From Publishers WeeklyJam-packed with critical insights and historical context, this discussion of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia from Miller's double perspectives--as the wide-eyed child who first read the books and an agnostic adult who revisits them--is intellectually inspiring but not always cohesive. Finding her distrust of Christianity undermined by her love of Lewis's indisputably Christian-themed world, Salon.com cofounder and staff writer Miller seeks to "recapture [Narnia's] old enchantment." She replaces lost innocence with understanding, visiting Lewis's home in England, reading his letters and books (which she quotes extensively) and interviewing readers and writers. Lengthy musings on Freudian analysis of sadomasochism, J.R.R. Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon nationalism and taxonomies of genre share space with incisive and unapologetic criticism of Lewis's treatment of race, gender and class. The heart of the book is in the first-person passages where Miller recalls longing to both be and befriend Lucy Pevensie and extols Narnia's "shining wonders." Her reluctant reconciliation with Lewis's and Narnia's imperfections never quite manages to be convincing, but anyone who has endured exile from Narnia will recognize and appreciate many aspects of her journey. (Dec. 3) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New YorkerIn this powerful meditation on 'the schism between childhood and adult reading,' Miller recounts her tumultuous relationship with the favorite books of her youth, C. S. Lewis's 'Chronicles of Narnia.' Filled from an early age with a distrust of the Catholic faith in which she was raised, Miller didn't notice the Christian subtext, and when she learned of it, as a teen-ager, she felt 'tricked, cheated.' Combining memoir, criticism, and biography, Miller takes Lewis to task for his 'betrayals,' including the racial stereotyping and 'litism that, she argues, inform the books. Yet her respect for Lewis's talent remains; scrupulously placing him in his historical context, she crafts a nuanced portrait of the author as a sensitive curmudgeon and comes to the realization that 'a perfect story is no more interesting or possible than a perfect human being.' Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker Views: 10
This is the new 'Fancy Jack' Crossman novel. The Indian Mutiny has almost run its course, but there are still battles to be fought before the uprising is finally put down. Lieutenant Jack Crossman, posted to India from his adventures in the Crimea, finds himself plagued by one Captain Deighnton, who seems determined to duel with him to the death. The reason for Deighnton's animosity appears to run deeper than a simple exchange of insults. When Jack is abducted following the Battle of Bareilly, and accused in his absence of desertion, he has to fight to clear his name - only to find Deighnton waiting for yet another, perhaps final duel... Views: 10
Joe Shelby — a brilliant and daring combat reporter for a big magazine he refers to as "the comic" — is an Englishman who is at home only in the world's trouble spots — Chechnya, Rwanda, Gaza — where he is face-to-face with murder, starvation, war crimes and the sound of bullets whistling past his ears. Now, after a life of triumphs, he must confront challenges he never imagined: lost love, incurable illness and failure both in his work and on his beloved high mountains.His partner is glamorous French photographer and former fashion model Faria Duclos: beautiful, cool, sexy and wildly intoxicated by taking incredible risks as she puts her life in jeopardy to capture with her battered Leica camera both war's killers and their victims — a woman high on danger who, in her own way, loves Joe.Eva Kimberly is a privileged white Kenyan about to marry her childhood sweetheart, Jeremy Davenport, when Joe and Faria explode into her life at a fancy lawn party given by her wealthy... Views: 10
Towering black obelisks have appeared in five different locations around the Mediterranean. The man who commissioned their construction claims they are nothing more than tributes to their respective countries, but CIA operative Gabrielle “Gabe” Lincoln believes they may be something far more ominous—and if she is right, humanity is about to be plunged into a living nightmare with no escape. Views: 10
Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias's mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homocidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the new novel," The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child's murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred. Views: 10
From the author of The Gustav SonataAt the moment that Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool of the Hotel Alphenrose, preparing for his late afternoon dip, his daughter Charlotte, carrying a suitcase, is getting out of her car back in England, preparing to rob the ancestral home. It is not just another day: it is the culmination of hundreds of days, hundreds of disappointments and misunderstandings, and thousands of very small lies...Over a million Rose Tremain books sold'A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion' Independent I'There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain' Irish Times'Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect' The Times'Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British... Views: 10
Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger—public and private—illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds’s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on hisfirst rotation in the emergency room.On the ancient boarding-school radio,in the attic hall, the announcer had given myboyfriend’s name as one of twobrought to the hospital after the sunriseservice, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of themcritical, one of them dead. I was looking at thestairwell banisters, at their lathing,the necks and knobs like joints and bones,the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had saidWhich one of them died, and now the world wasan ant’s world: the huge crumb of eachsecond thrown, somehow, up ontomy back, and the young, tired voicesaid my fresh love’s name.from “Easter 1960”From the Trade Paperback edition.From Publishers WeeklyThe ninth outing from Olds (Blood, Tin, Straw) should again please the many admirers of her raw, vivid and often explicit poems, but might surprise few of them—until the end. As in all her books, Olds works in a demotic free verse, driven by rough enjambments and shocking comparisons: she devotes much of her energy (three of five sections here) to sex, remembered pain and parenthood—the dramatic, abusive household in which she grew up and her tender relationship with her own daughter. Olds depicts the traumas of her first decades with undeniable, if occasionally cartoonish, force: When I think of people who kill and eat people,/ I think of how lonely my mother was. Olds can also offer high-volume poetry of public protest, as in the set of sonnet-sized poems against war with which the book begins. What seems new here are Olds's reactions to her mother's last years, and to her mother's death. On an antidepressant, briefly adorable, and then in failing health, my mother sounds like me,/ the way I sound to myself—one/ who doesn't know, who fails and hopes. Both the failures and the hopes find here a voice that takes them seriously. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review An audacious virtuoso, Olds shares perceptions so archaic they predate consciousness and tells of dark deeds worthy of Greek myths transpiring in an otherwise ordinary middle-class, mid-twentieth-century American household. What makes her work so potent is her countering of the shock and shiver of her baroquely bloody revelations with poetic structures so refined and sturdy, they have something of the Shaker about them, minus, of course, the celibacy. Olds is a moralist, and she does believe in confession, in expiation, as long as it is contained in clean-lined, well-keeled vessels. In another breathtaking collection, Olds begins with “War,” a portrait gallery of the displaced, the maimed, and the cruel, iconic poems as haunting as paintings by Goya. She then extends her long series on family trauma, writing with chilling restraint of moments of malevolent selfishness, brutality, and weirdness. But Olds also writes with tremendous assertion about a tormented girl’s revenge as she comes into womanhood, and here Olds sees her fierce mother gentled by age and illness, their terrible adversity canceled as death nears. This is a pivotal collection, and Olds signals a sea change in moments of gleeful self-mockery and resounding catharsis. --Donna Seaman Views: 10
A major literary debut, an epic tale of love, failure, and unexpected faith set in New York, Amsterdam, and Las VegasThe modern-day Jonah at the center of Joshua Max Feldman's brilliantly conceived retelling of the book of Jonah is a young Manhattan lawyer named Jonah Jacobstein. He's a lucky man: healthy and handsome, with two beautiful women ready to spend the rest of their lives with him and an enormously successful career that gets more promising by the minute. He's celebrating a deal that will surely make him partner when a bizarre, unexpected biblical vision at a party changes everything. Hard as he tries to forget what he saw, this disturbing sign is only the first of many Jonah will witness, and before long his life is unrecognizable. Though this perhaps divine intervention will be responsible for more than one irreversible loss in Jonah's life, it will also cross his path with that of Judith Bulbrook, an intense, breathtakingly intelligent woman who's no... Views: 10
Stadium School is more than just a special summer course, it's a reallycool school that teaches its students everything about football. Withits state-of-the-art facilities, top coaches and location in thegrounds of a former football stadium, the school is the place foraspiring footballers. And better still it's a co-ed boarding school, sothe kids can live and breathe football from morning to night. Roddy Jones is the star of his schoolfive-a-side team, in which he plays alongside his best friend Bryn.However, Roddy has bigger dreams. So when he is spotted by a scout forStadium School and invited to a trial he is determined to win a place,whatever it takes. But even if he does get in, will his parents be ableto afford the fees and how will Roddy feel about leaving Bryn behind? Views: 10
