Adam FREUDENHEIM (Herausgeber/Vorwort):
The Best Books Ever Written
Free Sample Chapters
Siri Hustvedt
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
Synopsis: Lily Dahl is a heroine of the old school: tough, beautiful and brave. A nineteen-year-old waitress and aspiring actress living in Webster, Minnesota, she becomes enchanted by an exotic outsider - an artist from New York. Drawn into a world of erotic adventure, she finds herself the target of mysterious acts of madness as she strains against the confines of small town life.
Was ich auch noch loswerden will: Am Freitag bin ich ja mit dem Kennedy-Buch fertig geworden. Nun lese ich ja in verschiedenen privaten Bücherseiten und -blogs, und in einem meiner Lieblingsblogs, nämlich dem eines amerikanischen Bibliothekars aus Illinois(http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/) gab es am Freitag auch einen Eintrag über das Kennedy-Buch, natürlich im amerikanischen Original "Profiles in Courage". Schön zu wissen, daß auch andere Menschen alte Bücher lesen.
Stuart Kelly
The Book of Lost Books
An incomplete History of all the
Great Books you will never read
Book Description: Loss is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm. It is the rule. It is inescapable.
The Book of Lost Books is an alternative history of literature, which begins with the earliest hominids and, ranging through from Homer and the Bible to Sylvia Plath and William Burroughs, ends with the entropic heat-death of the Universe. Each of the entries describes and discusses a work of literature, which, for various reasons, cannot be read: it may have been destroyed, or left incomplete at the author’s death, or may never even have been started.
Books are destroyed by fire, water, internment, apathy, madness, a crocodile and prejudice. There are mathematical puzzles and magic symbols, quack prophets and inveterate riddlers, a novel written entirely without the letter ‘e’ and an encyclopaedia that was logically impossible to write. Despite the undercurrents of loss, cultural extinction and the ubiquity of Death, it is a celebratory book, revelling in the oddities and haphazard chances that comprise the history of writing. For the Lost Book, like the person you never dared ask to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it remains perfect only in the imagination…
Kurzbeschreibung: Ein Buch für Leseratten und Wien-Besucher. Schauplätze großer Literatur mit Wiener Flair. Ein Journalist und ein Fotograf begeben sich auf Spurensuche: Wie sieht es heute an jenen Orten aus, die einst Schauplatz eines Romans waren? Wo immer sie hinkommen, finden sie etwas, das wie ein Echo aus dem dazugehörigen Roman in die Jetztzeit schwingt. In der Gasse, in der Robert Menasse in „Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt“ einen VW gegen einen Baum setzt, kugeln tatsächlich zerbeulte Teile ebenjener Automarke herum. Und wo Robert Musils „Mann ohne Eigenschaften“ mit einem wahren Hasenfuß von Kutscher unterwegs war, treffen sie einen Fiaker, der bekennt, ein „Nervenbündel“ zu sein. Die Leser dieses Buches haben das Vergnügen, Literatur in Text und Bild neu zu erleben, treffen alte Bekannte und bekommen Lust auf bisher vielleicht noch nicht Gelesenes. Darüber hinaus eignet es sich auch als Stadtführer für Wien-Besucher, die die Stadt auf den Spuren großer Literatur erkunden möchten.
Josepf ROTH
Zipper and his Father
Synopsis: Set in Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century, Zipper and his Father is a compelling and wonderfully atmospheric portrayal of a childhood friend, Arnold Zipper, and his father, as seen through the eyes of a young boy.
The Zipper family welcome the arrival of their son's friend and the boy is fascinated by their cosy suburban life. Zipper Senior, a violin-maker and travelling salesman, is determined that they will attain the success that was denied to him. However, as the two friends mature their lives take different paths' - the army, university, early career choices and a disastrous marriage to an aspiring actress all take their toll - and each has a very different story to tell.
From the outskirts of Vienna to the Hollywood hills, Zipper and his Father charts the ambitions of a whole generation who, during period of erratic social change, found themselves dreaming of what might have been.
