Bücher veröffentlicht von Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

A deeply personal, intimate conversation about music and writing between the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author and the former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In Absolutely on Music, internationally Haruki Murakami sits down with his friend Seiji Ozawa, the revered former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for a series of conversations on their shared passion: music. Over the course of two years, Murakami and Ozawa discuss everything from Brahms to Beethoven, from Leonard Bernstein to Glenn Gould, from Bartok to Mahler, and from pop-up orchestras to opera. They listen to and dissect recordings of some of their favorite performances, and Murakami questions Ozawa about his career conducting orchestras around the world. Culminating in Murakami's ten-day visit to the banks of Lake Geneva to observe Ozawa's retreat for young musicians, the book is interspersed with ruminations on record collecting, jazz clubs, orchestra halls, film scores, and much more. A deep reflection on the essential nature of both music and writing, Absolutely on Music is an unprecedented glimpse into the minds of two maestros.

The true story of how a renowned writer's struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her revealing, fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes. When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "e;Lewis Carroll,"e; Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her moods have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month--bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity--she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is eye-opening, often hilarious, and utterly enthralling.

The best-selling author ofBorn to Runnow travels to the Mediterranean, where he discovers that the secrets of ancient Greek heroes are still alive and well on the island of Crete, and ready to be unleashedin the muscles and minds of casual athletes and aspiring heroes everywhere. After running an ultramarathon through the Copper Canyons of Mexico, Christopher McDougall finds his next great adventure on the razor-sharp mountains of Crete, where a band of Resistance fighters in World War II plotted the daring abduction of a German general from the heart of the Nazi occupation. How did a penniless artist, a youngshepherd, and a playboy poet believe they couldcarry out such a remarkable feat of strength and endurance, smuggling the general past thousands of Nazi pursuers, with little more than their own wits and courage to guide them? McDougall makes his way to the island to find the answer and retrace their steps, experiencing firsthand the extreme physical challenges the Resistance fighters and their local allies faced. On Crete, the birthplace of the classical Greek heroism that spawned the likes of Herakles and Odysseus, McDougall discovers the tools of the heronatural movement, extraordinary endurance, and efficient nutrition. All of these skills, McDougall learns, are still practiced in far-flung pockets throughoutthe world today. More than a mystery of remarkable people and cunning schemes, Natural Born Heroes is a fascinating investigation into the lost art of the hero, taking us from the streets of London at midnight to the beaches of Brazil at dawn, from the mountains of Colorado to McDougall's own backyard in Pennsylvania, all places where modern-day athletes are honing ancientskills so they're ready for anything. Just asBorn to Runinspired readers to get off the treadmill, out of their shoes, and into the natural world,Natural Born Heroeswill inspire them to leave the gym and take their fitness routine to natureto climb, swim, skip, throw, and jump their way to their own heroic feats.

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joes wife, Violet, attacks the girls corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

With the born storyteller's command of narrative and imaginative approach, Leonard Mlodinow vividly demonstrates how our lives are profoundly informed by chance and randomness and how everything from wine ratings and corporate success to school grades and political polls are less reliable than we believe.By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is the universally acclaimed novelwinner of the Booker Prize and the basis for an award-winning film. This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "e;great gentleman,"e; Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "e;greatness,"e; and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

The letters of the great writer to his wifegathered here for the first timechronicle a decades-long love story and document anew the creative energies of an artist who was always at work.No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov's to Vera Slonim. She shared his delight in life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humor of any woman he had met. From their first encounter in 1923, Vladimir's letters to Vera form a narrative arc that tells a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, pithy and memorable. At the same time, the letters tell us much about the man and the writer. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everythinganimals, people, speech, the landscapes and cityscapes he encounteredand learn of the poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays and translations on which he worked ceaselessly. This delicious volume contains twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters themselves and the puzzles and doodles Vladimir often sent to Vera.

Although Truman Capote's last, unfinished novel offers a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Cte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently finny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.

For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day. Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda. He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey-with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit-the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

At last, a book about eating (and eating well) for health -- from Dr. Andrew Weil, the brilliantly innovative and greatly respected doctor who has been instrumental in transforming the way Americans think about health. Now Dr. Weil -- whose nationwide best-sellers Spontaneous Healing and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health have made us aware of the body's capacity to heal itself -- provides us with a program for improving our well-being by making informed choices about how and what we eat. He gives us all the basic facts about human nutrition. Here is everything we need to know about fats, protein, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins, and their effects on our health.He equips us to make decisions about the latest miracle diet or reducing aid. At the heart of his book, he presents in easy-to-follow detail his recommended OPTIMUM DIET, including complete weekly menus for use both at home and in restaurants.He provides eighty-five recipes accompanied by a rigorous and reliable nutritional breakdown -- delicious recipes reminding us that we can eat for health without giving up the essential pleasures of eating.Customized dietary advice is included for dozens of common ailments, among them asthma, allergies, heart disease, migraines, and thyroid problems. Dr. Weil helps us to read labels on all food products and thereby become much wiser consumers. Throughout he makes clear how an optimal diet can both supply the basic needs of the body and fortify the body's defenses and mechanisms of healing. And he always stresses that good food -- and the good feeling it engenders at the table -- is not only a delight but also necessary to our well-being, so that eating for health means enjoyable eating.In sum, a hugely practical and inspiring book about food, diet, and nutrition that stands to change -- for the better and the healthier -- our most fundamental ideas about eating.

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work--because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart. In Mohawk, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard.

Cheating, shooting angles, hustling -- whatever you want to call it, its what poker is really all about, and in the tradition of Mario Puzo's Fools Die, that's what is at the heart of the drama of this riveting first novel told by a nontraditional 1990s kid with an incurable obsession, an outrageous wardrobe, and a knack for staying in action.He smokes a lot of pot, hides behind mirrored sunglasses, and practices yoga. But appearances are deceiving -- he may look like a live one, but he has not gone broke. He has made his way from teenage games in the basements of New Jersey suburbs, to professional games across America and Europe. Perhaps this is because he understands something most people just don't get: "Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they're wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That's philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren't ever gonna fade it. That's what sets poker apart. And that is what keeps everyone coming back for

It's 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he's an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming, but Fleming's life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption-a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.