Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

A timely and profound anthology from the national bestselling author of Black, White and Jewish, Representing a stunning range of essayists and novelists, both men and women, this groundbreaking anthology boldly confronts the complications, possibilities, uncertainties, and joys of being a man in the 21st century.

"In this updated collection of literary essays, interviews, prefaces, personal notes, and occasional writings, including poignant and illuminating appreciations of other poets and novelists and of New York City life, Paul Auster offers not only samplings but insights into the first fifty years of his brilliant writing career. Through critical readings of literary greats such as Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett and Kafka, as well as less well-appreciated poets from George Oppen to Laura Riding, Auster celebrates the achievements of his fellow authors while probing the constraints of language and considering the relationships between writers and the works they create. In addition, through an offering of highly personal notes, essays, and interviews dating back to his student days at Columbia in the 1960s, Auster turns the light on himself, exposing readers to the myriad of topics and inspirations that have shaped his work. From sitting in the bleachers at a Mets game to discussing the Dada art movement, from witnessing the death-defying performances of high-wire artist Philippe Petit to reflecting on the events of September 11th, Auster ushers readers into his thinking across fifty years and through a wide-reaching literary world. Sprawling in scope and subject, local in outlook, Talking to Strangers paints a vivid and intimate portrait of the man behind the page who has long captivated readers around the world"

French Dressing looks at the ancien régime's scenarios of libertine seduction--unsafe sex and its consequences for women's lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. French Dressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display--French undressing.

In mid-century London, aspiring writer Fleur becomes secretary to a group of egotists who are writing their memoirs in advance and uncovers material enough for any novelist, but is perplexed by the familiarity of their lives.

The most enduring tales of fantasy are appreciated by readers of all ages, generation after generation. This trilogy of novellas by critically acclaimed author Mark Helprin will stand that test by time. The heroes of his imagined kingdom pit the power of their love and devotion against dark forces of greed and suppression. His themes resonate for readers of contemporary fantasy as well as those who cherish classic legends and tales. This Calla Edition presents Helprin's novellas -- Swan Lake , A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows -- in a single volume, as he had always intended. Award-winning illustrator Chris Van Allsburg's 42 full-color plates complement Helprin's prose with sensitively wrought, finely nuanced images -- sometimes grand, sometimes fanciful, always evocative. This signed, numbered edition, limited to 300 copies, includes a deluxe slipcase.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award Tenth Anniversary Edition, with a new introduction and three extra stories. It's a rainy day when the woman approaches Joe. He is a private detective and she is looking for someone, as these things often go. Her quarry is the obscure author of a series of pulp novels featuring one Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. Joe's quest will take him across the world in search of the writer. And every step of the way - from the backwaters of Laos to Paris and London - he is plagued, by assailants he cannot name, by questions he cannot hope to answer and by ghostly entities he cannot seem to shake. Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he will find in New York and atop a quiet hill above Kabul, nor for the choice he will have to make there...

"Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page beautiful homage to New York City. Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Commodity,” “Downtown,” “Subway,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage."--

This updated Agatha Christie compendium offers synopses of all Christie's novels, plays and short stories, without revealing whodunit. It also features: a portrait of Agatha Christie by Julian Symons; Christie's own comments on her work; articles on themes in her work such as a guide to Agatha's toxic agents, gossip and intuition as detective tools and the subtleties of the all-encompassing dress codes that governed her characters; articles on films, plus an updated filmography and new-video listing; a behind-the-scenes look at "Agatha" the movie; a mystery map showing locations of stories; a Christie crossword; and coverage of her romantic writing under the pen name Mary Westmacott.--From publisher description.

The Strand's 42nd issue features short stories by Joseph Finder, Tennessee Williams, Michael Stanley and an interview with Lisa Unger. The Strand also has the latest book reviews of the latest mystery novels and audiobooks.

