There
is nothing like Riddley Walker. No other book offers such a convincing
and immersive portrait of another culture, another place, another time.
In this
case, that place is Kent, England, but deep into the future, where a new culture
and language have emerged after a long-forgotten nuclear
war. Hoban asks readers to make an effort; you have to get your ear in for his
expertly handled broken English, but the returns are enormous.
"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy...Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and-this matters most-intensely ponderable." -Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "This is what literature is meant to be." -Anthony Burgess "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style...The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." -Anthony Thwaite, Observer "Extraordinary...Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." -Michael Dirda,…
It only takes a few pages to know that you’re in safe hands. What sounds
like a strange idea – a Frankenstein monster roaming the streets of occupied Baghdad
– turns out to be both a perfect narrative device and political metaphor.
Assembled from the parts of people blown up by terrorists, soldiers and
insurgents, our monster carries both the conscience and the guilt, the humanity
and the violence, of a disassembled city.
"Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound." -Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment
"Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read." -Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi-a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local cafe-collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial.…
Stories of the small adventures and ruminations of a
wealthy old man in Trieste may not sound that gripping. But our protagonist,
Zeno Cosini, is a really compelling and funny portrait of pedantic self-absorption.
The
book has qualities akin to Diary of a Nobody, though Zeno’s world is far
more elevated than Charles Pooter. This was the author’s last book and is
unfinished but with this new translation, by Frederika Randall, it’s a charming
classic.
A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience.
A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923.
Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start—aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias—even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of…
New islands are being built at an unprecedented
rate, while many islands are disappearing or fragmenting because of rising sea
levels.
It is a strange planetary spectacle, creating an ever-changing map
that even Google Earth struggles to keep pace with. In The Age of
Islands, I take the reader on a
compelling and thought-provoking tour of the world’s new islands.
From a ‘crannog,’ an ancient artificial island
in a Scottish loch, to the militarized artificial islands China is building in
the South China Sea, from the disappearing islands that remain the home of
native Central Americans to the luxurious new islands of Dubai, from Hong Kong and
the Isles of Scilly to islands far away and near—all have urgent stories to
tell.
