en-US Tue, 08 Apr 2025 06:38:43 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 208511278 406 László Krasznahorkai 0811231534 Nina 0 4.34 2021
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Nina
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: currently-reading, in-translation
review:

]]> 337113 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful depiction of a woman's fight for domestic independence and creative freedom.]]> 576 Anne Brontë 0140434747 Nina 0 4.00 1848
author: Anne Brontë
name: Nina
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1848
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
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review:

]]> 59808607 A gripping, heartbreaking new novel about female friendship, art, and memory by the award-winning author of Where Reasons End.

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised--the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.

As children in a war-ravaged, backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves--until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a haunting story of friendship, art, exploitation, and memory by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.]]> 348 Yiyun Li 037460634X Nina 0 to-read 3.67 2022
author: Yiyun Li
name: Nina
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203200544 112 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 Nina 0 to-read 3.85 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Nina
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 3356942 157 Georges Perec Nina 0 to-read 3.65 1965
author: Georges Perec
name: Nina
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218494525 From the pages of Vanity Fair to the red carpets of Hollywood, editor Graydon Carter’s memoir revives the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture

When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour that would come to define his storied career in magazines, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors, and readers, as well as many of the faces that would come to appear in Vanity Fair’s pages. He went on to run the magazine with overwhelming success for the next two and a half decades.

Filled with colorful memories and intimate details, When the Going Was Good is Graydon Carter’s lively recounting of how he made his mark as one of the most talented editors in the business. Moving to New York from Canada, he worked at Time, Life, The New York Observer, and Spy, before catching the eye of Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, who pulled him in to run Vanity Fair. In Newhouse he found an unwavering champion, a loyal proprietor who gave Carter the editorial and financial freedom to thrive. Annie Leibovitz’s photographs would come to define the look of the magazine, as would the “New Establishment�� and annual Hollywood issues. Carter further planted a flag in Los Angeles with the legendary Vanity Fair Oscar party.

With his inimitable voice and signature quip, he brings readers to lunches and dinners with the great and good of America, Britain, and Europe. He assembled one of the most formidable stables of writers and photographers under one roof, and here he re-creates in real time the steps he took to ensure Vanity Fair cemented its place as the epicenter of art, culture, business, and politics, even as digital media took hold. Charming, candid, and brimming with stories, When the Going Was Good perfectly captures the last golden age of print magazines from the inside out.]]> 432 Graydon Carter 0593655907 Nina 0 to-read 4.20
author: Graydon Carter
name: Nina
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 13641208 Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.

In the taut opening, "Victory Lap," a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In "Home," a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antique store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders' signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.

Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov's dictum that art should "prepare us for tenderness."]]> 251 George Saunders 0812993802 Nina 5 3.98 2013
author: George Saunders
name: Nina
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves:
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]]> 59127770 America's leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian show us how to prevent the private takeover of our cherished public resources

As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that must be kept out of the market. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other.

The Privatization of Everything, by the founder of In the Public Interest, an organization dedicated to shared prosperity and the common good, chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers. Ever since Ronald Reagan labeled government a dangerous threat, privatization has touched every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military.

However, citizens can, and are, wresting back what is ours. A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the State of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code.

The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a broad spectrum of issues and raises larger questions about who controls the public things we all rely on, exposing the hidden crisis of privatization that has been slowly unfolding over the last fifty years and giving us a road map for taking our country back.]]> 320 Donald Cohen 1620976536 Nina 0 to-read 4.37 2021
author: Donald Cohen
name: Nina
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 4070095
Meet Asterios middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape�� really about?

As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.

In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.

Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s a great American graphic novel.]]> 324 David Mazzucchelli 0307377326 Nina 0 4.21 2009
author: David Mazzucchelli
name: Nina
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 23403179 288 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 9632274751 Nina 5 4.13 1969
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Nina
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves:
review:
what can i say about this book that hasn't already been said? i guess it's the only book i've read in three different decades and two different languages.
]]> 130367
Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Lindsey Hughes provides an engrossing account of one of the most significant periods in Russian history. She proceeds thematically, discussing Russia’s foreign policy, the army and navy, economy, governing institutions, society, arts, education, and religion. She explores the experience of women and investigates the life of the court (including Peter’s “All-Drunken Assembly��), feasts, entertainments, and popular culture. Although the book is not a biography, Peter is a vivid presence throughout—a six-foot-seven-inch giant who enjoyed the company of dwarfs and ordinary people, adopted disguises and pseudonyms, married a peasant, and had a passion for cultural reform. Hughes recounts the events that shaped Peter’s youth, provides an intimate character sketch, and explores his complex family relations (including the tragic conflict with his eldest son Alexis, whom he condemned to death). Her account closes with a reconsideration of the Petrine legacy from Peter’s time to our own, as his name and image become harnessed to sell beer and cigarettes and the erection of his statue provokes recent controversy.]]> 602 Lindsey Hughes 0300082665 Nina 0 to-read 3.90 1998
author: Lindsey Hughes
name: Nina
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2189187 473 Alec Nove 0140157743 Nina 0 to-read 3.75 1969
author: Alec Nove
name: Nina
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 2331172
Un país esta dejando de existir. Los ochenta están comenzando y la infancia va quedando atrás entre damajuanas de vino, colectas para pagar por sexo, amistades probadas en el peligro y el miedo. Hay muerte y hay pérdida al final de la infancia. Pero lo que nunca se pierde es el deseo, y El origen de la tristeza no renuncia a la alegría.

En esta novela con mucho de autobiográfico, Pablo Ramos exhibe sus extraordinarias dotes de narrador a través de una escritura luminosa y precisa, de ritmo apasionante, que sabe que el humor es más poderoso que la autocompasión y que, si se la deja vibrar, la vida se abre paso incluso donde no se ve camino.]]> 160 Pablo Ramos 9505119518 Nina 0 currently-reading 3.82 2004
author: Pablo Ramos
name: Nina
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 575350 476 Yuri Slezkine 0801481783 Nina 0 currently-reading 3.95 1994
author: Yuri Slezkine
name: Nina
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 19089 "People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are"

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".]]> 912 George Eliot 0451529170 Nina 5 4.00 1872
author: George Eliot
name: Nina
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1872
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:
I would gladly read another 800 pages of this.
]]> 1589467 238 Lyudmila Ulitskaya 5040104693 Nina 0 to-read 4.22 2002
author: Lyudmila Ulitskaya
name: Nina
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1726630 320 Thomas Bernhard Nina 5 read-in-german 4.13 1984
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Nina
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1984
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: read-in-german
review:
ridiculous and thoroughly enjoyable
]]> 2842109 286 W.G. Sebald 3596120543 Nina 0 to-read 3.98 1990
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Nina
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 88432 Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.

Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.

Librarian's Note: This is an alternative cover edition of ISBN13: 9780099506164]]> 864 Vasily Grossman Nina 0 to-read 4.42 1960
author: Vasily Grossman
name: Nina
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 189954
“This is fearsomely good writing. And the ultimate hero of Memoirs of a Revolutionary is not the one we would normally suspect: not Lenin, not Trotsky, not the multitudes of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian Anarchists, Communists and radicals that Serge knew. . . Rather, the hero in this story is Serge himself.”—RALPH

“I can't think of anyone else who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge's combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.”—Dwight Macdonald

“An extraordinary time capsule from the darkest hours of the twentieth century. Although often compared to Orwell, Serge is a more noble and irreconcilable figure. This book—written as the GPU was exterminating the last of the Bolshevik old guard-is a fiery testament to political conscience and revolutionary hope. Through Serge, we know something of those gigantic but largely forgotten figures: the anarchist and communist opponents of Stalin.”—Mike Davis

“The best account of [Serge's] life remain his “Memoirs,�� and one hopes its re-publication wins Serge the wider readership he deserves. . . . An impassioned work of burning intensity, Serge's “Memoirs,�� charts not only his own harrowing odyssey through the revolutionary maelstrom of interwar Europe but also the tragic fortunes of an entire generation of leftists and fellow revolutionaries . . . For the contemporary reader, “Memoirs,�� still offers one of the finest—and most terrifying—accounts of the degradation of the Russian Revolution into murderous tyranny and bureaucratic strangulation . . . Serge's capacity to convey roiling human passion never dims; whether he is writing about allies or enemies, his subjects live and breathe.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

The book begins in 1906, with Serge describing his impoverished, idealistic days as an activist in the left-wing movements of Europe; it ends with the years 1936 to 1941 after his release from exile to a remote city in a time of famine, expulsion from the Soviet Union, escape from Nazi agents in Paris, and flight to Mexico as a political refugee. More than a personal memoir, this insider's history of the revolution and its allied upheavals fills in the human details that add to our understanding of how mass movements take place, how governments stand and fall, how individuals survive in struggles between ideologies. It is a human memoir and, though set in an inhumane time, during a clash among powerful ideals, it is a humane memoir.]]> 446 Victor Serge 0877458278 Nina 0 to-read 4.44 1951
author: Victor Serge
name: Nina
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 79787 The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to sit beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.]]> 400 Victor Serge 1590170644 Nina 0 in-translation 4.14 1948
author: Victor Serge
name: Nina
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> 207294259 From the award-winning author of The Island of Extraordinary Captives, the riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world’s first seed bank who were faced with an impossible choice during the Second World War’s Siege of eat the seeds to stave off starvation, or protect their life’s work to potentially end world hunger? In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded Leningrad with a plan to besiege the Russian city and starve its citizens into submission. So began the longest blockade in recorded history. By conservative estimates, it would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million people—four times the number killed in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. Most died by starvation. At that time, the world’s largest collection of seeds and plants were stored in a converted palace building in the city center. Hand-collected during the previous two decades under the leadership of the world-famous explorer Nikolai Vavilov, the Plant Institute represented the greatest living library of plant matter ever assembled, more than a quarter of a million seeds from every continent. But as the siege wore on, attempts to evacuate this priceless collection failed. Trapped in the city with dwindling supplies, the botanists faced a terrible should they distribute the seeds to the city’s starving population, or preserve them in the hopes that future scientists might use them to breed crops and prevent future famine? Drawing from previously unseen primary sources, The Forbidden Garden tells for the first time the story of the botanists who remained at the Plant Institute during the darkest days of the blockade, many of whom sacrificed their lives in service to their mission. As climate change, wars, and supply chain issues impact food security in today’s times, this fascinating story remains as relevant and urgent as ever.]]> 384 Simon Parkin 1668007665 Nina 0 to-read 4.23 2024
author: Simon Parkin
name: Nina
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28634749 8 Ivan Bunin Nina 0 read-in-russian 3.97 1925
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Nina
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1925
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: read-in-russian
review:

]]> 1560965 217 L.P. Hartley 0571203825 Nina 0 to-read 3.82 1944
author: L.P. Hartley
name: Nina
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1944
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25804269 384 Nikolai Gogol 5170852630 Nina 0 4.14 1836
author: Nikolai Gogol
name: Nina
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1836
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: in-translation, read-in-russian
review:

]]> 537094 57 Nikolai Gogol 1419176528 Nina 0 4.17 1842
author: Nikolai Gogol
name: Nina
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1842
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: read-in-russian, in-translation
review:

]]> 951188
This Princeton University Press edition was originally published in 1984.]]> 689 Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov 0691007993 Nina 0 in-translation 4.21 1922
author: Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov
name: Nina
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> 207294076 From Yale professor and bestselling author of How Fascism Works, a searing confrontation with the authoritarian right’s efforts to annihilate public education, silence teachers, and use taxpayer money to undo a century of work to advance social justice action on race, gender, sexuality, and class.Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, and Argentina’s Javier Milei have all reached the same if you want to roll back the clock on civil rights, equity, and inclusion, a great place to start is in our schools. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history. He shows that hearts and minds are won in our elementary schools, high schools, and universities—and that governments are currently ill-prepared to do the work of uprooting fascist policies being foisted upon our children through school boards, in courtrooms, and in the boardrooms of the companies trusted to train our teachers and create the materials they’ll share with their students. Deeply informed and urgently needed, this book is a vibrant call to action for lovers of democracy worldwide.]]> 256 Jason F. Stanley 1668056917 Nina 0 to-read 4.31 2024
author: Jason F. Stanley
name: Nina
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205673381 Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writers

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy’s broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball’s absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.]]> 256 Jesse Ball 1646221400 Nina 0 to-read 3.13 2024
author: Jesse Ball
name: Nina
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 206120244 176 C.F. 1681378698 Nina 0 to-read 4.35
author: C.F.
name: Nina
average rating: 4.35
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 188442
A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder.]]> 291 Ivy Compton-Burnett 0940322641 Nina 0 to-read 3.54 1935
author: Ivy Compton-Burnett
name: Nina
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1935
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18490870 Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature.

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, in remote Paraguay. Eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, Don Diego does as little as he possibly can while plotting an eventual transfer to Beunos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.

