books

One of our greatest novelists and thinkers presents a radiant, thrilling interpretation of the book of Genesis.

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents, by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis , which includes the original text, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.

First published March 12, 2024

Shusaku Endo is Japan's foremost novelist, and Silence is generally regarded to be his masterpiece. In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.

First published January 1, 1966

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

First published January 1, 1948

Dolls: red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight-for Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three women become best friends when they are young and struggling in New York City and then climb to the top of the entertainment industry -- only to find that there is no place left to go but down -- into the Valley of the Dolls.

First published February 1, 1966

In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think.As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse, the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture, is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.

First published November 25, 1985

Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord's text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image/information culture.

First published January 1, 1967

"At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he'd begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle - with an ongoing, affectless, humorless realisation that his day 'was over' - he noticed with confusion, having thought it was early morning, that it was 4:46PM."

Taipei is an ode - or lament - to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.

From one of this generation's most talked-about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal and uncompromising novel about memory, love, and what it means to be alive.

First published June 4, 2013

Walking the wire between imagination and confession, My First Book captures both our cultural moment and the feeling of growing up in the internet generation. Debut author Honor Levy’s uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in the 21st century, only having lived in a post-internet world. Never far from a digital interface, Levy’s characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched world simultaneously hyper-real, hyper-performative, and on the brink of collapse. Amid the sense of imminent catastrophe, a fragile self struggles to form.

Wildly inventive, always ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy’s prose illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. “I’d rather do Xanax than cut myself. No, I’d rather do Xanax then cut myself,” one protagonist muses, while another discovers the infinite nature of love, another reminisces about sunsets that were “pinker, like way pinker,” and another encounters God in a downtown video game arcade. To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?

For readers of Patricia Lockwood, Bret Easton Ellis, and the depths of the internet, and for anyone who would like to see Generation Z from the inside out, My First Book holds the key. And in capturing the experience of an entire generation, it marks the arrival of an electric new talent.

First published May 14, 2024

"Incandescent" writes The New York Times of the award-winning poet Akbar's first novel. Its protagonist is Iranian-American immigrant Cyrus Shams, whose family is shattered after his mother's death (her plane was shot down by a US Navy warship). The troubled hero becomes obsessed with martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – and with martyrdom, in his search for a meaningful death "The novel itself is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty," writes The New Yorker. "This is a novel that comes at you from every conceivable direction," writes The Observer, "some playful, some whimsical, others grimly intense." In its review – and the book was subsequently selected as one of the paper's 10 novels of the year – The New York Times writes: "what Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous." (RL)

First published January 23, 2024

Class, sexuality and politics are the themes that Alan Hollinghurst often returns to in his masterful novels, which have included The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and the 2004 Booker-winner The Line of Beauty. And Our Evenings, in which the late middle-aged narrator Dave Win shares the trajectory of his life, revisits these themes. Dave's story unspools, from childhood to growing into adulthood as a gay man of a generation that reached maturity not that long after the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Over the years, Dave welcomes his freedoms, faces intolerance, finds love and loses it, encounters an old adversary, all against a backdrop of constant social and cultural change. "The events keep coming, but the quiet moments that receive such loving attention are the real treasure," says The New Statesman. "The depiction of Dave's mother Avril, their closeness is palpable and deeply moving." The Guardian says: "Hollinghurst is precise about sentiment in ways that puts loose sentimentality to shame." He is "above all an appreciator," it adds. "That capacity for appreciation acquires new emotional and political meaning here, in the finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time."(LB)

First published October 3, 2024