The Sensualist

A scholar’s search for her husband unfolds a hallucinatory tale of vengeance in a mystery illustrated by the artist and author of The Tattooed Map. When her journalist husband suddenly goes missing, art historian Helen Martin travels to Vienna to find him. But soon after her arrival, she finds herself entering a strange world of twilight, dream logic, and danger. Traveling by train with a mysterious box of wonders, Helen’s search for her husband takes her headlong into a tense mystery with provocative links to the past. The clues Helen must piece together—jewels, notes, ancient anatomy texts—are all presented to the reader in Barbara Hodgson’s illustrations. Both a complex thriller and an investigation of the senses, The Sensualist explores the limitations of looking and the boundless power of seeing.

The Sensualist is the story of a man enslaved by his libido and spiralling towards self-destruction. Gripping, erotic, even brutal, the book explores the demons that its protagonist must grapple with before he is able to come to terms with himself. In this fascinating account of the pleasures and perils that attend a young man's coming of age, Ruskin Bond displays his felicity in exploring the dark aspects of the human psyche. Bold and powerful, The Sensualist is a compelling read.

"Raised in Baltimore in the ‘90s, 17-year-old Samuel Gerson is ready to be rid of his high school baseball team, his protective upbringing, and the tight-knit Jewish community in which he's spent his whole life. But when he befriends enigmatic Dmitri Zilber, a recent Russian Jewish immigrant who is obsessed with the works of Dostoevsky, Samuel's world begins to shift. In the wake of his grandfather's suicide, as his life increasingly entangles with that of Dmitri and his beautiful sister Yelizaveta, it sets in motion a series of events that culminates in a disturbing act of violence. A quietly devastating portrait of late adolescence, The Sensualist examines the culture we inherit as it collides with the one we create"--from the cover.

Om den amerikanske maler John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

Edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. "Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus' three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter."--The New York Times Book Review "...a new single work for American readers that stands among the very finest."--The Nation

Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowing, consists of a series of lectures he delivered in his Berlin home to members of the city's political and cultural elite in 1804. The lectures mark a dramatic shift in the terminology and methodology he uses to explore the nature of knowledge and reality as presented in his philosophical system, the Wissenschaftslehre. Although not published during his lifetime, Fichte's 1804 lectures provide a systematic update to his philosophy of knowledge and being, which was only hinted at in print in popular presentations like Characteristics of the Present Age (1805) and The Way Towards the Blessed Life (1806). In fact, these lectures contain Fichte's first public articulation of his philosophical position in the wake of the professional disaster of the "atheism controversy." This volume of new essays not only offers readers novel interpretations of the lectures but also introduces and clarifies key concepts, debates the relationship of the lectures to Fichte’s Jena presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre, and examines issues related to his method and system of idealism.

Ruskin Bond, b. 1934, Indo-English litterateur.