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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 52

Colored Television by Danzy Senna. New York. 2024. Riverhead Books. 9780593544372. 277 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: lauren peters-collaer.

9780593544372 DESCRIPTION - A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia. Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong. Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet. AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER.and A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK. “A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy… This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.” –LA Times. “Funny, foxy and fleet…The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times.

Senna Danzy AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Danzy Senna, (b. 1970) is an American novelist. Danzy Senna was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is the daughter of the author Carl Senna (THE BLACK PRESS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS,) a black poet of Mexican heritage who came from a struggling single-parent household, and Fanny Howe, an Irish-American poet and novelist born into privilege. They met and married while both were activists during the American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968). Senna received her B.A. from Stanford University and MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several creative writing awards. Her first novel, CAUCASIA (1998), received the Book-of-the-Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. It also received the Alex Award , American Library Association. Her second novel SYMPTOMATIC (2003), is a psychological thriller narrated by a biracial young woman who is often mistaken for white. Senna's latest work is a memoir entitled WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?: A PERSONAL HISTORY (2009).

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 62

Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing by Walter Benjamin. New York. 1978. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151761892. Translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott. Edited & With An Introduction by Peter Demetz. 348 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Anthony.

0151761892 DESCRIPTION - A new selection from the work of ‘the most important critic of the time.' - Hannah Arendt . . .A companion volume to ILLUMINATIONS, the earlier collection of Benjamin's writings, REFLECTIONS presents a new sampling of his wide-ranging work. In addition to his literary criticism, this book contains some of his autobiographical narrations, among them ‘A Berlin Chronicler' and Benjamin's travel pieces; a selection from his aphorisms, a form in which he excelled; and philosophical-theological speculations. Most of Benjamin's writings on Brecht and his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus are also included. With the passage of time, Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940, has been recognized as one of the most acute analysts of literary and sociological phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Benjamin Walter AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 - 26 September 1940) was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term ‘auratic perception', denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays ‘The Task of the Translator' (1923) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‘ (1936). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 71

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin. New York. 1968. Harcourt Brace & World. Translated from the German by Harry Zohn. 280 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Ken Braren.

illuminations essays and reflections harcourt brace and world 1968 DESCRIPTION - Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, a German-Jewish man of letters, was known to the discerning few as one of the most acute and original critical and analytical minds of his time. His work consisted of literary essays, general reflections, aphorisms, and probings into cultural phenomena. He achieved posthumous fame when a collected edition of his writings appeared in Germany fifteen years after his death. ILLUMINATIONS is the first publication, in English, of a selection from Benjamin's writings. It includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust, both of whom he translated, his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his noted, penetrating study on ‘Time Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,'' a cultural assessment of time interrelation of art, technology, and mass society, an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaced them with a substantial, admirably informed Introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development as well as his work and his life in dark times.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1578

Republic by Plato. New York. 1993. Oxford University Press. 0192126040. Translated from the Ancient Greek by Robin Waterfield. 475 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: detail from 'The Acropolis', Carl Haag.

0192126040 DESCRIPTION - What is at stake is far from insignificant: it is how one should live one's life.' The central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher, Republic is essentially an enquiry into morality, but it contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. Socrates and others meet to discuss the ideal community, where morality can be achieved in the balance of wisdom, courage, and restraint. The dialogue is, however, as much about our internal life as about social morality, for these vital elements must likewise work together to create harmonious human beings. Plato achieves more than a philosophical dialogue of lasting fame and importance: Republic is a literary masterpiece too, for he presents the philosophy for the ordinary reader, who is carried along by the wit and intensity of the dialogue and by Plato's unforgettable images of the human condition. This new, lucid translation by Robin Waterfield is complemented by full explanatory notes and an up-to-date critical introduction. 'Waterfield's is certainly the best translation of the Republic available. It is accurate and informed by deep philosophical understanding of the text unlike other translations it combines these virtues with an impressive ability to render Plato into English that is as varied and as expressive as is Plato's Greek.' - Professor Julia Annas, University of Arizona. Jacket illustration: detail from The Acropolis, by Carl Haag. PLATO (c, 427-347 BC), Athenian philosopher-dramatist, has had a profound and lasting influence upon Western intellectual tradition. Born into a wealthy and prominent family, he grew up during the conflict between Athens and the Peloponnesian states. Following its turbulent aftermath, he was deeply affected by the condemnation and execution of his revered master, Socrates (469-399), on charges of irreligion and corrupting the young. Reacting against political activity, Plato now devoted his life to philosophy and to composing memoirs of Socratic enquiry cast in dialogue form. He was strongly influenced by the Pythagorean thinkers of southern Italy and Sicily, whom he reputedly visited when he was about 40. Sometime after his return to Athens he founded the Academy, an early ancestor of the modern university Plato is the earliest Western philosopher from whose output complete works have been preserved. For their combination, dramatic realism, poetic beauty, intellectual vitality, and emotional power his dialogues are unique in Western literature. ROBIN WATERFIELD was born in 1952. After graduating from Manchester University, he went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a university lecturer (at Newcastle upon Tyne and St. Andrews), and an editor and publisher. Currently, however, he is a self-employed consultant editor and writer, whose books range from philosophy to children's fiction. He has translated, in particular, a number of Plutarch's essays, Xenophon's Socratic works, and several other dialogues by Plato. Plato

