Archive for the ‘New Release’ Category
The powerful Chinese novel about love and war on which Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) has based his latest film starring Christian Bale to be released in 2012.
This moving short novel is based on true events that took place during the Nanjing Massacre in 1937 when the Japanese invaded the Chinese city, slaughtering not only soldiers but raping and murdering the civilian population as well. It tells the story of an American missionary who, for a few terrifying days, finds himself sheltering a group of schoolgirls, prostitutes and wounded Chinese soldiers in the compound of his church.
American priest Father Engelmann is one of the small group of Westerners who have remained in Nanjing, despite the approach of the Japanese. America is not yet in the war and so his church compound is supposedly neutral territory. However, his confidence in his ability to look after the Chinese schoolgirls left in his care is shaken when thirteen prostitutes from the floating brothel on the nearby Yangtze River climb over the compound wall and demand to be hidden. The situation becomes even more intense when some wounded Chinese soldiers appear. Meanwhile Engelmann is becoming increasingly aware of the barbaric behaviour of the Japanese outside the compound walls. It is only a matter of time before they knock on the door and find the people he is protecting.
Like Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, this poignant book looks at the effect upon individuals of large-scale war and tragedy. The characters are beautifully observed. From the naive schoolgirls, the brazen prostitutes and the frightened soldiers to the slightly priggish priest and his resentful Chinese entourage. As the Japanese circle ever closer, the barriers of hatred and prejudice that separate the characters dissolve, and they perform unexpected and moving acts of heroism. Geling Yan, an important Chinese writer, reveals herself to be a master of detail and emotion in this novel. She recreates history as if it is unfolding before our eyes, and writes characters that are so engaging and so rich that we believe in them entirely. This is a novel full of humanity — at its worst and at its best — and a fascinating insight into 1930s China.
In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century.
The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins’ internationally acclaimed Rites of Spring and Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era–from the eve of the First World War and the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Berlin Wall–that illuminates our current world, with its cults of celebrity and the crisis of the authentic. Solar Dance is a penetrating examination of legitimacy and truth, fakery and pretence–highly relevant to all of us today.
In the years following World War II, a small group of gay writers established themselves as literary power players, fueling cultural changes that would resonate for decades to come, and transforming the American literary landscape forever.
In EMINENT OUTLAWS, novelist Christopher Bram brilliantly chronicles the rise of gay consciousness in American writing. Beginning with a first wave of major gay literary figures-Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin-he shows how (despite criticism and occasional setbacks) these pioneers set the stage for new generations of gay writers to build on what they had begun: Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Tony Kushner, and Edward Albee among them.
Weaving together the crosscurrents, feuds, and subversive energies that provoked these writers to greatness, EMINENT OUTLAWS is a rich and essential work. With keen insights, it takes readers through fifty years of momentous change: from a time when being a homosexual was a crime in forty-nine states and into an age of same-sex marriage and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Inside the world of Elizabeth II.
Throughout history, there has been no Monarch like her. She is not merely the oldest Sovereign England has ever known. She is the most worldly. She has travelled further than all her predecessors put together. She has met more historic figures than anyone alive — from Churchill to Mandela, de Gaulle, Reagan and Obama. And today, Queen Elizabeth II is no more contemplating retirement than she was when she came to the throne in 1952. She sits at the head of a hereditary institution so often associated with rigid tradition. And yet, it is more dynamic now than ever.
Having inherited a quasi-Edwardian insitution nearly 600 years ago, the Queen presides over a Monarchy which has managed to remain, simultaneously, popular, regal, inclusive and relevant in a 21st Century world. She has done this so effectively that she is, beyond doubt, the most respected and popular figure in British public life.
As she reaches a defining moment of her reign — her Diamond Jubliee — Robert Hardman explores the secrets of the Queen’s success to produce a fascinating new portrait of a Sovereign who has witnessed more change than any since the creation of Great Britain.
