Bøker utgitt av Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In a strangely distorted Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she's already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelganger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students. Henrik's inquiry expands beyond Fumiko's seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend's precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself. David Hoon Kim's debut is a transgressive, darkly comic novel of becoming lost and found in translation. With each successive, echoic chapter, Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost plunges us more deeply beneath the surface of things, to the displacement, exile, grief, and desire that hide in plain sight.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAn immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression-and employed some of the biggest names in American lettersThe plan was as idealistic as it was audacious-and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states-along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns-while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day's most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing-forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself. Scott Borchert's Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the experiences of key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We observe notable writers at their day jobs, including Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel; Zora Neale Hurston, the most widely published Black woman in the country; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the FWP's chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and other future literary stars found encouragement and security on the FWP payroll. By way of these and other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation's very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book's lessons are urgent and strong.

A breakout bestseller in Italy, now available for American readers for the first time, Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began is a short, humanistic tour of the origins of the universe, earth, and life-drawing on the latest discoveries in physics to explain the seven most significant moments in the creation of the cosmos.Curiosity and wonderment about the origins of the universe are at the heart of our experience of the world. From Hesiod's Chaos, described in his poem about the origins of the Greek gods, Theogony, to today's mind-bending theories of the multiverse, humans have been consumed by the relentless pursuit of an answer to one awe inspiring question: What exactly happened during those first moments?Guido Tonelli, the acclaimed, award-winning particle physicist and a central figure in the discovery of the Higgs boson (the "e;God particle"e;), reveals the extraordinary story of our genesis-from the origins of the universe, to the emergence of life on Earth, to the birth of human language with its power to describe the world. Evoking the seven days of biblical creation, Tonelli takes us on a brisk, lively tour through the evolution of our cosmos and considers the incredible challenges scientists face in exploring its mysteries. Genesis both explains the fundamental physics of our universe and marvels at the profound wonder of our existence.

One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021"e;[George Packer's] account of America's decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling."e; -William Galston, The Washington PostAcclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America's descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and dividesIn the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation's underlying conditions-discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities-and how difficult they are to remedy.In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality-the "e;hidden code"e;-that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called "e;the art"e; of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valery, one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century.Heir to Mallarme and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valery was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks.Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valery's lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary "e;exercise of thought,"e; a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject.The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valery: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works-Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms-with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem "e;The Angel."e; Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy.A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma-and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.Second Place, Rachel Cusk's electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art's capacity to uplift-and to destroy.

"e;Indelicacy isn't merely a book, it's a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever . . . Arch, yet warm; aspiring and impervious; confiding and enigmatic; reposing and intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind and filled my heart."e; -Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond A haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.In "e;a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch"e; (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor-social and erotic-but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one's true calling.

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for PoetryA luminous, seductive new collection from the "e;fearless"e; (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poetLouise Gluck is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "e;a major event in this country's literature"e; in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "e;on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball"e; and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "e;the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball."e; Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May"e;A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two."e; -Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street JournalA captivatingstudy of Napoleon's plundering of Europe's art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from VeniceCynthia Saltzman's Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers' space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon's looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness-to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization-and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre's plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa.Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

"e;A terrifically exciting account of [Slaght's] time in the Russian Far East studying Blakiston's fish owls, huge, shaggy-feathered, yellow-eyed, and elusive birds that hunt fish by wading in icy water . . . Even on the hottest summer days this book will transport you."e; -Helen Macdonald, author of H is for HawkA field scientist and conservationist tracks the elusive Blakiston's Fish Owl in the forbidding reaches of eastern RussiaI saw my first Blakiston's fish owl in the Russian province of Primorye, a coastal talon of land hooking south into the belly of Northeast Asia . . . No scientist had seen a Blakiston's fish owl so far south in a hundred years . . . When he was just a fledgling birdwatcher, Jonathan C. Slaght had a chance encounter with one of the most mysterious birds on Earth. Bigger than any owl he knew, it looked like a small bear with decorative feathers. He snapped a quick photo and shared it with experts. Soon he was on a five-year journey, searching for this enormous, enigmatic creature in the lush, remote forests of eastern Russia. That first sighting set his calling as a scientist.Despite a wingspan of six feet and a height of over two feet, the Blakiston's fish owl is highly elusive. They are easiest to find in winter, when their tracks mark the snowy banks of the rivers where they feed. They are also endangered. And so, as Slaght and his devoted team set out to locate the owls, they aim to craft a conservation plan that helps ensure the species' survival. This quest sends them on all-night monitoring missions in freezing tents, mad dashes across thawing rivers, and free-climbs up rotting trees to check nests for precious eggs. They use cutting-edge tracking technology and improvise ingenious traps. And all along, they must keep watch against a run-in with a bear or an Amur tiger. At the heart of Slaght's story are the fish owls themselves: cunning hunters, devoted parents, singers of eerie duets, and survivors in a harsh and shrinking habitat.Through this rare glimpse into the everyday life of a field scientist and conservationist, Owls of the Eastern Ice testifies to the determination and creativity essential to scientific advancement and serves as a powerful reminder of the beauty, strength, and vulnerability of the natural world.

Four undocumented Mexican American students, two great teachers, one robot-building contest . . . and a major motion pictureIn 2004, four Latino teenagers arrived at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They were born in Mexico but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where they attended an underfunded public high school. No one had ever suggested to Oscar, Cristian, Luis, or Lorenzo that they might amount to much-but two inspiring science teachers had convinced these impoverished, undocumented kids from the desert who had never even seen the ocean that they should try to build an underwater robot. And build a robot they did. Their robot wasn't pretty, especially compared to those of the competition. They were going up against some of the best collegiate engineers in the country, including a team from MIT backed by a $10,000 grant from ExxonMobil. The Phoenix teenagers had scraped together less than $1,000 and built their robot out of scavenged parts. This was never a level competition-and yet, against all odds . . . they won! But this is just the beginning for these four, whose story-which became a key inspiration to the DREAMers movement-will go on to include first-generation college graduations, deportation, bean-picking in Mexico, and service in Afghanistan. Joshua Davis's Spare Parts is a story about overcoming insurmountable odds and four young men who proved they were among the most patriotic and talented Americans in this country-even as the country tried to kick them out.

A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "e;sweet science of bruising"e; bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time.

Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book has been unavailable to the general reader since its original publication in the 1920s.Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her fellow modernists were thrilled by her originality, her "e;clear, flawless"e; language--to them she was "e;a rafter holding up . . . our uncompleted building."e; Equally forceful for subsequent generations, Observations was an "e;eye-opener"e; to the young Elizabeth Bishop, its poems "e;miracles of language and construction."e; John Ashbery has called "e;An Octopus"e; the finest poem of "e;our greatest modern poet."e; Moore's heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on multiculturalism, biodiversity, and individual liberty make her work uniquely suited to our times.Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers.

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for GodIn the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "e;Christ-haunted"e; literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "e;predicament shared in common."e;A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself-to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,an eelnet made by man for the eel fightingmy eyes have seen what my hand did.Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include the letters that Robert Lowell's wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that "e;art just isn't worth that much."e; Nevertheless, these poems are a powerful document of an impulsive love, and a moving record of Lowell's change from one life and marriage in America to a new life on new terms with a new family in England, rendered with the stunning technical power and control for which he was so celebrated. This new edition, which follows the 1973 edition, includes scans of the pages of Lowell's original manuscript, giving us a look into the brilliant and complicated mind of one of our most beloved and distinguished poets.