Bøger udgivet af NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"'The dilemma my friends suppose me to be in,' writes the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 'has, for its two horns, the endurance of a sleepless night, and the adoption of some recipe for inducing sleep.' In this delightful book - the perfect gift for all insomniacs - are collected a splendid variety of entertainments devised to help pass 'the wakeful hours'. Ranging from puzzles, rhymes and limericks to simple number problems, calming calculations and planning dreams, here is a feast of intriguing activities guaranteed to keep you entertained as you search for the elusive rabbit-hole of a good night's sleep"

Now in paperback, a collection of interviews with a French cinematic titan—covering subjects such as adaptation, the effects of capitalism on art, and the importance of intuition—selected from a period of four decades.Robert Bresson, the director of such cinematic masterpieces as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped, Mouchette, and L’Argent, was one of the most influential directors in the history of French film, as well as one of the most stubbornly individual: He insisted on the use of nonprofessional actors; he shunned the “advances” of Cinerama and CinemaScope (and the work of most of his predecessors and peers); and he minced no words about the damaging influence of capitalism and the studio system on the still-developing—in his view—art of film. Bresson on Bresson collects the most significant interviews that Bresson gave (carefully editing them before they were released) over the course of his forty-year career to reveal both the internal consistency and the consistently exploratory character of his body of work.Successive chapters are dedicated to each of his fourteen films, as well as to the question of literary adaptation, the nature of the soundtrack, and to Bresson’s one book, the great aphoristic treatise Notes on the Cinematograph. Throughout, his close and careful consideration of his own films and of the art of film is punctuated by such telling mantras as “Sound...invented silence in cinema,” “It’s the film that...gives life to the characters—not the characters that give life to the film,” and (echoing the Bible) “Every idle word shall be counted.” Bresson’s integrity and originality earned him the admiration of younger directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas. And though Bresson’s movies are marked everywhere by an air of intense deliberation, these interviews show that they were no less inspired by a near-religious belief in the value of intuition, not only that of the creator but that of the audience, which he claims to deeply respect: “It’s always ready to feel before it understands. And that’s how it should be.”

Complete and uncensored in English for the very first time, a fragmented, daringly irreverent depiction of decadence and decay in Franco's Spain written by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.The translator Anthony Kerrigan compared Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte—all “ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, even foulmouthed.” However provocative and disturbing, Cela’s novels are also flat-out dazzling, their sentences as rigorous as they are riotous, lodging like knives in the reader’s mind. Cela called himself a proponent of “uglyism,” of “nothingism.” But he has the knack, to quote another critic, Américo Castro, of deploying those “nothings and lacks” to construct beauty.The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes more than three hundred characters whose comings and goings it tracks to hypnotic effect. Scabrous, scandalous, and profane, The Hive is a virtuosic group portrait of a wounded and sick society.

"A man can't decide between two dress shirts for a wedding. A woman questions the style of her new glasses and her engagement. A figure-drawing model considers quitting posing. The figure-drawing model's teacher considers quitting teaching. A man drives into a fog bank and is unsure of how to get home. ... In Blurry, Shaw renders the doubts around everyday decisions as startling cliffhangers, presenting us with the kinds of choices that can make a life expand or contract in equal measure"--

"Since it's appearance in The New Yorker, on July 15, 1967, Jonathan Schell's THE VILLAGE OF BEN SUC has come to be regarded as a classic of American reporting. It is a rigorously factual account of the destruction by the United States Army, of a South Vietnamese village and of what happened to the 3500 in habitants"--

"From the author of Storm, a breathtaking novel about a raging fire and the path of destruction and change it leaves in its wake. Spitcat, a raging forest fire in the Sierra Nevada of California, had a lifespan of merely eleven days, "yet its effects could be reckoned ahead in centuries." So writes George R. Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire - smoldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake. Firefighters and lookouts, forest rangers and smokejumpers - as well as animals in the forest, many of them the bewildered victims of the blaze, and all the varied tress and bushes there - are characters of this realistic story"--

Tiny boys and girls play under a mushroom--setting up a little town, imagining they are flowers, and pretending all sorts of things.

First publlished in 1950, this charming picture book by the Caldecott Medal-winning team of Simont and Krauss features bold illustrations that bring to life a humorous and engaging reversal of ordinary reality that will enchant young children and their parents. Full color.