When Quentin Tarantino was eight years old, and all the regular kids were lining up to see the latest from Disney, Tarantino's mother took him to see Carnal Knowledge. Sound about right? A high-school dropout who never attended film school, Tarantino got all the education he needed while working the register at Los Angeles's fabled Video Archives. His enthusiasms — for pop culture (foreign and domestic), eye-popping aesthetics, and genre films — would become notorious and infectious. The outrageous success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction essentially killed off Tarantino the man, and gave birth to Tarantino the myth. Here, from legendary novelist and historian Jerome Charyn, is a portrait of both the man AND the myth — and the mind behind them both. More than a biography, more than a critical study, Raised by Wolves is a feisty and astute reckoning with Tarantino en toto.

Hermione Lee's critical 'estimation' of Bowen's work finds the author's witty, stylish treatment of manners and emotions to have an austere basis in her critique of the English middle classes. Underlying the struggles of will between individuals in her novels and stories is a diagnosis of the dislocation and dispossessin of a whole society. Her preccupation with betrayal and loss, and her interest in conflict (between innocence and experience, egotism and social pressures, memory and the present) are fully considered. In estimating the value of the whole range of her work, the book pays particular attention to the Anglo-Irish context, to Elizabeth Bowen's extraordinary evocation of war-time London, to her penetration into the minds of children and adolescents, and to her special predilection for the macabre and the supernatural. It also considers her achievement as a critic and a historian.

Herman Wouk has ranged in his novels from the mighty narrative of The Caine Mutiny and the warm, intimate humor of Marjorie Morningstar to the global panorama of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. All these powers merge in this major new work of nonfiction, The Will to Live On, an illuminating account of the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, set against a swiftly reviewed background of history, tradition, and sacred literature. Forty years ago, in his modern classic This Is My God, Herman Wouk stated the case for his religious beliefs and conduct. His aim in that work and in The Will to Live On has been to break through the crust of prejudice, to reawaken clearheaded thought about the magnificent Jewish patrimony, and to convey a message of hope for Jewish survival. Although the Torah and the Talmud are timeless, the twentieth century has brought earthquake shocks to the Jews: the apocalyptic experience of the Holocaust, the reborn Jewish state, the precarious American diaspora, and deepening religious schisms. After a lifetime of study, Herman Wouk examines the changes affecting the Jewish world, especially the troubled wonder of Israel, and the remarkable, though dwindling, American Jewry. The book is peppered with wonderful stories of the author's encounters with such luminaries as Ben Gurion, Isidor Rabi, Yitzhak Rabin, Saul Bellow, and Richard Feynan. Learned in general culture, warmly tolerant of other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own faith with a passion that gives the book its fire and does so in the clear, engaging style tha-as in all Wouk's fiction -- makes the reader want to know what the next page will bring.

Harlan Ellison is probably best known as a script writer for sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV series such as the original Outer Limits, The Hunger, Logan's Run, and Babylon Five. But his range is much broader than that, encompassing stories, novels, essays, reviews, reminiscences, plays, even fake autobiographies. Essential Ellison includes contains 74 unabridged works, including such classics as "A Boy and His Dog," "Xenogenesis," and "Mefisto in Onyx." Includes black-and-white photos.

Harlan Ellison and his editor, Jason Davis, have painstakingly assembled the whole story of Vic and Blood and Spike from the author’s files, using revised-and-expanded versions of the novella and short stories, interstitial material developed for Richard Corben’s graphic adaptation, and—for the first time—never-before-published material from the aborted 1977 NBC television series Blood’s a Rover to tell the complete story of A Boy and His Dog, and a Girl who is tougher than the other two combined.

Harlan Ellison introduced you to Vic and Blood in 1969's Nebula Award-winning novella, "A Boy and His Dog." You thrilled to their on-screen adventures in the 1975 Hugo Award-winning feature film adaptation billed as "a kinky tale of survival." 1977 and 1980 brought brief reunions in "Eggsucker" and "Run, Spot, Run," and the promise of another story-and a third solo, Spike, to make the Dystopian Duo a Tribulation Trio-but only audiobooks and comics followed, revisiting the same tales.Now, nearly fifty years after they first set off across the blasted wasteland, Vic and Blood are back.Harlan Ellison and his editor, Jason Davis, have painstakingly assembled the whole story of Vic and Blood and Spike from the author's files, using revised-and-expanded versions of the novella and short stories, interstitial material developed for Richard Corben's graphic adaptation, and-for the first time-never-before-published material from the aborted 1977 NBC television series Blood's a Rover to tell the complete story of A Boy and His Dog, and a Girl who is tougher than the other two combined.And let's not forget...the wit and wisdom of Blood.

'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

George R. R. Martin, from his Introduction to Warriors: "People have been telling stories about warriors for as long as they have been telling stories. Since Homer first sang the wrath of Achilles and the ancient Sumerians set down their tales of Gilgamesh, warriors, soldiers, and fighters have fascinated us; they are a part of every culture, every literary tradition, every genre. All Quiet on the Western Front , From Here to Eternity , and The Red Badge of Courage have become part of our literary canon, taught in classrooms all around the country and the world. "Our contributors make up an all-star lineup of award-winning and bestselling writers, representing a dozen different publishers and as many genres. We asked each of them for the same thing---a story about a warrior. Some chose to write in the genre they're best known for. Some decided to try something different. You will find warriors of every shape, size, and color in these pages, warriors from every epoch of human history, from yesterday and today and tomorrow, and from worlds that never were. Some of the stories will make you sad, some will make you laugh, and many will keep you on the edge of your seat." Every story in this volume appears here for the first time. Included are: a long novella from the world of his Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, a new tale of "Lord John" by Diana Gabaldon, and an epic of humanity at bay by David Weber. Also present are original tales by David Ball, Peter S. Beagle, Lawrence Block, Gardner Dozois, Joe Haldeman, Robin Hobb, Cecelia Holland, Joe R. Lansdale, David Morrell, Naomi Novik, James Rollins, Steven Saylor, Robert Silverberg, S. M. Stirling, Carrie Vaughn, Howard Waldrop, and Tad Williams. Many of these writers are bestsellers. All of them are storytellers of the highest quality. Together they make a volume of unforgettable reading.

The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is a classic example of a conspiracy of silence, a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth. But the denial of social realities -- whether incest, alcoholism, corruption, or even genocide -- is no fairy tale. In this book, the author sheds new light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial -- the keeping of "open secrets." The author shows that conspiracies of silence exist at every level of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics. Drawing on examples from newspapers and comedy shows to novels, children's stories, and film, the book travels back and forth across different levels of social life, and from everyday moments to large-scale historical events. At its core, the book helps us understand why we ignore truths that are known to all of us. The author shows how such conspiracies evolve, illuminating the social pressures that cause people to deny what is right before their eyes. We see how each conspirator's denial is symbiotically complemented by the others, and we learn that silence is usually more intense when there are more people conspiring -- and especially when there are significant power differences among them. He concludes by showing that the longer we ignore "elephants," the larger they loom in our minds, as each avoidance triggers an even greater spiral of denial. Social life in families, organizations, communities and even entire nations is full of situations where the emperor has no clothes. The book illuminates the dynamics behind these situations, revealing why we ignore obvious and alarming realities.

"Vivid, lyrical details enrich this narrative poem that celebrates time in the outdoors." -- The Seattle Times Independent Publisher Book Award Winner Most outdoor enthusiasts understand the phrase "turn around time" as that point in an adventure when you must cease heading out in order to have enough time to safely return to camp or home--regardless of whether you have reached your destination. For award-winning novelist David Guterson, it is also a metaphor for where we find ourselves in the middle of our lives, and his new narrative poem explores this idea through a lyrical journey along a trail, much like those in Washington's mountain ranges he hiked while growing up. Even outdoor-lovers who are not normally readers of poetry will relate to the physicality of hiking represented here, from endless trail switchbacks to foot and ankle pains. There is a fast-moving, propulsive quality to David's writing, with lush language, vivid imagery, and pacing that resonates as a journey on foot. His words are brought further to life by the delicate yet mythical illustrations by award-winning artist Justin Gibbens.