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"'The dilemma my friends suppose me to be in,' writes the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 'has, for its two horns, the endurance of a sleepless night, and the adoption of some recipe for inducing sleep.' In this delightful book - the perfect gift for all insomniacs - are collected a splendid variety of entertainments devised to help pass 'the wakeful hours'. Ranging from puzzles, rhymes and limericks to simple number problems, calming calculations and planning dreams, here is a feast of intriguing activities guaranteed to keep you entertained as you search for the elusive rabbit-hole of a good night's sleep"

Now in paperback, a collection of interviews with a French cinematic titan—covering subjects such as adaptation, the effects of capitalism on art, and the importance of intuition—selected from a period of four decades.Robert Bresson, the director of such cinematic masterpieces as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped, Mouchette, and L’Argent, was one of the most influential directors in the history of French film, as well as one of the most stubbornly individual: He insisted on the use of nonprofessional actors; he shunned the “advances” of Cinerama and CinemaScope (and the work of most of his predecessors and peers); and he minced no words about the damaging influence of capitalism and the studio system on the still-developing—in his view—art of film. Bresson on Bresson collects the most significant interviews that Bresson gave (carefully editing them before they were released) over the course of his forty-year career to reveal both the internal consistency and the consistently exploratory character of his body of work.Successive chapters are dedicated to each of his fourteen films, as well as to the question of literary adaptation, the nature of the soundtrack, and to Bresson’s one book, the great aphoristic treatise Notes on the Cinematograph. Throughout, his close and careful consideration of his own films and of the art of film is punctuated by such telling mantras as “Sound...invented silence in cinema,” “It’s the film that...gives life to the characters—not the characters that give life to the film,” and (echoing the Bible) “Every idle word shall be counted.” Bresson’s integrity and originality earned him the admiration of younger directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas. And though Bresson’s movies are marked everywhere by an air of intense deliberation, these interviews show that they were no less inspired by a near-religious belief in the value of intuition, not only that of the creator but that of the audience, which he claims to deeply respect: “It’s always ready to feel before it understands. And that’s how it should be.”

"The translator Anthony Kerrigan has compared the work of Camilo Josâe Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to that of Louis-Ferdinand Câeline and Curzio Malaparte. These are, Kerrigan writes, "ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, foul mouthed." However provocative and disturbing, they are also flat-out dazzling as writers, whose sentences, as rigorous as riotous, lodge like knives in the reader's mind. Cela called himself a proponent of "uglyism," of "nothingism." But he has the knack, the critic Amâerico Castro reminds us, of deploying those "nothings and lacks" to construct beauty. The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War and when the regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes more than three hundred characters whose comings and goings it tracks to hypnotic effect. Scabrous, scandalous, and profane, this virtuosic group portrait of a wounded and sick society was first published in Buenos Aires in 1950 because in Spain it could not be published at all. This new translation by James Womack is the first in English to present Cela's masterpiece in uncensored form"--

The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region's history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life. Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the most significant voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, began his career as a poet, producing three collections and two separately published poem cycles in the 1980s and 1990s, the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, a time of great political change and artistic revolution. Set Change: Selected Poems presents for the first time in English comprehensive selections from all three collections and both cycles. In modern Ukrainian letters, Andrukhovych occupies a position similar to the literary giant Nikolai Gogol. While his influence is broad and significant, he is constantly reinventing himself as a writer: his work represents everything playful, free-spirited, and new, and epitomizes all the most original aspects of Ukrainian literature. The poems collected here showcase the poet's prolonged quest for a representation of--and response to--the region's history of violence. In this quest Andrukhovych explores various settings and themes of geography, investigates the shifting borders of Eastern Europe, and invokes a gamut of myths and fantastical elements set in the territory of present-day Ukraine. The cornerstone of his poems is a deep fascination with the idea of the city. Andrukhovych's vivid descriptions lend themselves to his investigations of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, two of the city's most significant aspects. The poet's deep interest in the baroque, his obsession with verbal play and irony, the elegiac mode, the many hidden as well as overt allusions to other literary works and writers, and the poet's need for textual experimentation are those elements that make his poems arresting, timely, and perpetually fascinating. (Translated by the award-winning duo of John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, whose work on this project has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts.)

