Lives
Peter Robb
Black Inc, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, PB, 9781863955638
$29.95 ex $32.95 inc
Peter Robb has an uncanny ability to get into the skin of other people: to show them in a new light, to home on what makes them tick. In Australia, these range from Alex Dimitriades to Ivan Milat, from Marcia Langton to Julian Assange. In Italy, Robb immerses the reader in the worlds of Fellini, Caravaggio, Calvino and Pasolini. Elsewhere, his observations of EM Forster, Arthur Rimbaud, Peter Carey and Gore Vidal illuminate the real people behind the public image. Featuring much previously unpublished material, this is a fascinating exploration of some notable lives -- in all their variety, glamour and idiosyncrasy.
As Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh: Journals And Notebooks, 1964-1980
Susan Sontag & David Rieff
Farrar, Strauss & Gir, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, HC, 9780374100766
$38.18 ex $42.00 inc
A second volume of journals by the National Book Award-winning author of In America shares intimate reflections on the writer's artistic and political development during a trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War and throughout her film-making years in Sweden before the dawn of the Reagan era. 20,000 first printing.
The New Republic
Lionel Shriver
Harper Collins, LITERATURE, PB, 9780732287054
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Fat and ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. When he's offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about the beloved "Bear," who is no longer lighting up their work lives. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba - "The Daring Soldiers of Barba" - have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the "SOB" suddenly dry up?
All The Madmen: Barrett, Bowie, Drake, The Floyd, The Kinks, The Who And The Journey To The Dark Sid
Clinton Heylin
Constable, MUSIC, HC, 9781849018807
$36.35 ex $39.99 inc
"After the Summer of Love - how English Rock lost itself, went mad, and produced some of the finest music. By the end of 1968 The Beatles were far too busy squabbling with each other, while The Stones had simply stopped making music; English Rock was coming to an end. All the Mad Men tells the story of six stars that travelled to edge of sanity in the years following the summer of love: Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Peter Green, Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, and David Bowie. The book charts how they made some of the most seminal rock music ever recorded: Pink Moon; Ziggy Stardust; Quadrophenia; Dark Side of the Moon; Muswell Hillbillies - and how some of them could not make it back from the brink. The extraordinary story of how English Rock went mad and found itself"
Skagboys
Irvine Welsh
Jonathan Cape, LITERATURE, PB, 9780224087919
$29.95 ex $32.95 inc
Mark Renton seems to have it all: he's the first in his family to go to university, he's young, has a pretty girlfriend and a great social life. But Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his badly handicapped younger brother dies the family bonds start to weaken, his life flips out of control, and he succumbs to the defeatism and the heroin which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas. His friends face similar challenges. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job and faces long-term unemployment, while Tommy Lawrence feels that only love can save him from being sucked into a life of petty Crime and violence - exemplified respectively by the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. And then there is Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, scamming and hustling his way through life. Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: not the sanitised version, of upbeat pop music, mullets, shoulder-pads and MTV, but a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred - and maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.
The Woman Who Changed Her Brain
Barbara Arrowsmith Young
Harper Collins, PSYCHOLOGY, PB, 9780732292393
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born with severe learning disabilities that caused teachers to label her slow, stubborn--or worse. As a child, she read and wrote everything backward, struggled to process concepts in language, continually got lost, and was physically uncoordinated. She could make no sense of an analogue clock. But by relying on her formidable memory and iron will, she made her way to graduate school, where she chanced upon research that inspired her to invent cognitive exercises to "fix" her own brain. The Woman Who Changed Her Brain interweaves her personal tale with riveting case histories from her more than thirty years of working with both children and adults.
The House Of Fiction: Leonard, Susan And Elizabeth Jolley : A Memoir
Susan Swingler
Fremantle Pub, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, PB, 9781921888663
$22.68 ex $24.95 inc
Susan Swingler is the step-daughter of one of Australia's most revered writers -- Elizabeth Jolley. Abandoned by her father Leonard at the age of four, Susan had no contact with the Jolley family until they found and reclaimed her at the age of twenty-one. Why they were kept apart is the subject of this startling new memoir. The House of Fiction tells the story of Swingler's quest to find her father. As she painstakingly traces and documents clues to a better understanding of Leonard, she inadvertently unravels an intricate fiction created by Elizabeth Jolley to protect those she loved.
