Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

    Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, "Stepping Stones "retraces the poet's steps from his first exploratory testing of the ground as an infant to what he called his "moon-walk" to the podium to receive the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also fascinatingly charts his post-Nobel life and is supplemented with a number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced during the dark years of the Ulster Troubles. Combining the spontaneity of animated conversation with the considered qualities of the best autobiographical writing, "Stepping Stones "provides an original, diverting, and absorbing store of reflections and recollections. Scholars and general readers alike are brought closer to the work, life, and creative development of a charismatic and lavishly gifted poet whose latest collection, "District and Circle," was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2007.

    Gass, "the finest prose stylist in America" (Steven Moore, Washington Post). Whether he's exploring the nature of narrative, the extent and cost of political influences on writers, or the relationships between the stories we tell and the moral judgments we make, Gass is always erudite, entertaining, and enlightening.

    They showed that “the modern”need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

    From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Umberto Eco offers a dazzling tour of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange to make sense of the world. Uncovering layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, Eco offers with wit and clarity such instances as Columbus's voyage to the New World, the fictions that grew around the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar, and the linguistic endeavors to recreate the language of Babel, to show how serendipities can evolve out of mistakes. With erudition, anecdotes, and scholarly rigor, this new collection of essays is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.

    A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

    They were married in 1931, just as tension between their two countries was mounting, and their constant dream was of a "rainbow across the Pacific," a bridge of peace between Japan and the United States.In the following ten years, Mr. Terasaki's service with the Japanese Foreign Office took them to Japan, China (where their daughter Mariko was born), Cuba, and Washington, where they were living at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As head of Japanese intelligence in the Western Hemisphere, Terasaki took enormous personal risks to avert war between the two countries. Mrs. Terasaki describes with rare perception and fine humor her months of internment with the Japanese diplomatic corps at Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs, the long voyage back to Japan via Africa on the famed exchange ship Gripsholm, and the struggle of the war years in Japan which were marked by illness and near starvation. After the surrender, Mr. Terasaki, a courageous and brilliant man who had risked everything to avert the war, was appointed liaison between the Emperor and General MacArthur, and in this capacity, he made a lasting contribution to post-war relations between the two countries.

    A Writer's Diary began as a column in a literary journal, but by 1876 Dostoevsky was able to bring it out as a complete monthly publication with himself as an editor, publisher, and sole contributor, suspending work on The Brothers Karamazov to do so. The Diary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame it incorporated an astonishing variety of material: short stories; humorous sketches; reports on sensational crimes; historical predictions; portraits of famous people; autobiographical pieces; and plans for stories, some of which were never written while others appeared later in the Diary itself. A range of authorial and narrative voices and stances and an elaborate scheme of allusions and cross-references preserve and present Dostoevsky's conception of his work as a literary whole. Selected from the two-volume set, this abridged edition of A Writer's Diary appears in a single paperback volume, along with a new condensed introduction by editor Gary Saul Morson.

    In the years since then he has dedicated himself to an assortment of idiosyncratic reading challenges: spending a year reading only short books, spending a year reading books he always suspected he would hate, spending a year reading books he picked with his eyes closed.In One for the Books, Queenan tries to come to terms with his own eccentric reading style. How many more books will he have time to read in his lifetime? Why does he refuse to read books hailed by reviewers as “astonishing”? Why does he refuse to lend out books? Will he ever buy an e-book? Why does he habitually read thirty to forty books simultaneously? Why are there so many people to whom the above questions do not even matter? And what do they read? Acerbically funny yet passionate and oddly affectionate, One for the Books is a reading experience that true book lovers will find unforgettable.

    An entire island bureaucracy casually confounds the attempts of Tillman, a hotel owner, in his attempt to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real grave; stymied, he resorts to a highly unusual form of burial. Two poor islanders stumble into a high-class dance party one night and find themselves caught up in a violent encounter that just might escalate into revolution. And a young woman sails off into the romantic tropics with the man of her dreams, only to learn the hard way - as Eve did - that paradise is just another place to leave behind.Winner of the National Book Award for first fiction, Easy in the Islands is a “stunning” (Washington Post) collection of stories by one of America’s foremost contemporary fiction writers. Infused with the rhythms and the beat of the Caribbean, these vivid tales of paradise sought and paradise lost are as lush, steamy, and invigorating as the islands themselves.From fishing fleets in remote atolls too small to appear on any map and reggae bars on islands narrow enough to walk across in an hour, to the sprawling barrios and yacht filled marinas of Miami, Bob Shacochis charts a course across a Caribbean that no one who has ever been there on vacation will recognize.

