aNobii: News from [person name]'s shelf

It Must've Been Something I Ate

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:34:01 PST

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Thirty-eight outrageous, deliciously provocative pieces from Vogue's indomitable food critic-the man who eats everything, dreams perpetually of the ultimate food experience, and compulsively searches out the truth about how, why, and what we eat. Each section of his new book is a savory course of a splendid feast: For starters, in "Who Is Having All the Fun?," join Steingarten as he dons costly ...

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:33:35 PST

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Tom Wolfe’s modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all — a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress. Suddenly, one wrong turn makes it all go wrong, and Sherman spirals downward in a sudden fall from grace that sucks him into the ravenous heart of a ...

A Year Without "Made in China"

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:33:09 PST

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Includes a Foreword by Joel L. Naroff, PhD, President, Naroff Economic Advisors, Inc. Chief Economist, Commerce Bank "Over the past century, Americans' images of China have fluctuated wildly from victim, to heroic fighter, to Communist fanatic. We have loved them and feared them. And now, as Sara Bongiorni shows in vivid personal terms, we are in a new phase where it is a little of both. Ch ...

This is My Country. What's Yours?

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:32:03 PST

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A Globe and Mail Best 100 Book (2006) National Post Best Books (2006) A bold cultural portrait of contemporary Canada through the work of its most celebrated novelists, short story writers, and storytellers. Stories are the surest way to know a place, and at a time when the fabric of the country seems daily more uncertain, Noah Richler looks to our authors for evidence of the true nature of ...

The Tenth Muse

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:31:23 PST

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From the legendary editor who helped shape modern cookbook publishing—one of the food world’s most admired figures—an evocative and inspiring memoir. Living in Paris after World War II, Judith Jones broke free of the bland American food she had been raised on and reveled in everyday French culinary delights. On returning to the States—hoping to bring some joie de cuisine to America—she publish ...

Reluctant Fundamentalist

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:30:56 PST

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From the author of the award-winning Moth Smoke comes a perspective on love, prejudice, and the war on terror that has never been seen in North American literature. At a caf ...

The Blind Side

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:29:57 PST

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The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever ...

Blink

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:29:35 PST

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How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others? Thats the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much mo ...

Oryx and Crake

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:29:13 PST

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In a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not en ...

A Hedonist in the Cellar

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:24:17 PST

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In the two decades since Bright Lights, Big City reinvigorated contemporary fiction, Jay McInerney can claim a great many accomplishments, including the mantle that Salon has given him: “the best wine writer in America.” Of his previous collection, Bacchus and Me, Robert M. Parker, Jr., concluded: “Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative.” And The New York Times a ...

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:23:58 PST

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In this latest collection of essays following The Polysyllabic Spree, critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering a funny, intelligent, and unblinkered account of the stuff he's been reading. Ranging from the middlebrow to the highbrow (with unrepenting dips into the lowbrow), Hornby's dispatches from his nightstand table serve as useful guides ...

The Year of Living Biblically

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:23:18 PST

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From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. What would it require for a person to live all the commandments of the Bible for an entire year? That is the question that animates this hilarious, quixotic, thought-provoking memoir from Jacobs (The Know-It-All). He didn't just keep the Bible's better-known moral laws (being honest, tithing to charity and trying to curb his lust), but also the obscure and ...

Stet

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:21:00 PST

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Diana Athill's memoir of a life spent working with some of the charismatic characters who have dominated 20th-century literature. In a prose style of inimitable wit and rare candour, she recounts tales from a long life in publishing, including her reflections on editing writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Gitta Sereny and Brian Moore. She also provides an account of her own writing career, w ...

The 100-Mile Diet

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:20:33 PST

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The remarkable, amusing and inspiring adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment. When Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon learned that the average ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the people and places ...

Pride and Prejudice

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:20:03 PST

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Jane Austen's perfect comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. "Pride and Prejudice seems as vital today as ever," writes Anna Quindlen in her introduction to this Modern Lib ...

The Botany of Desire

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:19:28 PST

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In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant — thought this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all th ...

Consolation

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:18:55 PST

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Intriguing, perceptive, and irresistibly moving, Consolation is a haunting novel about the traces of history layered in our lives, and how time alters the contours of even the things we hold most certain. As he slips beneath the waves of Toronto’s harbour, Professor David Hollis follows in death the man he pursued in the last years of life. One hundred and fifty years earlier, J.G. Hallam, a ...

