The Beginning Of Terror

Traces the development of German writer Rilke (1875-1926), emphasizing psychoanalytic themes such as his relationships with his parents and surrogate parents; and how he blamed his illness on his childhood, but turned it to a resource for his art. Draws on his published poetry and novels, and on letters. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Perhaps no cycle of poems in any European language has made so profound and lasting an impact on an English-speaking readership as Rilke's Duino Elegies. These luminous new translations by Martyn Crucefix, facing the original German texts, make it marvellously clear how the poem is committed to the real world observed with acute and visionary intensity. Completed in 1922, the same year as the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land, the Elegies constitute a magnificent godless poem in their rejection of the transcendent and their passionate celebration of the here and now. Troubled by our insecure place in this world and our fractured relationship with death, the Elegies are nevertheless populated by a throng of vivid and affecting figures: acrobats, lovers, angels, mothers, fathers, statues, salesmen, actors and children. This bilingual edition offers twenty-first century readers a new opportunity to experience the power of Rilke's enduring masterpiece. Book jacket.

Nadav Kander creates unfailingly beautiful photographs with the formal precision of a master photographer. But beauty is the beguiling lure for Kander's disconcerting explorations into representation through genre as diverse as portraiture, landscape, and still life. He employs the seductive charm of aestheticism to expose our inconsistent response to the female nude, to probe questions of morality and desire in a series on Cuban prostitutes, and to manifest the fragile imbalances of the American landscape with its endlessly repeating artifice at the edge of vast emptiness. The book is composed of chapters of images, interleaved with short stories, poems, and essays, each responding to a particular image or section. Each sequence elaborates a narrative, at times driven by the commissioned texts and often arising from the friction between two dissociated images. Nadav Kander was born in Israel in 1961 and was raised in South Africa. In 1982 he moved to London, where in 1986 he set up his first studio. Kander has received international critical acclaim for his photography and is one of the most sought-after photographers working today. In the preceding few years, Kander has shot for numerous magazines and commercial accounts, including Nova, Visionaire, Dazed & Confused, Raygun, Rolling Stone, Zoom, the London Sunday Times, Sports Illustrated, Graphis, and others. He has exhibited in museums and galleries such as the Saatchi Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Photographic Society, and the Tate Museum. This book, his first, is accompanied by an international touring exhibition.

The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rainer Maria Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse, these ten letters of correspondence between Rilke and a young aspiring poet reveal elements from the inner workings of his own poetic identity. The letters coincided with an important stage of his artistic development and readers can trace many of the themes that later emerge in his best works to these messages—Rilke himself stated these letters contained part of his creative genius.

David Hufford's work exploring the experiential basis for belief in the supernatural, focusing here on the so-called Old Hag experience, a psychologically disturbing event in which a victim claims to have encountered some form of malign entity while dreaming (or awake). Sufferers report feeling suffocated, held down by some "force," paralyzed, and extremely afraid. The experience is surprisingly common: the author estimates that approximately 15 percent of people undergo this event at some point in their lives. Various cultures have their own name for the phenomenon and have constructed their own mythology around it; the supernatural tenor of many Old Hag stories is unavoidable. Hufford, as a folklorist, is well-placed to investigate this puzzling occurrence.

This novel is a major literary discovery, and Odrach is drawing favorable comparisons with such eminent writers as Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn. Odrach wrote in Ukrainian, while living an exile's life in Toronto. This remarkable book is a microcosm of Soviet history, and Odrach provides a first-hand account of events during the Stalinist era that newsreels never covered. It has special value as a sensitive and realistic portrait of the times, while capturing the internal drama of the characters with psychological concision. Odrach creates a powerful and moving picture, and manages to show what life was really like under the brutal dictatorship of Stalin, and brings cataclysmic events of history to a human scale.

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER​ Named one of the most anticipated novels of the season by People, Associated Press, Time, Los Angeles Times, Parade, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more. From the #1 bestselling authors Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny comes a novel of unsurpassed thrills and incomparable insider expertise—State of Terror. After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state. There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate. As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source. Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning. What begins as a series of apparent terrorist attacks is revealed to be the beginning of an international chess game involving the volatile and Byzantine politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; the race to develop nuclear weapons in the region; the Russian mob; a burgeoning rogue terrorist organization; and an American government set back on its heels in the international arena. As the horrifying scale of the threat becomes clear, Secretary Adams and her team realize it has been carefully planned to take advantage of four years of an American government out of touch with international affairs, out of practice with diplomacy, and out of power in the places where it counts the most. To defeat such an intricate, carefully constructed conspiracy, it will take the skills of a unique team: a passionate young FSO; a dedicated journalist; and a smart, determined, but as yet untested new secretary of state. State of Terror is a unique and utterly compelling international thriller cowritten by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th secretary of state, and Louise Penny, a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling novelist.