Unwitting Street

Unwitting Street PDF Author: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time. When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.

Unwitting Street

Unwitting Street PDF Author: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time. When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.

Unwitting Street

Unwitting Street PDF Author: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374889
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time. When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.

Unwitting Accomplice

Unwitting Accomplice PDF Author: Sid Meltzer
Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
ISBN: 1624205798
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
How can a homicide be prevented when it’s still only in some stranger’s head? Kim Barbieri, a tough, street-smart New York City crime reporter unfazed by fragile male egos and mangled bodies, is sent an anonymous note with an ominous message: I intend to commit a murder. She doesn’t know who the killer is. She doesn’t know who his victim will be. She doesn’t know where, when and how he will strike. But there is one thing she does know: If she doesn’t learn to think like a killer, someone’s going to get away with murder. Does she succeed in stopping the homicide? Or does she become complicit in it?

Autobiography of a Corpse

Autobiography of a Corpse PDF Author: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176960
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.

The Letter Killers Club

The Letter Killers Club PDF Author: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175239
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a merry medieval cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. But in this book set in an ominous Soviet Moscow of the 1920s, the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.

Fathers and Children

Fathers and Children PDF Author: Ivan Turgenev
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681376369
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
A 19th-century Russian masterpiece about love, politics, family, and the tension between the new generation and the old world. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is a book full to bursting with life, both comic and tragic. At the heart of this novel about love, politics, and society, strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death, is the generational divide between the young and the old. When the young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, the nihilist Bazarov, leave St. Petersburg to visit their aging parents in the provinces, the conflict that ensues from the generations’ clashing views of the world—the youths’ radicalism and the parents’ liberalism—is both representative of nineteenth-century Russia and recognizably contemporary. At the time of its publication in 1862, the book aroused indignation in critics who felt betrayed by Turgenev’s refusal to let his novel serve a single ideology; it also received a spirited defense by those who saw in his diffuse sympathies a greater service to art and to humanity. In this fresh new translation Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater have captured Turgenev’s subtle humor, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his compassion, and, above all, his skill as a storyteller

Germs

Germs PDF Author: Richard Wollheim
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
A brilliant, sinuous exploration of family and childhood memory by one of the most original British philosophers of the twentieth century. Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things—houses, clothes, meals, parents—loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control. Richard Wollheim’s remarkably original memoir is a disturbing, enthralling, dispassionate but also deeply personal depiction of a child standing, fascinated and fearful, on the threshold of individual life.

Muhammad

Muhammad PDF Author: Maxime Rodinson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374935
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
A classic secular history of the prophet Muhammad that vividly recreates the fascinating time in which Islam was born. Maxime Rodinson, both a maverick Marxist and a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, first published his biography of Muhammad in 1960. The book, a classic in its field, has been widely read ever since. Rodinson, though deeply versed in scholarly studies of the Prophet, does not seek to add to it here but to introduce Muhammad, first of all, as “a man of flesh and blood” who led a life of extraordinary drama and shaped history as few others have. Equally, he seeks to lay out an understanding of Muhammad’s legacy and Islam as what he called an ideological movement, similar to the universalist religions of Christianity and Buddhism as well as the secular movement of Marxism, but possessing a singular commitment to “the deeply ingrained idea that Islam offers not only a path to salvation but (for many, above all) the ideal of a just society to be realized on earth.” Rodinson’s book begins by introducing the specific land and the larger world into which Muhammad was born and the development of his prophetic calling. It then follows the steps of his career and the way his leadership gave birth to a religion and a state. A final chapter considers the world as Islam has transformed it.

The Stone Face

The Stone Face PDF Author: William Gardner Smith
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681375176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
A roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living amidst the tensions and violence of Algerian War-era France, and one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris massacre of 1961. As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk PDF Author: Nikolai Leskov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374919
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story. Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with. The title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Dmitri Shostakovich's operas. The other stories, all but one newly translated, present the most focused and finely rendered collection of this indispensable writer currently available in English.