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THESE NEW TITLES JUST IN!

Wholphin No. 3: DVD Magazine of Rare and Unseen Short Films

by Brent Hoff

$15.95 DVD McSweeney’s Publishing

This third issue of Wholphin features the early, rediscovered work of Alexander Payne and Dennis Hopper; new-found talent from abroad, including Jonas Odell and Alice Winocour; the strangest Japanese film we’ve ever seen, from the three-man directing team Naisu No Mori; a documentary about a thirteen-year-old Yemeni girl who refuses to wear her veil; and “The Popcorn Effect” of trap-jaw ants.

This issue also includes a bonus disc featuring Part Two: “The Phantom Victory” of Adam Curtis’s powerful documentary, The Power of Nightmares.

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Nine Novels by Younger Americans
by Sara Bradshaw, Rachel Barber, Daniel Cowen, Sarah Meira Rosenberg, Dylan Suher, Lucas Gonzalez, Julia Mayer, Carolyn Maughan, and Samantha Lipman.
With a forward by Richard Powers

Paperback $18.00 826 Books

This anthology collects nine exceptional novels that were written by high school students from New York City during the summer of 2005 in 826NYC’s Young Adult Writers’ Colony. Ranging from comedic, to fiercly political, to deeply personal, these novels are immensely entertaining and forecast a bright future for this brand new generation of novelists. As novelist Richard Powers says in his foreword, “There comes a time when we must decide whether we love the world enough to hand it over to its next lover . . . [This is a book of] nine worlds that nine people could not find and so had to make themselves. Here it is before you: how the story ends this time. And how it starts again.”

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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

Paperback $13.95 Random House

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage-and a life, in good times and bad-that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, just after they had returned from the hospital where their only child, Quintana, was lying in a coma. This book is a memoir of Dunne’s death, Quintana’s illness, and Didion’s efforts to make sense of a time when nothing made sense. “She’s a pretty cool customer,” one hospital worker says of her, and, certainly, coolness was always part of the addictive appeal of Didion’s writing. The other part was the dark side of cool, the hyper-nervous awareness of the tendency of things to go bad. In 2004, Didion had her own disasters to deal with, and she did not, she feels, deal with them coolly, or even sanely. This book is about getting a grip and getting on; it’s also a tribute to an extraordinary marriage.

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Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

Hardcover $26.00 -10% Random House

A glorious new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner: a big, smart, bawdy tale of love and war, sex and politics, friendship and betrayal—and the allure of the movies. With Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” as her model, Jane Smiley takes us through ten transformative, unforgettable days in the Hollywood hills.It is the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards. Max—an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned—and his lover, Elena, luxuriate in bed, still groggy from last night’s red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, and talking about the war in Iraq, recently begun. But soon their house will be full of guests, and guests like these demand attention. There is Max’s ex-wife, “the legendary Zoe Cunningham,” a dazzling half-Jamaican movie star, with her new lover, the enigmatic healer, Paul (fraudulent? enlightened?). Max’s agent, Stoney, a perhaps too easygoing version of his legendary agent father, can’t stay away, and neither can Zoe and Max’s daughter, Isabel, though she would prefer to maintain her hard-won independence. And of course there is the next-door neighbor, Cassie, who seems to know everyone’s secrets.

As they share their stories of Hollywood past and present, watch films in Max’s opulent screening room, gossip by the swimming pool, and tussle in the many bedrooms, the tension mounts, sparks fly, and Smiley delivers an exquisitely woven, virtuosic work—a Hollywood novel as only she could fashion it, told with bravura, rich with delightful characters, spiced with her signature wit. It is a joyful, sexy, and wondrously insightful pleasure.

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The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

by Robert Fisk

Paperback $20.00 Random House

A sweeping and dramatic history of the last half century of conflict in the Middle East from an award-winning journalist who has covered the region for over thirty years, “The Great War for Civilisation “unflinchingly chronicles the tragedy of the region from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution; from the American hostage crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War; from the 1991 Gulf War to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A book of searing drama as well as lucid, incisive analysis, “The Great War for Civilisation “is a work of major importance for today’s world.