The Mountain: Vintage Trade Paperback
Drusilla Modjeska
Vintage Australia, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781741666502
$25.41 ex $27.95 inc
In 1968 Papua New Guinea is on the brink of independence, and everything is about to change. Amidst the turmoil filmmaker Leonard arrives from England with his Dutch wife, Rika, to study and film an isolated village high in The Mountains. The villagers' customs and art have been passed down through generations, and Rika is immediately struck by their paintings on a cloth made of bark. Rika and Leonard are also confronted with the new university in Moresby, where intellectual ambition and the idealism of youth are creating friction among locals such as Milton - a hot-headed young playwright - and visiting westerners, such as Martha, to whom Rika becomes close. But it is when Rika meets brothers Jacob and Aaron that all their lives are changed for ever. Drusilla Modjeska's sweeping novel takes us deep into this fascinating, complex country, whose culture and people cannot escape the march of modernity that threatens to overwhelm them. It is a riveting story of love, loss, grief and betrayal.
Eleven Seasons: Vogel Winner 2012
Paul D Carter
Allen & Unwin, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781742379715
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
'Some guys are good at school and telling jokes or they have the latest stuff. Others are cricketers and basketball players: they can do things with the ball that make their classmates talk about them when they're not around. His thing is football. He becomes the centre of whichever team he plays for: he becomes the advantage.' MELBOURNE, 1985. Jason Dalton sits on his bed and counts his football cards, dreaming of the day he too is immortalised in the public eye. He's young and gifted, a natural player who can do anything with the ball in his hand. If only everything else in his life was as obvious to him as playing. GOLD COAST, 1991. The bottom has fallen out of Jason's life; he's now a high-school dropout, tired and wasted on the Gold Coast, with an explosive family secret still ringing in his ears. He needs to get his life back. But first he needs to find out who he is.
Dial M For Murdoch: News Corporation And The Corruption Of Britain
Tom Watson & Martin Hickman
Allen Lane, MEDIA STUDIES, PB, 9781846146046
$27.23 ex $29.95 inc
Dial M for Murdoch gives the first connected account of the wrongdoing over the last decade at News International, and the extraordinary lengths to which its parent company, News Corporation, went to "put the problem in a box" (in James Murdoch's words), how its efforts to maintain and extend its power were aided by its political and police friends, and how it was finally exposed.
A History Of Greek Cinema
Vrasidas Karalis
Continuum, FILM, PB, 9781441194473
$36.35 ex $39.99 inc
The history of Greek cinema is a rather obscure and unexamined affair. Greek cinema started slowly and then collapsed; for several years it struggled to reinvent itself, produced its first mature works, then collapsed completely and almost vanished. Because of such a complex historical trajectory no comprehensive survey of the development of Greek cinema has been written in English. This book is the first to explore its development and the contexts that defined it by focusing on its main films, personalities and theoretical discussions.
A History of Greek Cinema focuses on the early decades and the attempts to establish a "national" cinema useful to social cohesion and national identity. It also analyses the problems and the dilemmas that many Greek directors faced in order to establish a distinct Greek cinema language and presents the various stages of development throughout the background of the turbulent political history of the country. The book combines historical analysis and discussions about cinematic form in to construct a narrative history about Greek cinematic successes and failures.
The Crisis Of Zionism
Peter Beinart peter Beinart
Melbourne Up, MID.EAST STUDIES, PB, 9780522861761
$29.99 ex $32.99 inc
A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organisations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream - the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals - may die. In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the centre of the crisis: Barack Obama, America's first Jewish president, a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people's special curse. These two men embody fundamentally different visions, not just of American and Israeli national interests, but of the mission of the Jewish people itself. Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change, and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late.
