The Translator


John Crowley - 2002
    A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer's words -- especially forbidden ones -- could be powerful enough to change the course of history.

In His Own Write


John Lennon - 1964
    Anyway they didn't get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn't pass—much to my Aunties supplies. As a member of the most publified Beatles my and (P, G, and R's) records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I'm conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I've ever ready. God help and breed you all.

The Zürau Aphorisms


Franz Kafka - 1931
    Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These “aphorisms” appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings–some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka’s death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka’s opus–a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.

Ali and Nino


Kurban Said - 1937
    Zhivago and Romeo and Juliet.  Its mysterious author was recently the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker, which has inspired a forthcoming biography. Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.It is the eve of World War I in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city on the edge of the Caspian Sea, poised precariously between east and west.  Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a Muslim schoolboy from a proud, aristocratic family, has fallen in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Nino Kipiani, a Christian girl with distinctly European sensibilities.   To be together they must overcome blood feud and scandal, attempt a daring horseback rescue, and travel from the bustling street of oil-boom Baku, through starkly beautiful deserts and remote mountain villages, to the opulent palace of Ali's uncle in neighboring Persia.  Ultimately the lovers are drawn back to Baku, but when war threatens their future, Ali is forced to choose between his loyalty to the beliefs of his Asian ancestors and his profound devotion to Nino.  Combining the exotic fascination of a tale told by Scheherazade with the range and magnificence of an epic, Ali and Nino is a timeless classic of love in the face of war.

The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran


Andrew Scott Cooper - 2016
    He draws the turbulence of the post-war era during which the Shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world's top five powers. Readers get the story of the Shah's political career alongside the story of his courtship and marriage to Farah Diba, who became a power in her own right, the beloved family they created, and an exclusive look at life inside the palace during the Iranian Revolution. Cooper's investigative account ultimately delivers the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty through the eyes of those who were there: leading Iranian revolutionaries; President Jimmy Carter and White House officials; US Ambassador William Sullivan and his staff in the American embassy in Tehran; American families caught up in the drama; even Empress Farah herself, and the rest of the Iranian Imperial family. Intimate and sweeping at once, The Fall of Heaven recreates in stunning detail the dramatic and final days of one of the world's most legendary ruling families, the unseating of which helped set the stage for the current state of the Middle East.

A Bounty of Blandings: Summer Lightning / Heavy Weather / Blandings Castle


P.G. Wodehouse - 2011
    He and his family live an idyllic life of peace and solitude, punctuated by afternoon tea, long strolls in the garden, and summer showers. Or would if they weren't in a Wodehouse story.The apple of Lord Emsworth's eye is the Empress of Blandings, a splendid Berkshire sow who has twice won honors in the Fat Pig class at the local agricultural show. Besides keeping his pig in shape, Emsworth must deal with his sister's snobby demeanor, his brother's crazy memoirs, and a rival pig whose bulk might dash the Empress's hopes of another medal. Throw in a few young lovers and you have yourself a perfect brew of hilarious adventures. Included in this omnibus are Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, and Blandings Castle. Evelyn Waugh once said, "The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. All those who know them long to return."

Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script


Charlie Kaufman - 1900
    A figure of speech inwhich a part is used for the whole, as in the screen for movies.From Charlie Kaufman, perhaps the most distinctive screenwritingvoice of our generation, comes a visual and philosophicadventure of epic proportions. Much as he did with hisgroundbreaking scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation,and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman twists andsubverts the form and language of film as he delves into themind of a man who, obsessed with his own mortality, sets outto construct a massive artistic enterprise that could give somemeaning to his life. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman,Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener,Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh, HopeDavis, and Tom Noonan, and directed by Kaufman,Synecdoche, New York is an epic story of grand artistic ambitionsand creative madness.This Newmarket Shooting Script® Book includes:Exclusive introduction by Charlie KaufmanComplete Shooting ScriptExclusive Q&AColor photo sectionComplete cast and crew credits

My Father's Notebook: A Novel of Iran


Kader Abdolah - 1999
    Once there, he was to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription—an order of the first king of Persia—as a means of freeing himself from his emotional confinement. For the remainder of his life, Aga Akbar used these cuneiform characters to fill a notebook with writings only he could understand. Years later, his son, Ishmael—a political dissident in exile—is attempting to translate the notebook . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.A stunning and ambitious novel by a singular literary talent, My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the poignant, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.

Misreadings


Umberto Eco - 1963
    Professor Anouk Ooma of Prince Joseph's Land University addresses his colleagues on recent archaeological findings that shed light on the poetry of Italy before the Explosion, Columbus' landing in the New World is covered by TV reporters and structural analysis of the art of striptease as performed by Lilly Niagara of the Crazy Horse.

The Rachel Papers


Martin Amis - 1973
    On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.

Jealousy & In the Labyrinth


Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1959
    “Jealousy,” said the New York Times Book Review “is a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived.” “It is an exhilarating challenge,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.

In the Company of Eagles


Ernest K. Gann - 1966
    Setting: The Western Front, 1916-1917.A young French aviator swears vengeance on the German ace who killed his best friend and kills without mercy.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men


James Agee - 1941
    Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives today stands as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Requiem: A Hallucination


Antonio Tabucchi - 1991
    He spent many years there as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. He even wrote Requiem in Portuguese; it had to be translated into Italian for publication in his native Italy.Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. But, it turns out, not twelve noon, twelve midnight, so he has a long time to while away. As the day unfolds, he has many encounters—a young junky, a taxi driver who is not familiar with the streets, several waiters, a gypsy, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel, an accordionist, in all almost two dozen people both real and illusionary. Finally he meets The Guest, the ghost of the long dead great poet Fernando Pessoa. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, and even a bit of a cookbook, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality.

Novels in Three Lines


Félix Fénéon - 1906
    This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.