The lone novel by a Latin American author of very short fiction (praised as "the most beautiful stories in the world" by Italo Calvino)--an antic, metafictional send-up of the Mexican literary scene told through the unreliable recollections of an aging critic's friends, relatives, and attendants. The one and only novel by renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso--Latin America's most expansive miniaturist, whose tiny, acid, and bracingly surreal narratives Italo Calvino dubbed "the most beautiful stories in the world"--The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres: a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity. Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres's friends, relations, and servants (their accounts of their subject skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant's own comically botched attempts at "criticism." Monterroso's narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are--and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.

"Steinberg's first book is a collection of about 200 wonderful drawings, with one or two words thrown in. Many of the drawings first appeared in The New Yorker; there is also a generous selection of drawings which he made while he was with the armed forces in North Africa, Italy, China, and India"--

A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the twentieth century.Cesare Pavese’s 1936 collection of poems, Lavorare stanca, is increasingly regarded as one of the most astonishing and powerful books of twentieth-century poetry. William Arrowsmith’s translations capture the spirit and complex vitality of Pavese’s voice.This bilingual edition also contains a thorough introduction to Pavese’s work, notes to individual poems, and two critical essays that he wrote about Lavorare stanca, the book by which he hoped to be remembered. “Lavorare stanca,” he once declared, “is a book that might have saved a generation.”

New poems from 100 of the world's brightest contemporary poets, all about a common subject: the Louvre--exploring the many pleasures, provocations, and surprises that the museum and its collection inspire. Of the world's great museums, the Louvre is the most encompassing, a sumptuous collection that includes not only some of the most celebrated works of art of all time, but fascinating, perplexing, splendid, and beautiful objects of all kinds, all housed in a building, itself monumental, that was once the seat of the kings of France. In the grand corridors and multiplying backrooms of the Louvre, the history of the world and the history of art and the history of how we look and think about art and its place in our lives challenge and delight us at every corner. Few other public spaces are at once so haunted and so alive. A unique collaboration between New York Review Books and the Louvre Museum, At the Louvre presents a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume, by a hundred of the world's most vibrant poets. They write about works from the museum's collection. They write about the museum and its history. They write what they see and feel, and together they take us on a tour of the museum and its galleries like no other, one that is an irresistible feast for the ear and mind and eye. Some of the poets in At the Louvre: Simon Armitage; Barbara Chase-Riboud; Hélène Dorion; Jon Fosse; Fanny Howe; Kenneth Goldsmith; Lisette Lombé; Tedi López Mills; Precious Okoyomon; Charles Pennequin; Blandine Rinkel; Yomi Şode; Krisztina Tóth; Jan Wagner; Elizabeth Willis.

A defining work of twentieth-century modernism, now newly translated--a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness, all centered around a character who is composed of absolute brain and intellect, a character of pure mind. When, after the Second World War, the American literary world began to become aware of the intensely musical, intensely intellectual, poetic work of Paul Valéry, their attention fixated on the early translations of Monsieur Teste. It was as if American poets, novelists, and philosophers had been waiting for something like this for a long time, and they leapt with joy when it came: a poet who can write intelligibly, tersely, brilliantly about the mind, its work, its needs. "Teste," of course, is old French for "head," and this celebration of the cerebral power of poetry, at a time when the emotional dimension of poetry seemed so dominant in our society, this manifestation of poetry as thinking, and thinking as poetry, came as a shock to many poets and writers of the day, and that shock continues. Generation after generation, young writers discover the acuity, the humor, the vivid scrutiny of language and human thought that Monsieur Teste represents. This new, definitive translation of the Monsieur Teste materials (both the original Evening with Monsieur Teste and Valéry's later additions) brings to readers a voice that has lost none of its clarity, comedy, or intensity.