Guitar Zero: The New Musician And The Science Of Learning
Gary Marcus
Penguin, MUSIC, HC, 9781594203176
$32.73 ex $36.00 inc
Just about every human being knows how to listen to music, but what does it take to make music? Is musicality something we are born with? Or a skill that anyone can develop at any time? If you don't start piano at the age of six, is there any hope? Is skill learning best left to children or can anyone reinvent him-or herself at any time? On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Gary Marcus, an internationally renowned scientist with no discernible musical talent, becomes his own guinea pig to look at how human beings become musical- and how anyone of any age can master something new. Guitar Zero traces his journey, what he learned, and how you can learn, too. In addition to being a groundbreaking look at the origins and allure of music, Marcus's journey is also an empowering tale of the mind's plasticity. In a quest that takes him from Suzuki classes to guitar gods, Marcus investigates the most effective ways to train your brain and body to learn to play an instrument. How can you make your practice more deliberate and effective? How can you find the best music teacher for you or your child? Does talent really exist? Or is hard work all you need?
The Secret Of Evil
Roberto Bolano
Farrar, Strauss & Gir, LITERATURE, HC, 9780811218153
$29.09 ex $32.00 inc
A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation 's political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano 's son Ger nimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory...
Drift: The Unmooring Of American Military Power
Rachel Maddow
Crown Pub, POLITICS, HC, 9780307460981
$31.82 ex $35.00 inc
One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of privateers ; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan's radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse.
Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a loud and jangly political debate about how, when, and where to apply America's strength and power--and who gets to make those decisions.
The Buddha In The Attic: Us Pb : Winner Of The Pen / Faulkner Awardfor Fiction
Julie Otsuka
Anchor Books, LITERATURE, PB, 9780307744425
$18.18 ex $20.00 inc
Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award... A gorgeous novel by the celebrated author of When the Emperor Was Divine that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as "picture brides" nearly a century ago. In eight unforgettable sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous journeys by boat, to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; from their experiences raising children who would later reject their culture and language, to the deracinating arrival of war. Once again, Julie Otsuka has written a spellbinding novel about identity and loyalty, and what it means to be an American in uncertain times.
Natural Woman: A Memoir
Carole King
Ecco, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, HC, 9781455512614
$35.45 ex $39.00 inc
Carole King takes us from her early beginnings in Brooklyn, to her remarkable success as one of the world's most acclaimed songwriting and performing talents of all time. A Natural Woman chronicles King's extraordinary life, drawing readers into her musical world, including her phenomenally successful #1 albumTapestry, and into her journey as a performer, mother, wife and present-day activist. Deeply personal, King's long-awaited memoir offers readers a front-row seat to the woman behind the legend. The book will include dozens of photos from King's childhood, her own family, and behind-the-scenes images from her performances.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel And The Shadow Of Dialectical Materialism
Slavoj Zizek
Verso, PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION, HC, 9781844678976
$104.55 ex $115.00 inc
For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape: whether in the name of the pre-rational Will, the social process of production, or the contingency of individual existence. Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the dominant philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity; a period with which our own time shares startling similarities. Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new transition. In Less Than Nothing , the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Zizek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Zizek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought - Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
Rosecrans Baldwin
Farrar, Strauss & Gir, TRAVEL WRITING, HC, 9780374146689
$32.73 ex $36.00 inc
A fresh, exhilarating take on one of the world's most popular topics -- Paris, the City of Light! -- by an acclaimed young novelist A self-described Francophile, Rosecrans Baldwin always dreamed of living in Paris -- drinking le cafe , eating les croissants, walking in les jardins -- so when the opportunity to work as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Paris presented itself, he couldn't turn it down. Despite the fact that he had no experience in advertising. And despite the fact that he wasn't exactly fluent in French. Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down is a nimble, comical account of observing the French capital from the inside out. It is an expedition into the Paris of Sarkozy, smoking bans, and a McDonald's beneath the Louvre -- the story of an American who loves Paris all out of proportion, who loves every beret and baguette cliche, but who finds life there to be very different from what he expected. At first, it's just the joy of running across the lingerie section in the hardware store, but over the next eighteen months, Rosecrans must rely on his American optimism to get him through some very unromantic situations -- at work (where he discovers a shockingly long-honored Parisian work ethic), at home (where his wife, who works at home, is dismayed not just by his hours but by the active construction that surrounds their apartment on five sides), and everywhere in between. An offbeat, up-to-date, surprising entry in the expat canon, Paris, I Love You is a book about a young man who witnesses his preconceptions replaced by the oddities of a vigorous, nervy city -- exactly what he needs to uncover a Paris of his own, and fall in love with the city all over again.
