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Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122841X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 78
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Book Description
A joyful ode—in a single soaring, crazy sentence—to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others” and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.” Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian” with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street . . . I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office”), which itself is just one aspect of his also being “constantly conscious of his connectedness” to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Lowry” and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville, but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.” Driven to save that Palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but “people must be told the truth: there is no dualism in existence.” And his dream will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace."
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122841X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 78
Get Book Here
Book Description
A joyful ode—in a single soaring, crazy sentence—to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others” and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.” Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian” with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street . . . I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office”), which itself is just one aspect of his also being “constantly conscious of his connectedness” to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Lowry” and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville, but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.” Driven to save that Palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but “people must be told the truth: there is no dualism in existence.” And his dream will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace."
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811224201
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Now in paperback, a transcendent and wide-ranging collection of stories by László Krasznahorkai: “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful.”—Marina Warner, announcing the Booker International Prize In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then narrates a number of unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, India, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on and on about the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in The New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with his own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”
Author: Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811229947
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 54
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Book Description
Four beguiling tales for children of all ages. A surprising new facet of Clarice Lispector’s genius “That woman who killed the fish unfortunately is me,” begins the title story, but “if it were my fault, I’d own up to you, since I don’t lie to boys and girls. I only lie sometimes to a certain type of grownup because there’s no other way.” Enumerating all the animals she’s loved—cats, dogs, lizards, chickens, monkeys—Clarice finally asks: “Do you forgive me?” “The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit” is a detective story which explains that bunnies think with their noses: for a single idea a bunny might “scrunch up his nose fifteen thousand times” (he may not be too bright, but “he’s not foolish at all when it comes to making babies”). The third tale, “Almost True,” is a shaggy dog yarn narrated by a pooch who is very worried about a wicked witch: “I am a dog named Ulisses and my owner is Clarice.” The wonderful last story, “Laura’s Intimate Life” stars “the nicest hen I’ve ever seen.” Laura is “quite dumb,” but she has her “little thoughts and feelings. Not a lot, but she’s definitely got them. Just knowing she’s not completely dumb makes her feel all chatty and giddy. She thinks that she thinks.” A one-eyed visitor from Jupiter arrives and vows Laura will never be eaten: she’s been worrying, because “humans are a weird sort of person” who can love hens and eat them, too. Such throwaway wisdom abounds: “Don’t even get me started.” These delightful, high-hearted stories, written for her own boys, have charm to burn—and are a treat for every Lispector reader.
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811226093
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 78
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Book Description
Now in paperback, two novellas from the Hungarian master László Krasznahorkai—“one of the most mysterious artists now at work” (Colm Toíbín) The Last Wolf (translated by George Szirtes) is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell—it features a classic obsessed narrator, a man hired (by mistake) to write the true tale of the last wolf in Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another person, dragged about a cold foreign place, and appalled by a species’s end) is narrated—all in a single sentence—as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender. Herman (translated by John Batki), “a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion,” is asked to clear a forest’s last “noxious beasts.” He begins with great zeal, although in time he “suspects that maybe he was ‘on the wrong scent.’” Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game …
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811226654
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 586
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE "Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece" (The Millions); "Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad" (Publishers Weekly); "One of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature" (Paris Review); "Obsessive and visionary" (The New Yorker); "Genius" (The Baffler) At last, the capstone to Krasznahorkai’s four-part masterwork Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town—offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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Book Description
A classic escape nightmare, Chasing Homer is sped on not only by Krasznahorkai’s signature velocity, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrations In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed—careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation … Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and—reaching out of the book proper—the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).
Author: Georges Perec
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567920888
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
The narrator of this posthumous novel investigates the disappearance of a famous French crime writer. The only clues he has are codes in a manuscript. A half-finished novel completed by its editors.
Author: Helen DeWitt
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811230082
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 61
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Book Description
A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified. Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811220117
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize A novel of awesome beauty and power by the Hungarian master, Laszla Krasznahorkai. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. War and War, Laszla Krasznahorkai's second novel in English from New Directions, begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked by thuggish teenagers and robbed; and from here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he can commit suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all on the world-wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery flophouse to his moving far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of humanity, a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the eight chapters of War and War is a short "prequel acting as a sequel," "Isaiah," which brings us to a dark bar, years before in Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and threatens suicide. Written like nothing else (turning single sentences into chapters), War and War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that Krasznahorkai's prose "far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing."
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780811219167
Category : Art in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize Limited to 2,000 gorgeous copies, this richly illustrated, extraordinary novella was created in collaboration with the famed painter Max Neumann.