Don Diego's slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man's perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama's stark, dreamlike prose and spare imagery make every word appear to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid.]]> 201 Antonio di Benedetto 1590177177 Nina 0 to-read 3.91 1956
author: Antonio di Benedetto
name: Nina
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34150881 More than a decade in the making, the result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.]]> 144 Dominique Goblet 1681370484 Nina 0 to-read 3.77 2007
author: Dominique Goblet
name: Nina
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61820437
Joe Kessler is at the forefront of European comics. Co-founder and art director of UK’s Breakdown Press, and winner of the Angoulême International Comics Festival’s Fauve Révélation for his breakthrough comic book Windowpane , Kessler rejuvenates the form once again with his vivid and moving The Gull Yettin .

Told in striking colors and loose but confident lines, The Gull Yettin ’s story begins when a young boy awakens late one night to find his home on fire. The boy is saved by a lanky, shapeshifting Gull. Orphaned by the fire, and now adrift in a boat piloted by the Gull, the boy faces an uncertain future, one that will be both helped and hindered by his new attendant.��

Without a word, Kessler builds a strange but recognizable world, using it to explore all the forms that grief, jealousy, longing, and love can take in our lives, and the compassion and cruelty that can dwell in a single heart.��Filled with all the warmth and poignancy of a great folktale, The Gull Yettin proves that Kessler is pushing comics to new heights.]]> 216 Joe Kessler 168137739X Nina 0 to-read 4.06 2022
author: Joe Kessler
name: Nina
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 138378653
The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even as he lives his life, Jacques L’Aumône, its hero, daydreams a hundred other possible lives. A few lines on a page, a chance encounter, a remark overheard in passing, any of these are enough to kick things into gear and send him off outside of himself to become a boxer, a general, a bishop, or a lord. He lives alongside his life with diligence and steadfastness; and the passage from real to dream is so natural for him that he no longer knows precisely which him he is. Eventually he becomes an actor in Hollywood, and the basis of countless dreams for others. This Jacques L’Aumône, like the characters who surround him, has the same sort of haunting and fluid consistency as someone that we might dream of in our beds at night. And reverie, here, is born through the tale’s humor, which is as gentle as it is cruel, as well as by way of a writing technique that is itself drawn from one of Queneau’s great loves, the cinema.]]> 208 Raymond Queneau 1681377705 Nina 0 to-read 3.42 1944
author: Raymond Queneau
name: Nina
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1944
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1158380 Pubblicato nel 1974, ottenne un enorme successo e infiammò violente polemiche, diventando immediatamente un caso politico e letterario. Dal romanzo è tratto il film omonimo, diretto da Luigi Comencini e interpretato da Claudia Cardinale.]]> 600 Elsa Morante 1586420046 Nina 0 to-read 4.28 1974
author: Elsa Morante
name: Nina
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28293
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.]]> 581 Georges Perec 0879237511 Nina 0 to-read 4.22 1978
author: Georges Perec
name: Nina
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210129420 The first English-language biography in over fifty years to tell the full, vibrant story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, known to history as the Brothers Grimm
��
“M���������ٱ��������.�Ũ���Kirkus Reviews
��
More than two hundred years ago, the German brothers Jacob Grimm (1785��1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786��1859) published a collection of fairy tales that remains famous the world over. It has been translated into some 170 languages—more than any other German book—and the Brothers Grimm are among the top dozen most translated authors in the world. In addition to collecting tales, the Grimms were mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants, and above all the closest of brothers, but until now, the full story of their lifelong endeavor to preserve and articulate a German cultural identity has not been well known.
��
Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms�� ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses. They produced a vast corpus of work on mythology and medieval literature, embarked on a monumental German dictionary project, and broke scholarly ground with Jacob’s linguistic discovery known as Grimm’s Law. Setting their story against a rich historical backdrop, Schmiesing offers a fresh consideration of the profound and yet complicated legacy of the Brothers Grimm.]]> 360 Ann Schmiesing 0300221754 Nina 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Ann Schmiesing
name: Nina
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Nina 5
I've read books before that wanted to be like this book, and honestly this type of book not done perfectly is the kind of book that I'll (sheepishly?) return to the library after a few pages. This was perfect, imperfections and all.

That said, I really disliked one of these characters, despite them I guess being "good at their core," and I found them slightly hard to believe in, as a plausible human being... and I really wanted them to do one thing that they didn't do, and everyone in the book agreed that they shouldn't do it... but I disagreed... help... oh well, I guess I like when books make me feel things like this... to an extent.

Two books in a row read in the season when they take place!]]> 3.88 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Nina
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:
I read an excerpt of this book in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, the second chapter, and was astonished by how much I loved it. I finally got my hands on the book, and I've been so hooked that, well, I haven't even glanced at a New Yorker in five days.

I've read books before that wanted to be like this book, and honestly this type of book not done perfectly is the kind of book that I'll (sheepishly?) return to the library after a few pages. This was perfect, imperfections and all.

That said, I really disliked one of these characters, despite them I guess being "good at their core," and I found them slightly hard to believe in, as a plausible human being... and I really wanted them to do one thing that they didn't do, and everyone in the book agreed that they shouldn't do it... but I disagreed... help... oh well, I guess I like when books make me feel things like this... to an extent.

Two books in a row read in the season when they take place!
]]> 53263726
The tragedy of traffic violence has barely registered with the media and wider culture. Disproportionately the victims are like Duarte-Rodriguez—immigrants, the poor, and people of color. They have largely been blamed and forgotten.

In Right of Way , journalist Angie Schmitt shows us that deaths like Duarte-Rodriguez’s are not unavoidable “accidents.�� They don’t happen because of jaywalking or distracted walking. They are predictable, occurring in stark geographic patterns that tell a story about systemic inequality. These deaths are the forgotten faces of an increasingly urgent public-health crisis that we have the tools, but not the will, to solve.��

Schmitt examines the possible causes of the increase in pedestrian deaths as well as programs and movements that are beginning to respond to the epidemic. Her investigation unveils why pedestrians are dying—and she demands action . ��Right of Way is a call to reframe the problem, acknowledge the role of racism and classism in the public response to these deaths, and energize advocacy around road safety. Ultimately, Schmitt argues that we need improvements in infrastructure and changes to policy to save lives.

Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities, where no one is expendable.]]> 248 Angie Schmitt 1642830836 Nina 0 to-read 4.36 2020
author: Angie Schmitt
name: Nina
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in��Görbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Nina 0 in-translation
Overall, the writing was engaging and a bit challenging, which is kind of what I love.