A rousing history of the penalty kick and its introduction in English football by a famed British writer & editor.Football, in the 1880s, was a rough and dangerous game. To address the abhorrent state of the sport, William McCrum, an amateur Irish goalkeeper and the author's great-grandfather, proposed the penalty kick, a new and drastic sanction introduced to the game in 1891. For over a hundred years, this extraordinary phenomenon has not only regulated the conduct of football (also known as soccer) but has also inspired game theories and infiltrated classics of contemporary literature.An enthralling portrait of a lost age, The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Gamechanger is a family history, a social history, and a history of the world's most popular sport. It considers an extraordinary phenomenon as it examines the penalty kick’s psychological—even philosophical—grip on our imaginations, with its distillation of risk and chance into the penalty shoot-out, an all-or-nothing moment.

"Pulling from pulp, sci-fi, gag cartoons, fantasy, and thrillers, and populated by goblins, astronauts, magical thieves, and talking owls, CF's comics break apart genres and forms, then reassemble them into one-of-a-kind stories that reveal an immense imagination and boundary-pushing talent. Christopher Forgues (better known as CF) roared onto the indie comics scene in the early 2000s, producing some of the most exciting and influential work of the decade. His output was startlingly original and impressively prolific: his collaboration with Ben Jones, Paper Radio; his multi-part epic, Powr Mastrs; and the shorter comics and zines now collected for the first time in Distant Ruptures. These comics--created using scratchy pencil and brilliant color, smudged Xeroxes and scraps of notepaper--capture the extraordinary range of CF's work"--

"An alternative comic written and drawn by Diane DiMassa, published 1991-1998. It features the title character generally wreaking violent vengeance on male oppressors. Recurring characters include Hothead's cat Chicken, her wise mystical friend Roz, a talking lamp, and her lover Daphne"--

"An ecologically minded collection of essays in the vein of Rebecca Solnit and Susan Sontag-covering everything from the equipment of photography to the difficulties of perception itself. In an age when most of us carry a device seemingly capable of freeze-framing the world, Benjamin Swett writes with refreshing clarity on the way of the true photographer. Combines cultural criticism with personal revelation to examine how the lived experience of photography can endow the mundane with meaning while bringing attention to the beauty of both the natural world and the world we build. Having photographed trees of Manhattan, Shaker dwellings, and the landscapes of upstate New York, award-winning photographer and writer Swett brings an ecological sensitivity to these expansive and profound meditations on how to document the world around us. Accompanied by nearly three dozen black-and-white photographs and illustrations, the essays take us from Coney Island in the early 70s to Paris and Prado at the turn of the last century. By turns literary criticism, art history, and memoir, they draw from writers such as Eric Sanderson, Max Frisch, and John Berger to uncover truths about a life spent in pursuit of art. In essays such as "The Picture Not Taken," "The Beauty of the Camera," and "My Father's Green Album" Swett gives us a picture of photography over generations and how we can or should relate to the mechanical devices so often fetishized by those interested in the subject. In "What I wanted to Tell You About the Wind" we understand photography's importance in understanding our place in larger environmental and social systems; and in "VR" and "Some Observations in the Galapagos" Swett challenges us to think through problems of perception and knowing central to the experience of photography, looking to the past and into our future for answers. Poignant and deftly crafted, The Picture Not Taken brings to mind the fearless ambition of Annie Dillard and the grand scope of Rebecca Solnit's Field Guide to Getting Lost. Swett's writing will appeal to readers who have enjoyed Geoff Dyer's work, and Susan Sontag's writing on photography"--

"Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story. The modern Italian writer Dino Buzzati wrote a huge body of short fiction, several hundred pieces, spanning a forty-year period. They offer a remarkable inventory of fantastic premises and tropes, international in the reach of their geographical settings, at times commenting on Italian issues but usually reflecting the worldwide horrors, catastrophes, and fanaticisms that characterized the twentieth century. A journalist for much of his life, Buzzati was adept at turning current events into fantasies that depicted social and political nightmares. He challenged the ideological complacencies of his era in accessible stories that solicit the reader's vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzati's first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer. Buzzati's own book-length selections are sampled, so that previously untranslated stories join new versions of classics like "Seven Floors," an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; "Panic at La Scala," where, fearful of a left-wing revolution, the Milanese bourgeoisie are imprisoned at the opera house; and "Appointment with Einstein," in which the scientist encounters a gas station attendant who is the Angel of Death. Venuti's crisp translations re-create Buzzati's technique of making the fantastic seem frighteningly plausible, establishing unreal worlds that disrupt dominant notions of what is real. The Bewitched Bourgeois is a definitive gathering of Buzzati's work in short fiction"--

"A man can't decide between two dress shirts for a wedding. A woman questions the style of her new glasses and her engagement. A figure-drawing model considers quitting posing. The figure-drawing model's teacher considers quitting teaching. A man drives into a fog bank and is unsure of how to get home. ... In Blurry, Shaw renders the doubts around everyday decisions as startling cliffhangers, presenting us with the kinds of choices that can make a life expand or contract in equal measure"--

"Farnoosh Fathi was born in 1981. Raised in California, she attended UCLA, NYU, and the University of Houston, where she earned her PhD in creative writing and literature. She is the author of the poetry collection Great Guns (2013) and the editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, Poems (NYRB Poets, 2018). Her poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, PEN America, and elsewhere. Her translations of poetry have appeared in Circumference and Jacket2, her interviews with poets can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, and her essay on Emily Dickinson's influence on contemporary poetry can be found in The Emily Dickinson Journal. She is the founder of the Young Artist Language and Devotion Alliance and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in New York City and teaches at Stanford Online High School and Columbia University"--

Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington’s revolutionary second novel, long out of print.The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman’s discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.Written at the end of World War II but not published until 1977 and long unavailable, The Stone Door is at once a celebration of the union of Carrington and her husband, the Hungarian-born photographer Chiki Weisz, and an argument for the unification of the male and the female as a means of liberating the human race.

"Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the metier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then coopted by one of the party's less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party's own leader-and that's when things really start going downhill"--

"Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing - somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy - that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel. TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing"--

"Since it's appearance in The New Yorker, on July 15, 1967, Jonathan Schell's THE VILLAGE OF BEN SUC has come to be regarded as a classic of American reporting. It is a rigorously factual account of the destruction by the United States Army, of a South Vietnamese village and of what happened to the 3500 in habitants"--

"From the author of Storm, a breathtaking novel about a raging fire and the path of destruction and change it leaves in its wake. Spitcat, a raging forest fire in the Sierra Nevada of California, had a lifespan of merely eleven days, "yet its effects could be reckoned ahead in centuries." So writes George R. Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire - smoldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake. Firefighters and lookouts, forest rangers and smokejumpers - as well as animals in the forest, many of them the bewildered victims of the blaze, and all the varied tress and bushes there - are characters of this realistic story"--

"The first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man'yoshu is considered, along with Tale of Genji, to be one of the two most important works in classical Japanese literature"--

A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides—which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself—in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation.A reporter’s boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, “For the blood, so the red is visible.” All he’s given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead.As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy: suicide by men, women, families, animals; thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead.A photographer assigned to work with him—also a woman—snaps pictures of the bodies and the family members of the dead, who speak of subterfuge, hypochondria, madness, a secret society, a body exhumed to be mutilated. During one of the interviews, in a widow’s tiny apartment, a huge dog hurls himself against a plate glass window again and again, lunging at the birds beyond.The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, called “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish” by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the final decade of the 18th century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), the trilogy’s final work takes place in a provincial city at the end of the 1960s, which is also when it was written and published, as Argentina plummeted towards the Dirty War. Its protagonist, once again, is a man in his early thirties, stymied and in search of an elsewhere.