The Legacy Of David Foster Wallace
Samuel Cohen & Lee Konstantinou
Iowa State Uni. Press, LITERARY CRITICISM, PB, 9781609380823
$25.45 ex $28.00 inc
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace's writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world's most influential authors. In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace's fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics--including Wallace's relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the social life of his fiction and nonfiction--contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center. The creative writers--including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky, and Wallace's Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch--reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author's too-short life. All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history.
The Mind Of A Thief: How Do You Belong To A Stolen Land?
Patti Miller
Uni. Of Queensland Press, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, PB, 9780702249365
$27.23 ex $29.95 inc
When writer Patti Miller discovers that the first post-Mabo Native Title claim was made by the Wiradjuri in the Wellington Valley where she grew up, she begins to wonder where she belongs in the story of the town. It leads her to the question at the heart of Australian identity - who are we in relation to our cherished stolen country? Feeling compelled to return to the Valley, Miller uncovers a chronicle of idealism, destruction and hope in its history of convicts, zealous missionaries, farmers and gold seekers who all took the land from the original inhabitants. But it's not until she talks to the local Wiradjuri that she realises there's another set of stories about her town, even about her own family. As one Wiradjuri elder remarks, 'The whitefellas and blackfellas have two different stories about who's related to who in this town'. Black and white politics, family mythologies and the power of place are interwoven as Miller tells a story that is both an individual search for connection and identity and a universal exploration of country and belonging.
Bullfighting
Roddy Doyle
Vintage, LITERATURE, PB, 9780099555629
$18.14 ex $19.95 inc
Bullfighting moves from classrooms to graveyards, local pubs to bullrings; featuring an array of men at their working day and at rest, taking stock and reliving past glories. Each are concerned with loss in different ways - of their place in the world, of power, virility, love - of the boom days and the Celtic Tiger. Brilliantly observed, funny and moving, the stories in Bullfighting present a new vision of contemporary Ireland, of its woes and triumphs.
Driven: Sequel To Drive
James Sallis
Ecco, CRIME, PB, 9781464200113
$15.45 ex $17.00 inc
Driven is the sequel to Drive, now also an award-winning film. As we exit the initial novel, Driver has killed Bernie Rose, “the only one he ever mourned,” ending his campaign against those who double-crossed him. Driven tells how that young man, done with killing, later will become the one who goes down “at 3 a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar.” Seven years have passed. Driver has left the old life, become Paul West, and founded a successful business back in Phoenix. Walking down the street one day, he and his fiancee are attacked by two men and, while Driver dispatches both, his fiancee is killed. Sinking back into anonymity, aided by his friend Felix, an ex-gangbanger and Desert Storm vet, Driver retreats, but finds that his past stalks him and will not stop. He has to turn and face it.
Snowflake / Different Sheets
Eileen Myles
Wave Books, POETRY, PB, 9781933517582
$25.45 ex $28.00 inc
One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature--honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it. -- Dennis Cooper [Myles' writing] comes across simultaneously as effortless and utterly gorgeous. . . . To be able to write with such gentleness and force all at the same time is such a gift, and Myles is completely generous in how she uses this. --Ron Silliman Two books meet as one in legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles' newest collection. In a world overflowing with technology and its mutant offspring, moments of human ecstasy and connection are as indelible as they are fleeting. Indeed, with every page, the poems of Snowflake and different streets create poet and poem anew. some cars seem to eruptfrom the tar itselfthey seem to pullthemselves upfrom below the surface of the landthough I don't think land. I mean something flat, something black almost like a water that we're onthough a dark water that holds us.
Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. She was recently awarded the 2010 Shelley Memorial Award for poetry and, for her new novel Inferno, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She lives in New York.