When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, he also won a long-running debate with his wife Michelle. Contrary to her fears, politics now seemed like a worthwhile, even noble pursuit. Together they planned a White House life that would be as normal and sane as possible.
Then they moved in.
In the Obamas, Jodi Kantor takes us deep inside the White House as they try to grapple with their new roles, change the country, raise children, maintain friendships, and figure out what it means to be the first black President and First Lady. Filled with riveting detail and insight into their partnership, emotions and personalities, and written with a keen eye for the ironies of public life, THE OBAMAS is an intimate portrait that will surprise even readers who thought they knew the President and First Lady.
Small-time private investigator Ray Lovell veers between paralysis and delirium in a hospital bed. But before the accident that landed him there, he’d been hired to find Rose Janko, the wife of a charismatic son of a traveling Gypsy family, who went missing seven years earlier. Half Romany himself, Ray is well aware that he’s been chosen more for his blood than his investigative skills.
The Greek and Roman myths have never died out; in fact they are as relevant today as ever. For thousands of years these myths have inspired plays, operas, paintings, movies, and television programs. They are fascinating tales that tell us about ourselves—about our hopes, fears, and desires, which are as ancient as mankind. Many of these myths are deeply disturbing; others are sublimely beautiful. All of them move us still, as they did the Greeks and Romans hundreds of generations ago.
Oh My Gods is a retelling of some of the most popular myths by a gifted scholar and writer. These tales of errant gods, fantastic creatures, and human heroes are brought to life in fresh and contemporary versions.
Have there ever been stories to rival the myths about the creation of the universe and the wars among the earliest gods? Or about the Olympian gods themselves: powerful Zeus, king of the gods, possessed of a wandering eye; his wife, Hera, queen of marriage and childbirth, perpetually outraged by her husband’s many affairs; Poseidon, god of the sea, brother of Zeus; their other brother, Hades, god of the underworld; and all the other gods and goddesses—talented Apollo, beautiful Aphrodite, fierce Athena, swift Hermes, and many more. And the dauntless heroes Theseus and Hercules, the doomed lovers Hero and Leander or Orpheus and Eurydice, whose stories can still break our hearts. From the astonishing tales of the Argonauts to the immortal narrative of the Battle of Troy, these ancient myths have inspired writers from Shakespeare to J. K. Rowling.
Philip Freeman’s vibrant, contemporary retelling makes us appreciate again why these wonderful tales have lasted thousands of years and charmed young and old readers alike.
-From the Publisher
Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon.
Horace Rumpole lives alongside Sherlock Holmes, Pickwick and Jeeves as one of the immortal characters of English fiction. With his curmudgeonly wit, his literary allusions, his disdain for personal ambition and his lack of pomposity, he has, according to the Daily Telegraph, ‘ascended to the pantheon of literary immortals’.
Over a period of thirty years, John Mortimer wrote almost eighty Rumpole stories. The world changed gradually and Rumpole found himself defending hunt-saboteurs and alleged Islamic terrorists, but the old boy himself remained the same: committed to defending the apparently indefensible, trusting of the good sense of a jury, scornful of the law’s pomposities – values he carried with him wherever he practised, whether a murder at the Bailey or a bit of assault at the Uxbridge Magistrates Court. And when the day was over, it was a quick nip into Pommeroy’s for a glass or two of Chateau Thames Embankment before the tube home to She Who Must Be Obeyed in Foxbury Mansions.
The best of Rumpole is represented in this new selection of fourteen stories, the first published in 1978, the last in 2004. And as an added bonus, the book ends with the fragment of a new Rumpole novel Sir John was working on when he died in January 2009.
The new Discworld novel from the master features the popular Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch.
According to the writer of the best-selling crime novel ever to have been published in the city of Ankh-Morpork, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder.
He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase and there must be a punishment.
They say that in the end all sins are forgiven. But not quite all.
-From the Publisher