Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter


Mario Vargas Llosa - 1977
    His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is masterfully done, hilarious, mischievous, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

Complete Poems


Edith Södergran - 1923
    Today she is regarded as Finland's greatest modern poet. Her poems - written in Swedish - are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud's, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular.Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith Edith Södergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St. Petersburg. Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German. The driving force of Edith Södergran's mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908. For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland. Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923.Edith Edith Södergran saw herself as an inspired free spirit of a new order, a disciple on her own terms of Nietzsche, then of the nature mystic Rudolf Steiner, and finally of Christ. But her voice is subtle and wholly original. It transcends the limits imposed by her illness to make lyrical statements about the violence and darkness of the modern world - imagistic poems that are alarming in the surreal beauty of their fragmentary diction. David McDuff's edition is the first complete translation into English of Edith Edith Södergran's Swedish poetry. His versions adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original. In his introductory essay David McDuff gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of Edith Edith Södergran's life and work.

Living to Tell the Tale


Gabriel García Márquez - 2002
    Living to Tell the Tale spans Marquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the beginning of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It is a tale of people, places and events as they occur to him: family, work, politics, books and music, his beloved Colombia, parts of his history until now undisclosed and incidents that would later appear, transmuted and transposed in his fiction. A vivid, powerful, beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Marquez as a writer and as a man.

Chronicles: Volume One


Bob Dylan - 2004
    But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else." So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Istanbul: Memories and the City


Orhan Pamuk - 2003
    Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or–hüzün–that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters–both Turkish and foreign–who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

The Immoralist


André Gide - 1902
    The story's protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple's honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. An awakening for him both sexually and morally, Michel discovers a new freedom in seeking to live according to his own desires. But, as he also discovers, freedom can be a burden. A frank defense of homosexuality and a challenge to prevailing ethical concepts, The Immoralist is a literary landmark, marked by Gide's masterful, pure, simple style.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Popular Music from Vittula


Mikael Niemi - 2000
    The story unfolds in sweltering wood saunas, amidst chain thrashings and gang warfare, learning to play the guitar in the garage, over a traditional wedding meal, on the way to China, during drinking competitions, while learning secret languages, playing ice hockey surrounded by snow drifts, outsmarting mice, discovering girls, staging a first rock concert, peeing in the snow, skiing under a sparkling midnight sky. In the manner of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, Mikael Niemi tells a story of a rural Sweden at once foreign and familiar, as a magical childhood slowly fades with the seasons into adult reality.

Dark Matter


Aase Berg - 1999
    Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson, Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations. "Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark." --China Mieville; "Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries....When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts." --Asa Beckman

Flights


Olga Tokarczuk - 2007
    Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.Here I am --World in your head --Your head in the world --Syndrome --Cabinet of curiosities --Seeing is knowing --Seven years of trips --Guidance from Cioran --Kunicki: water (I) --Benedictus, quivenit

Anabasis


Saint-John Perse - 1924
    S. Eliot. In this definitive edition, French and English texts appear on facing pages. Preface by T. S. Eliot.

War's Unwomanly Face


Svetlana Alexievich - 1983
    More than 200 women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941. More than 500,000 Soviet women participated on a par with men in the Second World War, the most terrible war of the 20th century. Women not only rescued and bandaged the wounded but also fired a sniper's rifle, blew up bridges, went reconnoitering and killed... They killed the enemy who, with unprecedented cruelty, had attacked their land, their homes and their children. Soviet writer of Belarussia, Svetlana Alexiyevich spent four years working on the book, visiting over 100 cities and towns, settlements and villages and recording the stories and reminiscences of women war veterans. The Soviet press called the book"a vivid reporting of events long past, which affected the destiny of the nation as a whole." The most important thing about the book is not so much the front-line episodes as women's heart-rending experiences in the war. Through their testimony the past makes an impassioned appeal to the present, denouncing yesterday's and today's fascism...

Riders in the Chariot


Patrick White - 1961
    An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.

Things My Son Needs to Know About the World


Fredrik Backman - 2012
    Alternating between humorous side notes and longer essays offering his son advice as he grows up and ventures out into the world, Backman relays the big and small lessons in life, including:-How to find the team you belong to -Why airports explain everything about religion and war -The reason starting a band is crucial to cultivating and keeping friendships -How to beat Monkey Island 3 -Why, sometimes, a dad might hold onto his son's hand just a little too tight.The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove shares an irresistible and moving collection of heartfelt, fictional, humorous essays about fatherhood, providing his newborn son with the perspective and tools he'll need to make his way in the world.

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1982
    They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist


Dario Fo - 1970
    It has since been performed all over the world and is widely recognised as a classic of modern drama. A sharp and hilarious satire on political corruption, it concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who, in 1969, 'fell' to his death from a police headquarters window.This version of the play was premiered in London in 2003.Commentary and notes by Joseph Farrell.Content: Dario Fo Plot Commentary Further reading Accidental death of an anarchist NotesQuestions for further study.