I also love reading a book at the time of year when it takes place.]]> 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Nina
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: in-translation
review:
I really enjoyed reading this, especially the first half. I felt like I could see and smell the place where it took place. But the writing was at times disjointed, and sometimes I found myself baffled by it. It felt odd to read a full description of all the characters early on, but then not to find out the main character's age until it’s offhandedly mentioned late in the book. While I think there's something to the oddness I felt, it did seem more like a stylistic decision than an oversight.

Overall, the writing was engaging and a bit challenging, which is kind of what I love.

I also love reading a book at the time of year when it takes place.
]]> 46114 The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 Nina 0 4.17 1931
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Nina
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 89231 Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs.

A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.]]> 336 John Williams 1400076730 Nina 0 to-read 4.23 1972
author: John Williams
name: Nina
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 Nina 5 4.35 1965
author: John Williams
name: Nina
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 529075 here.

Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into the shadows and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)]]> 280 Javier Marías 0811215059 Nina 0 in-translation 4.13 1992
author: Javier Marías
name: Nina
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: in-translation
review:
I don't know how I feel about this upon finishing it. It was very compelling at first (long paragraphs! translators! ..!) but it felt sexist in a weird, dated way, and I just couldn't get past that. There were a lot of layered themes in the book, but I found myself sort of pushing them aside in an attempt to finish it more quickly..
]]> 258079 The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924) was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

If you enjoyed The Go-Between, you might like Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Magical and disturbing'
Independent

'On a first reading, it is a beautifully wrought description of a small boy's loss of innocence long ago. But, visited a second time, the knowledge of approaching, unavoidable tragedy makes it far more poignant and painful'
Express]]> 326 L.P. Hartley 0940322994 Nina 0 3.99 1953
author: L.P. Hartley
name: Nina
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/17
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:
Really liked this and keep thinking back on it fondly.
]]> 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey Nina 0
Basically, this book blurs the line between fact and fiction. Actual 20th century celebrities are characters in the book, in a bizarro version of America. There's a footnotes section of sorts at the end, where the author explains which aspects of the story come from real-life events. My jaw dropped when I got there -- I'd missed at least half the references.

Would I have enjoyed the book more if I'd gotten the references? No, I think I would have liked it less. The idea that the mysterious (fictional) artist this book is about was there writing Low with Bowie in Berlin, and the weird detached detail with which this idea comes to life in the book, had me cringing. Sometimes it felt almost like fan fiction.

This is a very ambitious book. For me, there may have been too many different ideas trying to work together.]]> 3.83 2023
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Nina
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:
Wasn't crazy about this. I think the premise is fascinating, and I mostly enjoyed the writing, but the book feels like "too much."

Basically, this book blurs the line between fact and fiction. Actual 20th century celebrities are characters in the book, in a bizarro version of America. There's a footnotes section of sorts at the end, where the author explains which aspects of the story come from real-life events. My jaw dropped when I got there -- I'd missed at least half the references.

Would I have enjoyed the book more if I'd gotten the references? No, I think I would have liked it less. The idea that the mysterious (fictional) artist this book is about was there writing Low with Bowie in Berlin, and the weird detached detail with which this idea comes to life in the book, had me cringing. Sometimes it felt almost like fan fiction.

This is a very ambitious book. For me, there may have been too many different ideas trying to work together.
]]> 133206512
Why are trans women the most targeted of LGBT people? Why are they in the crosshairs of a resurgent anti-trans politics around the world? And what is to be done about it by activists, organizers, and allies?

A Short History of Transmisogyny is the first book-length study to answer these urgent but long overdue questions. Combining new historical analysis with political and activist accessibility, the book shows why it matters to understand trans misogyny as a specific form of violence with a documentable history. Ironically, it is through attending to the specificity of trans misogyny that trans women are no longer treated as inevitably tragic figures. They emerge instead as embattled but tenacious, locked in a struggle over the meaning and material stakes of gender, labor, race, and freedom.

The book travels across bustling port cities like New York, New Orleans, London and Paris, the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai'i, and the lively travesti communities of Latin America.

The book shows how trans femininity has become legible as a fault line of broader global histories, including colonial government, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public space, and the line between the formal and informal economy. This transnational and intersectional approach reinforces that trans women are not isolated social subjects who appear alone; they are in fact central to the modern social world.]]> 182 Jules Gill-Peterson 1804291560 Nina 0 4.39 2024
author: Jules Gill-Peterson
name: Nina
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
Concise and complex *and* compelling. Read in two sittings but would happily have read more and more.
]]> 89915
L. P. Hartley's much-loved novel, the magnum opus of one of twentieth-century England's best writers, is a complex and spellbinding a comedy of upper-class manners; a study in the subtlest nuances of feeling; a poignant reckoning with the ironies of character and fate. Above all, it is about two people who cannot live together or apart, about the ties that bind—and break.]]> 876 L.P. Hartley 0940322803 Nina 0 to-read 3.97 1947
author: L.P. Hartley
name: Nina
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60707 160 J.L. Carr 0940322471 Nina 0 to-read 4.10 1980
author: J.L. Carr
name: Nina
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25614601 A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century that continue to reverberate throughout modernity—a story unlike anything you’ve ever read before.
��
Sudden Death��begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the world. And in a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that instead of a parody, it’s a manual.
��
In this mind-bending, prismatic novel, worlds collide, time coils, traditions break down. There are assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, utopias, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love stories and war stories. A dazzlingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Álvaro Enrigue tells a grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era in this short, powerful punch of a novel. Game, set, match.]]> 272 Álvaro Enrigue 1594633460 Nina 0 in-translation 3.69 2013
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Nina
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: in-translation
review:
Wanted to love this, but found that I couldn't... Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, or maybe it dragged on a bit too long.
]]> 30763882
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.]]> 183 Samanta Schweblin 0399184597 Nina 0 in-translation 3.62 2014
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Nina
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> 48585697 A restlessly brilliant novel of creative crisis and transformation

Beguiling and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue to her publisher, spending long days alone with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the novel's narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rilke, Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.

A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is a dramatic step forward for one of our most daring writers.]]> 328 Kate Zambreno 0593087216 Nina 0 to-read 3.67 2020
author: Kate Zambreno
name: Nina
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62043762 Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying inability to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that make up a life confined to the home, where both everything and nothing happens.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Mavis Gallant and Lucy Ellman, this late-period novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and film and literary critic Mieko Kanai - whose often dark and cynical work occupies something of a cult place within the Japanese canon - is a disconcerting and astute portrait of life in late-stage capitalist society.]]> 176 Mieko Kanai 1804270385 Nina 0 in-translation 3.52 1997
author: Mieko Kanai
name: Nina
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> 553929 163 Thomas Bernhard 3518379658 Nina 0 to-read 4.15 1982
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Nina
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1331392 651 Thomas Bernhard 351838063X Nina 0 to-read 4.46 1986
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Nina
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 852766 672 Thomas Mann 3596294282 Nina 0 to-read 4.11 1947
author: Thomas Mann
name: Nina
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54785558 From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships.

