Books

A beautiful, wrenching debut novel chronicling the life of a family struggling for survival during the Armenian genocide in Turkey, in 1915.

author: Antonia Arslan ASIN or ISBN-10: 1400044359 binding: Hardcover list price: $23.95 USD amazon price: $39.51 USD

The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.

author: Franz Kafka ASIN or ISBN-10: 0805212078 binding: Paperback list price: $15.95 USD amazon price: $15.95

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

When Timothy Murphy graduated from college, Robert Penn Warren advised him to go home and grow some roots. This memoir in prose, verse and woodcuts, depicts the consequences of Warren's advice for a writer who turned his back on cities and the academic world.

author: Tim Murphy ASIN or ISBN-10: 0821413228 binding: Paperback list price: $19.95 USD amazon price: $19.95 USD

From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Beowulf, edited by Sarah Anderson and translated by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy, includes the complete work and contextual materials on the early medieval age.

ASIN or ISBN-10: 0321107209 binding: Paperback list price: $23.20 USD amazon price: $20.30 USD