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:18:17 PST

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For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, grit ...

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:17:30 PST

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This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, ...

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:15:58 PST

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Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. "As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to ...

Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:15:25 PST

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“Tearing Down the Wall of Sound is a remarkable book about, among other things, fame, obsession, genius, money and madness. It paints the fullest picture yet of a man who, whether creating some of the greatest pop music of all time, or destroying the lives of those closest to him, seems to have existed in a continuous state of mental agitation. The Phil Spector story still awaits its ending. In t ...

Julie and Julia

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:14:38 PST

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With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job thats going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she in ...

Family Man

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:14:20 PST

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Calvin Trillin begins his wise and charming ruminations on family by stating the sum total of his child-rearing advice: "Try to get one that doesn't spit up. Otherwise, you're on your own." Suspicious of any child-rearing theories beyond "Your children are either the center of your life or they're not," Trillin has clearly reveled in the role of family man. Acknowledging the special perils to the ...

Fingersmith

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:13:50 PST

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Fingersmith is the third slice of engrossing lesbian Victoriana from Sarah Waters. Although lighter and more melodramatic in tone than its predecessor Affinity, this hypnotic suspense novel is awash with all manner of gloomy Dickensian leitmotifs: pickpockets; orphans; grim prisons; lunatic asylums; "laughing villains" and, of course, "stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad". Oliver Twist ( ...

The Night Watch

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:13:21 PST

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Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at ...

Apples

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:12:03 PST

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Winner of the 1999 IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award in the category of Literary Food Writing Frank Browning leads us on a beguiling journey through the primal myths of the world's most popular fruit, then explains that the first apples really appeared in Kazakhstan on the slopes of the Heavenly Mountains. He visits the apple germ-plasm repository in Geneva, New York, and describes the powerful ef ...

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:11:17 PST

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English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell ...

Sideways

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:10:55 PST

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Sideways is the story of two friends-Miles and Jack-going away together for the last time to steep themselves in everything that makes it good to be young and single: pinot, putting, and prowling bars. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Mil ...

Ball Four

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:10:32 PST

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Twentieth-anniversary edition of a baseball classic, with a new epilogue by Jim Bouton. When first published in 1970, Ball Four stunned the sports world. The commissioner, executives, and players were shocked. Sportswriters called author Jim Bouton a traitor and "social leper." Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force him to declare the book untrue. Fans, however, loved the book. And seri ...

Unaccustomed Earth

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:10:15 PST

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The Outcast

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:09:41 PST

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1957, and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community. A decade earlier, his father's homecoming casts a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert has recently been demobbed. He reverts easily to suburban life - cocktails at six th ...

The Nasty Bits

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:09:14 PST

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The good, the bad, and the ugly, served up Bourdain-style. Bestselling chef and No Reservations host Anthony Bourdain has never been one to pull punches. In The Nasty Bits, he serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, revealing what you didn't want to know about the more ung ...

No Reservations

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:08:50 PST

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An illustrated, behind-the-scenes travel journal of Anthony Bourdain’s global adventures. More than just a companion to the hugely popular show, No Reservations is Bourdain’s fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, mixing beautiful, never-before-seen photos and mementos with Bourdain’s outrageous com ...

Ella Enchanted

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:07:37 PST

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Every child longs for the day when he or she will be free from meddling parents and bossy grownups. For young Ella, the heroine of Gail Carson Levine's Newbury Honor-winning debut novel, this is more than a fanciful wish; it could be a matter of life or death. Placed under the spell of a blundering fairy, she has no choice but to go through life obeying each and every order--no matter what the co ...

My White Planet

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:07:15 PST

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Sixteen Acres

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:06:59 PST

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When we stand in downtown Manhattan in the future and look up and ask, 'Why?'-Why is it so strange, so rude, so striving, so right, so wrong?-we will have Sixteen Acres to give us the answers. Tracing the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site from graveyard to playground for high design, insurgent critic Philip Nobel strips away the hyperbole to reveal the secret life of the century's most ...

