstein offers eloquent assessments of philosophers, politicians, athletes, composers, social scientists, movie stars, and especially writers and critics. He is particularly drawn to figures whose renown is at odds with their personal and professional shortcomings hence, his evaluation of Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, as a writer whose inability to complete his second novel for the next 42 years suggests that "perhaps it is not a good idea to write a great book the first time out." His studies of Dwight Macdonald, Gore Vidal, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Kristol create a lively, multifaceted portrait of America's postwar intelligentsia. Though not uncritical, Epstein is more adulatory of celebrities, among them George Gershwin ("a genius of the natural kind"), Irving Thalberg ("the most talented producer in the history of American movies"), and Michael Jordan ("this magnificent athlete who turned his sport into art"). Opinionated and sometimes personal (notably in his piece on Saul Bellow, who fell out with him), these essays are edifying and often very entertaining. Agent: Georges Borchardt Inc. (Oct.) Copyright 2012 Reed Business Information. --Publishers Weekly

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

by Jisheng Yang    (Find this book)

The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine
An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950's and early '60's. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as the "three years of natural disaster."

As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang lays the deaths at the feet of China's totalitarian Communist system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone" is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in "The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of "Tombstone ""groundbreaking...The most authoritative account of the great famine...One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years." -- Publisher Marketing

Reinventing Bach

by Paul Elie    (Find this book)

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach

In "Reinventing Bach," his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.

As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological frontier--restoring organs, inventing instruments, and perfecting the tuning system still in use today. Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach's music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works to the world beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach's cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with "Fantasia," made Bach the sound of children's playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations" opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized, technically savvy artist.

"Reinventing Bach" is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion--and a story with special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology. -- Publisher Marketing

Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith    (Find this book)

Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, "Former People "is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries'-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.

Yet "Former People "is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class--so-called "former people" and "class enemies"--overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families--the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns--it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on.

Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, "Former People "is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia's most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition. -- Publisher Marketing

Parade's End

by Ford Madox Ford    (Find this book)

Ford Madox Ford's masterpiece, a tetra-logy set in England during World War I, is widely considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

First published as four separate novels ("Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up--, and The Last Post) "between 1924 and 1928, "Parade's End" explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war. Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine. A profound portrait of one man's internal struggles during a time of brutal world conflict, "Parade's End" bears out Graham Greene's prediction that "There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford." -- Publisher Marketing

Philip Roth: Nemeses: Everyman/Indignation/The Humbling/Nemesis ( Library of America #237 )

by Philip Roth    (Find this book)

What kind of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance? These are the dark questions that animate "Nemeses," the quartet of thematically related short novels that are published here together for the first time in this final volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works. "Everyman "(2006) is the sparse and affecting story of one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, "Indignation "(2008) is the extraordinary narrative of a young man struggling against the conformity of McCarthy-era America and his father's overwhelming fear. In "The Humbling "(2009), aging actor Simon Axler embarks on a risky and aberrant affair in a desperate attempt to recoup his lost artistic gifts. And in "Nemesis "(2010), Roth offers an exacting portrait of the emotions--fear and anger, bewilderment and grief--bred by a polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944. Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. -- Publisher Marketing