Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Edward Upward - In The Thirties
Theophile Gautier - Mademoiselle de Maupin
Moliere - The Misanthrope & Other Plays
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O & Other Stories

"Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O & Other Stories"

best book.

agree

Yesterday I grabbed a used Penguin paperback copy of The Jewish War, Josephus, for $1. I think it may be the last ancient history in a penguin translation that I have not yet read. Now I can get the skinny on Herod the Great, Titus and the siege of Masada.

Robert Irwin, Satan Wants Me
Nicholson Baker, House of Holes
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity- A Cultural Biography
Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

Which edition(a) of Marquise of O--- and Other Stories did yall find, crimplepacker and scott? I recently got the '78 Penguin Classic, trans. by David Luke and Nigel Reeves, which was way smaller than I remembered---think I might've gotten the big Faber & Faber from 1963, which Amazon lists w 318 pages, and a preface, by Thomas Mann, which I don't remember at all (read it like 20 years ago, but still). Might be the same as Criterion Books' first American edition (1960), which also incl. Mann, and credits Martin Greenberg as translator. No page number for this (and no translator listed for Faber)(good ol' Amazon)

I'm tempted to the big edition for extra stories x Mann's preface, but not if it's just bigger print of same stories in the Penguin.

tempted to order, that is.

the copy i read was older. paperback. oversized paperback. probably from the 60's or early 70's. don't know if i still have it. might have sold it in my store. would read again.

Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow, in a used mass market paperback for 50 cents. After all the praise recently, I snagged one of the (as the book's cover proclaims) "Over 2 1/2 Million Copies in Print!"

Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels, used trade paperback in good shape, for 50 cents. Theological history was never so easy to read as when Pagels writes it.

Exile and Return: Selected Poems 1967 - 1974, Yannis Ritsos, translated by Edmund Keeley, in a trade paperback, middling condition, for $3. I have a soft spot for modern greek poets and this was a cheap indulgence of that.

Eyrbyggja Saga, translated by Palsson and Edwards, Penguin classics paperback in very good condition, for $5.95. I seem to read one Icelandic saga per year lately. This one is next in line.

I need to reread ragtime. I read it as a teenager and loved it.

Macolm - The Journalist and the Murderer -- I suppose I already had this on the New Yorker DVDs but boy is their interface terrible. currently reading it and it's great.
Perec - Life, a User's Manual
Delany - Babel-17
Koestler - Darkness at Noon -- a resolution for this year was to read 12 books from that modern library list of 100. this will be #4, which means I'm behind schedule.
Tezuka - Buddha Vol. 1

I need to read Ragtime. I've only seen the movie. Billy Bathgate was a fave of mine as a teen, as well.

My 'Marquise of O & Other Stories' is a recent Penguin Classics, but it's the same edition as the 1978 David Luke and Nigel Reeves translation. It's 318 pages. Haven't started it yet, but after the above comments I'm febrile with anticipation.

Darkness At Noon is great btw - compulsive and hypnotic.

Koestler was a notable crank, but Darkness is an excellent novel that makes some penetrating observations on the psychological effects of ideology, using Leninism as its model.

picked up the NYRB edn. of gogol's "dead souls", as a counterpart to picking up nabokov's book on gogol rece

also, re-reading the prime of miss jean brodie game me the taste to read more muriel spark so I also bought "the ballad of peckham rye"

what does an nyrb gogol look like

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vWQJqtf5UEU/T__zxaHXAqI/AAAAAAAAHhU/nj-GZkk0l0w/s1600/nikolaigogol_deadsouls_donaldrayfield.png

^ i am reading this edition of dead souls right now, am at p. 184

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: Real Mister Kurtz(es) and much worse.

i more meant, what kind of apparatus (if any), have they reset the text, etc

haha wait 'a new translation'

it's a good translation. very readable and funny. i compared the passages nabokov translated for his gogol book to the same passages in this one and they are pretty similar, sometimes better, if that means anything. i just got sick of pevear and volohonsky and wanted a change so i bought this one.

when's theirs from? the norton is "the acclaimed George Reavey translation"

i wonder if they'll do an ed of the stories

it's really recent...2008 i think. there is no introduction or any annotations. i like the pevear and volohonksy edition of the stories, which vintage publishes pretty well. i think those two are at their best with Dostoevsky. their notes from underground is incomparably better than the norton one.

btw idk if there are any tolstoy readers here, but is the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of Anna Karenina okay? i ordered the pevear one on amazon and got this one instead and was too lazy to try to exchange it. but i think if i am actually going to put in the time to read that book i'd like to be reading a decent translation.

there should be a comma in the second sentence of my above post after "publishes"

shelagh delaney's play, a taste of honey, is the last thing i got, cos am working on it for college.

Henry Green - Concluding.

love 'a taste of honey,' but have never been able to track down anything else of delaney's.

i suspect that P&V's rep as the 'only' russian translators you should read is kinda overstated -- like, definitely go with them over constance garnett but i feel like you should mix it up a bit with translations.