The Film Club

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:06:41 PST

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The Lovely Bones

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:06:11 PST

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The Jaguar Smile

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:05:26 PST

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This edition includes a new Preface by the author to the 1997 paperback edition. In this portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, "harboring no preconceptions of what he might find." What he discovered was for him overwhelming: ...

Eating for England

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:02:03 PST

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Written in a style similar to that of Nigel Slater's multi-award-winning food memoir 'Toast', this is a celebration of the glory, humour, eccentricities and embarrassments that are The British at Table. The British have a relationship with their food that is unlike that of any other country. Once something that was never discussed in polite company, it is now something with which the nation is o ...

Brick Lane.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:01:24 PST

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With its gritty Tower Hamlets setting, this sharply observed contemporary novel about the life of an Asian immigrant girl deals cogently with issues of love, cultural difference and the human spirit. The pre-publicity hype about Brick Lane was precisely the kind to set alarm bells ringing (we've heard it so often before), but, for once, the excitement is fully justified: Monica Ali's debut novel ...

Eat, Pray, Love

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:01:10 PST

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A celebrated writer’s irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead o ...

Alentejo Blues

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:00:31 PST

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Ghost

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:24:45 PST

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Einstein's Dreams

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:24:16 PST

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Now available: New signed, boxed edition! An imaginary re-creation of Einstein's discovery of the nature of time, this novel takes us through the young patent clerk's many dreams depicting compelling conceptions of time.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:23:39 PST

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"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside ...

Assassination Vacation

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:23:11 PST

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"Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other -- a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washin ...

Home

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:22:22 PST

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Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend. Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying ...

Gilead

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:21:52 PST

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2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction 2004 National Book Critics Circle Winner In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He ...

Take the Cannoli

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:21:13 PST

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Take the Cannoli is a moving and wickedly funny collection of personal stories stretching across the immense landscape of the American scene. Vowell tackles subjects such as identity, politics, religion, art, and history with a biting humor. She searches the streets of Hoboken for traces of the town's favorite son, Frank Sinatra. She goes under cover of heavy makeup in an investigation of goth cu ...

Bottle Rocket Hearts

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:20:27 PST

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The Enchantress of Florence

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:11:37 PST

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A tall, yellow-haired young European traveler calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty beli ...

Summer Will Show

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:10:27 PST

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The Commitment

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:09:54 PST

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The true story of a marriage (not really), a lovable and relentless mother, a six-year old who says his parents cannot get married (but wants to go to the reception), a partner who doesnt want to act like a straight person, and the author, who has written a hilarious and poignant memoir about making "The Commitment." There is no hotter issue than gay marriage in the culture-war debate, and D ...

Rock On

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:08:53 PST

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How do you land a sweet six-figure marketing gig at the hallowed record label known for having signed everyone from Led Zeppelin to Stone Temple Pilots? You start with a resume like Dan Kennedy's: • Dressed up as a member of Kiss every Halloween • Memorized Led Zeppelin IV at age ten • Fronted a lip-sync band in junior high • Worked as a college DJ while he was a college drop-out In his ou ...

Dry Store Room No. 1

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:08:20 PST

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'Dry Store Room No. 1' is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination. Behind the public facade of any great museum there lies a secret domain: one of unseen galleries, locked doors, priceless specimens and hidden lives.Through the stories of the ...

Farewell, My Subaru

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:07:09 PST

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Advance praise for Farewell, My Subaru “Fine is Bryson Funny.” ——Santa Cruz Sentinel “Fine is an amiable and self-deprecating storyteller in the mold of Douglas Adams. If you're a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style humor -- and also looking to find out how to raise your own livestock to feed your ice-cream fetish -- Farewell may prove a vital tool.” —— The Washington Post ...

Justine

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:06:30 PST

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The time is the eve of the Second World War. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are still dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed and purblind characters in this mesmerizing first novel of the Alexandria Quartet, the pursuit of knowledge leads to no library, only to the bedrooms in which each seeks to know - and posse ...

The Gargoyle

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:06:08 PST

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An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time. On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizop ...

The Remains of the Day

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:58:44 PST

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A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book.

The Day of the Triffids

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:57:47 PST

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Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:57:13 PST

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Award-winning food writer Fuchsia Dunlop went to live in China as a student in 1994, and from the very beginning she vowed to eat everything she was offered, no matter how alien and bizarre it seemed. In this extraordinary memoir, Fuchsia recalls her evolving relationship with China and its food, from her first rapturous encounter with the delicious cuisine of Sichuan Province to brushes with cor ...

