Bücher veröffentlicht von Counterpoint

Peter Wexler is 40 and obsessed with what's wrong in the world, including his marriage. Deciding that a change of scenery might help, Peter leaves his wife and their son in search of a resolution to the confusion, estrangement, fatigue, and adultery that have confounded his life.

Irish-American writer Maeve Brennan, who died in 1993, is justly admired for her stories and articles for the New Yorker, and this novella - written in the 1940s but not published until 2001 - gives added evidence of her gifts. The story has a wrenching sadness that leaves a mark on the reader, its tale of rejection and loneliness almost too hard to bear. The title - as spare and forthright as the writer's style - is exactly right At 16 Anastasia left her home in Dublin to follow her mother to exile in Paris. Now, six years later, she is coming home to her grandmother only to find that that word is denied to her as she is asked how long she intends to stay. A meticulous evocation of the old lady, her equally aged servant and the preserved past of their house creates an atmosphere of musty despair. Increasingly dislocated from ordinary life, Anastasia persists in her hope that she will be welcomed and loved. She rebuffs suggestions that she should make her life elsewhere and refuses to acknowledge her grandmother's polite coldness. As Anastasia begins to lose hope Brennan demonstrates her gift for conveying the deadliness of spite without exaggeration. In a chilling few lines she shows the girl withdrawing from normal life: 'Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people round it.' Anastasia wants to be loved in that world with walls around it but she is locked out. (Kirkus UK)

Sent away from home for the first time, Neil Pritchard spends the summer of 1962 with his Aunt Nessie on the Solway Firth. Neil soon becomes involved with Euan Bone, a young Scottish composer. Suddenly, however, Neil is expelled from his Eden - with devastating consequences for all.

For fifty years, Peter Brook's opera, stage, and film productions have held audiences spellbound. His visionary directing has created some of the most influential productions in contemporary theater. Now at the pinnacle of his career, Brook has given us his memoir, a luminous, inspiring work in which he reflects on his artistic fortunes, his idols and teachers, his philosophical path and personal journey. In this autobiography, the man The New York Times has called "the English-speaking world's most eminent director" and The London Times has named "theater's living legend" reveals the myriad sources behind his lifelong passion to find the most expressive way of telling a story. Whether in India's epic Mahabharata or a stage adaptation of Oliver Sask's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, South Africa's Woza Albert or The Cherry Orchard, Brook's unique blend of practicality and vision creates unforgettable experiences for audiences worldwide.

A “blunt, bold debut memoir” of women’s lives on an army base and the intimate hardships of war and deployment on this community (Kirkus)Raised as an army brat, Angie Ricketts though she knew what she was in for when she eloped with Darrin – then an Infantry Lieutenant – on the eve of his deployment to Somalia. Since then, Darrin, now a Colonel, has been deployed eight times, serving four of those tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ricketts has lived every one of those deployments intimately – distant enough to survive the years apart from her husband, but close enough to share a common purpose and a lifestyle they both love.With humor, candor, and a brazen attitude, Ricketts pulls back the curtain on a subculture many readers know, but few will ever experience. Counter to the dramatized snapshot seen on Lifetime's Army Wives, Ricketts digs into the personalities and posturing that officers' wives must survive daily – whether navigating a social event at the base, suffering through a husband's prolonged deployment, or reacting to a close friend's death in combat.At its core, No Man's War is a story of sisterhood and survival. As Ricketts states: "We tread those treacherous waters together. Do we sometimes shove each other's heads underwater for a few seconds? Maybe even on purpose? Of course. Are we sometimes dragged underwater ourselves by the undertow created by all of us struggling together too closely? Without a doubt. But we never let each other drown. Our buoyancy is our survival."

Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Maso. In her elegy for a family broken apart and for a country wounded by injustice and corporate greed, Maso skillfully draws parallels between the personal tragedy and the larger tragedies unfolding in the country.

