Kirjahaku

The renowned poet--praised by John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht, among others--offers another collection of poems that explore urban life, travel, and the depths of the human experience. Reprint.

On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in Lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, a photographer named Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality--a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragonpoints and Tibetan mysticism where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica's father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White's disappearance was no accident: he was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present. Until Veronica finds Leo...

A novel of magic, a noir romance and mystery, set in a real and imagined New York which seeks to tap in to the growing New Age market. From the author of "The Soloist".

"A large, lavishly inventive novel . . . an American descendant of The Arabian Nights . . . erudite and artful entertainment."--The New York Times Book Review At a Manhattan planetarium in 1965, ten-year-old Enzo is whisked away from his young adoptive aunt, Mala. His abductor turns out to be a blood relative: his great-uncle Junius Samax, a wealthy former gambler who lives in a converted Las Vegas hotel surrounded by a priceless art collection and a host of fascinating, idiosyncratic guests. In Samax's magical world, Enzo receives a unique education and pieces together the mystery of his mother's life and the complicated history of his adoption. Back in New York, Mala only knows that Enzo has disappeared. After a yearlong search proves fruitless, she enlists in the Navy Nursing Corps and on a hospital ship off Vietnam falls in love with a wounded B-52 navigator, who disappears on his next mission. Devastated again, Mala embarks on a restless, adventurous journey around the world, hoping to overcome the losses that have transformed her life. Fusing imagination, scholarship, and suspense with remarkable narrative skill, Nicholas Christopher builds a story of tremendous scope, an epic tale of love and destiny, as he traces the intricate latticework of Mala's and Enzo's lives. Each remains separate from each other but tied in ways they cannot imagine--until the final miraculous chapter of this extraordinary novel. "A writer of remarkable gifts."--The Washington Post Book World "This labyrinthine novel . . . is animated by an encompassing lust for beauty."--The New Yorker " Nicholas] Christopher is North America's Garc a M rquez; Borges with emotional weight. . . . This is one of those rare books that, by connecting the stars, catches you in its web."--The Globe and MailIncludes an excerpt of Nicholas Christopher's Tiger Rag

At thirty-four, piano soloist Max Randal has hit a wall. It's been four years since his last live performance, and his manager is intent on revitalizing his career with a big concert at Carnegie Hall. As if that wouldn't be enough for Max to worry about, as he struggles to prepare, the ghosts of his failed relationships have come to haunt him  his first ex-wife is dying, his second ex-wife wants to get back together, the mother of his child has taken off for Europe and unexpectedly left him to care for their nine-year-old, and his present girlfriend now wants to get serious. Believe it or not, the plot only gets thicker.Merging dozens of characters and events into a seamless narrative, gifted novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher delivers a compelling tale. Like an exhilarating performance, The Soloist takes you on a brilliant adventure that resonates even once it's over.

Acclaimed as both a poet and a novelist, Nicholas Christopher began publishing poems in The New Yorker in his early twenties. Since then, he has published eight poetry collections. He has been praised over the years, by poets and critics, as one of America's most important poets. Reviewing his selected poems, Crossing the Equator, The Washington Post wrote:  To read his richly honed and sensuous work, which has so much tensile strength, is to visit other worlds and then to return to our own disturbed by time, but also refreshed and reawakened."On Jupiter Place is Christopher's first book since that collection, and its poems are among his most personal and intimate. A section of beautifully constructed lyric and narrative poems is followed by a series of twenty-one interconnected poems set in a Paris that is both real and nearly real. The title poem reads almost like a mini-autobiography of the poet's earliest experiences  his mother's near fatal illness, his subsequent life with his grandparents in a multiethnic working-class neighborhood, teeming with characters: a Holocaust survivor who resides next door to a former German-American Bund member, a flashy mobster raises his family across the street from a failing car salesman, a night nurse and a domineering widow. Other poems explore issues of travel, love, loss, death. There is a "notebook" that chronicles, by way of short poetry entries, the turbulent, reflective year after the poet's father dies, and a long poem in which we take a feminist look at Lois Lane as a cultural icon. As in all his poetry books, Christopher draws on his skills as a novelist to construct his long poems and to assemble the intricate sequences at the heart of this collection. As W.S. Merwin has written: "His poems are vibrant with light and the surprise of recognition. He shows us again and again the luminous nature of the familiar." On Jupiter Place is a rich, powerful collection from one of our premier poets.