Bücher veröffentlicht von W. W. Norton & Company

Chain-smoking, peculiarly stylish, stubborn, and eccentric Vera and Istvan were anything but ordinary grandparents. Sixteen years after their death, Johanna Adorjan fills the gaps in their story. An Exclusive Love is a brilliantly constructed memoir and a gorgeous romance, a tale of two people who died as they lived: inseparable.

For a writer, voice is the problem that never lets you go. For a reader, voice is a profound mystery. What is it? How does it develop and why should it even matter? How does the reader hear and respond to an authentic voice, and what happens when the cult of personality threatens to subvert it? These are some of the slippery questions The Writer's Voice addresses with confidence and clarity.Aspiring young writers often confuse voice with stylishness, but the voice that matters has the whole weight of a life, however young, behind it. In this compelling book, renowned poet, author, and critic A. Alvarez defines "voice" as the vehicle by which a writer expresses his aliveness, hooks his readers, and keeps them listening. These powerful reflections from a lifetime's experience belong alongside John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, and William Zinsser's On Writing Well.

For Beth Kephart's son, the diagnosis was "pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified"-a broad spectrum of difficulties, including autistic features. As the author and her husband discover, all that label really means is that their son Jeremy is "different in a million wonderful ways, and also different in ways that need our help."In intimate, incandescent prose, Kephart shares the painful and inspiring experience of loving a child whose "special needs" bring tremendous frustration and incalculable rewards. "What, in the end, are you fighting for: Normal?" Kephart asks. "Is normal possible? Can it be defined? . . . And is normal superior to what the child inherently is, to what he aspires to, fights to become, every second of his day?"With the help of passionate parental involvement and the kindness of a few open hearts, Jeremy slowly emerges from a world of obsessive play rituals, atypical language constructions, endless pacing, and lonely frustrations. Triumphantly, he begins to engage others, describe his thoughts and passions, build essential friendships. Ultimately this is a story of the shallowness of medical labels compared to a child's courage and a mother's love, of which Kephart writes, "Nothing erodes it. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth."

Born in New York in 1963, historian Hester Rosenfeld-very American and marginally Jewish-goes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of "murderers and cowards," Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famous-he is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could make for an important contemporary historical document-kitchen table history. Heinrich is married (four times, twice to his current wife) and has four daughters. But madly in love with Hester, adultery is nothing new to him. As he assists her in her note-taking-about him and his family, about German history-she often suspects Heinrich is covering up something. Was his brother really a Werewolf, a Nazi militiaman who vowed to continue fighting after the war's end? What kind of gas company did his mother work for? And what exactly did his father do during those years?Yet Hester has her secrets, too, and the longer she remains in Germany the harder it is to keep them concealed. As she uncovers more of the Falk family's possible connection to Nazism, she finds herself reexamining her feelings about her own parents and her complicated attraction to Heinrich. As the lovers' intimacy deepens beyond the erotic, each suspects the other of hiding something about the past.Called a "rare and remarkable writer" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, Kirshenbaum has written a searing novel about history's unforgettable legacy and its continuing impact.

Thomas Merton may have seemed an unlikely candidate for a best-selling author. Cloistered in a remote Kentucky monastery, Merton struggled as a young man to reconcile the contemplative life he sought as a monk and his very public passion for writing. Publisher James Laughlin saw Merton's talent and played the muse, encouraging him with the poems, essays, and diaries of other writers and publishing nearly everything Merton sent in return.Ironically, the very society Merton rejected upon entering the monastery embraced his work, bringing him publishing success only dreamed of by more eager authors. Soon Merton discovered he had a podium, a voice, and a responsibility that weighed as heavily on him as his previous quest for silence. Laughlin's encouragement remained constant throughout, as political ally, publishing adviser, and supporting friend.Nearly thirty years of rich correspondence documents this strong literary and personal relationship and traces the remarkable development of Merton's vision: from an early focus on matters internal and religious, to a tremendous world view encompassing issues of race, politics, war, and the spiritual decay of modern society.

Big drug dealer Ralph Ember stumbles on a ghastly surprise when he and sidekick Beau Derek arrive at the house of yachtsman Barney Coss, his bulk supplier: Barney and his two women have been savagely murdered-and the murderers, three drug rivals from London, are still in the house. Beau dies quickly at their hands; they let Ralph go-for the moment-but he's a marked man because of what he's seen. When Melanie, Beau's alluring, ruthless girlfriend, learns what has happened, she is bent on revenge and wants Ralph as her partner-all the way.Bill James's latest Harpur & Iles police procedural ratchets up the tension as the cops (the brilliant Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his ungovernable, half-cracked superior, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles) fight the drug barons for control of the city. As a body washes up, and one of the London creeps meets a violent end, the wily Ralph finds himself starting a new, very risky career-and Harpur sorts out what's going on just in time.