Paul AUSTER
The Red Notebook
"The Red Notebook bears testimony to Auster's sense of the metaphysical elegance of life and art." Literary Review
In this acrobatic and virtuosic collection, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature. In a selection of interviews, als well as in the collection's title essay, Auster reflects upon his own work, on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing, and on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity.
The Red Notebook both undermines and illuminates our accepted notions about literature, and guides us towards a finer understanding of the dangerous stakes of writing. It also includes Auster's impassioned essay "A Prayer for Salman Rushdie", as well as a set of striking and bittersweet reminiscences collected under the apposite title, "Why Write?"
"An elegant collection of observations and autobiographical fragments." Observer
Brian MOORE
Es gibt kein anderes Leben
Kurzbeschreibung: Können ungerechte, politische Verhältnisse, Elend und Korruption nur mit Gewalt beseitigt werden? Für den Armenpriester Jeannot, Präsident einer Karibikinsel, die in vielem an Haiti erinnert, ist dies angesichts der Not seines Landes keine Frage. Seinen geistigen Ziehvater, Père Paul Michel, stürzt diese Frage hingegen in eine Glaubenskrise. Brian Moore erzählt das Drama von Moral und Macht, dem sich jeder stellen muß, der seinen Glauben an eine bessere Welt nicht aufgeben will.
"Nicht nur Brian Moores bisher bestes Buch, sondern einer der besten politischen Romane, die in den letzten Jahren geschrieben wurde." Boston Sunday Globe
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Amazon.co.uk Review: Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues--"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale.
Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Sally Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other "heathen state". When Jeanette starts going to school ("The Breeding Ground") and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl ("Unnatural Passions"), she's swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette's existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress.
In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview.
Philip ROTH
Everyman
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.comPhilip Roth's 27th novel is a marvel of brevity, admirable for its elegant style and composition (no surprise), but remarkable above all for its audacity and ambition. It seizes unflinchingly on one of the least agreeable subjects in the domain of the novel -- the natural deterioration of the body. But beyond that, Everyman can be seen as a bid to engage conclusively with the core anxieties that the literary novel exists to confront: How, absent the shadow of God, in new and confusing brightness, shall we decide what we are, how we human animals should judge ourselves and whether we can love our species despite everything?
Everyman begins with its hero's end, his interment. Only three of the graveside mourners speak -- the dead man's daughter, his second wife and his older brother. Ordinary puzzlement, sadness and resignation are expressed: "That was the end. No special point had been made." What follows is a summary retrospective of the protagonist's life. We see him as a dutiful good son who, yielding to his parents' wishes, sets aside his artistic aspirations and, after a tour of duty in the Navy, goes to work in advertising. He prospers, ultimately becoming creative director of a major New York-based firm. His infidelities figure in the breakups of at least two of his three marriages. Along the way, he fathers two sons (they reject him with bitterness for having left their mother) and a hapless daughter, who adores him.
His health abruptly worsens when he is in his early fifties and he has to live through 20 years of episodic but severe medical interventions: many surgeries, including a quintuple bypass. His medical miseries dominate his life. He retreats to an upscale retirement community on the Jersey shore and devotes himself to painting (until he concludes that he has nothing to say in that medium) and to teaching painting to his fellow residents. He hears of colleagues declining, beginning to die off. A last operation for a carotid blockage is fatal.
Roth has taken great pains to craft an archetypical American life for his readers to contemplate. The nameless protagonist "was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man," Roth writes. "He never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being." He is l'homme moyen sensuel to perfection, neither good nor bad -- or, rather, about as good as he is bad. He has served his country. He has no visible politics. He is unreligious (he gave up attending synagogue after his bar mitzvah). He has met his obligations -- his material obligations -- to his immediate families, but he has made no wider benefactions that we hear of. In his thought-life, there's nothing distinctive. He is reasonably stoical about his medical ordeals, which are brought to life in harrowing detail by the author, but toward the end he is less stoical.
There is, in truth, more on the negative side of his ledger than on the credit side. He is self-centered to a fault. In conscious envy of his beloved elder brother's robust health, he turns against this man who has been his sole steadfast friend. He deceives his wives. And he asserts a comfortably exculpatory determinism when he thinks over the many missteps in his life: "There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it -- he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body." Finally, he is insular. He seems never to apprehend that he is suffering at a privileged level, that great medical coverage means everything when the bad luck begins.
