The Essential Feminist Reader
Edited by Estelle Freedman
Paperback $17.95
The Essential Feminist Reader is the first anthology to present the full scope of feminist history. Prizewinning historian Estelle B. Freedman brings decades of teaching experience and scholarship to her selections, which span more than five centuries. Moving beyond standard texts by English and American thinkers, this collection features primary source material from around the globe, including short works of fiction and drama, political manifestos, and the work of less well-known writers.
Freedman’s cogent Introduction assesses the challenges facing feminism, while her accessible, lively commentary contextualizes each piece. The Essential Feminist Reader is a vital addition to feminist scholarship, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women.
Where Men Hide
by James B. Twitchell, with photographs by Ken Ross
Paperback $19.95
The author of AdCULT USA and Lead Us into Temptation takes a vacation from consumer culture to explore male spaces, from the recliner to the boxing ring, with photographer Ross. An affable guide, Twitchell mourns the demise of the men-only barbershop, puzzles over the “dreariness” of male lairs and wanders into the cross-cultural history of deer hunting. His vivid personal accounts of, say, his fascination with Saddam Hussein’s spider hole breathe life into what could have been a fusty set of clichés. Twitchell dissects Ross’s photos of male insularity and advertisements reassuring men they can get away from it all. But in the end the book arrives at the obvious conclusion: men make their own spaces for good or ill, and these spaces are changing. He also falls into sweeping generalization (“Women go to convents to do good work. Men go to monasteries to get away from women”). Still, he is that rare thing in cultural studies, a raconteur, and his generalizations are sometimes thought provoking, as when he discusses why men-only groups are a selling point of megachurches. For men who like to think about manhood—but not too hard—and women who are wondering what the attraction is of that grimy garage, Twitchell makes an entertaining companion.
Frost: A Novel
by Thomas Bernhard
Paperback $14.95
A student’s increasingly erratic dispatches over 27 days comprise this obsessive first novel by Bernhard (1931–1989), published to European acclaim in 1963. An unnamed medical student is sent from Vienna by his supervisor, an eminent surgeon named Strauch, to undertake “precise observation” of the surgeon’s brother, a famous painter who has suddenly left the city for the “dismal” village of Weng. After “systematically inveigling” himself into the company of the painter under the pretense of being a vacationing law student, the student slowly feels his own mood and mental attitudes being subsumed by the painter’s paranoid outbursts and disjointed monologues. Weng itself, located in a grim valley still bearing the grisly traces of WWII, is a hotbed of murky scandal: the landlady sleeps with the village knacker (handyman), while her husband, against whom she testified in a murder trial, sits in jail; a traveling show appears in the village displaying “deformed women and deformed animals”; a barn is torched. All are dutifully reported by the disintegrating student. Bernhard’s glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett’s, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut.
Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
by Rob Sheffield
Paperback $13.00
Music critic Sheffield’s touching and poignant memoir of love and death will strike a chord in anyone who has used a hand-selected set of songs to try to express something that can’t be put into words. A socially awkward adolescent, Sheffield finds true love as a college student in the late ’80s with Renée, a “hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl.” They’re brought together by their love of music, get married and spend eight years together before Renée suddenly dies of a pulmonary embolism. Sheffield’s delivery is not that of the typical actor/ reader. We come to know Rob as this geeky, lanky guy, and his reading is characteristically a little bit uncoordinated, yet it is tender and heartfelt enough to win us over. Each chapter opens with a song list from a mix tape made at the time. Listeners may wish that, as with Nick Hornby’s essay collection Songbook, there had been an audio component that would allow the music to take us back or would introduce us to new songs that helped Sheffield press on into an uncertain but hopeful future.
House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
Paperback $14.00
With The House of Meetings, Martin Amis may finally have written the novel his critics thought would never come. By taming his signature (and polarizing) stylistic high-wire act, Amis has crafted a sober tale of love and cynicism against the grim curtain of Stalin’s Russia. The book’s anonymous narrator-a Red Army veteran and unapologetic war criminal-and his passive, poetic half-brother, Lev, become pinned in a politically dangerous love triangle with the exotic Zoya, though their tactics (and intentions) are as divergent as their personalities. Swept up in the wave of Stalin’s paranoid purges, the brothers are sent independently to Norlag, a Siberian internment camp where their respective fates are cast through their contrasting reactions to the depravity of the prison. Zoya and Lev share a night in “The House of Meetings,” a room provided for conjugal visits with the prisoners, and the events of that night reverberate through the decades, the details of the liaison remaining concealed until the story’s devastating denouement. Amis’s main achievement is his depiction of the cruel realities of the Soviet gulags. Drawing heavily on his research for Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, his half-history/half-memoir of political imprisonment and mass killing in Soviet Russia, Amis has created his own Animal Farm-without metaphors to mask the blood, filth, and death of the camps. Amis vividly recreates the social structure of gulag life, as the inmates and guards sort themselves into distinct hierarchies and stations in their struggles to survive the rigors of the gulag. Here The House of Meetings may accomplish what Amis had intended for the unfocused Koba: to cast a searing light on an often overlooked episode of 20th century inhumanity, injustice, and murder.
