Bøker utgitt av Picador USA

The intellectual autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.From its origins, the liberal doctrine has represented the most advanced forms of democratic culture, and it is what has most defended us from the inextinguishable "call of the tribe." This book hopes to make a modest contribution to that indispensable project.In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel laureate, "tireless in his quest to probe the nature of the human animal" (Marie Arana, The Washington Post), maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and his alienation from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.The works of Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel helped the author enormously during those uneasy years. They showed him another school of thought, one that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class, or party and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal ideology.

National Bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a best book of March by Apple Books and Amazon, and a most anticipated book by The New York Times, Esquire, The Guardian, Time, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Chicago Review of Books"A major novel, and a notably audacious one." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times "It feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X, Catherine Lacey somehow-magically-makes the nearly impossible look easy." -Lauren GroffFrom one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.When X-an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter-falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife's deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

From the award-winning writer-director of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a riveting drama about the complexities of living the simple life.More than twenty years ago, Jack Slavin (Daniel Day-Lewis) walked away from the mainstream to live a more deliberate life. But the island commune he began in hopes of a better future has long since imploded, and he is now one of its final residents. Jack's only companion is his sixteen-year-old daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle), whom he has carefully sheltered from the outside world. Now, beset by terminal illness, encroaching developers, and Rose's emerging womanhood, Jack faces troubling questions about the days ahead.In an attempt to provide his daughter with the kind of family she's never known, Jack invites Kathleen (Catherine Keener), the woman he's been secretly seeing on the mainland, and her sons to live with them. But Rose feels betrayed rather than comforted, and lashes out with a willful retribution that places her innocence on the battlefield and Kathleen's safety in danger. His carefully constructed world thrown into chaos, Jack finds himself trapped between two headstrong women and forced to take action.With The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the award-winning filmmaker Rebecca Miller has created a startling family drama. Miller's screenplay, introduced by the author and accompanied by stills from the film, is a powerful, poetic work, primed to be savored page by page.

"From page one, A Country You Can Leave is a riveting, exasperating, and deeply heartbreaking tale of mother-daughter strife and resilience." -Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies DreamingA stunning debut novel following the turbulent relationship of a Black biracial teen and her ferocious Russian mother, struggling to survive in the California desert.When sixteen-year-old Lara and her fiery mother, Yevgenia, find themselves homeless again, the misnamed Oasis Mobile Estates is all they can afford. In this new community, where residents are down on their luck but rich in humor and escape plans, Lara navigates what it means to be the Black biracial daughter of a Russian mother and begins to wonder what a life beyond Yevgenia's orbit-with her insistence on reading only the right kind of books (Russian) and having the right kind of relationships (casual, with lots of sex)-might look like.Lara knows that something else lies beneath her mother's fierce, independent spirit, but Yevgenia doesn't believe in sharing, least of all with her daughter. When a brutal attack exposes the cracks in their relationship, Lara and Yevgenia are forced to confront the family legacy of violence and the strain of inherited trauma on the bonds of their love.A Country You Can Leave is a dazzling, sharp-witted story suffused with yearning, as Lara and Yevgenia attempt to forge their own identities and thrive in a hostile land. Compelling and empathetic, wry and intimate, Asale Angel-Ajani's unforgettable debut novel examines the beauty and dangers of womanhood in multiracial America.

A National Indie BestsellerWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and a Windham-Campbell Literature PrizeA Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Houston Chronicle, Roxane Gay's The Audacity, Mashable, Polygon, Kirkus Reviews, and Library JournalA New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice"Uncanny and haunting . . . Genius." -Michele Filgate, The Washington Post"Dazzling." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh AirWhat happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything-if you bury yourself alive. These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAYA collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award-winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer.Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition. Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time-"a master of vivisection," as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. "When she's done with a subject, it's still living, mystery intact."

"I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise is like an exquisite string of pearls: the perfect balance of elegance, style, design, and beauty. This book is inspiring, spirited, and totally absorbing." -Diane von FurstenbergThe story of Bunny Mellon, the great landscape and interior designer, becomes a revelatory exploration of extreme wealth in the American century. Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare, once-in-a-generation sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work-the White House Rose Garden, designed during the presidency of John F. Kennedy-demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect. Later, her understated landscape design for the Kennedy grave site at Arlington National Cemetery changed the face of American public memorials.Mellon was a famously private person, and many of her greatest achievements remained concealed from public view. Her rarely seen gardens and domestic interiors at eight different properties on three continents became legends and models. At Oak Spring Farm in Virginia, the bibliographic riches of her Garden Library were twinned with the expansive flowering gardens lying below the Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building. At her home on Nantucket, she pruned back the landscape to reveal the elemental forms of nature. Mellon also ranked as one of the great art collectors of her era, encouraging her husband Paul to use his family's vast wealth to acquire hundreds of nineteenth-century French paintings, many of which were donated to the National Gallery of Art. Her own tastes ranged from Mark Rothko to Richard Diebenkorn-in quantity.In I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold-who knew Mellon personally-delves into her subject's closely guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman-as-wife-as-mother by getting a divorce, admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new and ultimately used her reputation, her connections, and above all her money to help fund John Edwards's short-lived presidential campaign. She led an American version of a royal court that, over the years, included Jackie Kennedy, Hubert de Givenchy, and I. M. Pei.How Mellon's character, style, and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments-private and public-is the real subject of this biography.