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Plato (c.427-347 BC) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He founded the Athenian Academy, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all Western universities. ROBIN WATERFIELD was born in 1952. After graduating from Manchester University, he went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a university lecturer (at Newcastle upon Tyne and St. Andrews), and an editor and publisher. Currently, however, he is a self-employed consultant editor and writer, whose books range from philosophy to children's fiction. He has translated, in particular, a number of Plutarch's essays, Xenophon's Socratic works, and several other dialogues by Plato.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 65

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. New York. 1957. Regnery. Translated from the Japanese by Edwin McClellan. hardcover.

kokoro regnery 1957 DESCRIPTION - No collection of Japanese literature is complete without KOKORO, the last novel Natsume Soseki completed before his death in 1916. Published here in the first new English translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro - meaning ‘heart'- is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls ‘Sensei.' Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that Soseki Natsume characterized Japan in the early twentieth century. ‘Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.' - Haruki Murakami.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sōseki Natsume (February 9, 1867 - December 9, 1916), born Kinnosuke Natsume was a Japanese novelist of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature and composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 68

The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right by Sally Denton. New York. 2012. Bloomsbury Press. 9781608190898. 273 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Natalie Slocum.

9781608190898 DESCRIPTION - In March 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally became the nation's thirty-second president. The man swept in by a landslide four months earlier now took charge of a country in the grip of panic brought on by economic catastrophe. Though no one yet knew it-not even Roosevelt-it was a radical moment in America. And with all of its unmistakable resonance with events of today, it is a cautionary tale. THE PLOTS AGAINST THE PRESIDENT follows Roosevelt as he struggled to right the teetering nation, armed with little more than indomitable optimism and the courage to try anything. His bold New Deal experiments provoked a backlash from both extremes of the political spectrum. Wall Street bankers threatened by FDR's policies made common cause with populist demagogues like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin. But just how far FDR's enemies were willing to go to thwart him has never been fully explored. Two startling events that have been largely ignored by historians frame Sally Denton's swift, tense narrative of a year of fear: anarchist Giuseppe Zangara's assassination attempt on Roosevelt, and a plutocrats' plot to overthrow the government that would Denton Sally come to be known as the Wall Street Putsch. THE PLOTS AGAINST THE PRESIDENT throws light on the darkest chapter of the Depression and the moments when the fate of the American republic hung in the balance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sally Denton is an award-winning author and investigative journalist. Her books INCLUDE PASSION AND PRINCIPLE, AMERICAN MASSACRE, FAITH AND BETRAYAL, THE BLUEGRASS CONSPIRACY, and THE MONEY AND THE POWER (co-written with Roger Morris). She is a Guggenheim fellow and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She lives in New Mexico.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 58

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L. Richards. New York. 2007. Knopf. . 292 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Joe Montgomery.

