A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation - published in two elegant volumes - is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life.During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969“Naturally, we were all there," old Qfwfq said, "where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?”

Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed, and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a sombre farce.

Two novellas: the first, a parody of medieval knighthood told by a nun; the second, a fantasy about a nobleman bisected into his good and evil halves. “Bravura pieces... executed with brilliance and brio”(Chicago Tribune). Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. A Helen and Kurt Wolff BookOriginally published as two distinct volumes: 'Il visconte dimezzato' (1952) and 'Il cavaliere inesistente' (1959). Also published in a single volume with 'The baron in the trees' (Il barone rampante, 1957) as 'Our Ancestors' (I nostri antenati, 1960).

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man's struggle to enlighten and instruct himself and others in the realm of desire. Published in 1870, the novel gained notoriety and a degree of immortality for its author when the word "masochism" - derived from his name - entered the vocabulary of psychiatry. This remains a classic literary statement on sexual submission and control.

Alternate cover edition here.When a man’s favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple’s midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald’s; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden; an insomniac wife wakes up to a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible—even death. In every one of the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal. He has a deadpan genius for dislocating realities to uncover the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.

This book (I read the ebook) consists of four short stories; the first, the story of the title, is by Kawabata; the other three are by Inoue. All four are exceptionally different in theme. In The Izu Dancer a male university student is bumming around in the summer and falls in love with a young dancer and drummer in a group of traveling performers. He joins up with them just to have company while he travels. Apparently itinerant performers were considered low-class as they act honored to have the student with them. The time period is uncertain because it seemed to me an ancient time – traveling by foot on dirt roads and drinking from streams – but then the young girl asks him to take her to a movie. So perhaps early 1900’s? At the public baths he discovers the girl is really a child and the girl’s mother won’t let him take her to a movie. It’s a love that cannot be and as such reminds me of poignant moments in Death in Venice, where the older German man is pursuing a young boy, or the moment in Colm Toibin’s The Master when Henry James waits outside a young man’s window and turns away… I thought the best story in the book was also the longest and most developed. The Counterfeiter is about a man hired by the family of a famous deceased artist to write his biography. The man has been writing this biography on and off over ten years (! – interrupted by WW II, but still!). As he visits private homes where his subject’s scroll paintings are housed, he learns many are counterfeit. His real interest shifts to the counterfeiter. In the introduction, we are told that Inoue’s work had themes of orphanhood, loneliness, fate, predestination, the arts, newspaper writing and his home province of the Izu Peninsula. All of these work their way into the story.In Obasute we learn that there is an ancient Japanese myth or legend about taking elderly people (over 70, so I’m eligible) to the top of this mountain and leaving them to die. There is a mountain in Japan, Mt. Kamuriki, the story is about, and it has been renamed from Ubasate which apparently means something like “leaving to die.” Anyway, this story is focused on how a family deals with their elderly mother who starts talking about “it’s time to carry me up Obasute.” The Full Moon is about office politics in corporate Japan. The CEO or President has just been fired by the board. The incoming president surrounds himself with sycophants and mistresses just as the former president did. It’s about money, power, women and decorations (awards) in that order. The outcome is predictable. I usually write a brief note about the author(s). The book is oddly structured with one story by Kawabata and three by Inoue. The book gives us an introduction and a brief biography of Inoue but nothing about Kawabata. So I looked up Kawabata on Wiki and discovered a lot of info that matches that given in the biographical info about Inoue – that Kawabata was the son of an army physician, orphaned at an early age, and raised by a grandmother on the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo. But that’s the same info given for Inoue in the translator’s intro! Then I started thinking that maybe Inoue was a penname that Kawabata had used in the past --- look at the similarities in their first names: Yasunari and Yasushi. But no, they have different birth and death dates. (Kawabata 1899-1972; Inoue 1907-1991. Apparently no one carried them up the mountain.) Could the translator have been so sloppy that he mixed up Inoue's bibliographical information with Kawabata's? Or more likely, Wiki is mixed up? After an hour of trying to figure it out, I gave up. Hopefully the pictures I used are accurate. A landscape on the Izu Peninsula from A scroll of "Old Japan Dying Cave" from alchetron.com/cdn/ubasuteYasunari Kawabata from nobelprize.orgYasuushi Inoue from Goodreads 

Books