"By Xi Xi, part of the first generation of writers raised in Hong Kong, a wise and amiably written book of autobiographical fiction on the author's experience with breast cancer-from diagnosis to treatment to recovery-and her passage from a life lived through the mind into a life lived through the body. In 1990, the Hong Kong cult classic writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer and began writing in order to make sense of her diagnosis and treatment. Mourning a Breast, published two and a half years later, is a disarmingly honest and deeply personal account of the author's experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery. The book opens with her gently rolling up a swimsuit. A beginning swimmer, she loves going to the pool, eavesdropping on conversations in the changing room, shopping for swimsuits. As this routine pleasure is revoked, the small loss stands in for the greater one. But Xi Xi's mourning begins to take shape as a form of activism. In a conversational, even humorous, manner, she describes her previous blinkered life of the mind before she came into her body and learned its language. Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she coaxes and confesses, confronts society's failings, and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as the first Chinese language book to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. A radical and generous book about creating in the midst of mourning"--

"We are on the eve of 1900, when decadentism and anarchy join hands to bring the century to an end. Georges Randal, a young man from a good family, an orphan ruined by an indelicate uncle, when the time has come to take on a situation, decides to become a thief. For what? Like that. For nothing. To say no to society, to the bourgeoisie, to order, to the socialists who jiggle on the stage and to the moralists who flush the toilet with humanitarian tears. In short, Randal, like a good nihilist, says no to everything and to the thieves themselves: "I do a dirty job, it's true; but I have an excuse: I do it dirty. " Not quite. Because there is in our thief a bit of the Baudelairian dandy, a bit of Arsáene Lupine mixed with Jarry and Alphonse Allais. And an intact, almost virginal taste for revolt, a sensitive and good heart, "beating too well, said Breton, not to hit the walls of the cage in all directions""--

A new translation of one of Balzac’s finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess—a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover.A story of baffled and irrepressible desire, Balzac's The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. His protagonist, Felix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, has been sent by his family to a ball in honor of a local dignitary. A wallflower at the party, his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress. She turns away from him, and, helpless, he stands, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him off. He leaves the party in shame. The woman at the party is Henriette de Montsauf, married to a much older count, the mother of two children whose health has been compromised by their father's past debauchery. Time passes, and Felix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins between the younger man and the still young mother, a courtship whose premise is that Felix will worship her without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits upon her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He develops a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Felix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the all too unconventional and uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Returning to the provinces, he learns Henriette is dying. She writes him, "Do you still today remember your kisses? They have dominated my life. They cut a furrow through my soul.... I am dying because of them."    Balzac the great realist is an incomparable witness to the fantasies that are the stuff of ordinary life and of the countless excuses that so-called virtue makes for eagerly imagined vice. The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love—and hate. Peter Bush's new translation, the first in over a century, brings out psychological dynamics of one of Balzac's masterpieces.

"Oæguz Atay (1934-1977), one of the most influential figures of 20th century Turkish literature, was not only a writer and a professor, but also a civil engineer. Aside from his widely acclaimed novels, in this book of collected stories, Atay engineers the language of a historically multilayered society that was in the midst of a cultural and political transition. By smoothly mending the autobiographical and the fictional, he invites the reader into a maze of seamlessly shifting narrative voices"--

On March 16, 1978 Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of Italy, was ambushed in Rome. Within three minutes the gang killed his escort and bundled Moro into one of three getaway cars. An hour later the terrorist group the Red Brigades announced that Moro was in their hands; on March 18 they said he would be tried in a "people's court of justice." Seven weeks later Moro's body was discovered in the trunk of a car parked in the crowded center of Rome. The Moro Affair presents a chilling picture of how a secretive government and a ruthless terrorist faction help to keep each other in business. Also included in this book is "The Mystery of Majorana," Sciascia's fascinating investigation of the disappearance of a major Italian physicist during Mussolini's regime.