A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch AwardA bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes-and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself.In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters-feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer's life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent's most daring and powerful work.Illuminating Sargent's restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

A Telegraph Best Book of 2022Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave's inner life.Created from more than forty hours of intimate conversations with the journalist Seán O'Hagan, this is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave's own words, of what really drives his life and creativity.The book examines questions of belief, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave's life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years.Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true visionary.

Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA Slate Top Ten Book of the YearA TIME Best Fiction Book of 2022Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and more.A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised-the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves-until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I is an incredibly moving and insightful book written by the talented Lindsey Fitzharris. Published by PICADOR in 2023, this compelling narrative falls under the genre of historical non-fiction. Fitzharris masterfully combines medical history and wartime narrative to bring to life the story of a visionary surgeon who dedicated his life to treating the disfigured soldiers of World War I. The Facemaker not only sheds light on the horrors of war but also the indomitable spirit of those who seek to heal amidst chaos. This is a book that will leave you with a profound appreciation for the advances in medical science and the heroes who make them possible. A must-read published by PICADOR.

Roberto Calasso, "a literary institution of one" (The Paris Review), tells the story of the eternal life of Utnapishtim, the savior of man, in the eleventh part of his great literary project.A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans, who were making too much noise and disturbing their sleep, and they decided to send a Flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree and advised one of his favorite mortals, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals. So Utnapishtim saved living creatures from the Flood. Rather than punish Utnapishtim, Enlil, king of the gods, granted him eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, Sindbad the Sailor is shipwrecked on that very same island, and the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation, and sacrifice. What Utnapishtim tells Sindbad is the subject of this book, the eleventh part of Roberto Calasso's great opus that began in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch. The Tablet of Destinies, a continuous narrative from beginning to end, delves into our earliest mythologies and records the origin stories of human civilization.

"A spellbinding book." -Megha Majumdar"Akil Kumarasamy is a singular talent." -Cathy Park HongIn the near future, a young woman finds her mother's body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets out on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students beset by a drought and living at the edge of a war as they create a new way of existing to help the people around them. As she works on the translation, her life and the manuscript become entangled. Later, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project force her to question her own moral compass. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world? Written in vivid and pulsating prose that alternates between the young woman's life and passages of the translated manuscript, Akil Kumarasamy's Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is a remarkable, genre-bending exploration of memory, technology, friendship, love, consciousness, and the costs of caring for others in an age when we are caught within the swamps of our own minds.

A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell's achievement.Includes black-and-white photographs

A Woman's Battles and Transformations is a portrait of the author's mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence.One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago. A picture of a happy young woman full of hopes and dreams. Growing up, Édouard knew only his mother's sadness, as she found herself trapped in the humdrum life of a housewife, and her struggles against the dominant world of men. What happened in those years since the photo was taken?Then, at the age of forty-five, his mother frees herself from this oppression. She leaves her husband and her old life behind to start anew in Paris.A Woman's Battles and Transformations is Édouard Louis's most tender book yet. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives, with politics and power-and with the possibility of escape. It is an exquisite and loving portrait of a mother, and an honoring of her self-discovery and liberation as she chooses to live on her own terms.

A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humaneIn the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war, with the United States exercising dominion everywhere. In Humane, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical-to ban torture and limit civilian casualties-have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier?To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics and law of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed-and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes.In the post-9/11 era, the U.S. military embraced the agenda of humane war, driven by both the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle moved from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but the war's foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends have only accelerated since. Even as the Obama and Trump administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the "forever" war.Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars become more protracted, they are also becoming more humane. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must pedal his way to five-star customer ratings-and, perhaps, freedom-in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery.Countries go wrong sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country-a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong.In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: a member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic, hoping for a decent tip and a five-star rating.He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to man up if he wants to impress N., the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English.Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever have a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway?Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unite and isolate every one of us, native and immigrant both.

An Oxford professor of archaeology explores the unique history of magic-the oldest and most neglected strand of human behavior and its resurgence today Three great strands of belief run through human history: Religion is the relationship with one god or many gods, masters of our lives and destinies. Science distances us from the world, turning us into observers and collectors of knowledge. And magic is direct human participation in the universe: we have influence on the world around us, and the world has influence on us.Over the last few centuries, magic has developed a bad reputation-thanks to the unsavory tactics of shady practitioners, and to a successful propaganda campaign on the part of religion and science, which denigrated magic as backward, irrational, and "primitive." In Magic, however, the Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden restores magic to its essential place in the history of the world-revealing it to be an enduring element of human behavior that plays an important role for individuals and cultures. From the curses and charms of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish magic, to the shamanistic traditions of Eurasia, indigenous America, and Africa; from the alchemy of the Renaissance to the condemnation of magic in the colonial period and the mysteries of modern quantum physics-Gosden's startling, fun, and colorful history supplies a missing chapter of the story of our civilization. Drawing on decades of research around the world-touching on the first known horoscope, a statue ordered into exile, and the mystical power of tattoos-Gosden shows what magic can offer us today, and how we might use it to rethink our relationship with the world. Magic is an original, singular, and sweeping work of scholarship, and its revelations will leave a spell on the reader.

A Best Book of 2020 at Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Refinery29 A Best Book of Summer at Vulture, Refinery29, Yahoo! Life, Alma, Subway Book Review, and Lit HubA Best Book of the Month at Entertainment Weekly, Hello Giggles, and PopSugarEDITORS' CHOICE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize"Miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting." -Lauren Groff, author of Florida"A twisting, strange delight, Parakeet shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts." -Kristen Iversen, Refinery29Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother.In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried. A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, Parakeet asks and begins to answer the essential questions. How do our memories make, cage, and free us? How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves? Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change? Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.