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Daedalus Books
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Young Pushkin was first published in serial form between 1935 and 1943 and immediately achieved classic status in Russia. Although the author did not live to accomplish his full epic scheme, he did complete the first part, his fictional masterpiece of Pushkin's early years. This is the first English translation. In a blend of encyclopedic knowledge and creative imagination, Tynyanov thrillingly brings early nineteenth century Russia to life — Napoleonic invasion, rapid political change, and a gallery of fascinating characters, including Pushkin's unusual family with its African blood stemming from his great-grandfather Abram Hannibal. At the center of it all is the young Pushkin, explosive, unpredictable, totally absorbed, constantly scribbling verses, consorting with women twice his age, and living it up in the capital with hussars and actresses, before being exiled for his reckless liberal verse. Tynyanov's novel not only captures Pushkin's impulsive, swift genius but also deftly foreshadows his place in Russian history. It includes notes, family tree, and a selection of Pushkin's early poems. |
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One of the most delightful and witty Russian operas, The Love of Three Oranges was composed by Prokofiev in 1919 and first performed at the Chicago Opera House with Prokofiev conducting in 1921. This complete vocal score includes both Russian and French text and a piano reduction of the orchestral part. Indispensable for recital and rehearsal purposes. |
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In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sadistic, sinister, and deeply demented as Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic with a penchant for Eastern mysticism and a hatred of communists, Baron Ungern-Sternberg took over Mongolia in 1920 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians. While tormenting friend and foe alike, he dreamed of assembling a horse-borne army with which he would retake communist controlled Moscow. In this epic saga that ranges from Austria to the Mongolian Steppe, historian and travel writer James Palmer has brought to light the gripping life story of a madman whose actions fore shadowed the most grotesque excesses of the twentieth century. |
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When Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile — and above all the miracle of survival. Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive potato-colored tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Leger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where one either died or came out famous. But turmoil lay ahead — war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories. His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists — the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall's passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array ofartist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime. Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall's complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as Andre Breton put it, under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting, and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall's work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life — ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth. Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling's Matisse and John Richardson's Picasso. |
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Following on from the huge success of the 44 Scotland Street series, Alexander McCall Smith has 'moved house' to a crumbling four-storey mansion in Pimlico — Corduroy Mansions. It is inhabited by a glorious assortment of characters: among them, Oedipus Snark, the first ever nasty Lib Dem MP, who is so detestable his own mother, Berthea, is writing an unauthorised biography about him; and one small vegetarian dog, Freddie de la Hay, who has the ability to fasten his own seatbelt. Although Corduroy Mansions is a fictional name, the address is now registered by the Post Office. |
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From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger. Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever's boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians-intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler's former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program. The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it. Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America. |
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Donald Sturrock's Storyteller is the authorized biography of Roald Dahl, one of the greatest storytellers of all time. |
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's extraordinary career as a novelist ended abruptly and unhappily, but it began with one of the most brilliant first novels in the history of American literature. Published when its author was just twenty-three, This Side of Paradise is about the education of a youth, and to this universal story Fitzgerald brought the promise of everything that was new in the vigorous, restless America during the years following World War I. Amory Blaine-egoistic, versatile, callow, and imaginative-inhabits a book that is interwoven with songs, poems, playscripts, and questions and answers. His growth from self-absorption to sexual awareness and personhood is described by means of a continuous improvisatory energy and delight. Far from being distracting, Fitzgerald's formal inventiveness and verve only heighten our sense that the world being described is our own modern world. A profound coherence informs This Side of Paradise — a coherence born of its author's uncanny ability to revel in the fragmented surfaces of human life while exploring and comprehending its serene depths. |
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Check Plus combines Spell Check, Word Check, and The American Heritage Abbreviations Dictionary, Third Edition, in a handsome and sturdy slipcase. Spell Check is a handy and up-to-date guide to the correct spelling of 40,000 commonly misspelled words. Word Check is a compact thesaurus that discusses 3,000 synonyms in easy-to-read paragraphs. The American Heritage Abbreviations Dictionary, Third Edition, presents some 20,000 acronyms and abbreviations including cyberspeak. |