Still, it is for some purpose that we are conducted through the salient parts of a life not interesting in itself. What do we say, as readers, waving farewell to this man? What assessment do we make of his life?
It's a feat, but through this clinically secular morality tale, Roth manages to extract love and pity for his created mortal. Bravura descriptions of his skirmishes with death skillfully penetrate the readers' normal, reflexive resistance to such images. Although our hero continues to fine-tune his rationalizations, his remorse -- powerfully depicted -- breaks through. And virtuoso lyrical passages capture the protagonist's yearning for the strength and joy of his youth: "Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler's loupe engraved with his father's initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself -- at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth!"
Through consummate art, Roth elevates the links that bind his protagonist to us, the readers who judge his life. From a distance, Everyman looks like a shaggy dog story -- a long, quotidian story whose meaning resides in its final pointlessness. Up close, though, it is a parable that captures, as few works of fiction have, the pathos of Being, as it's manifested even in the favored precincts of affluent America.
Reviewed by Norman Rush Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Ismail KADARE
Der General der toten Armee
Vladimir NABOKOW
Sprich, Erinnerung
Wiedersehen mit einer Autobiographie
Anne WEST
Der Venus-Effekt
Spielregeln für Liebe, Sex und andere lustvolle Kleinigkeiten
Tom WOLFE:
I am Charlotte Simmons
Product Description: Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite - her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus - she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.
Elizabeth Noble
The Reading Group
From Publishers Weekly: Perfect indulgence for the eponymous set—or pandering to an anticipated audience? Or maybe both? As the London Evening Standard put it, "The blurb has [the author] down as a simple Surrey housewife who knocked this out between the Hoovering and the hot sex, but further investigation reveals her to be a veteran of book marketing married to the head of Time Warner UK." Go figure! Well, either way, this U.K. bestseller is a frothy page-turner that dissects the relationships, desires and discoveries of five English women, all members of a book club. Over the course of a year, the women read 12 novels (including Atonement, Rebecca and The Alchemist) and, through their playful but intimate discussions (few of which revolve around the books), they bond closely while coping with such matters as a philandering husband, a mother with dementia, a pregnant but unmarried daughter, an infertility crisis, a wedding and a funeral. It's a testament to Noble's characterizations and plotting that the novel is not overwhelming, despite its numerous (perhaps too many) points of view, complicated backstories and interweaving contemporary crises. Light but never flip, this is funny, contemplative and touching reading, and the group's familiar book choices allow readers to feel as if they're part of the gang, too, as they race to the end, eager to find out what happens, why it does and what it all means.
Leslie Brenner
American Appetite
The Coming auf Age of a Cuisine
From Publishers WeeklyI: this intriguing, albeit somewhat haughty, culinary treatise, Brenner (1996 winner of the James Beard Award for journalism and the author of several books on wine and food) attempts to discern whether an American cuisine exists. Brenner observes that "Americans love big flavors. As a group, we tend not to have, shall we say, refined tastes," and from there she sets out to define what is American cuisineAmostly from a perspective of culinary sophisticationAas evidenced in what is offered by grocery stores, restaurants and cookbooks. She gives a brief history of the American culinary evolution, from the clever and imaginative cooking methods of the Native Americans and Dutch (which were altered to suit the bland Puritan taste) to Thomas Jefferson's introduction of French foods to the era of industrial canning, which Brenner believes led to the demise of American gastronomy. In a chapter entitled "Xenophobes No More: The Foreign Influence," she lists the contributions that have been made by people from other countries, especially since the Immigration Act of 1965. A chapter on "chic" food informs that celery ruled in the 1860s, oranges gained prominence in the 1870s and vichyssoise came of age in the 1920s. In the end, Brenner states that American cuisine is "alive, it's vibrant, it's hereAthough it's only just starting to come into its own." Although her tone may irk readers not from New England or California ("In many cities and towns across America, the gastronomic revolution has yet to arrive"), Brenner offers a fascinating look into the history of America's cuisine. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
