We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness. We know its configuration, but there is no way to make it accessible to others. It will never be right. Something, the most important thing, the most significant thing, something remains unsaid.
Relate one year of my country—it does not matter which one: let us say, 1957. And one month of that year—say, July. And just one day—let us say, the sixth.
No.
Yet that day, that month, that year exist in us, somehow, because we were there, walking that street, or digging coal, or cutting the forest, and if we were walking along that street how can we then describe it (it could be Kraków) so that you can see its movement, its climate, its persistence and changeability, its smell and its hum?
They cannot see it. You cannot see it, anything, the night, Mpango, the thick bush, Ghana, the fire dying out, the elders going off to sleep, the Nana dozing, and snow falling somewhere, and women like blacks, thoughts, ‘They are learning to read, he said something like that,’ thoughts, ‘They had a war, ach, a war, he said, yes, no colonies, that country, Poland, white and they have no colonies,’ thoughts, the bush screams, this strange world.
From
RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI
Travels with Herodotus
An intimate account of the legendary reporter’s first forays into the world beyond the iron curtain.
Available June 2007 in hardcover from Knopf
$25.00/ $32.00 CAN • 978-1-4000-4338-5
PLEASE VISIT WWW.AAKNOPF.COM
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Selected titles by Ryszard Kapuściński, available in Vintage paperback:
The Emperor • 978-0-679-72203-8
Imperium • 978-0-679-74780-2
The Shadow of the Sun • 978-0-679-77907-0
Shah of Shahs • 978-0-679-73801-5
The Soccer War • 978-0-679-73805-3
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TIME’S ARROW
by Martin Amis
Dr. Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home, in this ingenious novel that not only rethinks history but dreastically revises our notion of time itself.
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—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73572-0
FLAUBERT’S PARROT
by Julian Barnes
An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert’s Parrot also investigates the obsession of the detective, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.
“A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio … rich in parody and parrotry, full of insight and wit … a great success.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73136-9
POSSESSION
by A. S. Byatt
An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.
“A masterpiece of wordplay and adventure, a novel that compares with Stendhal and Joyce.”
—The Washington Post Book World
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9
THE STRANGER
by Albert Camus
Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72020-0
IN COLD BLOOD
by Truman Capote
As Capote reconstructs the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. The resulting work transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
“A masterpiece … a spellbinding work.”
—Life
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-74558-0
INVISIBLE MAN
by Ralph Ellison
This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”
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—R.W. B. Lewis
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72313-7
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
by William Faulkner
The tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
“For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country.”
—Robert Penn Warren
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73224-1
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.
“One of the best books of the year.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5
THE WOMAN WARRIOR
by Maxine Hong Kingston
“A remarkable book … As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.”
—The New York Times
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-72188-6
BUDDENBROOKS
THE DECLINE OF A FAMILY
by Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann’s first novel, published when he was only twenty-five, is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. This acclaimed new English version by the award-winning translator John E. Woods deftly conveys the tonal variety, vigorous wordplay, and unfettered humor that previous translations missed.
“Wonderfully fresh and elegant … bound to become the definitive English version.… Essential reading for anybody who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe.”
—Los Angeles Times
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75260-9
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
by Cormac McCarthy
At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
“A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.”
—Washington Post Book World
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8
THE CEMENT GARDEN
by Ian McEwan
Out of the blasphemous wishes and hair-raising games of four children alone in a world without parents or teachers, Ian McEwan constructs a novel that is all the more chilling for its offhand approach to the unspeakable.
“A writer of uncanny power.”
—Time
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75018-5
A RIVER SUTRA
by Gita Mehta
Set by India’s Narmada River, whose banks are said to contain four hundred billion sacred places, and inhabited by characters including naked ascetics and ecsta
tic singers, a millionaire monk and an erotically possessed businessman, A River Sutra combines Indian storytelling traditions with thoroughly modern perceptions into the nature of love—love both carnal and sublime, treacherous and redeeming.
“Enchanting … sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and always filled with insights.… A delight, bringing to Western readers the mystery and drama of a rich cultural heritage.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75247-1
LOLITA
by Vladimir Nabokov
The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
“The only convincing love story of our century.”
—Vanity Fair
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72316-1
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
by Michael Ondaatje
During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable circumstances of war.
“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”
—Newsday
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3
OPERATION SHYLOCK
by Philip Roth
In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.
“A diabolically clever, engaging work … Roth is so splendidly convincing … that the result is a kind of dizzying exhilaration.”
—Boston Globe
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75029-0
THE PASSION
by Jeanette Winterson
Intertwining the destinies of two remarkable people—the soldier Henri, for eight years Napoleon’s faithful cook, and Villanelle, the red-haired daughter of a Venetian boatman—The Passion is “a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so” (The New York Times Book Review).
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72437-0
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