Эдит Перлман0.0 Tenderly, observantly, incisively, Edith Pearlman captures life on the page like few other writers. She is a master of the short story, and this is a spectacular collection.
Дана Спиотта0.0 "Stone Arabia" is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.
In the sibling relationship, there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other, says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik s most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family s first defense against the world s fragility. Friends die, their mother s memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunt Denise. When her daughter Ada decides to make a film about Nik, everyone s vulnerabilities seem to escalate."
Alan Hollinghurst4.4 Tout commence en 1913, dans le jardin de la maison de campagne des Sawle dans le Middlesex. Etudiant à Cambridge, le timide George Sawle a invité aux Deux Arpents un de ses camarades, l'aristocratique et énigmatique Cecil Valance. Ces jours dans la maison familiale et le poème qu'ils inspirent à Cecil vont changer leur destin. Et plus encore celui de Daphné, la sœur de George. En ce printemps où rien n'annonce les proches bouleversements de l'Histoire, un pacte se noue secrètement entre les trois jeunes gens, point de départ d'une fresque saisissante à travers le XXe siècle, par l'un des plus grands romanciers anglais contemporains.
Джеффри Евгенидис4.0 "А порою очень грустны" - под таким названием впервые по-русски выходит долгожданный роман известного американского прозаика Джеффри Евгенидиса The Marriage Plot (2011 г.).
Первый шумный успех пришел к писателю после публикации бестселлеров "Девственницы-самоубийцы" (1993 г.) - книга экранизирована Софией Коппола (1999 г.), и "Средний пол" (Пулитцеровская премия, 2003 г.).
Роман "А порою очень грустны" - повествование, насквозь проникнутое любовью, - рассказывает о выпускниках университета Брауна начала восьмидесятых, где в те же годы учился сам автор. Главные герои книги изучают теорию литературы: это и влюбленная в викторианскую эпоху Мадлен, которая пишет диплом по теме "Матримониальный сюжет", и ее друзья - Леонард и Митчелл, - их кумиры Эко, Деррида, Хемингуэй. Мадлен, с ее романтическими исканиями, предстоит быстро повзрослеть, пройдя через нелегкие испытания, а ее друзьям - один из них станет мужем Мадлен, - почувствовать, какая глубокая социальная пропасть их разделяет.
Теджу Коул3.7 По улицам Манхэттена бродит молодой нигерийский врач-психиатр по имени Джулиус, размышляя о своих отношениях, недавнем разрыве с подругой, о своем настоящем и прошлом. Он встречает людей разных культур и классов, которые помогут ему разобраться в том путешествии, которое приведет его в Брюссель, в Нигерию его юности и в самые непознаваемые грани его собственной души.
Единственный роман фотографа, эссеиста и куратора Теджу Коула был восторженно принят критикой, закономерно сравнивавшей этот текст с прозой Зебальда. Однако в том неприметном зазоре между фактом и выдумкой, который возникает между рассказчиком и автором, таится отнюдь незебальдовский сюжетный поворот, заставляющий читателя по-новому взглянуть на обманчивую слабость голосов меньшинства.
Майя Ясанофф0.0 On November 25, 1783, the last British troops pulled out of New York City, bringing the American Revolution to an end. Patriots celebrated their departure and the confirmation of U.S. independence. But for tens of thousands of American loyalists, the British evacuation spelled worry, not jubilation. What would happen to them in the new United States? Would they and their families be safe? Facing grave doubts about their futures, some sixty thousand loyalists—one in forty members of the American population—decided to leave their homes and become refugees elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica, and for the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning, and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world.
A groundbreaking history of the revolutionary era, Liberty’s Exiles tells the story of this remarkable global diaspora. Through painstaking archival research and vivid storytelling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff re-creates the journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. She tells of refugees like Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who spent nearly thirty years as a migrant, searching for a home in Britain, Jamaica, and Canada. And of David George, a black preacher born into slavery, who found freedom and faith in the British Empire, and eventually led his followers to seek a new Jerusalem in Sierra Leone. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant resettled his people under British protection in Ontario, while the adventurer William Augustus Bowles tried to shape a loyalist Creek state in Florida. For all these people and more, it was the British Empire—not the United States—that held the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet as they dispersed across the empire, the loyalists also carried things from their former homes, revealing an enduring American influence on the wider British world.
Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, Liberty’s Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysis—a book that explores an unknown dimension of America’s founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself.
Джон Джеремия Салливан4.0 In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us—with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that’s all his own—how we really (no, really) live now...
Gradually, a unifying narrative emerges, a story about this country that we’ve never heard told this way. It’s like a fun-house hall-of-mirrors tour: Sullivan shows us who we are in ways we’ve never imagined to be true. Of course we don’t know whether to laugh or cry when faced with this reflection—it’s our inevitable sob-guffaws that attest to the power of Sullivan’s work.
Адам Хохшильд5.0 World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.
Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.” Can we ever avoid repeating history?
James Gleick4.2 From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory.
Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.
10 BEST BOOKS • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • 2011
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post • The New Yorker • Chicago Tribune • The Economist • Nancy Pearl, NPR • Bloomberg.com • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed historian Amanda Foreman follows the phenomenal success of her New York Times bestseller Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire with her long-awaited second work of nonfiction: the fascinating story of the American Civil War and the major role played by Britain and its citizens in that epic struggle.
Even before the first rumblings of secession shook the halls of Congress, British involvement in the coming schism was inevitable. Britain was dependent on the South for cotton, and in turn the Confederacy relied almost exclusively on Britain for guns, bullets, and ships. The Union sought to block any diplomacy between the two and consistently teetered on the brink of war with Britain. For four years the complex web of relationships between the countries led to defeats and victories both minute and history-making. In A World on Fire, Amanda Foreman examines the fraught relations from multiple angles while she introduces characters both humble and grand, bringing them to vivid life over the course of her sweeping and brilliant narrative.
Between 1861 and 1865, thousands of British citizens volunteered for service on both sides of the Civil War. From the first cannon blasts on Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they served as officers and infantrymen, sailors and nurses, blockade runners and spies. Through personal letters, diaries, and journals, Foreman has woven together their experiences to form a panoramic yet intimate view of the war on the front lines, in the prison camps, and in the great cities of both the Union and the Confederacy. Through the eyes of these brave volunteers we see the details of the struggle for life and the great and powerful forces that threatened to demolish a nation.
In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, Foreman reveals the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America. A World on Fire is a complex and groundbreaking work that will surely cement Amanda Foreman’s position as one of the most influential historians of our time.
