Kirjahaku

Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper. He's a card-carrying member of Local 312, an eccentric union of mourners, hired for funerals and wakes, services and burials. But all that feeling can wear a man down, and the tears don’t come like they used to. Especially as the normals, the privileged non-weepers, appear to feel less and less every day, even as the world gets worse and worse. Lately it’s been drier and hotter than hell itself. And then one morning a new kid shows up. No belongings, no parents, no name. He’s young, scrawny, non-union. Ed can’t help but feel a fondness for him. The kid never sheds a tear, but he is charged with a strange, divine power to make others feel. He leaves a trail of something - call them miracles, call them disasters - in his wake. And then he disappears. A surrealist story of mass grief, of feeling and failing, of families and cowboys and deserts and strung-out souls, Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a messianic mystery for this age and the next.

A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of readinghow we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a pagea graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just soand other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our belovedor reviledliterary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literaturehe considers himself first and foremost as a readerinto what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.

A messianic tale about a group of professional mourners--a darkly funny novel of grief, mystery and redemption from the author of The Delivery. Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper. He's a card-carrying member of an eccentric union hired to cry at funerals, wakes, services and burials. It's an odd job, but his services are sorely needed these days, as the town, the region, the country as a whole has become more or less numb. No one is able to summon a shred of human emotion whatsoever. Not anymore. (What'd be the point? The world's already gone to hell.) So there's always work for Ed and his colleagues. But all those cries can wear a man down, and the tears don't flow quite like they used to, even for a consummate pro like Ed. Then one morning, a stranger comes to town. A scrawny kid with no belongings, no parents, no name, no past. And at precisely the moment of his arrival, people begin to experience something new. Something strange. An onslaught of unbidden feelings, unfamiliar feelings, too many feelings A surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.

Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must pedal his way to five-star customer ratings--and, perhaps, freedom--in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery. Countries go wrong sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country--a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong. In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: a member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic, hoping for a decent tip and a five-star rating. He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to man up if he wants to impress N., the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English. Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever have a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway? Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unite and isolate every one of us, native and immigrant both.

From acclaimed designer and novelist Peter Mendelsund, a deeply personal reflection on depression and the redemptive power of art, interspersed with 100 original paintings In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression--which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life--that brought him to the brink of suicide. Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and--against all odds--truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author's reckoning with his father's tortured legacy; it's also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.

In the shifting sands of the desert, near an unnamed metropolis, there is an institute where various fellows come to undertake projects of great significance. But when our sort-of hero, Percy Frobisher, arrives, surrounded by the simulated environment of the glass-enclosed dome of the Institute, his mind goes completely blank. When he spills something on his uniform--a major faux pas--he learns about a mysterious shop where you can take something, utter the command "same same," and receive a replica even better than the original. Imagining a world in which simulacra have as much value as the real--so much so that any distinction between the two vanishes, and even language seeks to reproduce meaning through ever more degraded copies of itself--Peter Mendelsund has crafted a deeply unsettling novel about what it means to exist and to create . . . and a future that may not be far off.