Author : P. Parrinder
Publisher : Springer
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 36,10 MB
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1137026987
New Directions in the History of the Novel challenges received views of literary history and sets out new areas for research. A re-examination of the nature of prose fiction in English and its study from the Renaissance to the 21st century, it will become required reading for teachers and students of the novel and its history.
Author : Harald Voetmann
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 98 pages
File Size : 16,37 MB
Release : 2021-09-21
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811230821
Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies. In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.
Author : P. Parrinder
Publisher : Springer
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 36,12 MB
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1137026987
New Directions in the History of the Novel challenges received views of literary history and sets out new areas for research. A re-examination of the nature of prose fiction in English and its study from the Renaissance to the 21st century, it will become required reading for teachers and students of the novel and its history.
Author : Mathias Énard
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 42,93 MB
Release : 2018-03-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811226638
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way.
Author : Troy J. Bassett
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 29,94 MB
Release : 2020-02-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3030319261
Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With the publication of Walter Scott’s popular novels in the 1820s, the three-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction aimed at middle-class audiences through the support of circulating libraries. Following a quantitative analysis examining who wrote and published these novels, the book investigates the success of publisher Richard Bentley in producing three-volume novels, the experiences of the W. H. Smith circulating library in distributing them, the difficulties of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Moore in writing them, and the resistance of new publishers such as Arrowsmith and Unwin to publishing them. Rather than faltering, the three-volume novel stubbornly endured until its abandonment in the 1890s.
Author : Yoko Tawada
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 47,36 MB
Release : 2022-03-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811229297
A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2022 National Book Award Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.” As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.
Author : John Keene
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 22,15 MB
Release : 2016-05-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 081122435X
Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly) Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; “Rivers” portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.
Author : László Krasznahorkai
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 49,22 MB
Release : 2024-04-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811224201
Now in paperback, a transcendent and wide-ranging collection of stories by László Krasznahorkai: “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful.”—Marina Warner, announcing the Booker International Prize In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then narrates a number of unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, India, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on and on about the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in The New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with his own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”
Author : Marcia Douglas
Publisher : Peepal Tree Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 12,83 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Future life
ISBN : 9781845233327
Longlisted: 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Bob Marley is dead. The Emperor Haile Selassie has been brutally murdered. The armed gangs of Kingston are at war and the murder rate soars. The people have lost all trust in self-serving politicians. It is hard to imagine worse times. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica's nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justice to both. It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning the Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor's palace in Addis Ababa and Zion. There is even a fallen angel. At its heart are the human stories of the deaf Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; the relationship between Fall-down (the street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy the orphaned street-boy, and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the island's dead. There is also the enslaved boy who was hung from the silk cotton tree in 1766. The novel sets out to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue. Not least of the novel's marvellous equations are the dread revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation.
Author : Jenny Erpenbeck
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 20,98 MB
Release : 2020-09-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0811229335
A collection of highly personal and poetic essays about life, literature, and politics by the renowned German writer, Jenny Erpenbeck Jenny Erpenbeck’s highly acclaimed novel Go, Went, Gone was a New York Times notable book and launched one of Germany’s most admired writers into the American spotlight. In the New Yorker, James Wood wrote: “When Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize in a few years, I suspect that this novel will be cited.” On the heels of this literary breakthrough comes , a book of personal, profound, often humorous meditations and reflections. Erpenbeck writes, “With this collection of texts, I am looking back for the first time at many years of my life, at the thoughts that filled my life from day to day.” Starting with her childhood days in East Berlin (“I start with my life as a schoolgirl … my own conscious life begins at the same time as the socialist life of Leipziger Strasse”), Not a Novel provides a glimpse of growing up in the GDR and of what it was like to be twenty-two when the wall collapsed; it takes us through Erpenbeck’s early adult years, working in a bakery after immersing herself in the worlds of music, theater, and opera, and ultimately discovering her path as a writer. There are lively essays about her literary influences (Thomas Bernhard, the Brothers Grimm, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), unforgettable reflections on the forces at work in her novels (including history, silence, and time), and scathing commentaries on the dire situation of America and Europe today. “Why do we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to flee over the wall, but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave?” With deep insight and warm intelligence, Jenny Erpenbeck provides us with a collection of unforgettable essays that take us into the heart and mind of “one of the finest and most exciting writers alive” (Michel Faber).