A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. His provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds.

With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Rachel Cusk's Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.]]> 186 Rachel Cusk 0374279225 Nina 0 I love reading Rachel Cusk. 3.69 2021
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Nina
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
I love reading Rachel Cusk.
]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Nina 5
I checked this out of the library after reading a profile of Miranda July in the New Yorker. Or, I should say, I placed a hold on this book after reading the profile, and checked the book out a few weeks later. I was one of hundreds in Philly waiting to read this book, though I didn't have to wait *that* long, all things considered. I wonder if that's because they have a lot of copies of the book, or if it's because a lot of people hated the book immediately and returned it without finishing it. I would place it in the genre "Extremely not for everyone."

Well, I knew from page one that I was going to love it, and not because I have fond memories of reading The First Bad Man (I don't remember anything about it except being embarrassed carrying it around because of the title (why was I like this? (rhetorical question))); nor because I saw July's art exhibit that happened to be showing at a museum I visited recently (I don't even remember why I didn't check out the exhibit). It's just written really, really well.

Maybe the library got through the holds so quickly because everyone devoured the book in four days like I did?

It's just an amazing book. That's it.]]> 3.53 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Nina
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
Absurd, brilliant, hilarious. 4.99999999995/5 stars, docking 0.00000000005 because by the end I'd realized that I wasn't actually reading a piece of absurdist literature, just a book about aging, one that shows how absurd life can be *as well as* how beautiful it can be. Once that minuscule disappointment wears off, I will add the 0.00000000005 stars back.

I checked this out of the library after reading a profile of Miranda July in the New Yorker. Or, I should say, I placed a hold on this book after reading the profile, and checked the book out a few weeks later. I was one of hundreds in Philly waiting to read this book, though I didn't have to wait *that* long, all things considered. I wonder if that's because they have a lot of copies of the book, or if it's because a lot of people hated the book immediately and returned it without finishing it. I would place it in the genre "Extremely not for everyone."

Well, I knew from page one that I was going to love it, and not because I have fond memories of reading The First Bad Man (I don't remember anything about it except being embarrassed carrying it around because of the title (why was I like this? (rhetorical question))); nor because I saw July's art exhibit that happened to be showing at a museum I visited recently (I don't even remember why I didn't check out the exhibit). It's just written really, really well.

Maybe the library got through the holds so quickly because everyone devoured the book in four days like I did?

It's just an amazing book. That's it.
]]> 39732783 A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children

With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.

Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous�� sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ��70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.

Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.]]> 288 Jules Gill-Peterson 1517904676 Nina 0 4.40 2018
author: Jules Gill-Peterson
name: Nina
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 62061170
Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion.

Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.

Pacing the hall, atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit?

Following the tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (“one who dirties their own nest,�� vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), in Fowler’s curt, spiralling, and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.]]> 153 S.J. Fowler 1838020063 Nina 0 to-read 3.81
author: S.J. Fowler
name: Nina
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60834548
It is 1935 and a small boy is found in a mine in what is known as the Belgian Congo. It is a time of ferment; nefarious forces are at play. Against this backdrop, the boy’s discovery draws the attention of men of distinction across the globe �� scientists, politicians and army men. Soon enough a race begins to bring the boy into safe custody. After a tortuous journey by train through the continent of Africa, the boy travels by ship to New York, where he is taken into the care of the United States Army. From here our diminutive hero will become swept up in a narrative not of his own making, a narrative that will lead him into the heart of one of the most devastating events of the twentieth century.

Audacious in its conceit, thrillingly readable and profoundly humane, Little Boy is a novel of science and politics, of men and war, of compassion and becoming. In prose of baffled grace, it weaves a path through some of the darkest moments in our collective history. Its ending will leave you, like its protagonist, suspended in mid-air, stunned by the awful things that men have put forth into the world.

"Little Boy is an extraordinary novel, audacious and poignant and superbly well-written. It imagines the unimaginable, finds innocence in awfulness. This is what the literary novel is capable of, and so rarely pulls off."
-- Andrew Cowan, author of Your Fault.

"Bold, audacious, written with surgical precision, quiet lyricism and incredible assurance. This novel hurt my feelings and made me think deeply. As Little Boy says, 'All the time he had spent in institutions, sheltered from the world, when in reality there was no greater threat to him than the institutions themselves.'"
-- Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti.

John Smith is a pseudonym. Little Boy is their first book.]]> 200 John Smith 1913861066 Nina 0 to-read 4.09
author: John Smith
name: Nina
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 197789783
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another]]> 243 Morgan Talty 1959030558 Nina 0 to-read 3.71 2024
author: Morgan Talty
name: Nina
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28584794 Mikor döbbenjen rá egy férfi, hogy nem adhatja föl ifjúsága eszményeit, és nem hajthatja fejét „csak úgy" a házasság jármába, ha nem a nászútján? Szerb Antal regénybeli utasa holdvilágos transzban szökik meg fiatal felesége mellől, hogy kiegészítse, továbbélje azt az ifjúságot, amely visszavonhatatlanul elveszett. A szökött férj arra a kérdésre keresi a választ, hogy a lélek időgépén vissza lehet-e szállni a múltba, vajon torzónak maradt élet-epizódokkal kiteljesíthető-e a jelen, és megszabadulhat-e valamikor az ember énje börtönéből vagy hazugnak gondolt „felnőttsége" bilincseitől? Az Utas és holdvilág a magát kereső ember önelemző regénye. Mihály, a regény hőse hiába akar előbb a házassága révén konformista polgári életet élni, s hiába szökik meg ez elől az élet elöl, a regény végén ott tart, ahol az elején: mégis bele kell törnie mindabba, amibe nem akar. „És ha az ember él, még mindig történhet valami" - ezzel a mondattal zárul a finom lélektani részletekkel megírt, először 1937-ben megjelent regény, amely első megjelenése óta hatalmas világsikerre tett szert.]]> 299 Antal Szerb 963227718X Nina 0 read-in-hungarian
The book itself was moody, dark, and strangely tragic. I felt very immersed in the plot the entire time, despite reading the book at a snail's pace. It's a beautiful book, confusing and thought-provoking. At times it was frustrating, but I appreciated it all the more for holding me so captive nonetheless.]]> 4.03 1937
author: Antal Szerb
name: Nina
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves: read-in-hungarian
review:
I read this as a DIY dual-language book, with the Hungarian in one hand and the English in the other, meaning the hardest part about reading my first Hungarian novel was the hand pain from the relentless book-holding during the tough sections.