"The newspaper cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller once admitted that "all my characters are conceived in desperation." Nancy was no exception. She was the niece of the star of his other strip, Fritzi Ritzi, and meant to serve as a throwaway gag character. But Nancy could not be contained: Within a few years, Bushmiller's strip had been renamed for her, and she had begun her ascent into the pantheon of cartooning greats. Nancy, along with on-and-off boyfriend Sluggo, delivered absurd laughs to readers for decades, all rendered in Bushmiller's distinctive line that cartoonist Denis Kitchen once called "geometric perfection." A masterpiece of humor and cartooning, Nancy earned both scorn and acclaim for decades, serving as a muse (and sometimes punching bag) for the likes of Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, Gary Panter, Matt Groening, and more. This collection of Bushmiller's Nancy brings together a selection from the beloved Kitchen Sink Press editions of Nancy strips, including How Sluggo Survives! and Nancy Eats Food, as well as a number of newly selected cartoons. Together, this wide-ranging collection offers a chance for readers to experience the full range of Bushmiller's absurd humor and unexpected visual delights. As Nancy once said: "Anything can happen in a comic strip!""--

Three household adventures in the life of Mitzi include an intended trip to grandmother's, sharing a family cold, and reversing the President's motorcade.

"Insightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s. Paul Celan, a Jewish poet born in the Bukovina, now part of Romania, who survived the Nazi genocide and moved to Paris while continuing to write in German, is recognized as one of the most powerful poetic imaginations of the second half of the twentieth century. His work, a touchstone not only for poets but for historians and philosophers, has been translated into countless languages. The letters he wrote to his wife, the artist Gisáele Lestrange, now published for the first time in English, provide the best picture we have of Celan's complicated personality and the course of his life, both private and public. The life was troubled by paranoid episodes and repeated mental breakdowns ending in hospitalization, and in 1970 he committed suicide. At the same time, his devotion to his work as a poet and translator (of Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Mandelstam, among others) was unflagging. This selection of his letters to Gisáele, which also includes his letters to his young son, Eric, as well as significant number of Gisáele's own letters, covers almost all of his literary career, and while it is a personal document, offering a remarkable protrait of a great poet, a tender husband and father, and a difficult but enduring marriage, it is also a poetic one, providing Celan's translations for Gisáele of his poems from German into French and his extensive commentaries on them. It takes us to Celan's work desk, capturing him in the act of composition while also giving us Celan's reading of Celan. Bertrand Badiou's notes transmit precious information about Celan's work and life. The volume also includes photographs and a detailed chronology of the poet's life"--

"In this prophetic allegory about artificial intelligence by a renowned figure of twentieth-century Italian literature, a modest university professor becomes involved in a remote and enigmatic project in the middle of the Cold War. At the beginning of Dino Buzzati's The Singularity, Ermanno Ismani, an unassuming university professor, is summoned by the minister of defense to accept a two-year, top-secret mission at a mysterious research center, isolated from the world among forests, plunging cliffs, and high mountains. What's he supposed to do there? Not clear. How long will he be there? No saying. Still, Ismani takes the mystifying job and, accompanied by his no-nonsense wife, Elisa, heads to the so-called Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36, wondering whether, in the midst of the Cold War, it's some sort of nuclear project he's been assigned to. But no, the colleagues the couple meets on arrival assure them, it's nothing like that. It's much, much more powerful. At the center of the research complex is a strange, shining, at times murmurous, white wall. Behind it, a deep gorge drops away, full of wires and radio towers and mobile sensors and a host of eccentric structures. A question begins to dawn: Could this be the shape of consciousness itself? And if so, whose? Buzzati's novella of 1960, a pioneering work of Italian science fiction, is published here in a brisk new translation by Anne Milano Appel. In it, Buzzati explores his favorite themes of love and longing while offering a startlingly prescient parable of artificial intelligence"--

