Literature & Fiction

A man of control and precision, Tobiasson-Svartman is overwhelmed by his attraction to the half-wild, illiterate Sara Fredrika, a total contrast to his reserved, elegant wife. Soon he enacts the worst of his impulses, turning into another, far more dangerous man, ready to trade in lies and even death to get closer to the lonely woman without losing hold of his wife. Matters of shame, fidelity, and duty are swept to sea as he struggles to maintain his parallel lives, with devastating consequences for the women who love him.

Henning Mankell, author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds, once again proves himself a master of the novel with Depths, an arresting, disquieting story of obsession.

Since the initial publication of Hatchet Jobs, the groves of literary criticism have echoed with the clatter of steel on wood. From heated panels at Book Expo in Chicago to contretemps at writers’ watering holes in New York, voices—even fists—have been raised.

Peck’s bracing philippic proposes that contemporary literature is at a dead end. Novelists have forfeited a wider audience, succumbing to identity politicking and self-reflexive postmodernism. In the torrent of responses to this fulguration, opinions were not so much divided as cleaved in two with, for example, Carlin Romano contending that “Peck’s judgments are worse than nasty—they are hysterical” and Benjamin Schwarz retorting that “in his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose and his disdain for pseudointellectual flatulence, Dale Peck is Mencken’s heir.”

Hatchet Jobs includes swinging critiques of the work of, among others, Sven Birkerts, Julian Barnes, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Jim Crace, Stanley Crouch, and Rick Moody.

Max Delmarc, age fifty, 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 Goncourt–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 stay in purgatory—part luxury hotel, part minimum security prison, under the supervision of deceased celebrities—Max is cast into an alarmingly familiar partition of hell, “the urban zone,” a dark and cloudy city much like his native Paris on an eternally bad day. Unable to play his beloved piano or stomach his needed drink, Max engages in a hapless struggle to piece his former life back together while searching in vain for the woman he once loved.

An acclaimed bestseller with 50,000 copies sold in France, Piano is a sly, sardonic evocation of Dante and Sartre for the present day, the playful, daring masterpiece of a novelist at the top of his form.

Claude Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning author and cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the book’s title, the transport that took him to and from school every morning of his childhood. Passing back and forth between vine-covered hills, the trolley punctuates the trivial or cruel events of many lives, while action unfolds at the shore, in the gradually modernizing town, on a tennis court, and in a country villa. Elsewhere, life in all its fragility persists in the pavilions and labyrinthine corridors of a hospital, where our narrator now travels on a wheeled hospital bed, set to begin a new voyage into old age. When coincidences unite the two trajectories, the story becomes a fugue of memory that has delighted critics and made the book an immediate bestseller in France.

In a book John Leonard calls “remarkable” and Michael Ignatieff describes as “invaluable,” The Voice of Memory collects thirty-six interviews with bestselling author Primo Levi—many of them completely new to English-speaking readers. This book reveals a varied and complex picture of the acclaimed writer, encompassing Levi the Holocaust witness, the writer, the chemist, the mountain climber, the intellectual, the political polemicist, the atheist, and the Jew.

Hailed by David Denby as “one of the outstandingly beautiful and moving writers of our time,” Levi emerges here in a rich, contradictory, and essentially human light. His status as perhaps the most important of the survivor-writers of the Holocaust is enhanced still further by his many voices speaking in this remarkable book.

The scripts of award-winning film director Ingmar Bergman have been among the most important documents in film history. Though his vision in such films as Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal has shaped our thinking about the cinema, none of his most recent films have been shown in U.S. theaters. This book brings to English readers for the first time some of the finest creations of Bergman’s mature years. In these three scenarios of extraordinary frankness, even rawness, Bergman shows his tender yet realistic views on the world of theater, cinema, and acting, culminating with In the Presence of a Clown, where he returns to the character of his Uncle Carl, an irrepressible inventor who comes up with an early version of the talking film. These most recent scripts, in effect Bergman’s own fifth act, add an important and moving chapter to his life work. A preface contextualizing the scripts within Bergman’s oeuvre has been added by Lasse Bergstrom, a noted Swedish film critic as well as the publisher of Bergman’s work in Sweden.

At home, Meera Syal’s women “walk in small steps, talk in sweet tones, pour dainty cupfuls, and refill plates in the shake of a dupatta,” but at work, they “kick ass across courtrooms and computer screens.” In a book somewhere between Waiting to Exhale and Bridget Jones’s Diary, Syal has created an indelible portrait of a close-knit group of Indian women living in London. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee is the story of Chila, a nice Punjabi girl married to the urbane Deepak, and her two childhood confidants: Sunita, the former activist law student, now an overweight, depressed housewife and mother; and the chic, beautiful Tania, who has rejected marriage in favor of a high-powered career in television and life in a trendy apartment with her English boyfriend. This hilariously scathing, no-holds-barred novel from the award-winning author of Anita and Me describes what happens when one of them makes a documentary, starring the other two, about contemporary urban Indian life.

In Literary Debate, the second volume in The New Press’s Postwar French Thought Series, editors Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman present a selection of texts, many available in English for the first time, that together offer an illuminating and provocative overview of the last half-century of French literary criticism.

Combining examination of literature as an institution and in historical context with path breaking interpretations of writing by such authors as Stephan Mallarmé and Sigmund Freud, Literary Debate presents the seminal work of figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean’Paul Sartre. These selections represent one of the most fertile periods the field has known. Including original essays by its editors, this volume brings together the important threads of one of the most influential movements in Western intellectual history.