The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel
by Heidi Julavits
Paperback $13.95
On November 7, 1985, Mary Veal, 16, a not especially distinguished upper-middle-class girl, disappears from New England’s Semmering Academy. A month later she reappears at Semmering, claiming amnesia, but hinting at abduction and ravishment. The events in Believer editor Julavits’s third, beautifully executed novel take place on three levels: one, dedicated to “what might have happened,” is the story of the supposedly blank interval; another is dedicated to the inevitable therapeutic aftermath, as Mary’s therapist, Dr. Hammer, tries to discover whether Mary is lying, either about the abduction or the amnesia; and the present of the novel, which revolves around the funeral of Mary’s mother, Paula, in 1999. There, Mary feels not only the hostility of her sisters, Regina (an unsuccessful poet) and Gaby (a disheveled lesbian) but Paula’s posthumous hostility. Or is that an illusion? This structure delicately balances between gothic and comic, allowing Julavits to play variations on Mary’s life and on the ’80s moral panic of repressed memory syndromes and wild fears of child abuse. While Julavits (The Effect of Living Backwards) sometimes lets an overheated style distract from her central story, as its various layers coalesce, the mystery of what did happen to Mary Veal will enthrall the reader to the very last page.
The Deviant’s Pocket Guide to the Outlandish Sexual Desires Barely Contained in Your Subconscious
by Dennis DiClaudio
Paperback $14.95
So you like animals. Everyone likes animals. But if you really, really like animals—or clowns, or trees, or dressing up in a fur suit before you enter the bedroom—then this book is for you. The Deviant’s Pocket Guide is an unerringly witty and surprisingly comprehensive pocket encyclopedia of the absurd and hilarious fantasies we indulge in the bedroom. As DiClaudio puts it, “human sexuality is a lovely and complex flower,†and this book is a colorful testament to that. In its pages, you will find clowns, balloons, hot rods, shoes, and a curio cabinet’s worth of other unlikely sexual objects.
Each of the forty illustrated encyclopedia entries is broken down into relevant sections, including a narrative fantasy typical of the fetish, the speculated psychological origins, and a few other factoids to complete the picture. The Deviant’s Pocket Guide is a look into our collective medicine cabinets: clever, devious, and surprisingly thorough—a handbook of our best-kept secrets, difficult to put down and impossible to ignore.
Grayson
by Lynne Cox
Paperback $13.00
On a clear California morning when Cox (Swimming to Antarctica) was 17 years old, she had an unusual experience that stayed with her for 30 years, creating a spiritual foundation for her personal and professional success. In this slim and crisp memoir, Cox details a morning swim off the coast of California that took an unexpected turn: returning to shore, she discovered that she was being followed by a baby gray whale that had been separated from its mother. As Cox developed a rapport with the whale, she took on the responsibility of keeping it at sea until it was reunited with its mother. Cox expertly weaves fine details together, from the whale’s mushroomlike skin to how other fish react to such a large creature. At times Cox’s prose is uneven, alternating from emotional to factual, but her pure joy at connecting with Grayson (her name for the baby whale) overrides any technical inconsistencies. The combination of retelling her once-in-a-lifetime experience with her observations on life (“If I try, if I believe, if I work toward something… the impossible isn’t impossible at all”) will have timeless appeal for all ages.
Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris
Paperback $11.00
Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs, who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible God. The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving†God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the superstitious bloodletting that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. . .
Ralph Ellison: A Biography
by Arnold Rampersad
Paperback $17.95
On the strength of just one novel, as well as a series of lasting essays in cultural criticism, Ralph Ellison stands as one of the major literary figures of the last century. The novel, of course, is Invisible Man, and much of the drama of Ellison’s life, as told by Arnold Rampersad in the first major biography of Ellison, is twofold: how Ellison came to write his masterwork, and how he failed to write another. Given complete access to Ellison’s papers, Rampersad tells the story of Ellison’s long apprenticeship as a musician and writer and his long life, full of honors and frustrations, after the great success of Invisible Man, capturing the complexities, to use of one of Ellison’s favorite words, of his elusive subject, at once passionate and patrician, fiercely critical of his country’s racial divisions and stubbornly hopeful about its democratic possibilities.
At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
by Susan Sontag
Paperback $15.00
The world lost a brilliant, passionate, and ethical thinker and writer when Susan Sontag died in December 2004. In his moving foreword to this collection of resonant essays and speeches, Sontag’s son, David Rieff, writes that his mother “was interested in everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity.” But for all her arresting insights into photography and other arts, literature was Sontag’s true love, and nowhere else has she so directly addressed what literature accomplishes. Sontag was working on this book at the end of her life, and it is a generously personal volume addressing her greatest ardors and gravest concerns. Here is Sontag on beauty, Russian literature, and the art of literary translation. Here, too, are Sontag’s clarion writings on Israel, 9/11, and Abu Ghraib. Although Sontag was happiest writing fiction, she never failed to celebrate the work of others or protest injustice and brutality, and in this she was both artist and hero. More posthumous works are promised.