Bøger i Nonpareil Books serien

First published in 1985 by Alfred A. Knopf.

"Novelist Robert Olmstead journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's New Hampshire dairy farm to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him in this coming-of-age memoir. Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me, Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he also traces the flowering of his first love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about growing up and leaving home and about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by award-winning author Brock Clarke"--

Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century.Guy Davenport was perhaps the last great American polymath. He provided links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—and pretty much everything in between. Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader’s guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In these forty essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, Louis Zukovsky, and many others. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition.

"As a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, William Maxwell helped shaped several generations' sense of the literary short story. At the same time, Maxwell himself was also an exceptional novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. Given unique, unfettered access to Maxwell's private papers, Alec Wilkson--whose memoir My Mentor explores his twenty-five-year friendship with Maxwell--has gathered a ... collection of some of Maxwell's lesser-known and previously unpublished works of nonfiction and fiction"--

"Enthralling essays on the expatriate experience in Paris and shrewd literary criticism by one of the twentieth century's finest writers. Mavis Gallant is revered as one of the finest short story writers of her generation, but she was also an astute observer and formidable reporter. This selection of Gallant's essays and reviews written between 1968 and 1985 begins with her impressions of the Parisian student uprising in May 1968-originally published in The New Yorker, "The Events in May" inspired Wes Anderson's star-studded film The French Dispatch and Gallant herself served as inspiration for the female journalist portrayed by Academy Award-winner Frances McDormand. Paris Notebooks presents a whole range of subjects portraying French society, ranging from architecture and literature to the gripping story of Gabrielle Russier, a young French schoolteacher driven to imprisonment, madness, and suicide as the result of an affair with one of her students. Also included are Gallant's astute reviews of books by major figures such Vladimir Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Gunter Grass. No matter what form she's working in, Mavis Gallant's flawless prose is always full of wit and acuity. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed literary biographer Hermione Lee"--

"A stirring memoir of a young, single woman's laborious struggle to save her family's New England apple farm from going under during the Great Depression. The Orchard is an exquisitely beautiful and poignant memoir of a young woman's single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Discovered by the author's daughter after the author's death, it tells the story of Adele "Kitty" Robertson, young and energetic, but unprepared by her Radcliffe education for the rigors of apple farming in those bitter years of the early 1930s. Alone at the end of a country road, with only a Great Dane for company, plagued by debts, broken machinery, and killing frosts, Kitty revives the old orchard after years of neglect. Every day is a struggle, but every day she is also rewarded by the beauty of the world and the unexpected kindness of neighbors and hired workers. Animated by quiet courage and simple goodness, The Orchard stands as a deeply moving celebration of decency and beauty in the midst of grim prospects and crushing poverty. In addition to a foreword and epilogue by Betsy Robertson Cramer, the author's daughter, this Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by award-winning author Jane Brox"--

"A gripping and compassionate tale of family and faith, whispers and accusations, and the deeply hidden truths we're compelled to uncover. After surviving a near-fatal accident, thirty-year-old Lizzy Mitchell faces a long road to recovery. She remembers little about the days she spent in and out of consciousness, save for one thing: She saw her beloved deceased uncle, Father Mike, the man who raised her in the rectory of his Maine church until she was nine and he was accused of improprieties, dismissed from his church, and Lizzy was sent away to boarding school. Was Father Mike an angel, a messenger from the beyond, or something more corporeal? Though her troubled marriage and her broken body need tending, Lizzy knows she must not only uncover the details of her accident, but also delve deep into events of twenty years earlier, when whispers and accusations forced a good man to give up the only family he had. With deft insight into the snares of the human heart, Monica Wood has written an intimate and emotionally expansive novel full of understanding and hope"--

"First published in 1967 by The Dial Press"--Title page verso.