"e;Biespiel's supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry."e; -Publishers Weekly (starred review)The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel's moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse-a great-grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa-through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the "e;pattern and random bursts that make up a life."e;His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia's Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities-ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft coupled with a classic coming-of-age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard'sKafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, "e;in telling the story of one's coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same."e;

A Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayYes, every inch of the globe has been seen, mapped, photographed, and measured, but is it known? Robert Leonard Reid doesn't think so. To draw a circle and calculate its diameter is not to know the circle. In this collection, Reid distinguishes himself from many science-based nature writers, using the natural world as a springboard for speculations and musings on the numinous and the sacred, injustice, homelessness, the treatment of Native Peoples in the United States, and what pushes mountaineers to climb. Ranging in their settings from eastern New Mexico to northern Alaska, Reid's essays illustrate his belief that the American West is worth celebrating and caring for.Taking its title from an affecting speech given by renowned author Barry Lopez, Because It Is So Beautiful is a response to desperate questions surrounding America's wildlands. Lopez's words resonated with the young mountaineer-musician-mathematician Robert Leonard Reid, who was struggling to understand his relationship to the world, to find his vision as a writer. What he learned on that long-ago evening is knit throughout the nineteen pieces in the collection, which include essays from Reid's previous books Arctic Circle, Mountains of the Great Blue Dream, and America, New Mexico; three essays that appear here in print for the first time; as well as revised and expanded versions of essays that appeared in Touchstone, The Progressive, and elsewhere.

Our planet is approaching a critical environmental juncture. Across the globe we continue to deplete the five pools of carbon soil, wood, coal, oil, and natural gas at an unsustainable rate. Weve burned up half the planets known reserves of oil one trillion barrels in less than a century. When these sources of energy-rich carbon go into severe decline, as they surely will, society will follow.Former archeologist and Sierra Club activist Courtney White calls this moment the Age of Consequencesa time when the worrying consequences of our environmental actions or inaction have begun to raise unavoidable and difficult questions. How should we respond? What are effective (and realistic) solutions?In exploring these questions, White draws on his formidable experience as an environmentalist and activist as well as his experience as a father to two children living through this vital moment in time. As a result, The Age of Consequences is a book of ideas and action, but it is also a chronicle of personal experience. Readers follow White as he travels the country --- from Kansas to Los Angeles, New York City, Italy, France, Yellowstone, and New England.

Jared Yates Sexton's latest is an outlaw expedition into America through the guise of the savage and unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign.

A hostage-taker hides a shocking secret in “a breakneck literary thriller that combines the worlds of conspiracy theory [and] reality TV.”—National Post Without warning, a man, armed with explosives, seizes a television studio taking over a hundred terrified hostages. He offers no motive. And he makes just a single curious demand. The only person he’ll speak to is Thom Pegg, a once honored investigative journalist turned disgraced tabloid reporter. As surprised as anyone, and pressured to comply by authorities, Pegg reluctantly enters the fray as the chosen confidante. From outside, the enthralling drama is revealed through the eyes of two very different people: Eve, an Olympic gold medalist and local hero; and a mysterious renegade street artist known only as Rabbit. As 24/7 media coverage helps to feed the public’s paranoia with reckless rumor, the lives of three strangers are brought inexorably together in an unfathomable and chaotic endgame. In this “unforgettable . . . exhilarating, at-times alarming read” (Atssa York), prize-winning author Timothy Taylor paints a powerful picture of the sinister side of our interconnected world. The result is “an ambitious . . . wonderful novel—a thought-provoking and challenging story that will . . . change the way you look at our celebrity-driven culture” (The Vancouver Sun).

Live Nude Elf chronicles Reverend Jen's two-year stint as sex columnist for nerve.com; she details her "sexperiments,” ranging from harrowing (working as a live nude girl at "Wiggles”) to embarrassing (fellatio school) to transcendent (reaching a mystical state through tantric sex). Along the way there is transvestitism, female ejaculation, opium smoking, and heartbreak.In the Rev's "art star” world, where a young bisexual boy named Orion has sex with a jar of mayonnaise, the more mundane acts of romance-kissing, buying dinner for a lover, and just making eye contact in the sack-become rare and subversive. The experiments, orgies, balloon fetish parties, a stint as the "lube girl” on a porn set, the "lab partners,” and the late nights begin to wear on the Reverend, who craves normalcy, and the columns change their tone: Jen takes care of a friend's baby, navigates yuppie bars trying to snag a millionaire hubby, and dates a silver fox, "someone older, distinguished, wealthy, and simply grooving with the eternal now.”After a decade of New York City affairs, Jen unexpectedly falls in love and must decide: Does the life required of an artist and a sex columnist preclude her from monogamous romantic love?