Kirjahaku

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer. Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.

Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century – whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism.

Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century – whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism.

A compelling quest to locate a history and poetics of the American sentence, this book applies four stages of communication to the story of American writing - the sermon, the telegraph, the newspaper and the screen - to ask what is an American sentence and how has it changed?While sentences have become the subject of their own form, literary histories, cultural narratives, and personal writings have not centred on the sentence as a singular object. There is no history of the sentence. This book addresses that absence, reviewing American style through American literary history for evolutionary moments in the development of the American sentence from the Puritans to the present day.Reading sentences from writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, we find ourselves asking if a poetics of the American sentence actually exists, whether good sentences are the reason we read, and what the future of the American sentence might be.

A compelling quest to locate a history and poetics of the American sentence, this book applies four stages of communication to the story of American writing - the sermon, the telegraph, the newspaper and the screen - to ask what is an American sentence and how has it changed?While sentences have become the subject of their own form, literary histories, cultural narratives, and personal writings have not centred on the sentence as a singular object. There is no history of the sentence. This book addresses that absence, reviewing American style through American literary history for evolutionary moments in the development of the American sentence from the Puritans to the present day.Reading sentences from writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, we find ourselves asking if a poetics of the American sentence actually exists, whether good sentences are the reason we read, and what the future of the American sentence might be.

The Business of Ballet: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes between Profit and the Avant-garde explores how a remarkable, internationally recognized ballet company, the Ballets Russes, was able to survive for twenty years without stable funding. Focusing on Ballets Russes's founder, Serge Diaghilev, and his talent for discovering monies through an uncanny ability to secure funds from aristocrats, industrialists, artists, and swindlers, Ira Nadel offers new insight into the financial life of modern ballet. Throughout the analysis, Nadel reveals that Diaghilev was able to attract not only financial support but also the most innovative artistic and musical talents and choreographers of the period, who collectively changed the nature of ballet from the conventional to the contemporary. Through it all, Diaghilev never sacrificed the essential Russianness of his enterprise, transforming Russian traditions by incorporating new and original musical and choreographic stagings. In doing so, Nadel argues, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes revised the idea of ballet as an art form, causing audiences throughout Europe and North America to riot and artists to create revolutionary compositions in art and music.

This work examines the literary and biographical connections between Marcel Proust and Philip Roth against the backdrop of European and American cultural change through a social and literary narrative involving war, literature and fashion. It emphasizes the parallel treatment of memory, place, history, illness, music and sex by Proust and Roth. The authors also possessed a mutual dependence on the past as they discovered their vocation as writers. Proust and the impact of political and social change at the end of the Belle Époque, including WWI, matches Roth and the impact of World War II and the revolutionary sixties, two of many themes and concerns they share.

David Mamet has been described as the greatest living American playwright of his generation and the quintessential American writer for his work as author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. His works are known for their clever and terse dialogue and have earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross and Oscar nominations for House of Games as well as The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, and The Verdict. This comprehensive biography represents a landmark study of one of the great writers and directors of our time. Detailing Mamet's ideas on writing, acting and directing, Nadel provides an insightful and authoritative guide to the genesis, text and productions of many of his plays and screenplays. Beginning with his Chicago origins, the work goes on to cover Mamet's relationship to Judaism, his reputation for machismo, as well as discussions of and excerpts from early plays and stories that have never before been referenced in print. Also included are interviews with key actors and directors such as William H. Macy, Mike Nussbaum, Robert Brustein, and Neil Pepe.