Tag: Books

Zora Neale Hurston/Thomas Mann (Books Acquired, 6.21.2013)

Biblioklept2 Comments

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I’m a sucker for these Penguin editions. Blurb:

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I used to have a paperback copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of The Mountain, but I loaned it to a student who never returned it.

I won’t loan out this first edition I found though:

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Love the detail on the clothbound cover:

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And a taste of Ms. Hurston’s wit:

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The Twelfth Department (Book Acquired, Sometime Last Week)

Biblioklept2 Comments

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The Twelfth Apartment is a forthcoming thriller from William Ryan. Macmillan’s blurb:

The new Captain Korolev mystery set in 1930s Stalinist Russia, from the lauded author of The Holy Thief and The Bloody Meadow

Moscow, 1937. Captain Korolev, a police investigator, is enjoying a long-overdue visit from his young son Yuri when an eminent scientist is shot dead within sight of the Kremlin and Korolev is ordered to find the killer.

It soon emerges that the victim, a man who it appears would stop at nothing to fulfil his ambitions, was engaged in research of great interest to those at the very top ranks of Soviet power. When another scientist is brutally murdered, and evidence of the professors’ dark experiments is hastily removed, Korolev begins to realise that, along with having a difficult case to solve, he’s caught in a dangerous battle between two warring factions of the NKVD. And then his son Yuri goes missing . . .

A desperate race against time, set against a city gripped by Stalin’s Great Terror and teeming with spies, street children and Thieves, The Twelfth Department confirms William Ryan as one of the most compelling historical crime novelists at work today.

 

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (Book Acquired, 6.14.2013)

Biblioklept5 Comments

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Big thanks to Mr. BLCKDGRD for sending me this copy of Vasily Grossman’s enormous novel Life and Fate. Over the past few years I’ve come to admire and trust BLCKDGRD’s taste, and I generally love these types of novels, so I’m looking forward to getting into this later in the year.

Here’s publisher NYRB’s blurb:

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.

Read our review of Grossman’s novel The Road.