"Goat Song, Vaginov's first novel, was written between 1927-1929. The novel mentions the ten-year anniversary of the October Revolution in passing, rather obliquely, yet the shadow of that event and all its immediate and long-lasting consequences hangs over the entire novel (and really, over the subsequent three novels as well). For Vaginov, the Soviet practice of naming and renaming is emblematic of societal changes that were-paradoxically-wholly superficial and yet devastatingly momentous. Like Goat Song itself, place names like "Second Rural Poverty Street" or "Victims of the Revolution Square" represent political shifts that are simultaneously exaggerated to the point of silliness and profoundly, genuinely tragic"--

Tiny boys and girls play under a mushroom--setting up a little town, imagining they are flowers, and pretending all sorts of things.

First publlished in 1950, this charming picture book by the Caldecott Medal-winning team of Simont and Krauss features bold illustrations that bring to life a humorous and engaging reversal of ordinary reality that will enchant young children and their parents. Full color.

"By Xi Xi, part of the first generation of writers raised in Hong Kong, a wise and amiably written book of autobiographical fiction on the author's experience with breast cancer-from diagnosis to treatment to recovery-and her passage from a life lived through the mind into a life lived through the body. In 1990, the Hong Kong cult classic writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer and began writing in order to make sense of her diagnosis and treatment. Mourning a Breast, published two and a half years later, is a disarmingly honest and deeply personal account of the author's experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery. The book opens with her gently rolling up a swimsuit. A beginning swimmer, she loves going to the pool, eavesdropping on conversations in the changing room, shopping for swimsuits. As this routine pleasure is revoked, the small loss stands in for the greater one. But Xi Xi's mourning begins to take shape as a form of activism. In a conversational, even humorous, manner, she describes her previous blinkered life of the mind before she came into her body and learned its language. Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she coaxes and confesses, confronts society's failings, and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as the first Chinese language book to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. A radical and generous book about creating in the midst of mourning"--

"We are on the eve of 1900, when decadentism and anarchy join hands to bring the century to an end. Georges Randal, a young man from a good family, an orphan ruined by an indelicate uncle, when the time has come to take on a situation, decides to become a thief. For what? Like that. For nothing. To say no to society, to the bourgeoisie, to order, to the socialists who jiggle on the stage and to the moralists who flush the toilet with humanitarian tears. In short, Randal, like a good nihilist, says no to everything and to the thieves themselves: "I do a dirty job, it's true; but I have an excuse: I do it dirty. " Not quite. Because there is in our thief a bit of the Baudelairian dandy, a bit of Arsáene Lupine mixed with Jarry and Alphonse Allais. And an intact, almost virginal taste for revolt, a sensitive and good heart, "beating too well, said Breton, not to hit the walls of the cage in all directions""--

"A new translation of one of Balzac's finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess-a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover. A story of baffled and irrepressible desire, Balzac's The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. His protagonist, Felix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, has been sent by his family to a ball in honor of a local dignitary. A wallflower at the party, his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress. She turns away from him, and, helpless, he stands, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him off. He leaves the party in shame. The woman at the party is Henriette de Montsauf, married to a much older count, the mother of two children whose health has been compromised by their father's past debauchery. Time passes, and Felix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins between the younger man and the still young mother, a courtship whose premise is that Felix will worship her without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits upon her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He developes a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Felix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the all too unconventional and uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Returning to the provinces, he learns Henriette is dying. She writes him, "Do you still today remember your kisses? They have dominated my life. They cut a furrow through my soul.... I am dying because of them." Balzac the great realist is an incomparable witness to the fantasies that are the stuff of ordinary life and of the countless excuses that so-called virtue makes for eagerly imagined vice. The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love-and hate. Peter Bush's new translation, the first in over a century, brings out psychological dynamics of one of Balzac's masterpieces"--