"We tend to write about what will not go away," Doug Anderson says in this candid, darkly humorous journey of self-discovery. Beginning in 1943, in the pre-civil rights South filled with tobacco and war stories, he recalls the difficult childhood that propels him into service in Vietnam. In 1967, having returned home deeply shaken by his experience as a combat medical corpsman, Anderson plunges into the heady freedoms and excesses of the sixties. His downward spiral-through booze, substance abuse, and sex-brings him dangerously close to a total breakdown. Finally, in a return group visit to Vietnam in 2000, he meets with former enemies now become writers and poets. Moved by the realization that "the last time I saw these people they were trying to kill me," Anderson confronts the past and calls upon a story-this powerful story-to rebuild a life.

In August of 1758, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, a poor Irish immigrant named Mary Madden bore a child, Sarah Madden, whose father was said to be a slave and the property of Colonel James Madison, father of the future president of the United States. This daughter, though born a free mulatto, became indentured to the Madisons. There she worked as a seamstress to pay off the fine of her birth until she was 31 years old.Sarah Madden bore ten children and when the term of her indenture was over, she and her youngest son, Willis, struck out for themselves-Sarah as a seamstress, laundress, and later, with Willis, a dairy farmer and tavern keeper. Stories of Willis and Sarah were passed down in Madden family lore through the generations-their hard work, their business sense, their ability to overcome obstacles, poverty, illiteracy, prejudice. This is the chronicle of those generations, a 200-year history of a kind unusually complete in American history. Two factors make it so-that Sarah Madden and her offspring kept their stories alive, and that they saved hundreds of important documents of their freedom, hardship, and daily work.These documents came to light in 1949 when author T.O. Madden, Jr. (great great grandson of Sarah Madden) conceived a powerful desire to know more of his bygone generations. He began to investigate, and his search for family brought him to a hidebound trunk originally belonging to his great grandfather Willis. Its contents brought tears to his eyes. Stored there, awaiting discovery, were papers dating back to the mid-eighteenth century, freedom papers, papers of indenture, deeds of land, Sarah Madden's laundry and seamstress record books, letters, traveling passes. In addition, the leather trunk held an exciting, full set of business records for the days of the nineteenth century when Madden's Tavern flourished as a center of activity in Orange County and as a place for travelers to rest on the road to Fredericksburg.Since that day, T.O. Madden, Jr., has been deeply researching his family, using census reports, other official sources, familly, and friends. All have led to his ably reconstructed family history, and to his own remarkable story. We Were Always Free is a unique and very American family saga.

In this exuberant, transformative tale of modern-day Cairo, a drunken Irish journalist named Fin seeks a story. His friend Farouk, mercurial teller of tales, has tantalized him with news of the wily Skinhead Said, who may or may not have discovered a cache of priceless antiquities. But the truth remains elusive-not until they both travel to proverbial hell and back, courtesy of a thuggish kebab-shop tycoon and his brutal retinue. Once Fin finds a way to save his friend's life, and baba ghanoush is properly made, and other necessities of life are observed, then stories may be spun and secrets reluctantly revealed.

Meteorology is popularly associated with day-to-day forecasting of weather, but as Professor Sutcliffe shows, this is only one among many interests of the meteorologist.

Eve Spoke presents a compelling case for the pivotal role that speech has played in human language and human evolution. Wrestling with the age-old question of why such a large gulf exists between humans and other animals, Philip Lieberman mines both the fossil record and modern neuro-scientific techniques to chart the development of the anatomy and brain mechanisms necessary for human language as we know it. Eschewing any notion of a language gene or instinct, he pursues instead an evolutionary path in which environment acts on a biological capacity to reveal the interconnectedness of systems that make us most human: precise motor skills, speech, language, and complex thought. Lieberman interweaves decades of research in anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and linguistics into his exposition on the evolution of human speech.

The Macdonalds were both of their own time and yet our contemporaries. In the personal and social journeys they made they were creatures of an exceptional moment in history, a social drama set in a privileged time and place, while in the ordinary dynamics of their relationships with each other they were us. The dynamism of family life mirrored the times. From the birth of Alice soon after Queen Victoria came to the throne, to their dispersal at the end of a long Edwardian summer, the Macdonalds were a prime example of the fluidity and social mobility that characterized the age.