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:56:50 PST

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:56:19 PST

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From the icy blast of reveille through the sweet release of sleep, Ivan Denisovich endures. A common carpenter, he is one of millions viciously imprisoned for countless years on baseless charges, sentenced to the waking nightmares of the Soviet work camps in Siberia. Even in the face of degrading hatred, where life is reduced to a bowl of gruel and a rare cigarette, hope and dignity prevail. This ...

Waterland

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:55:42 PST

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Tom Crick, a history teacher in the Fenlands, is driven by a marital crisis and the provocation of one of his pupils, to forsake his teaching and relate the story of his family who have lived in the Fens since the 18th century. Graham Swift won the 1996 Booker Prize for Fiction for "Last Orders".

The Virgin Suicides

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:55:28 PST

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This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter’s spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates “the year of the suicides.”

Exit Music

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:54:28 PST

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It's late autumn in Edinburgh and late autumn in the career of Detective Inspector John Rebus. As he tries to tie up some loose ends before retirement, a murder case intrudes. A dissident Russian poet has been found dead in what looks like a mugging gone wrong. By apparent coincidence, a high-level delegation of Russian businessmen is in town - and everyone is determined that the case should be c ...

Infidel

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:53:59 PST

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In this profoundly affecting memoir from the internationally renowned author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West.One of today's most admired and controversial political figure ...

The Time Traveler's Wife

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:53:29 PST

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This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor con ...

Lush Life

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:52:15 PST

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So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, ...

The Wapshot Chronicle

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:51:32 PST

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When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist. Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential ...

Foreign Affairs

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:51:06 PST

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Not Quite What I Was Planning

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:50:49 PST

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Deceptively simple and suspiciously addictive, "Not Quite What I Was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure" is a thousand little glimpses at humanity - six words at a time. In 2006, "SMITH" Magazine decided to give people the opportunity to answer a Hemingway inspired challenge: What would a six-word memoir look like? Within weeks, submissions were coming in by the th ...

Sense and Sensibility

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:50:25 PST

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Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willougby, she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their paral ...

An American Childhood

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:49:50 PST

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A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

Tipping the Velvet

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:48:54 PST

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The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't believe the story told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch--for 18 years I never ...

Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:48:15 PST

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A glorious new voice on Africa, Robyn Scott's adventures growing up in Botswana in a loving but eccentric family will be one of the season's most talked-about memoirs Robyn Scott's story of moving at the age of seven to Botswana with her adventure-seeking parents is described by Alexander McCall Smith as "beautifully written" and "acutely observed." It is that and more. Twenty Chickens for a ...

Affinity

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:47:50 PST

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Set in and around the women's prison at Milbank in the 1870's , AFFINITY is an eerie and utterly compelling ghost story, a complex and intriguing literary mystery and a poignant love story with an unexpected twist in the tale. Following the death of her father, Margaret Prior has decided to pursue some 'good work' with the lady criminals of one of London's most notorious gaols. Surrounded by pris ...

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:47:27 PST

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A delightful true story of food, Paris, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream In 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six-year-old American living and working in London, returned from vacation to find that her corporate job had been eliminated. Ignoring her mother's advice that she get another job immediately or never get hired anywhere ever again, Flinn instead cleared out her savings and moved ...

Netherland

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:47:02 PST

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In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his ...

Home Game

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:44:06 PST

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When he became a father, Michael Lewis found himself expected to feel things that he didn t feel, and to do things that he couldn t see the point of doing. At first this made him feel guilty, until he realized that all around him fathers were pretending to do one thing, to feel one way, when in fact they felt and did all sorts of things, then engaged in what amounted to an extended cover-up. Lewi ...

The Consequences of Love

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:39:43 PST

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Under the hot sun, the Jeddah streets resemble a scene from an old black-and-white movie: the women dressed like long, dark shadows and the men in their light cotton tunics. Naser's friends have all left town for cooler climes but he can't get away: he's an outsider in Saudi and he needs to hold down his job at the local carwash. During his time off, he sits beneath his favourite palm tree, writi ...