Author: James Wood
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: novel, laughter, irresponsible
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 2005-04-01
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0312424604
ISBN-13: 9780312424602

"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia OzickFollowing the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood’s preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discus

Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: novel, illusions, book
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 2003-08-01
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0312421818
ISBN-13: 9780312421816

Vermont professor David Zimmer is a broken man. The protagonist of Paul Auster’s 10th novel, The Book of Illusions, hits a period in which life seemed to be working aggressively against him. After his wife and sons are killed in an airplane crash, Zimmer becomes an alcoholic recluse, fond of emptying his bottle of sleeping pills into his palm, contemplating his next move. But one night, while watching a television documentary, Zimmer’s attention is caught by the silent-film comedian Hector Mann, who had disappeared without a trace in 1929 and who was considered long-dead. Soon, Zim

Authors:Mario Vargas Llosa,  Helen R. Lane,
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: novel, scriptwriter, julia
Number of Pages: 384
Published: 2007-10-02
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0312427247
ISBN-13: 9780312427245

Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterful, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author’s youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city’s listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving

Author: Atul Gawande
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: science, imperfect, notes, surgeon, complications
Number of Pages: 288
Published: 2003-04-01
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0312421702
ISBN-13: 9780312421700

Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine--on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande’s tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for impro

Authors:David Grossman,  Haim Watzma,
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: geneva, agreement, oslo, life, way, death
Number of Pages: 224
Published: 2004-05-01
List price: $17.00
ISBN-10: 0312423233
ISBN-13: 9780312423230

What went wrong after Oslo? How can Israelis and Palestinians make peace? How has the violence changed their lives, and their souls? For the last ten years, David Grossman, one of Israel’s great fiction writers, has addressed these questions in a series of passionate essays and articles, writing not only as one of his country’s most respected novelists and commentators, but as a husband and father and peace activist bitterly disappointed in the leaders of both sides.

Author: James Galvi
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: novel, sky, fencing
Number of Pages: 258
Published: 2000-12-01
List price: $17.00
ISBN-10: 0312267347
ISBN-13: 9780312267346

James Galvin opens his first novel with a shocking, seemingly inexplicable murder--horseman Mike Arans closes on a pistol-packing motorist named Merriwether Snipes, throws a rope and snaps his neck--and then proceeds to illuminate why it happened, what it means, and how Mike deals with the consequences. Though billed as a novel, Fencing the Sky is in fact a more deeply fictionalized continuation of The Meadow, Galvin’s partly historic, partly imagined evocation of a way of life that took hold on an upland Wyoming ranch for a century and then blew away. If The Meadow is elegiac, Fencing t

Authors:Svetlana Alexievich,  Keith Gesse,
Publisher: Picador
Keywords: nuclear, disaster, history, oral, chernobyl, voices
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2006-04-18
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0312425848
ISBN-13: 9780312425845

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl