geoffrey brock

Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory-he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries.

author: Umberto Eco ASIN or ISBN-10: 0156030438 binding: Paperback list price: $18.00 USD amazon price: $18.00 USD

Though one of the best-known books in the world, Pinocchio at the same time remains unknown—linked in many minds to the Walt Disney movie that bears little relation to Carlo Collodi’s splendid original. That story is of course about a puppet who, after many trials, succeeds in becoming a “real boy.” Yet it is hardly a sentimental or morally improving tale. To the contrary, Pinocchio is one of the great subversives of the written page, a madcap genius hurtled along at the pleasure and mercy of his desires, a renegade who in many ways resembles his near contemporary Huck Finn.

author: Carlo Collodi ASIN or ISBN-10: 1590172892 binding: Paperback list price: $14.00 USD amazon price: $11.83 USD

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. Once read, his keen perceptions--all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language and his supple use of poetic form--will be long remembered.

author: Geoffrey Brock ASIN or ISBN-10: 1566636671 binding: Hardcover list price: $18.95 USD amazon price: $14.21 USD