Girl Rearing is the story of girlhood in the fifties, the pent-up desire, the isolation by gender, the trials between mother and daughter. The last of four daughters, the narrator grows up in the wake of tragedy - her sister's death by drowning - and under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture, and feminine destiny. The narrator is destined to rebel. Never fulfilling expectations, she makes a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.

In wanting to think through modern women's history, Susan Ware found herself drawn to seven larger-than-life women who influenced not only their professions-politics, journalism, anthropology, acting, sports, dance, and music-but also the way women saw themselves and their options in life. Ware recovers the people behind the legends of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, Margaret Mead, Katharine Hepburn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Martha Graham, and Marian Anderson in compelling life stories. She looks at how they created their persona, how they kept themselves in the public eye, and how they did so for so long. She also speaks to how these women balanced their personal lives-choosing lovers and mates and deciding whether to have children. In the choices they made and the success of those choices are lessons relevant to contemporary working women. As part of living exceptional and unconventional lives, they gave other women the ability to desire beyond the limits imposed on women and allowed them to dream and strive for lives of independence and fulfillment.

West of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, lie the nine states of level prairie and rolling high plains that constitute the very heart of the American continent. Here is the story of those states in our times, related by Neal Peirce as part of his sensitive account of people, politics, and power in the U.S.A. today.

The Communist-oriented putsch developed on the night of September 30, 1965, when the Indonesian Communist Party-the oldest in Asia-had attained the zenith of its power and influence as the biggest Communist movement in the world after China and Russia. When Sukarno, the Communists, and a group of "progressive, revolutionary officer" struck, the Anglo-American allies were standing back to back on the rim of the South China Sea. In Vietnam, to the north, the Americans and their Asian allies were trying to hold the tide; in Malaysia, to the south, the British and their Pacific allies were trying to contain Sukarno. Both sought to blunt the Jakarta-Peking axis.

With the harrowing power of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden comes a remarkable work of fiction. Winner of the prestigious Premio La Nacion Prize for Fiction in 2000, A Secret for Julia brilliantly depicts the lasting psychological attacks of Argentina's reign of repression and terror on a new, seemingly innocent generation. Set mainly in 1990s London, interlaced with vivid flashbacks to Buenos Aires, Patricia Sagastizabal's novel tells the emotionally wrenching story of Mercedes Beecher, an Argentinian writer living in self-imposed exile in London with her teenaged daughter, Julia. When a mysterious figures appears from her past, Mercedes must endure a new round of psychological terror and reveal herself to her inquisitive but embittered, daughter in a way that she never believed possible. A dramatic story of retribution and conscience, A Secret for Julia touches on many compelling themes: the politics of institutionalized and sanctioned cruelty; the wistfulness of a life lived in exile; the bonds of family, justice, and redemption.Much of A Secret for Julia reads like a personal diary, yet Sagastizabal propels it forward with elements of astonishing intrigue, drama, and terror. The savage murders and tortures that came to decimate an entire generation of Argentinian students and activists in the 1970s may remain-even twenty-five years later-so vivid and searing that they can be expressed only through the palette of fiction. In this way, Sagastizabal's novel represents the voice of the fallout from Argentina's so-called "dirty war," the voice of the next generation-Julia's generation. A Secret for Julia is a testament to the changing of the guard-an unforgettable, astounding novel for one simple reason: the reader is left with the lingering notion that it might be frighteningly close to the truth.

An adjunct to "Ocean Planet", a major traveling exhibition opening at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995, this fascinating book is the first to explore the newest discoveries in oceanography and marine ecology in the context of the global economy and human population growth. For thousands of years humanity has seen the oceans as a mysterious, and limitless, source of treasures to be fished, harvested, mined, and salvaged. Now accelerating developments in ocean studies offer a new understanding of the oceans, their role in a global ecosystem, and their vulnerability to threats from human action. Drawing on the latest research, this book offers a fascinating tour of the complex reaches of our ocean world and points the way toward changes that will preserve, rather than squander, the wealth of oceans.

The facts are these: When Albert Einstein was a young man, his wife-to-be gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, whom they soon gave up for adoption to a Hungarian woman. Beyond that, Lieserl Einstein is lost to history.But not to literature. Anna McGrail has imagined an amazing yet plausible life for this indomitable woman, one that spans the scientific history of the modern world from the theory of relativity to the atomic bomb and that moves from the plains of rural Hungary to the death camps of Germany to the laboratory at Los Alamos where the entire world was put under threat of annihilation. It is Lieserl's sole burning desire to learn physics, to beat her father at his own game, to teach him that his actions-whether giving away a daughter or unlocking the secrets of the universe-have consequences that cannot be denied. In that she will succeed-but at what cost to herself and to the world?An extraordinary tour de force of the literary imagination, written with utter confidence and panache. A novel certain to be widely reviewed, debated, and read. This breathtaking book will appeal to readers of works as diverse as Sophie's World and Jane Mendelssohn's I Was Amelia Earhart.

