Bøker utgitt av Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A brilliant lyrical exploration of how modern science illuminates what it means to be human, from the award-winning author of The Price of AltruismWe no longer think, like the ancient Chinese did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori, that it came from the tearing-apart of a love embrace. The Greeks told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to demystify the workings of the universe.Science is an astounding achievement, but are we really any wiser than the ancients? Has science revealed the secrets of fate and immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy or love? There are those who believe that science has replaced faith, but must it also be a death knell for mythology?Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies. Here are the earth and the moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus, and the birth of language in evolution summoning humankind's struggle with truth. Science may not solve our existential puzzles, but like the age-old legends, its magical discoveries can help us continue the never-ending search.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commidity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

One of the world's leading woman politicians tells her inspiring storyAt forty-one, Gro Harlem Brundtland, physician and mother of four, was appointed prime minister of Norway-the youngest person and the first woman ever to hold that office. In this refreshingly forthright memoir, Brundtland traces her unusual and meteoric career. She grew up with strong role models-her parents were active in the Norwegian resistance and involved in postwar politics. She became known as a pro-choice crusader in the seventies and entered politics as the minister of the environment. She appointed eight women to her second eighteen-member cabinet, to this day a world record, and was the leading figure in the process that led to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. As director-general of the World Health Organization since 1997, Brundtland is the first woman elected to run a major UN institution. Along the way, she met a host of international politicians, including Margaret Thatcher-who did not share Brundtland's view on feminism-Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton.Brundtland writes candidly and with humor about raising children in the political limelight and about dealing with political opposition and stereotypes about women. Hers is a fascinating story of one person's ability to make a difference-globally.

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetryJoe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "e;To the Film Industry in Crisis,"e; "e;In Memory of My Feelings,"e; "e;Having a Coke with You,"e; and the famous Lunch Poems-so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman.Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other-an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.

Luminous new poems from one who "has long been a poet of gorgeous description" -William Logan, The New CriterionLandscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.Don't just do something, sit there.And so I have, so I have, the seasons curling around me like smoke,Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.-from "Body and Soul II"This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead," a trilogy of trilogies hailed "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.

The Virgin Mary had made an untoward appearance in Dublin. Is she real? Is she a hoax? Mary Breasted's gift for poking fun where it hurts the most has produced an irreverent, irrepressible, unforgettable book. Ireland will never be the same."e;Breasted's perfectly aimed dialogue and brisk action skewer the jumbled politics--sexual, religious and marital, in academia and the governing Dail--that shape life in modern Ireland."e; - Publishers Weekly

The acclaimed work that debunks our myths and false assumptions about race in AmericaMaurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged environment of New York City in the sixties. His father was a Jewish liberal who worshiped Martin Luther King, Jr.; his mother a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew who hated black people. Berger himself was one of the few white kids in his Lower East Side housing project.Berger's unusual experience--and his determination to examine the subject of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and startling book.Berger has become a passionate observer of race matters, searching out the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racial meaning in everyday life. In White Lies, he encourages us to reckon with our own complex and often troubling opinions about race. The result is an uncommonly honest and affecting look at race in America today--free of cant, surprisingly entertaining, unsettled and unsettling.

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."Always, "What will have been done to me?"And so we don our mental armor,flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?"--from "Risk"Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence."Repair is a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams presents this fluent and accessible version of the Athenian playwright Euripides's great tragedy.Based on the Greek myth of the god Dionysus's punishment of King Pentheus and his mother Agave, Williams' The Bacchae of Euripides is a unique interpretation of one of the most celebrated plays in the history of dramatic theater. With an Introduction by Martha Nussbaum, award-winning author of The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

Heschel's classic work on Maimonides, originally published in Berlin during the thirties, is one of the few scholarly biographies available of the great medieval philosopher.