Three of the legendary Russian dissident writer's greatest poems, two autobiographical and one based on a Russian folktale, now in a new, invigorating English translation.The three poems in this collection, "Backstreets", "Poem of the Mountain" and "Poem of the End," were all written in the few short years spanning the period immediately preceding Tsvetaeva's move from the Soviet Union to Prague in 1922. "Poem of the Mountain" and "Poem of the End" are generally considered some of her finest poems and have been translated widely; "Backstreets," initially dismissed by Russian readers as nigh unintelligible, is almost unknown in English. Andrew Davis's translation is a first, and it reveals the poem in all in its emotional intensity and poetic pyrotechnics as among Tsvetaeva's greatest achievements."Poem of the Mountain" and "Poem of the End" both concern the end of an affair. "Backsteets," by contrast, is a retelling of the Russian folk-tale of Dobrynya and Marinka. It is a very free retelling, however. In the original story a hero (Dobrynya) is seduced by a witch (Marinka) and turned into an aurochs, the extinct European ancestor to modern cattle. Marinka is then forced by Dobrynya's sister, herself possessed of magic powers, to restore Dobrynya to his original form. This she does, though at the same time extorting from him a promise to marry her in exchange for the restoration. He marries her, but murders her on their wedding night. Almost none of this makes it into "Backstreets," though the poem does retain the sense of magic and menace of the original. What is actually being described, is, beneath everything, a remarkable description of a highly charged erotic encounter. The poem is the clearest expression of Tsvetaeva's understanding of love and its possibilities.Davis's versions of Osip Mandelstam's Voronezh Notebooks have been widely admired. Here he brings his talents as poet and translator to the work of a Russian poet whose achievement has loomed ever larger with the years.

The great poet Eugenio Montale was also a remarkable writer of prose whose stories appeared regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Butterfly of Dinard is a collection of fifty of those stories, pieces about “silly and trivial things which are at the same time important,” whose sprightliness, subtle irony, and conversational ease defy the limits of traditional fiction. Taken together, they form a sort of autobiographical novel, evoking people, objects, and animals dear to the poet, while simultaneously shedding light on the social, cultural, and political events of the day. The book begins with Montale’s childhood in Liguria and goes on to explore his adult life in pre-Fascist Florence and the onset of Fascism. The last part of the book, focusing on his final years in Milan, forms what Jonathan Galassi in his introduction calls “a mosaic self-portrait of the writer himself, a bumbling yet proud, memory-obsessed Chaplinesque antihero, who sees himself as the only surviving, if unwilling, witness to a disappearing world.” The stories were first published in book form in 1956; Montale added further stories to subsequent editions, culminating in the final 1973 edition. Butterfly of Dinard is the first complete translation of this edition and includes five stories never before translated into English.

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere.” —Jack KerouacFrom Duncan Minshull, the UK’s “laureate of walking,” a collection of more than fifty writings about hiking the globe from contemporary and classic authors such as Mark Twain, William Boyd, Edith Wharton, Helen Garner, Rabindranath Tagore, and many more.In Globetrotting, Duncan Minshull, the UK’s “laureate of walking,” brings together the work of more than fifty walker-writers who have traveled the world’s seven continents by foot. From the 1500s to the present day comes a memorable band of explorers and adventurers, scientists and missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters recalling their experiences and asking themselves a compelling question—why travel this way in the first place?With contributions from Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Vernon Lee, Sarah H. Bradford, Rabindranath Tagore, D. H. Lawrence, Isabella Bird, Katherine Mansfield, Rachel Carson, Helen Garner, Jean-Paul Clébert, Colin Thubron, William Boyd, Matsuo Bashō, and many more, Globetrotting takes us across the streets of London, Rome, Melbourne, Cairo, Kiev and Kabu; through the frozen wastes of Antarctica; along the pilgrim paths of Japan; into the jungles of Ghana; and around the Great Wall of China.

"When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film critic. Siegfried Kracauer's Ginster is the great World War I novel you've never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero-Ginster-spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin. Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster's dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world. All the scenes of Ginster are well to the rear of the military action, yet with Kracauer narrating, military language saturates all aspects of civilian life in the homeland. Ginster's nearest and dearest are so gung-ho, he feels that he's at the front when he visits them. War, the author seems to say, is merely ordinary life seen from the back instead of the front. As a new European war darkens our horizon, one no more expected than was World War I, Kracauer's novel feels timelier than ever"--

Told through the perspective of his sister in poetry, prose, and the sign-language alphabet, when hearing-impaired Carlo begins to lose vision in his only functioning eye he must undergo an operation to try and save his vision.