9780307265203 DESCRIPTION - It has always been understood that the 1848 discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada influenced the battle over the admission of California to the Union. But now, in this revelatory study, award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards makes clear the links between the Gold Rush and many of the regional crises in the lead-up to the Civil War. Richards explains how Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves and saw themselves importing their own slaves to dig for gold, only to be frustrated by California's passage of a state constitution that prohibited slavery. Still, they schemed to tie California to the South with a southern-routed transcontinental railroad and worked to split off the southern half as a separate slave state. We see how the Gold Rush influenced the squabbling over the Gadsden Purchase, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and various attempts to take Cuba and Nicaragua. We meet David Broderick, a renegade New York Democrat who became a force in San Francisco politics in 1849, and his archrival William Gwin, a major Mississippi slaveholder and politician who arrived in California with the intent of making it a slave state and himself one of its first senators. Richards recounts the Washington battles involving Taylor, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Davis, Webster, Fillmore, and others, as well as the fiery California political battles, feuds, duels, and perhaps outright murder as the state came shockingly close to being divided in two. When war did break out efforts were made to push California to secede, but there was little general enthusiasm for secession, and many prominent Southerners wentoff to join the Confederate Army. And with the South out of the Union, the Pacific Railroad Act passed, insuring a comfortably northern route.

Richards Leonard L AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonard L. Richards, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, grew up in California, and earned his AB, MA, and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii. His "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1970. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 took the second-place Lincoln Prize in 2001. He is also the author, with William Graebner, of The American Record (1981, 1987, 1995, 2000, 2005) and of Shay's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (2002). He and his wife live in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 59

Monsieur De Saint-George: Virtuoso, Swordsman, Revolutionary by Alain Guede. New York. 2003. Picador. 0312309279. 292 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting - 'Monsieur De St George' by William Ward After Mather Brown. Jacket design by Nina Laricchia.

0312309279 DESCRIPTION - The first full biography of one of the greatest figures of eighteenth-century Europe, known in his time as the ‘Black Mozart'. Virtually forgotten until now, his life is the stuff of legend. Born in 1739 in Guadeloupe to a slave mother and a French noble father, he became the finest swordsman of his age, an insider at the doomed court of Louis XVI, and, most of all, a virtuosic musician. A violinist, he directed the Olympic Society of Concerts, which was considered the finest in Europe in an age of great musicians, including Haydn, from whom he commissioned a symphony, and Mozart, to whom he was often compared. He also became the first Freemason of color, embracing the French Revolution with the belief that it would end the racism against which-despite his illustrious achievements-he struggled his whole life. This is the life of Joseph Bologne, known variously as Monsieur de Saint- Guede Alain George, the ‘Black Mozart,' and, because of his origins, ‘the American.' Alain GuEdE offers a fascinating account of this extraordinary individual, whose musical compositions are at long last being revived and whose story will never again be forgotten.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alain Guede is a journalist for the French newspaper Le canard enchaine. A leading expert on the life and music of Saint-George, Guede has organized a website that follows developments in Saint-George's rediscovery.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 54

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff. New Haven. 2019. Yales University Press. 9780300222784. 395 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph: Vasily Grossman with the Red Armu in Schwerin, Germany, 1945. HIP/Art Resource, NY.

9780300222784 DESCRIPTION - The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman. If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman's powerful anti‑totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting Popoff Alexandra quality of great art. Because Grossman's major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates Grossman's life and legacy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ALEXANDRA POPOFF is a former Moscow journalist and Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow. She is an expert on Russian literature and cultural history and the author of several literary biographies, including the award-winning SOPHIA TOLSTOY (2010) and THE WIVES (a Wall Street Journal best non-fiction title for 2012). Her new book VASILY GROSSMAN AND THE SOVIET CENTURY was selected by the Christian Science Monitor among five best biographies published in March 2019. She lives in Canada.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 47

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New York. 1983. New Directions. 081120846x. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim. 446 pages. hardcover. Cover drawing and design by Harold Wortsman.

081120846x DESCRIPTION - Few first novels have had the impact of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Written in an explosive style that fairly jumps off the page, the book shocked most critics but found immediate success with the French reading public, which responded enthusiastically to the violent misadventures of its petit-bourgeois antihero, Bardamu, and his scabrous nihilism. His military experiences in the first years of World War I, his travels to colonial French West Africa, New York, and Detroit, his return to postwar France and his beginning medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris—all these have some parallels with the real life of the author. However, repeated attempts to prove the novel strictly autobiographical have become exercises in academic futility: the picaresque extravagance of this twentieth-century classic clearly marks it as a forerunner of absurdist black humor. The publication of Ralph Manheim's translation of Journey to the End of the Night follows some years after his rendering into English of its companion novel, Death on the Installment Plan. Manheim, more than any other translator, has been able to capture the savage energy of Céline's French, drawn from the Parisian argot he made his own.

Celine Louis Ferdinand AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis-Ferdinand Celine was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 - 1 July 1961). He was a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Celine was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and world literature.

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