Long-distance father William McKeen watched his son grow up during summers, holidays, and long weekends. Now, with Graham in college, the two take a summer road trip down Highway 61, the legendary road of the blues, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. In cheap motels and smoky bars, with obscure bluesmen and barnstorming guitar heroes, they discover how the highway links rich and poor, black and white. In Minnesota and Iowa, William shows his son where he spent boyhood summers with his father, who died a decade before Graham was born. In St. Louis, there's another nostalgic return to a former haunt, a slice of rock-and-roll heaven called Blueberry Hill. In Memphis, they find the genuine, uncommercialized side of the city's legendary music world, and deep in the heart of the Mississippi Delta they stand over the grave of legendary bluesman Charley Patton, listen to the murmur of wind over the cotton fields, and offer silent benediction. As they venture together through magnificent country, walking the hometown streets of Bob Dylan and Mark Twain, standing at Robert Johnson's haunted crossroads, journeying from the Delta Blues Museum to Doe's Eat Place to the Alachafaya Café of New Orleans, father and son come to realize that they have a permanent connection that can never be broken by age or distance."Rock authority, scholar, and newly minted good ol' boy when he feels like it, William McKeen doesn't even know how to be uninteresting, least of all on Highway 61." -Tom Wolfe "I read the book with joy and admiration for a writer at the top of his game. The book bursts with inspiration and cunningly chronicles the nuances of father/son relations in the broader context of a rock 'n' roll illusion. McKeen achieves a stunning narrative velocity and scope. A brilliant writer!" -Nick Fowler, author of A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla "All the senses are touched in this sassy but poignant road book. William McKeen's stick-to-the-ribs words will make readers hunger for greasy burgers, thirst for icy beer, and listen to a constant serenade of music and poetry from the shoulders of the highway. En route they eavesdrop on a father and son memorizing each other during their free-fall journey without any reservations." -Michael Wallis, author of Route 66: The Mother Road "From the Iron Range of Minnesota, where they search for the spirit of Bob Dylan, to the Mississippi Delta haunted by the ghost of Robert Johnson, William McKeen and his son take the reader down Highway 61 on a trip as rich as the musical roots they explore en route." -Curtis Wilkie, author of Dixie

Pat Hudson distills her twenty-plus years of psychotherapy and radio counseling down to four essential solutions that can help women create the lives they want. These are the thinking solution, the action solution, the dreaming solution, and the feeling solution. The thinking solution focuses upon the questions you ask yourself about problems, helps you identify the stories you construct around them, and guides you to ways to alter those stories or create new ones. The action solution operates from the assumption that the way to change your life is to communicate for actions, change what you do, and change your patterns with others. The dreaming solution teaches you how to use imagery, self-hypnosis, and dreams to engage your unconscious mind in change. The feeling solution, used when you feel sad or unresolved about an issue, involves acknowledging feelings and creating rituals to leave the past behind and embrace the future. Hudson offers numerous examples of how to apply these solutions to the main aspects of a woman's life: relationships, parenting, and work. She also covers the more difficult challenges of recovering and escaping from violations and violence. Upbeat, sensible, and in touch with women's lives, this book gives you the skills you need to be the woman you want to be.

Few writers of fiction have demonstrated so early in their career such a firm grasp of the forms disaster can take as Joseph Clark does in Jungle Wedding. Fewer still have been able to balance their unnerving feeling for apocalypse with an equally unerring sense of the possibilities for grace and transcendence, however provisional.In the title story a cutting-edge video artist is hired to document a shamanistic New Age wedding ceremony deep in the Central American jungle - and gets far more than he bargained for. In "Public Burning" a sociological experiment in the study and surveillance of an "average" American spirals down into a literally incendiary conclusion. "Wild Blue" is a tour de force narrative of one man's collision with the scarily dysfunctional American armed forces of the 1970s.Other stories in Jungle Wedding hold out possibilities for communion, reconciliation, and absolution. In "Revenge" emotional rescue for a psychologically besieged divorcée arrives in the form of a clearly too-young lust object, while "Oasis" stages a haunting father-daughter reunion in terrain reminiscent of a Sam Shepard play. Whatever his subject, Clark stakes out his territory with an imaginative authority and vigor of language that is truly exciting.