The book itself was moody, dark, and strangely tragic. I felt very immersed in the plot the entire time, despite reading the book at a snail's pace. It's a beautiful book, confusing and thought-provoking. At times it was frustrating, but I appreciated it all the more for holding me so captive nonetheless.
]]> 216734901 Ezek a mesék olyan általános emberi viszonyokról, társadalmi és politikai berendezkedésekről szólnak, melyek mozgatórugói, alapstruktúrái évszázadok óta mit sem változtak. Ma is magunkra ismerhetünk egy-egy szereplő viszontagságairól vagy épp szerencsés megmeneküléséről, okosan megoldott konfliktusáról olvasva.
Jelen kötet két nyelven, a magyar mellett angolul is elénk tárja Ezópus meséit, így az élményalapú nyelvtanulás, nyelvgyakorlás alapvető eszköze lehet. A kiadvány forrásául szolgáló kötet 1928‑ban jelent meg Londonban.
A mesék mellett expresszív metszetek is segítik a tanulságok befogadását, belsővé tételét. Ajánljuk a kötetet mindenkinek, aki szívesen elmerülne az ókori görög meseirodalom egy meghatározó szeletében úgy, hogy közben saját magáról és a világhoz való viszonyáról is gondolkodhat.
Hungarian and English]]> 140 Aesop 9634093434 Nina 0 read-in-hungarian 0.0
author: Aesop
name: Nina
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: read-in-hungarian
review:

]]> 3390876 205 Nina Berberova 081121401X Nina 0 to-read 3.80 1936
author: Nina Berberova
name: Nina
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 795363 96 Nina Berberova 0811215342 Nina 0 to-read 3.65 1935
author: Nina Berberova
name: Nina
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1935
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60246552
Jon Fosse’s ​S���ٴDZ��Dz��� is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience �� incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.]]> 825 Jon Fosse 1804270067 Nina 0 to-read 4.51 2022
author: Jon Fosse
name: Nina
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53492649
In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.]]> 432 Maria Stepanova 0811228835 Nina 0 to-read 3.83 2017
author: Maria Stepanova
name: Nina
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198493976
As tensions over Taiwan escalate, the United States and China stand on the brink of a catastrophic war. Resolving the impasse demands we understand how it began. In 1943, America declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. The Chinese civil war led to a change of plans. The Communist Party came to power in China and the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection. The specter of conflict has loomed ever since.��

In The Struggle for Taiwan , Sulmaan Wasif Khan offers the first comprehensive history of the triangular relationship between the United States, China, and Taiwan, exploring America’s ambivalent commitment to Taiwan’s defense, China’s bitterness about the separation, and Taiwan’s impressive transformation into a flourishing democracy. War is not inevitable, Khan shows, but to avoid it, decision-makers must heed the lessons of the past.��

From the White Terror to the Taiwan Straits Crises, from the normalization of Sino-American relations to Trump-era rising tensions, The Struggle for Taiwan charts the paths to our present predicament to show what futures might be possible.����]]> 336 Sulmaan Wasif Khan 1541605047 Nina 0 to-read 3.90
author: Sulmaan Wasif Khan
name: Nina
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 196585876 An Unfinished Love A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.

The Goodwins�� last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.

Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.]]> 480 Doris Kearns Goodwin 1982108665 Nina 0 to-read 4.53 2024
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Nina
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36373223 The Middlesteins), about a cleaning lady on a quest for self-acceptance after her relationship with a loveable junkie goes awry.

Jen Beagin’s quirky, moving, “frank and unflinching�� (Josh Ferris) debut novel introduces an unforgettable character, Mona—almost twenty-four, emotionally adrift, and cleaning houses to get by. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient she calls Mr. Disgusting, who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways.

In search of healing, Mona decamps to Taos, New Mexico, for a fresh start, where she finds a community of seekers and cast-offs, all of whom have one or two things to teach her—the pajama-wearing, blissed-out New Agers, the slightly creepy client with peculiar tastes in controlled substances, the psychic who might really be psychic. But always lurking just beneath the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she’s trying to disentangle herself, and the larger legacy of the past she left behind.

The story of Mona’s journey to find her place in this working-class American world is at once hilarious and wonderfully strange, true to life and boldly human, and introduces a stunningly one-of-a-kind new voice in American fiction.]]> 240 Jen Beagin 1501183931 Nina 0 3.72 2015
author: Jen Beagin
name: Nina
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves:
review:
liked, didn't love. weird book to read on an airplane: a page-turner, but one where you're constantly trying to hide the words on the page so you don't scandalize the stranger stuck sitting next to you for eight hours��
]]> 29069374 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazines iconography. Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge. Full-color illustrations throughout.]]> 416 Emil Ferris 1606999591 Nina 0 4.21 2017
author: Emil Ferris
name: Nina
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/05/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 60853075
‘The fever burning through this story, its suspense and its lyrical escapes don’t curb its sensuality, and precision. [Kerangal’s] language has an incredible driving force. It is both like a stone made up of many crystals, mixing registers with fluidity, and juxtaposing the poetic and the trivial. The whole thing has a unique rhythm, a sense of breathless speed: the sort of graceful rockslide that only she can pull off. In flux between interior and exterior, this is the perfect voyage.�� �� Le Monde des Livres]]> 140 Maylis de Kerangal Nina 5 in-translation 3.94 2012
author: Maylis de Kerangal
name: Nina
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: in-translation
review:
Beautiful. I loved the part when they see Lake Baikal. I read this in one sitting, abandoning all my evening activities. Hope I won't regret not doing any of my activities as much as I regret spending a year in Siberia (by choice) and not seeing Baikal.
]]> 40132960 270 Harry H. Josselson Nina 0 read-in-russian 3.00
author: Harry H. Josselson
name: Nina
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: read-in-russian
review:

]]> 24796150 292 Sergei Lebedev 1939931258 Nina 0 to-read 3.67 2010
author: Sergei Lebedev
name: Nina
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 119512 314 László Krasznahorkai 0811215040 Nina 5 in-translation 4.22 1989
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Nina
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/05/09
shelves: in-translation
review:
Masterful. Currently the only item on my bucket list is: read Krasznahorkai in Hungarian.
]]> 8708905 ��
In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal.
��
Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.]]> 694 Vladimir Sorokin 1590173864 Nina 0 to-read 3.60 2006
author: Vladimir Sorokin
name: Nina
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 153300 128 Sergei Dovlatov 0802112463 Nina 0 to-read 4.36 1986
author: Sergei Dovlatov
name: Nina
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2376088 The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet "years of stagnation." It consists entirely of sounds and
dialogue from people performing the quintessential Soviet act: joining a
long line to buy something, without knowing what..Thousands of citizens are in line and the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn't matter - if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin's tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, and even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.]]> 263 Vladimir Sorokin 1590172744 Nina 0 to-read 3.76 1984
author: Vladimir Sorokin
name: Nina
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18839 Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.]]> 336 Virginia Woolf 0141184272 Nina 0 to-read 3.88 1928
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Nina
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 446542 241 Samuel Beckett 0802151361 Nina 0 to-read 4.06 1951
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Nina
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 128657343 From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.To give up or not to give up?The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment - an attempt to make a different future.In On Giving Up, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central what must we give up in order to feel more alive?'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville'The best living essayist writing in English' John Gray]]> 160 Adam Phillips 0241656591 Nina 0 to-read 3.52
author: Adam Phillips
name: Nina
average rating: 3.52
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 190855045
An incandescent debut about young adults learning how to care for themselves �� from within the limits of the psychiatric system

Perfect for fans of Tove Ditlevsen and devotees of Sylvia Plath

In honest, crackling investigations of the psychiatric system and the young people trying to find their way, Gråbøl’s soaring debut offers a critique of institutionalization and an urgent recalibrating of the language and conceptions of care.

“I’m not inarticulate, but I leave language to the room around me,�� says Fine Gråbøl’s nameless narrator as she dreams of furniture flickering to life in the room she occupies at a temporary psychiatric care unit for young adults. A chair that greets you, or shiny tiles of floor that follow a peculiar grammar of their own. Our narrator is obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness , assuming personalities and private motives. She also cannot sleep, and practices her daily routines with the urgency of survival �� peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice �� all an acutely calibrated exploration into having a home.

Structured as a series of intimate vignettes like those of Olga Ravn, What Kingdom thrums with the swirling voices of this shared home. Hector blares Michael Jackson from the recreation room and recalls a past in Peru when his psychoses were treated with exorcism. The town would shake the devil out of his small, teenage body before he was relocated to Denmark. Or Marie, who has lived in the temporary unit since she was eighteen, has no idea that her mother lives just four floors below in a permanent care unit.

Echoing the aching writings of Janet Frame on electroconvulsive therapy, or Linda Boström Knausgård’s mythical meditations on silence and mental health, Fine Gråbøl renders a delicate and deep uncoupling from the world.]]> 152 Fine Gråbøl 1953861849 Nina 0 to-read 3.78 2021
author: Fine Gråbøl
name: Nina
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1695835 310 Thomas Bernhard 3518380532 Nina 5 read-in-german 4.18 1985
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Nina
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: read-in-german
review:
want to restart this immediately, even though it was basically just the same 50 sentences over and over
]]> 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Nina 0 to-read 3.90 2018
author: Ling Ma
name: Nina
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7027954 241 Olga Shevchenko 0253220289 Nina 0 to-read 3.88 2008
author: Olga Shevchenko
name: Nina
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 800586 Chevengur is a massive series of satirical scenes from Soviet life during the New Economic Policy instituted by Lenin in the 1920s, the story of the efforts of provincial builders of Communism, but in their grotesque Utopia, Cheka murders are the only thing efficiently organized.]]> 333 Andrei Platonov 0882333097 Nina 0 to-read 4.27 1928
author: Andrei Platonov
name: Nina
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50374582
But Sergey lives in Ukraine, where a lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda has been dragging on for years.

His simple mission on behalf of his bees leads him through some the hottest spots of the ongoing conflict, putting him in contact with combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers, and Crimean Tatars.

Grey Bees is as timely as the author's Ukraine Diaries were in 2014, but treats the unfolding crisis in a more imaginative way, with a pinch of Kurkov's signature humour. Who better than Ukraine's most famous novelist - who writes in Russian - to illuminate and present a balanced portrait of this most bewildering of modern conflicts?]]> 349 Andrey Kurkov 0857059343 Nina 0 to-read 4.04 2018
author: Andrey Kurkov
name: Nina
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2018
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]]> 41071389 Six romances, one revolution, the story of the century.

'That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.'

At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste ...

Stasia learns it from her Georgian father and takes it north, following her new husband, Simon, to his posting at the centre of the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg. Stasia's is only the first in a symphony of grand but all too often doomed romances that swirl from sweet to sour in this epic tale of the red century.

Tumbling down the years, and across vast expanses of longing and loss, generation after generation of this compelling family hears echoes and sees reflections. Great characters and greater relationships come and go and come again; the world shakes, and shakes some more, and the reader rejoices to have found at last one of those glorious old books in which you can live and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.]]> 944 Nino Haratischwili 191161746X Nina 0 to-read 4.47 2014
author: Nino Haratischwili
name: Nina
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
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]]> 58890783 From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel--a life worthy of becoming a novel--without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?

Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice--no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.

Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]> 368 Elif Batuman 0525557598 Nina 5 4.00 2022
author: Elif Batuman
name: Nina
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
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Selin is like the friend you meet freshman year who you befriend because you're basically the same person, but then you come back for sophomore year and your lives have diverged. I'm not sure I even experienced that myself in college, but I can imagine it happening. Anyway, I felt like the Idiot was written about me, but I can't say the same for Either/Or -- but I still adored every word of it. There was one major similarity: Like Selin, I too have the feeling that the first time I was anywhere of my own volition, not because of anyone else, was when I stepped off a plane in Russia.
]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Nina 3 in-translation 3.98 1962
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Nina
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/03/15
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]]> 185767245
In Towards the Abyss , social scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko tracks a decade of war and upheaval in Ukraine. Ishchenko has been among the most significant left-wing commentators on Ukraine since 2014 when pro-EU protestors toppled the government in Kiev, pro-Russian separatists seized parts of the Donbas and Putin annexed Crimea. His analysis gives a deeper understanding of the country’s political dynamics. NATO occupies a peculiar place in this history and Ishchenko sifts Ukrainians' attitudes towards it.

Ishchenko’s parents worked as Soviet scientists and engineers in Kiev on cybernetics and cosmonautics. No outside power has offered Ukraine a future that compares to this lost world of Soviet modernity.

