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Arcade
This documentation of the work surrounding the regeneration of the Gorbals area in Glasgow looks at the issues surrounding urban public art, raising questions about its place and value in the 21st century.
On Poets and Others
The Nobel Prize–winning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, and Henri Michaux. Paz writes, “I believe that a writer’s attitude to language should be that of a lover: fidelity and, at the same time, a lack of respect for the beloved object. Veneration and transgression.” When this original thinker meets these writers, each essay is an adventure of the mind.
I'll Let You Go
Twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tull” Trotter lives with his grandfather on a vast Bel-Air parkland estate and spends most of his time with young cousins Lucy, “the girl detective,” and Edward, a prodigy who was born disfigured by the effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation by Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull—and the Trotter family—forever. I’ll Let You Go, the third novel of Bruce Wagner, is a Angelino Bleak House that follows a young boy as he searches for his lost father, his beautiful, drug-addicted mother, Katrina, who is still coming down from the disappearance of her husband, and their family’s connection to a street orphan and a homeless schizophrenic. A masterful, modern-day family saga about the valleys between wealth and poverty and reality and fantasy.
Late Arcade
A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal. Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”—oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays— which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention. Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum).
Destiny
Christopher Burton, the protagonist of this masterful novel, is one of Britain’s foremost foreign correspondents, the acknowledged world expert on Italian affairs. Three months after returning to London with his Italian wife for an extended stay, Burton receives a phone call at the reception desk of his hotel informing him that his teenage son has committed suicide. Why, upon receiving this terrible news, does he immediately conclude that his marriage of almost thirty years is over? And why is grief so slow in coming? Burton feels his pious, mercurial wife may have given him his life in Italy—even his prestigious career—but she has also made it impossible. Was their troubled son somehow the victim of their long, explosive love-hate relationship? Looking back, Burton sees in his life a web of contradictions, unanswered questions, and confusions. And yet, it has been his destiny. Intensely dramatic, dark, and yet often hilariously funny, Destiny is a seamless, beautifully plotted story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity. Parks offers us a searing account of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis.
I'm Losing You
An epic novel that brings together a motley crew of characters, including porn stars in love, celebrity chore-whores, plotting dermatologists, masseurs, and shrinks, among many others cast in the debauchery of Hollywood. I’m Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences. A masterfully told story of decadence that examines the psychological complexities of Hollywood reality and fantasy, soaring far beyond the reaches of Robert Stone's Children of Light and Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust.
The File on H.
In the mid-1930s, two Irish Americans travel to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as The Iliad and The Odyssey without ever putting pen to paper. The answer, they believe, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining habitat of the oral epic. But immediately upon their arrival, the scholars’ seemingly arcane research excites suspicion and puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under surveillance and are dogged by gossip and intrigue. It isn’t until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question.
The Essay
Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary. There aren’t many options if your last name is Hic...
The Half Brother
At the end of World War II, twenty-year-old Vera is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that rape is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a talented boxer. Vera’s young son, Barnum, forms a special but bizarre relationship with his half brother, fraught with rivalry and dependence as well as love. “I should have been your father,” Fred tells Barnum, “instead of the fool who says he is.” It is Barnum, who is now a screenwriter with a fondness for lies and alcohol, who narrates his family’s saga. As he shares his family’s history, he chronicles generations of independent women and absent and flawed men whom he calls the Night Men. Among them is his father, Arnold, who bequeaths to Barnum his circus name, his excessively small stature, and a con man’s belief in the power of illusion. Filled with a galaxy of finely etched characters, this prize-winning novel is a tour de force and a literary masterpiece richly deserving of the accolades it has received.
Scrolling Forward
What's up, doc? Information scientist David M. Levy wants us to look at the documents that fill our lives, and his book Scrolling Forward is a thoughtful reflection on their near-omnipresence. Levy has the perfect r+¬sum+¬ for this job--after getting his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, he took off for England to pursue the study of calligraphy and bookbinding. His love of books shows in his writing, which is rich with references and anecdotes from Walt Whitman to Woody Allen.Drawing on examples as disparate as grocery store receipts, greeting cards, identity papers, and (of course) e-mail, Levy finds the common threads binding them together and explores how and why we use them in daily life. He looks at digitization closely, considering how speed, ease of editing, and potentially perfect copying changes our traditional considerations of documentation. Though he insists that he's looking at the present, not speculating about the future, it's hard to see how to avoid looking ahead after reading Scrolling Forward. --Rob Lightner