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Music is Andrew Zuckerman's latest masterpiece, an extraordinary sequel to the highly acclaimed Wisdom. For this new, ambitious project, he now turns his unique perspective to music. Sixty eminent individuals — artists, composers, producers and performers from rock, rap, dance, soul, R&B, country, classical, reggae, pop, jazz, world and more — have all been subjected to Zuckerman's democratic interview technique and hyperreal photographic style to create an inspiring, illuminating and brilliant glimpse into the world of music and musicians. A full list of participants is still to be finalized, but confirmed participants include Tori Amos, Billy Corgan, Peter Gabriel, Yoko Ono, Ozzy Osbourne, Tom Petty, Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, Tom Waits, Philip Glass, Burt Bacharach, Danny Elfman, Quincy Jones, John Williams, Willie Nelson, Dave Brubek, Cindi Lauper, Ziggy Marley, Mary J. Blige, Ravi Shankar and Yusef Islam (Cat Stevens). |
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This is the long-awaited biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights whose postwar decade of work earned him international critical and popular acclaim. Arthur Miller was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over sixty years, writing a wide variety of plays — including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman — which are still performed, studied and lauded throughout the world. Born in 1915 to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Miller wrote during a fascinating time in American history. The Great Depression was a period of deprivation for many that left an indelible mark on the national psyche, and, like many, Miller found hope for the beleaguered common man in Communism. The Second World War elevated the common man to war hero, but when the Cold War subsequently began, the ugly elements of American conservatism freely persecuted writers and artists who had embraced Communism. Miller was among them. His refusal to give evidence against others to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 gave him a heroic role to play. In that same year, Arthur Miller momentously married the young actress Marilyn Monroe, a marriage that remains famous to this day. Christopher Bigsby's gripping, meticulously researched biography, based on boxes of papers made available to him before Miller's death, offers new insights into their marriage, and sheds new light on how their relationship informed Miller's subsequent great plays. After his death in 2005, many respected actors, directors and producers paid tribute to Miller, calling him 'the last great practitioner of the American stage'. Christopher Bigsby's supremely authoritative biography does full justice to Miller's life and art. |
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'If you do not want to dwell with evil-doers', wrote Richard of Devizes in 1180, 'do not live in London'. In her third exploration of the city's history, Catharine Arnold focuses on the sex trade, from slave girls brought to service Roman troops in first century Londinium, through medieval stews, 18th century sex clubs and Victorian male brothels to infamous '60s call girls and the internet 'Belle de Jour'. |
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Come feel the cool and shadowed breeze, come smell your way among the trees, come touch rough bark and leathered leaves: Welcome to the night. Welcome to the night, where mice stir and furry moths flutter. Where snails spiral into shells as orb spiders circle in silk. Where the roots of oak trees recover and repair from their time in the light. Where the porcupette eats delicacies — raspberry leaves — and coos and sings. Come out to the cool, night wood, and buzz and hoot and howl — but do beware of the great horned owl — for it's wild and it's windy way out in the woods! |
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From military sportswriter to roving correspondent for the National Observer, from quasi Hell's Angel to counterculture author and gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson led a life of legend. Hunter S. Thompson: The Glory Years tells the remarkable insider's story. Jay Cowan, who was caretaker on Thompson's ranch and a trusted friend, paints a sensitive portrait of a man who redefined participatory journalism, who captured the decadence and depravity of an era, and generally consumed more drugs and alcohol than any other living creature on the planet. A self-professed lazy hillbilly, Hunter Thompson would immerse himself researching a story, then write it all in a multi-day frenzy of drugs and sleeplessness. In his role as America's rock star author, he was invited to the White House (where he claimed to have snorted coke with presidential aides) and rubbed elbows with the marquee celebrities of his time. Featuring previously unpublished color photos, this book provides the most compelling and readable portrait to date of one of America's most extraordinary personalities. |
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Meet Jumpy Jack, a very nervous snail who's afraid of monsters, and Googily, who is a — well, who is a very good friend, indeed. Wherever they go, Googily kindly checks high and low just to make sure there are no scary monsters about. But as every child knows, monsters come in many shapes and sizes. Some are even blue with hairy eyebrows and pointy teeth. Here is a universal story of friendship and fear of the unknown told with wit and charm by the fantastic team who created the irresistible Meet Wild Boars, |
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The Maltese Falcon set the standard by which the private eye genre is judged. Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him? |
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A collection of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual excerpts from 16th- and 17th-century writing. Shakespeare's England brings to life the variety, the energy and the harsh reality of England at this time. Providing a portrait of the age, it includes extracts from a wide variety of writers, taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. These include: William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbes (with a Puritan view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself. |
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In this new history of England, Tom Beaumont James uses archaeology to present a fresh view of the events that have shaped the country. Both accessible and comprehensive, The Story of England guides us from prehistory to Cool Britannia, through invasions, wars, disease and empire-building, peopled by monarchs, rebels, politicians, and others who have left an indelible mark on England's development. |
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Take a round-the-world trip and bring back a timeless souvenir. Our Passport Journals will allow you to revisit your memories and fulfill that wanderlust long after your travels have been completed. The pocket-sized hardcover books contain designed pages which re-create the international feel of an actual passport. |
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