"A sharp, delicious, bright-girl-comes-to-New-York memoir. Forty-one-year-old Alison Rose was a bright and beautiful single woman, feeling lost in mid-1980s New York City: "I couldn't afford one more round of my famous bad judgment, which was, according to my own records at that point, eternal." Then she landed a job at The New Yorker. "Some of the best things anyone's every said to me were said in, or in the doorway of, my cubicle at School, which was The New Yorker Magazine," writes Rose. She was taken up by the writers there, "a tribe of gods" who turned her from a semi-recluse into a full-fledged writer. These kindred souls formed an impromptu club: Insane Anonymous (a "whole other world that was better than sane"). Rose was unlike anyone in the group. Fellow staff writer Renata Adler said of Rose's path, "It was the most nuanced, courageous, utterly crazy way to have wended." In Better Than Sane, Rose takes us from her California childhood to her years at The New Yorker, revealing how, often, she "didn't care enough about existence to keep it going" and preferred to stay in her room with her animals and think. She writes about growing up on the West Coast, daughter of a movie-star-handsome psychiatrist who was charming to friends but a bully and a tyrant to his family; moving to Manhattan in her twenties, sleeping in Central Park, subsisting on Valium, Eskatrol, and Sara Lee orange cake; moving to Los Angeles, attending the Actors Studio, befriending celebrities and living with some larger than life personalities; and, finally, returning to New York and finding work at the New Yorker. After she'd written an article, Rose would sit on a park bench with a coffee, savoring the moment: "What I had done, by myself. That's what I liked." Better Than Sane is the true story of how-despite her endless ability to sabotage herself-one brilliant and mordantly funny woman found herself"--

"Lavender, basil, hyssop, balm, sage, rue - the thinking gardener's guide to herbs. Writer/naturalist Henry Beston, a founding father of the environmental movement, believed that a strong connection to nature is essential. "It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live," Beston says in his now-classic Herbs and the Earth. In this book, Beston shares one of those connections as seen through the oldest group of plants known to gardeners. "A garden of herbs," he writes, "is a garden of things loved for themselves in their wholeness and integrity. It is not a garden of flowers, but a garden of plants which are sometimes very lovely flowers and are always more than flowers." Whether you are already a committed herbalist or just dreaming of planting your first small garden, this book is a powerfully rich source of inspiration and information. As Roger B. Swain observes in his moving introduction, Herbs and the Earth has an intensity that evokes the herbs themselves, as if, pressed between the pages, their aroma has seeped into the pages. This Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by environmentalist, educator, and author, Bill McKibben"--

This volume weaves together the Scottish otter stories from Gavin Maxwell's three non-fiction books, Ring of Bright Water (1960), The Rocks Remain (1963), and Raven Meet Thy Brother (1969). Maxwell was both an extraordinarily evocative writer and a highly unusual man. While touring the Iraqi marshes, he was captivated by an otter and became a devoted advocate of and spokesman for the species. He moved to a remote house in the Scottish highlands, co-habiting there with three otters and living an idyllic and isolated life at least for a while. Fate, fame, and fire conspired against this paradise, and it, too, came to an end, though the journey was filled with incident and wonder. Maxwell was also talented as an artist, and his sinuous line drawings of these amphibious and engaging creatures, and the homes they occupied, illustrate his story. This book stands as a lasting tribute to a man,his work, and his passion. It was received and has endured as a classic for its portrait not only of otters but also of a man who endured heartaches and disappointments, whose life embodied both greatness and tragedy.He writes with rare eloquence about his birth, his devotion to the beloved Scottish highlands, and the wildlife he loved,while refusing to ignore the darker aspects of his nature and of nature in its larger sense. Maxwell's legacy has been preserved at the Eilean Ban Trust and Bright Water Visitor Centre (www.eileanban.org).

Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935.

novel of an Irish terrorist, a teenage volunteer in the IRA. A fanatical believer, Behan was arrested with explosives at the age of 17 and spent three years locked in a British juvenile borstal. There he begins to wonder, who's really the enemy?Borstal Boy is both a riveting self-portrait and a window into the problems, passions, and heartbreak of Ireland's past. It is also a record of a change of heart. Inside the borstal (reform school), Behan meets British Protestants who are there for reasons of their own. He begins to see that class creates more common ground than he ever believed while religion and nationality are much more superficial divisions between people than he'd ever been taught. Released, Behan returned to Ireland changed though still and a rebel-and became one of that country's most important dramatists with the plays The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and Richard's Cork Leg.Celebrated for its dialogue and masterful characterization, Borstal Boy has endured as an important document of a time and an artist.

A mousy librarian is called to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of a secretive Colonel whose most surprising secret is a bear who keeps the librarian company--shocking company.