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Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

Paperback 13.95 Random House

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.
Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.
How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.
“Remainder” is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

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New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Jed Perl

Paperback $18.95 Random House

In this landmark work, Jed Perl captures the excitement of a generation of legendary artists–Jackson Pollack, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly among them–who came to New York, mingled in its lofts and bars, and revolutionized American art. In a continuously arresting narrative, Perl also portrays such less well known figures as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, and the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, as well the writers, critics, and patrons who rounded out the artists’world.Brilliantly describing the intellectual crosscurrents of the time as well as the genius of dozens of artists, “New Art City” is indispensable for lovers of modern art and culture.

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Changing Light: A Novel

by Nora Gallagher

Hardcover $22.00 -10% Pantheon

Nora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel, “Changing Light”, is a love story set in Los Alamos during the summer of 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.During the last summer of the war, in the beautiful New Mexico desert, a man and a woman come together: Eleanor Garrigue, a young painter from New York, and Leo Kavan, a neutron physicist. The story begins when Eleanor finds a delirious man lying by the river near her house. She takes him in and cares for him. In this novel of secrets, we learn before Eleanor does that Leo is AWOL from Los Alamos after witnessing a fatal radiation accident that has forced him to confront the moral implications of his work on the bomb. And we know, too, what Leo does not know: Eleanor is married, and has fled to New Mexico to escape her husband.

As Eleanor and Leo slowly reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady art world in New York to Einstein’s Berlin, from the bomb labs in the English countryside to the hidden city of Los Alamos. Nora Gallagher perfectly evokes the veil of secrecy and tension surrounding the Manhattan Project, the constant hum of fear alongside the remarkable fearlessness of the scientists in the laboratories.

As Leo and Eleanor privately struggle with the losses the war has pitched into their lives, the two find unexpected solace in each other. Their story is all the more poignant because it can only flourish in a brief interlude–an interlude of brilliant madness and irrevocable change. As the scientists engage in literally “changing light,” Leo and Eleanor are connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.

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Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World

by Margaret Macmillan

Hardcover $27.95 -10% Random House

With the publication of her landmark bestseller “Paris 1919″, Margaret MacMillan was praised as “a superb writer who can bring history to life” (”The Philadelphia Inquirer”). Now she brings her extraordinary gifts to one of the most important subjects today–the relationship between the United States and China–and one of the most significant moments in modern history. In February 1972, Richard Nixon, the first American president ever to visit China, and Mao Tse-tung, the enigmatic Communist dictator, met for an hour in Beijing. Their meeting changed the course of history and ultimately laid the groundwork for the complex relationship between China and the United States that we see today.

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This is Hong Kong

by Miroslav Sasek

Hardcover $17.95 -10% Universe

Like the other Sasek classics, this is a facsimile edition of the original book. The brilliant, vibrant illustrations have been meticulously preserved, remaining true to his vision more than 40 years later. Facts have been updated for the 21st-century, appearing on a “This is . . . Today” page at the back of the book. These charming illustrations, coupled with Sasek’s witty, playful narrative, make for a perfect souvenir that will delight both children and their parents, many of whom will remember the series from their own childhoods. “This is Hong Kong”, first published in 1965, captures the enchantment and the contrasts of Hong Kong in the sixties. Roaring jets bring in the tourists; bamboo rickshaws taxi them through exotic streets fragrant with incense, roasting chestnuts, and honey-glazed Peking duck. Sasek shows you the sweeping panorama of gleaming Kowloon Bay framed by misty mountain ridges, then moves in for close-ups of laborers and hawkers, refugees from the mainland, and sailors of flame-red junks, and the strange “water people” who, it is said, never set foot on dry land.

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This is Rome

by Miroslav Sasek

Hardcover $17.95 -10% Universe

“This is Rome”, (also first published in 1960,) traces the history of Roman civilization to bring to life the Rome of the 60’s. Sasek navigates Rome’s busy, winding streets to visit such glorious historical landmarks as the statues of Michelangelo, Vatican City, the Pantheon, and the Fontana di Trevi-and to show us the eccentricities of modern Roman life, from its colorful trains, trams, and taxis to its chic espresso bars and pasta houses.

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