I agree but I wonder if the Maude translation of A.K., specifically is alright becsuse its from the 19th century

Phaidon sale starts today! Keeping most of my powder dry for the art books that come up on the 14th but picked up the Robert Massin and Odile Decq overviews for 75% off.

Bought the teNeues Tim Walker retrospective (which is a massive slab of a book) and the reissued vol.1 of Danzig Baldaev's guide to Russian criminal tattoos last week.

Also got Owen Hatherley's A New Kind Of Bleak, which is interesting but would probably work better if you follow his suggestion to dip in and out of it rather than read it through in one go, and Voodoo Science Park by Victoria Halford and Steve Beard.

Snaffled the new Penguin Classics 'Tales Of the German Imagination' this morning.

bought the new Dan Brown book "Inferno" because I saw it on the shelf in target when "Lucky Like Saint Sebastian" was playing on my ipod. it seemed serendipitous. the book I am reading right now is Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland..." and I bought that recently as well.

Yukio Mishima - Death in the Afternoon (short stories)

*Death in Midsummer

Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, Kenny Moore, used hardcover with dust jacket, $2.50. This is mainly of local interest; it's a biography of the head track coach at U. of Oregon, who was also a co-founder of Nike, and it was written by an Olympic marathoner who ran for U.O.

Recollections & Essays, Tolstoy, translated by Aylmer Maude, in a rather scuffed up Oxford World Classics hardcover copy. This volume includes the somewhat notorious essay in which Tolstoy trashes Shakespeare as being a wretched author no one should bother to read. Fifty cents.

Orwell's essay on that Tolstoy essay on Shakespeare is worth reading though, i think.. been a while since i read it but i remember it as interesting.

Today:

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano, as a used hardcover w/o dust jacket, in good condition, for $2.

Yesterday I ordered three books from Archipeligo Books, all for 50% off. They are:

The Mountain Poems of Men Hao-jan, tr. David Hinton, paperback, $5.60.

Diaries of Exile, Yannis Ritsos, tr. Edmund Keeley, paperback, $6.40.

Poems, Cyprian Norwid, tr. Danuta Borchardt, paperback, $6.40. A polish poet of the nineteenth century.

The Archipeligo poetry books arrived yesterday. They look pretty sweet.

Oh let me know how the Ritsos goes? He's the one who's got the line about 'statues bending in the light'?

i have to say, i have never been happy with the size or shape of ANY of their books. why can't they just be normal?!? and not so floppy!

They are artistes, don't you know.

the writers are artistes, the publishers are selling me books that i'm supposed to want to touch with my hands and look at with my eyes

Augustine's City of God against the Pagans in the big blue Cambridge political texts edition. What's the point of working all the time if you can't throw money at big books you don't have time to read & can't carry around?

adventurous.

I took out a Tao Lin and a Dennis Lehane from the library.

which tao lin novel? if you like it you should pick up taipei.... and read the taipei thread.

I made a run to my favorite cheap bookstores and came back with:

A Short History of Byzantium, J. J. Norwich, used trade paperback, good condition, $4. Byzantium lasted in the neighborhood of a millenium so it's hard to wrap your head around it. This book represents yet another attempt by me to do just that.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, used trade paperback, good condition, $3. If I am not mistaken, this was the book that introduced the word 'paradigm' into the consciouosness of the english-speaking world. Probably worth reading, if only for that singular feat.

What's the point of working all the time if you can't throw money at big books you don't have time to read & can't carry around?

You've distilled my philosophy of life to the essence

Yet another book-buying day today, but this time I uncharacteristically spent some real money.

Selected Translations, W.S. Merwin, as a new hardcover from Copper Canyon Press, $40. Copper Canyon designs books very well and Merwin was his own editor for this selection. I've generally admired his translations more than his original work, so this was a purchase I had to make.

Collected Works, Lorine Niedecker, as a used hardcover, U.California Press, slight interior damage to the spine, $25. Niedecker had both a keen eye and a deft touch with short imagist poems, along with a mindset I find congenial.

The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell, as a used trade paper reprint of a 1903 work, $4. BR had some impressive philosophy-of-math chops as a young man and could also write clearly enough for non-experts to follow. I'm sure I'll never read it end to end, but it looks interesting to dip into.

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, used trade paperback, $3. What can I say? This stuff is just great fun.

birthday used bookstore haul:

jean rhys - wide sargasso sea
alain robbe-grillet - jealousy/in the labyrinth
gertrude stein - everybody's autobiography
jeanette winterson - oranges are not the only fruit
wanda coleman - imagoes

Lots of new & newish fiction:

Jorge Amado - Tereza Batista
Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge
Richard Stark - The Seventh
Micheline Aharonian Marcon - A Brief History of Yes
Donald Antrim - The Hundred Brothers
Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape
Carole Maso - Ava
Mary Caponegro - All Fall Down

Tried to order Matt Bell's _Cataclysm Baby_ from Amazon, but after two months they gave up. Now I see they sell used copies for two thousand bucks. Apparently Mud Luscious Press shut down operations half a year ago.

Also got Terry Teachout's new Duke Ellington biography on order.