Vintage Publishing strana 63 z 64

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman' First published in Paris in 1949, The Second Sex by Simone de Beavoir was a groundbreaking, risque book that became a runaway success. Selling 20,000 copies in its first week, the book earned its author both notoriety and admiration. Since then, The Second Sex has been translated into forty languages and has become a landmark in the history of feminism. Required reading for anyone who believes in the equality of the sexes, the central messages of The Second Sex are as important today as they were for the housewives of the forties.

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he here and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighbourhood butcher seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in the every corner for his beloved boy. So Marcus leaves and, far from home, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation is the story of a young man's education in life's terrifying chances and bizarre obstructions. It is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage and error, told with all the inventive energy and with Roth has at his command.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing. Equal parts travelogue, training log, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and settings ranging from Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston. Funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a must read for fans of this masterful yet private writer as well as for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

Set in the fictional Free Republic of Aburiria, Wizard of the Crow dramatises with searing humour and piercing observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Ngugi wa Thiog'o reveals humanity in all its surprising intricacy. Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, Wizard of the Crow is a masterpiece and a major achievement in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's extraordinary and brave career.

Los Angeles, 1991. Maximilian Ophuls is knifed to death on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former United States ambassador to India, and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal. This is the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter - and of a fourth character, the woman who links them all. The story of a deep love gone fatally wrong, destroyed by a shallow affair, it is an epic narrative that moves from California to France, England, and above all, Kashmir: a ruined paradise, not so much lost as smashed.

Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story is a series of one-page comics that tell the same story in a variety of ways. Inspired by Raymond Queneau's 1947 work of the same title, which told a simple story in ninety-nine different styles and genres - haiku, sonnet, book jacket blurb - Madden does the same but in different styles of comics - Marvel superhero, R. Crumb, Herge, even as a map or the Bayeux Tapestry. Or he uses varying points of view, visual and verbal parodies, even radical reshuffling of the elements of the story. The result is funny, inspiring, and genuinely clever.

Discover Amos Oz's most iconic work in this extraordinary memoir that is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation *OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE* `A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant' Simon Schama Amos Oz's remarkable, moving story takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s and into a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. Oz dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. This book aims to expose a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'.

Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

This is the story of Francis Andrews, a young man whose betrayal of his fellow smugglers has left a man dead. Fearing vengeance, he flees and takes refuge in the house of a young, isolated woman who persuades him to give evidence against his accomplices in court. But neither she nor Andrews is aware that to both criminals and authority, treachery is as great a crime as smuggling.

Since Glass and God, which was her first full-length collection published in Britain and which was nominated for the 1998 Forward Prize, Anne Carson has published a book a year to extraordinary critical acclaim. Her last two volumes, Autobiography of Red and Men in the Off Hours were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and she has received numerous North American awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. In her brilliant new book, she tells a single story. A long-time love, now a crumbling marriage, unfolds in 29 'tangos' of narrative verse, informed by the romanticism of Keats, the wisdom of the classical world and, most importatnly, by Carson's own unique sensibility. The unnamed narrator - sometimes 'I', sometimes 'the wife' - speaks of the man she calls only 'the husband', illuminating moments that are by turn sensual, erotic, painful and heartbreaking. The Beauty of the Husband is a work that explores these oldest of lyrical subjects - beauty, desire, love, betrayal - with freshness and devastating power. **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town's pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.

Thomas More is one of the great figures in English history. Pre-eminent as a courtier and as a humanist, a friend to Henry VIII and the author of Utopia, More's life and career epitomise the great transformation of England in the space of 35 years. Ackroyd investigates the paradox of this 'man for all seasons': the man of the world who travelled across Europe to negotiate on behalf of his king, and the unworldly man who's careful silence on the matter of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn would lead to his disgrace and execution. A magnificent achievement, The Life of Thomas More gives us a rich portrait of the man and the social and cultural world in which he lived.

In Brave New World Revisited Huxley checks the progress of his prophecies in his seminal novel Brave New World thirty years after it was first published. Covering issues such as overpopulation, propaganda, the art of selling and brainwashing as well as drugs and political control Huxley gives prescient warnings to the reader. A vigorous, astute analysis of the nature of power and authority in modern society, Brave New World Revisited is an urgent and powerful appeal for the defence of individualism.