"A deeply felt celebration of a classic novel--and a reflection on the ways our favorite books can shape and heal us"--

Robert A. Heinlein began publishing in the 1940s at the dawn of the Golden Age of science fiction, and today he is considered one of the genre's 'big three' alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. His short stories were instrumental in developing its structure and rhetoric, while novels such as Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers demonstrated that such writing could be a vehicle for political argument. Heinlein's influence remains strong, but his legacy is fiercely contested. His vision of the future was sometimes radical, sometimes deeply conservative, and arguments have flared up recently about which faction has the most significant claim on his ideas. In this major critical study, Hugo Award-winner Farah Mendlesohn carries out a close reading of Heinlein's work, including unpublished stories, essays, and speeches. It sets out not to interpret a single book, but to think through the arguments Heinlein made over a lifetime about the nature of science fiction, about American politics, and about himself.

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. 'Astounding' Sebastian Barry 'A masterpiece' Ayad Akhtar 'This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise' Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus - a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years - resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

In the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed - the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature? The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who sees him as complicit in genocide, Draxler fixates on bad news. He shouts at the television. He carries his own tin of paint to cover up graffiti. The staffroom at the primary school of which he is headmaster has become a battlefield of inflamed opinion he does nothing to quiet. His wife, Charmian, is a beacon of calm, but even she isn't sure she can save Ferdie from himself. 'Don't worry about me,' he tells her. 'I don't have what it takes to go mad.' -- Source other than Library of Congress.

"In this literary diary, Krasznahorkai chronicles his attempts to fathom the life of Herman Melville, which is also the source of inspiration for his forthcoming novella Spadework for a Palace. Retracing Melville's steps, Krasznahorkai becomes engrossed in a web of chance encounters and coincidences that stretch from Manhattan to Nantucket, to London and to Berlin. Over the course of his wanderings, Krasznahorkai finds himself increasingly alienated from his present-day surroundings, drawn instead to the company of ghosts: the novelist Malcolm Lowry when he was down-and-out, the visionary architect Lebbeus Woods and of course - Melville himself. Ornan Rotem's photographic essay follows Krasznahorkai on his forays, both in space and time, creating a subtle portrait of a creative mind at work and the places he encounters."--Publisher.

"In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture's Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a "Greek DNA" in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the "aesthetics of victimhood" in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgard. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence--a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist's personal essays, including his "critic's manifesto" and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics."--

From 1955 to 1987, the year of his suicide, Primo Levi wrote a series of articles that appeared in newspapers and journals. This volume contains a selection of these writings which shows at once the range of his interests and the skill, thoughtfulness and sensitivity he brought to his subjects, whether writing from the point of view of an eye-witness of the holocaust, of an author of novels and short stories, or of a chemist. The first part of this collection brings together Levi's articles about the holocaust and the concentration camp. In With Anne Frank history spoke, Levi rails intelligently and eloquently against what he saw as the yearly assault on the veracity and moral weight of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. The second part contains a representative selection of Levi's essays on his own status as a writer and his profession of Chemist, and the many prefaces he wrote to others' histories and novels.

If you like the fiction of Henry James, the psychology of his brother William, and have a taste for Gothic mysteries you will enjoy The Dark Sister . The novel is a curious mixture of the Victorian repressiveness about sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor. With a new afterword

"The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost. The novel begins with Professor Kuno Adler, who is Jewish and fled Vienna after the Anschluss (the events of March 1938 when Hitler's troops marched into Austria). He is returning from New York to try and take up his old life as a research scientist. We realise through his confrontation with officialdom and with the changed fabric of the city (the lime trees are there no longer, it is hard to know who behaved well during the war and who was a Nazi sympathiser) that a refugee who goes back has a very difficult time. Next we are introduced to a wealthy Greek named Kanakis..."--Publisher description.

Taking its name from Bach's Goldberg Variations, as well as inspiration from its formal structure, this work hybridizes breezy philosophical meditation and fragment-based novel. Most of the diffused story takes place in nineteenth-century England, where a Jewish writer by the name of Goldberg is commissioned by an incessantly thoughtful insomniac to create a story each day to be told that night, hopefully thus assuaging the man's sleeplessness.