False Starts

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball’s magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature. The rhetoric of failure was used at various times to engage artistic ambition, the arrival of advanced capitalism, and a rapidly changing culture, not to mention sheer exhaustion. False Starts locates a lively narrative running through American literature that consequently queries assumptions about the development of modernism in the United States.

"False Starts is an intimate portrayal of how segregated preschools fall short in offering poor children of color the experiences they deserve to thrive"--

Sydney Brenner was born in South Africa and educated at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Medicine and Science). He then moved to Oxford and received a D.Phil in 1952, before joining the MRC Unit in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1956. His various accomplishments include serving as the Director of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, founding the Molecular Science Institute in Berkeley, holding the position of Distinguished Professor at the Salk Institute, La Jolla. And during his last years, Sydney Brenner played a key role in shaping research and development in the biomedical sector in Singapore as A*Star Senior Fellow.He was one of the greatest biologists of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his pioneering work in the field of molecular biology. He was also known for his boundless curiosity, sharp intellect and courage to speak with clarity and characteristic wit as evident in this delightful book which is a compilation of the columns that he wrote for Current Biology in the late '90s.

Running a railway is a complex business beset with drama. The operation of heavy equipment at speed, twenty-four hours a day, across the full length of the country and using extremely technical signaling, track and mechanical engineering is no mean feat and throws up a constant stream of challenges. Fortunately, the highly professional railway staff are ready to deal with these daily obstacles using their expertise, dedication and, as is so often required, a sense of humour. Here Geoff Body and his son Ian have collated a selection of entertaining and revealing anecdotes that illustrate just how unexpected working on the railways can be.

After getting arrested for petty burglary as a teenager, Braly couldn't get a break and spent much of his life behind bars. This is his searing autobiography, from the author of Shake Him Till He Rattles and On the Yard.

This volume is the final in the Yale Boswell Editions' manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, a four-volume sequence designed to stand as a research supplement to the Hill-Powell version of the Life. The first volume, edited by Marshall Waingrow and covering the years 1709-1765, appeared in 1994, and the second, 1766-1776, edited by Bruce Redford with Elizabeth Goldring, in 1998. The third, 1776-1780, edited by Thomas F. Bonnell was published in 2012. This fourth volume traces Boswell's processes of composition from first draft to final publication. It restores much deleted material and passages lost or overlooked at proof and revision stage. It also corrects a host of errors--from compositorial to misreadings--that have stood in all editions of Boswell's biographical masterwork. Thomas Bonnell's annotation clarifies a range of textual issues, and sheds revealing light on Boswell's processes of selection and deletion.