Ever since Alfred Brendel bid farewell to the concert stage after six decades of performing, he has been passing on his insight and experience in the form of lectures, readings and master-classes. This reader for lovers of the piano distils his musical and linguistic eloquence and vast knowledge, and will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in the technique, history and...(展开全部)

Max Delmarc, age 50, is a famous concert pianist with two problems: the first is a paralyzing stage fright for which the second, alcohol, is the only treatment. In this unparalleled comedy from the Prix Concourt-winning French novelist Jean Echenoz, we journey with Max, from the trials of his everyday life, through his untimely death, and on into the afterlife. After a brief st...(展开全部)

Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept of photomediations that unites the twenty essays collected here challenges the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice. Capturing the dynamics of the photographic medium today, it also explores photography's inherent kinship with ot...(展开全部)

'The only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap-dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing ...' Truman Capote began writing at the age of eight, and never looked back. "A Capote Reader" contains much of the author's published work: his brilliant and prolific oeuvre of fiction, travel sketches, portraits, reportage and ess...(展开全部)

Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul’s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut—wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

A Lover's Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes o...(展开全部)

The language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak, for it is addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It is a language of solitude, of mythology, of what Barthes calls an 'image repertoire'. This book revives beyond the psychological or clinical enterprises which have characterised such researches in our culture - the notion of the amorous subject. ...(展开全部)

After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlie...(展开全部)

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called 'the Casanova of reading', argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. 'We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything', writes Manguel, 'landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create'. Reading o...(展开全部)