    A monumental work of scholarship - arguably the most important book about Beckett ever published - SAMUEL BECKETT is also fascinating reading. Beckett's life has been as rich as his writing is spare, and Deirdre Bair tells his story superbly: the upper-middle-class Irish childhood; the early years in Paris and Beckett's complex relationship to Joyce; the psychological anguish of his apprenticeship, poured out by Beckett in more than 300 remarkable, heretofore-unknown letters to a confidant, Thomas McGreevy; Beckett's heroic service with the French Resistance, also unknown till now; "the siege in the room," that extraordinary period after the Second World War during which Beckett created the first masterpieces that would make him world famous; Beckett's increasing involvement with the theatre and his desperate attempts to guard his privacy against the encroachments of celebrity.SAMUEL BECKETT chronicles Beckett's tumultuous relationship with his family, recounts the psychosomatic illnesses that have often kept him from writing, and traces (where they exist) the autobiographical strains in his work. The book tells of his relationships with publishers, actors, directors, and friends. Above all, it portrays Beckett himself, the poet of despair, the angular, enigmatic artist who, in the words of his Nobel Prize citation, "has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation."When Deirdre Bair began the research for this book, Beckett said he would not authorize it nor would he read it before it was published. To friends he wrote, "I am sure Mrs. Bair is a serious scholar and is out to do a fine book. I will neither help nor hinder her." After literally hundreds of interviews and years of research in Ireland, England, France, Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland, Canada and the United States, after correspondence with people living on every continent, Deirdre Bair has produced a book that is everything a scholar or a reader could hope for: SAMUEL BECKETT is one of the remarkable literary biographies of our time.Deirdre Bair received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a journalist on newspapers and magazines before returning to academic life and taking a M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. She has taught at Trinity College (Connecticut) and Yale University, and teaches now in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania. She is married, has two children, and lives in Connecticut. (Taken from the inside jacket material of the First Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Edition, 1978.)

    The author of Down and Out in Paris and London, Nineteen Eighty-four, and Animal Farm, he published ten books and two collections of essays during his lifetime -- but in terms of actual words, produced much more than seems possible for someone who died at the age of forty-six and was often struggling against poverty and ill health. His essays, letters, and journalism are among the most memorable, lucid, and intelligent ever written, the work of a master craftsman and a brilliant mind. Taken as a whole they form an essential collection, and read in toto and sequentially, they provide a remarkably literary self-portrait of an engaged, and consistently engaging, writer. Here, in four volumes, is the best selection of his nonfiction writing now available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. An Age Like This collects Orwell's essential early writings, including material that would later emerge in Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as observations on marriage, reviews of Henry Miller and J. B. Priestley, reports from the Spanish Civil War, an examination of the meaning and value of Charles Dickens, and notes on the early years of the Second World War.

    In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible.In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky sets down his thoughts and his memories, revealing for the first time the original inspirations for his extraordinary films--Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublyov, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice. He discusses their history and his methods of work, he explores the many problems of visual creativity, and he sets forth the deeply autobiographical content of part of his oeuvre--most fascinatingly in The Mirror and Nostalgia. The closing chapter on The Sacrifice, dictated in the last weeks of Tarkovsky's life, makes the book essential reading for those who already know or who are just discovering his magnificent work.

    But those who seek instead a true widening of the horizons of meaning, coupled with a sure-handed mastery of the craft of poetry, will find this latest collection satisfying indeed.Here is a man who matches superb gifts with a truly subtle imagination, into whose depths he is courageously traveling--pioneering--in exploratory penetrations into areas of life that are too often evaded or denied. "The Firebombing," "Slave Quarters," "The Fiend"--these poems, with the others that comprise the present volume, show a mature and original poet at his finest.

    A fascinating collection of six essays, written for the William Empson Lectures in Oxford, each exploring an aspect of writerly contemplation.