The Attraction of Things

The Attraction of Things
Author: Roger Lewinter
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811226107

Stunning fragments that offer an epiphany of grace and beauty The Attraction of Things concerns the entirety of beauty and the possibility of grace, relayed via obsessions with rare early gramophone records, the theater, translation, dying parents: all these elements are relayed in a dizzying strange traffic of cultural artifacts, friendships, losses, discoveries, and love. Roger Lewinter believes that in the realm of art, “the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other.” Whereas Story of Love in Solitude is a group of small stories, The Attraction of Things is a continuous narrative (more or less) of a man seeking (or stumbling upon) enlightenment. “The Attraction of Things,” states Lewinter, “is the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts—beings, works, things—and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where the bolt of illumination strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward the illumination.”

Story of Love in Solitude

Story of Love in Solitude
Author: Roger Lewinter
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2016-10-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811226115

A notable discovery of a truly original voice Several stories inhabit Roger Lewinter’s first small book to appear in English, Story of Love in Solitude. Each story takes the form of a loop: a spider who won’t stop returning; camellias that flourish and then die; dying parents whose presence is always yet felt; turning again and again to work on Rilke translations; a younger man whom the narrator sees each week at the Geneva street markets. All the tales touch on the possibility, the open possibility of love—a loop without end. Lewinter’s short fictional works are at once prose poems and a form of dreaming; they are akin to the great French tradition of things sparking emotions and emotions sparking things—part Sarraute, part Robbe-Grillet, part Perec. Plot is not really the point of his meditative works. Lewinter concerns himself more with perception, apperception, and sudden inflections of grace: loss and beauty meet in an explosion of joy, which becomes, “in its brilliance, a means of transmittal.”

The Invention of Solitude

The Invention of Solitude
Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2010-11-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0571266746

'One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.' So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.

Fighting Solitude

Fighting Solitude
Author: Aly Martinez
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2016-01-21
Genre: Man-woman relationships
ISBN: 9781523635184

I was born a fighter. Abandoned by my parents, I spent my life forging my own path-one guided by my fists and paved with pain. Untouchable in the ring, I destroyed everyone who faced me, but that's where my victories ended. Outside the ropes, I repeatedly failed the few people who loved me. Including my best friend, Liv James-the one person I'd die to protect. Even though I didn't deserve her, Liv never stopped believing in me. Never gave up. Never let go. After all, she understood what I'd lost, because she'd lost it too. Liv was everything to me, but she was never truly mine. That was going to change. I lost my first love, but I refused to lose my soulmate. Now, I'm on the ropes during the toughest battles of my life. Fighting to be the man she deserves. Fighting the solitude of our pasts. Fighting for her.

The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts
Author: Louis de Bernieres
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2012-06-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307822362

This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corelli's Mandolin is set in an impoverished, violent, yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America. When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny. "Walks a precarious edge between slapstick and pathos, never once losing its balance."--Washington Post Book World.

In Praise of Love

In Praise of Love
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: New Press/ORIM
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1595588892

The renowned French philosopher’s “ode to love’s power to unite in the face of eternity, and its optimism in the face of pain” (Publishers Weekly). In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen as a mere variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line “love needs reinventing,” In Praise of Love is the celebrated French intellectual’s passionate treatise in defense of love. For Badiou, love is an existential project, a constantly unfolding quest for truth. This quest begins with the chance encounter, an event that forever changes two individuals, challenging them “to see the world from the point of view of two rather than one.” This, Badiou believes, is love’s most essential transforming power. Through thought-provoking dialogue edited from a conversation between Badiou and Truong, a vibrant cast of thinkers are invoked: Kierkegaard, Plato, de Beauvoir, Proust, and more, create a new narrative of love in the face of twenty-first-century modernity. Moving, zealous, and wise, Badiou’s “paean to the anticapitalist, antiessentialist, unifying power of love” urges us not to fear it but to see it as a magnificent undertaking that compels us to explore others and to move away from an obsession with ourselves (Publishers Weekly). “Finally, the cure for the pornographic, utilitarian exchange of favors to which love has been reduced in America. Alain Badiou is our philosopher of love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2022-10-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Netflix’s series adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres December 11, 2024! One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.

The Lonely City

The Lonely City
Author: Olivia Laing
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1250039576

There is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. This roving cultural history of urban loneliness centers on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Laing travels deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists in a celebration of the state of loneliness.

A Soldier of the Great War

A Soldier of the Great War
Author: Mark Helprin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 808
Release: 1991
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

A young aesthete from a privileged Roman family, Alexandro Giuliani, found his charmed existence shattered by the coming of WWI. Highly recommended.

Kinder Than Solitude

Kinder Than Solitude
Author: Yiyun Li
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0007357109

The new novel from Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.