New Books List

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017A quiet explosion of a book, exquisite and unforgettable The EconomistA cleverly constructed rural Gothic fable. . . Elmet is a marvellous achievement TLSPastoral idyll, political expose, cosy family saga and horror tale, it reads like a traditional childrens story that turns into a gangster film: Hansel and Gretel meets The Godfather Sunday TimesDaniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned menacing and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them in the woods with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. Cathy was more like their father: fierce and full of simmering anger. Daniel was more like their mother: gentle and kind. Sometimes, their father disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home, he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasnt true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew. Brutal and beautiful in equal measure, Elmet is a compelling portrayal of a family living on the fringes of contemporary society, as well as a gripping exploration of the disturbing actions people are capable of when pushed to their limits.

Jayadeva's dramatic lyrical poem Gitagovinda is one of the most important works in Indian literature and a source of religious inspiration in both medieval and contemporary Vaishnavism. Revealing an intense earthly passion to express the complexities of divine and human love, its songs are an important part of Indian devotional music and literature. The twentith anniversary edition of the renowned translation by noted scholar Barbara Stoler MIller brings this classic to a new generation of readers and offers fresh insights for those familiar with the text.

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

In lucid narrative prose, Sean Kicummah Teuton studies the stirring literature of ¿Red Power,¿ an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. Teuton challenges the claim that Red Power thinking relied on romantic longings for a pure Indigenous past and culture. He shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities. Looking to the era¿s moments and literature, he develops an alternative, ¿tribal realist¿ critical perspective to allow for more nuanced analyses of Native writing. In this approach, ¿knowledge¿ is not the unattainable product of disinterested observation. Rather it is the achievement of communally mediated, self-reflexive work openly engaged with the world, and as such it is revisable. For this tribal realist position, Teuton enlarges the concepts of Indigenous identity and tribal experience as intertwined sources of insight into a shared world.

A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and popular essayist. ¿Poetry,¿ Jane Hirshfield has said, ¿is language that foments revolutions of being.¿ In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds some of the ways this is done¿by the inclusion of hiddenness, paradox, and surprise; by a perennial awareness of the place of uncertainty in our lives; by language¿s own acts of discovery; by the powers of image, statement, music, and feeling to enlarge in every direction. Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bash¿, Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among others, Hirshfield reveals how poetry¿s world-making takes place: word by charged word. By expanding what is imaginable and sayable, Hirshfield proposes, poems expand what is possible. Ten Windows restores us at every turn to a more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity and of the seemingly limitless means by which that knowledge is both summoned and forged.

"Faiz Ahmed Faiz is widely regarded as the greatest Urdu poet of the twentieth century, and the iconic voice of a generation. Although he is best remembered for his revolutionary verses that decried tyranny and called for justice, his oeuvre also extended to scintillating, soulful poems of love. In this...

In the Letters, we discover the art of Plath¿s correspondence, most of which has never before been published and is here presented unabridged, without revision, so that she speaks directly in her own words. Refreshingly candid and offering intimate details of her personal life, Plath is playful, too, entertaining a wide range of addressees, including family, friends and professional contacts, with inimitable wit and verve. The letters document Plath¿s extraordinary literary development: the genesis of many poems, short and long fiction, and journalism. Her endeavour to publish in a variety of genres had mixed receptions, but she was never dissuaded. Through acceptance of her work, and rejection, Plath strove to stay true to her creative vision. Well-read and curious, she offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary culture.

The Museum of Innocence - set in Istanbul between 1975 and today - tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Fusun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique. The novel depicts a panoramic view of life in Istanbul as it chronicles this long, obsessive, love affair between Kemal and Fusun; and Pamuk beautifully captures the identity crisis esperienced by Istanbul's upper classes who find themselves caught between traditional and westernised ways of being.

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine. Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects that Zee is beginning an affair with Eddie, `more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over thirty years,¿ Waldo is pressed to action: determined to expose the couple, he sets himself first to prove his suspicions correct ¿ and then to enact his revenge.

From the Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Snow and My Name Is Red, a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a master welldigger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating meter by meter without luck, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before¿not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world. But in the nearby town, where they buy provisions and take their evening break, the boy will find an irresistible diversion. The Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a traveling theater company, catches his eye and seems as fascinated by him as he is by her. The young man¿s wildest dream will be realized, but when, in his distraction, a horrible accident befalls the welldigger, the boy will flee, returning to Istanbul. Only years later will he discover whether he was in fact responsible for his master¿s death and who the red-headed enchantress was. A beguiling mystery tale of family and romance, of East and West, tradition and modernity, by one of the great storytellers of our time

Paul Kemp has moved from New York to the steamy heat of Puerto Rico to work at the Daily News. He starts hanging out at Al's Backyard, a local den selling booze and hamburgers to vagrant journalists who are mostly crazy drunks on the verge of quitting. Then he meets Yeamon, whose delectable girlfriend has Kemp stewing in his own lust. But the idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day is reaching a violent breaking point.

During the 1960s I spent nearly two years in the Coimbatore District of Tamilnadu. As a social anthropologist, I was initially interested in studying Tamilian social organization. I elected to focus on rural tradition, and so I chose to live in an unelectrified house in a small village about fifty miles from a major city. The nights were long, and I wondered how the people accupied themselves after dark.

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works, beginning with the six shown here, will be published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art. Of this initial group of six titles, The Wayward Bus is in a new edition. An imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus travelling California's back roads. This allegorical novel of pilgrimage includes a new introduction by Gary Scharnhorst. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers ¿ and to the many who revisit them again and again.

The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can't. Won't people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated? For nearly four decades, David Sedaris has faithfully kept a diary in which he records his thoughts and observations on the odd and funny events he witnesses. Anyone who has attended a live Sedaris event knows that his diary readings are often among the most joyful parts of the evening. But never before have they been available in print. Now, in Theft by Finding, Sedaris brings us his favorite entries. From the family home in Ralegh, North Carolina, we follow Sedaris as he sets out to make his way in the world. As an art student and then teacher in Chicago he works at a succession of very odd jobs, meeting even odder people, before moving to New York to pursue a career as a writer - where instead he very quickly lands a job in Macy's department store as an elf in Santaland...

Set in Lahore, This House of Clay and Water explores the lives of two women. Nida, intelligent and lonely, has married into an affluent political family and is desperately searching for some meaning in her existence; and impulsive, lovely Sasha, from the ordinary middle-class, whose longing for designer labels and upmarket places is so frantic that she willingly consorts with rich men who can provide them. Nida and Sasha meet at the famous Daata Sahib dargah and connect-their need to understand why their worlds feel so alien and empty, bringing them together. On her frequent visits to the dargah, Nida meets the gentle, flute-playing hijra Bhanggi, who sits under a bargadh tree and yearns for acceptance and affection, but is invariably shunned. A friendship-fragile, tentative and tender-develops between the two, both exiles within their own lives; but it flies in the face of all convention and cannot be allowed.