He argues that the conflict being fought in Ukraine with tanks, artillery and rockets is the same conflict that police batons have suppressed in Belarus and Russia itself. The intensification of the post-Soviet crisis �� the incapacity of an oligarchic ruling class in the territories of the former USSR to develop sustained political, moral and intellectual leadership �� is the root cause for the escalating violence.]]> 192 Volodymyr Ishchenko 180429554X Nina 0 to-read 4.14
author: Volodymyr Ishchenko
name: Nina
average rating: 4.14
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]]> 56155135
In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system, and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalised people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.]]> 292 Shon Faye 0241423147 Nina 0 to-read 4.55 2021
author: Shon Faye
name: Nina
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
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date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> 70021586
Joan Acocella, “one of our finest cultural critics�� (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it―its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times , “Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?��

The Bloodied And Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations, “life and art.�� In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.]]> 368 Joan Acocella 0374608091 Nina 0 to-read 4.00 2024
author: Joan Acocella
name: Nina
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
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]]> 174070104
But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway. Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself.

As the mother―a novelist―attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?

Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.]]> 240 Julie Myerson 1959030310 Nina 0 to-read 3.98 2022
author: Julie Myerson
name: Nina
average rating: 3.98
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]]> 45688210 IV - Sketches of the Criminal World
V - The Resurrection of the Larch
VI - The Glove, or, Kolyma Stories II

The astonishing follow-up to 2018's Kolyma Stories.

In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.

In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered firsthand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky’s underground: “How does someone stop being human?�� and “How are criminals made?�� By 1972, when he was writing his last stories, the camps were being demolished, the guard towers and barracks razed. “Did we exist?�� Shalamov asks, then answers without hesitation, “I reply, ‘We did.’”]]> 576 Varlam Shalamov 168137367X Nina 0 to-read 4.34
author: Varlam Shalamov
name: Nina
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]]> 199211943
Nicht zuletzt weil man eine Spaltung auch herbeireden kann, tut mehr Klarheit not. Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux und Linus Westheuser kartieren aufwendig die Einstellungen in vier Arenen der Ungleichheit: Armut und Reichtum; Migration; Diversität und Gender; Klimaschutz. Bei vielen großen Fragen, so der überraschende Befund, herrscht einigermaßen Konsens. Werden jedoch bestimmte Triggerpunkte berührt, verschärft sich schlagartig die Debatte: Gleichstellung ja, aber bitte keine »Gendersprache«! Umweltschutz ja, aber wer trägt die Kosten? Eine 360-Grad-Vermessung der Konflikte um alte und neue Ungleichheiten, die eine unverzichtbare Diskussionsgrundlage bietet und viele Mythen entzaubert.]]> 540 Steffen Mau 3518029843 Nina 0 to-read 4.28 2023
author: Steffen Mau
name: Nina
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
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date added: 2024/03/10
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]]> 58828129 How succession in authoritarian regimes was less a competition of visions for the future and more a settling of scores
��
“Joseph Torigian’s stellar research and personal interviews have produced a brilliant, meticulous study. It fundamentally undermines what political scientists have presumed to be the way Chinese Communist and Soviet politics operate.”—Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine
��
The political successions in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, respectively, are often explained as triumphs of inner‑party democracy, leading to a victory of “reformers�� over “conservatives�� or “radicals.�� In traditional thinking, Leninist institutions provide competitors a mechanism for debating policy and making promises, stipulate rules for leadership selection, and prevent the military and secret police from playing a coercive role. Here, Joseph Torigian argues that the post-cult of personality power struggles in history’s two greatest Leninist regimes were instead shaped by the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence. Mining newly discovered material from Russia and China, Torigian challenges the established historiography and suggests a new way of thinking about the nature of power in authoritarian regimes.]]> 256 Joseph Torigian 0300254237 Nina 0 to-read 4.20 2022
author: Joseph Torigian
name: Nina
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
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]]> 52199304 Meet the traders who supply the world with oil, metal and food - no matter how corrupt, war-torn or famine-stricken the source.
The modern world is built on commodities - from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones.

We rarely stop to consider where they come from. But we should.

In The World for Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinised corners of the economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the earth's resources.

It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets: enabling an enormous expansion in international trade, and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world's financial centres.

And it is the story of how some traders acquired untold political power, right under the noses of Western regulators and politicians - helping Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, fuelling the Libyan rebel army during the Arab Spring, and funnelling cash to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin in spite of strict sanctions.

The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.
__________________________

'This jaw-dropping study shows how much money and global influence is concentrated in the hands of a tiny group . . . A remarkable book . . . As the authors roam from oilfield to wheatfield, they reveal information so staggering you almost gasp.' SUNDAY TIMES

'Rollicking yarns from the biggest ever commodity boom . . . The high level narrative is gripping enough. But it is the details of what these freewheeling companies actually got up to that give the book a thriller-like quality . . . Educational and entertaining.' FINANCIAL TIMES

'A fascinating and revealing story . . . There are tales in the book of breathtaking trades, such as shipments of rebel oil from war-torn Libya or deals bartered amid the brutal "aluminium wars" in the Russia of the 1990s.' ECONOMIST

'A globe-spanning corporate thriller, full of intrigue and double dealing . . . Changes how we see the world, often in horrifying ways . . . New insights and reporting mean that even seasoned observers will be amazed.' SPECTATOR

'Javier Blas and Jack Farchy should be awaiting the call from Hollywood. The World for Sale contains at least half a dozen narrative threads that would form the basis of a good thriller. But the authors' main achievement is to subject the biggest commodity players, and their impact on the real world, to proper critical scrutiny.' REUTERS

'Blas and Farchy shine light on what's long been the financial markets' darkest corner - the crucial, yet underappreciated, role commodity traders play in global finance and geopolitics . . . The World For Sale is a fascinating, eye-opening read.' GREGORY ZUCKERMAN, author of The Man Who Solved the Market

'The definitive, eye-opening story of the most powerful and secretive traders in the world.' BRADLEY HOPE, co-author of Billion Dollar Whale

'If you have the slightest interest in how the modern world was made, by whom, at what price, and at what profit, this is the book for you . . . Superbly researched.' FOREIGN POLICY

'Javier Blas and Jack Farchy deftly peel back the curtain on the amoral swashbucklers of capitalism who trade in commodities . . . The World for Sale is a gripping account of how they achieved their stranglehold over the world economy, and their troubling influence on global politics.' BRAD STONE, author of The Everything Store

'Some of the stories could be straight out of John Le Carré. The difference is they're true . . . Fascinating.' ANDREW NEIL]]> 410 Javier Blas 1847942660 Nina 0 to-read 4.33 2021
author: Javier Blas
name: Nina
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/10
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]]>