"It's no exaggeration to say that Charles Baudelaire invented modern poetry. Flowers of Evil has been a bible for poets from Rimbaud to T.S. Eliot to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, with Georges Dillon, brought out an inspired rhymed version of the book in 1936. Here it is reprinted, with the French originals, for the first time in many years. Millay and Dillon's versions are virtuosic in their handling of rhyme and meter, and their take on the Flowers of Evil as a whole is among the most persuasive English, capturing in flowing lines comparable to Baudelaire's the tortured consciousness and troubling sensuality that are his opulent music's counterpart. The book also allows readers a new appreciation of the range of Millay's own achievement as a poet and translator"--

"A tsunami slams into the Maluku islands. Giant mollusks wreak havoc. An ominous, quadrilateral UFO appears in the night sky. And a mysterious villain watches and waits in the shadows. Twin paranormal investigators Montgomery and Chris and their best friend Fongor are on the case, delving into this unduly complicated and possibly nefarious plot. They're the only ones who can unravel the mystery, but they might not--especially if they can't stay on task. Between journeys to Uganda, primordial Earth, and the pants store, and confrontations with ghosts frozen in ice cubes, baby turtles, and an army of small, sinister men, the trio will be tested like never before as they search for clues, answers, and a good all-you-can-eat buffet spot"--

"For years, Aidan Koch's comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, helping reimagine what a comic can look like, and the kinds of stories it can tell. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. ... Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit"--

"ABOUT BLUE LARD The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination. Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author's books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese-peppered with ample neologisms-and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this "script-process" is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon-that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin's novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon-and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence"--

"Provocative, hilarious, and tender stories about sex, violence, politics from one of the greatest Russian writers of the post-Soviet era. Red Pyramid is a sort of "greatest hits" collection of short stories from across Vladimir Sorokin's career, beginning with juvenilia like "The Pink Tuber," composed with no expectation of either publication or readership; moving on to scatological conceptual texts like "An Obelisk"; then plunging into the more even-tempered, but still quite uncanny, delights of his post-Soviet work. Stories like "A Month in Dachau" earn Sorokin his moniker as the "Russian De Sade," while others, like "Timka," are shockingly tender-despite their graphic depictions of mass shootings and anal sex. This collection also contains the infamous "Nastya," a story about a family cannibalizing its daughter on the eve of the twentieth century, for which Sorokin was nearly put on trial; "Horse Soup," which was the first translation from the Russian to win an O'Henry Prize; as well as stories published in Anglophone magazines such as The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's, and The Baffler to great acclaim. Translated by Max Lawton with equal attention to chewiness and pop flair, Red Pyramid is introduced brilliantly, brutally, and as always, unexpectedly by Will Self. Red Pyramid is perhaps the best place to begin a dive into Sorokin's arch detonation of Russian violence"--

"Manchette wrote two novels using the character of private eye Eugene Tarpon, Morgue pleine (Crowded day at the Morgue) and Que d'os! (Skeletons in the Closet!). Tarpon is a French private detective, a former cop responsible for the death of a protester, eaten up by grief, with a wry and weary outlook on the world, who gets mixed up in very tangled cases áa la Raymond Chandler, another of Manchette's favorite writers"--

"The twenty-four tales included in Oceans of Cruelty constitute one of the oldest collections of stories in the world, a book that offers both a set of uncanny, unsettling, and unforgettable narratives and a profound meditation on what weird thing it is that drives us to tell and to listen to stories. "Tales of the Vetala" is one of the names under which these stories have made their way from ancient India to the world at large, a Vetala being a corpse-spirit, and the frame story to the collection as a whole tells of a young king who bears the burden of a double spell. He has fallen under the power of a sorcerer, whose demand is that he fetch to him a Vetala to be his servant, and he has fallen under the power of the Vetala itself. Like a bat, the Vetala roosts upside down in the branches of a tree, and night after night the king is driven to take it down and bear it on his back to the burial ground where, once laid to rest, it will fall into the sorcerer's hands. Night after night, king and spirit make their way from tree to burial ground, and as they do the spirit whispers a riddling story in the king's ear. If the king knows the answer to the riddle, he must tell it; as soon as he tells it, the spirit flies back to the tree. Thus story follows story, the king's labors continue, and neither he nor the spirit finds rest. Only when the king has no idea what the answer to the riddle may be, when he is unable at last to respond to the story at all, will his obligation to the sorcerer be fulfilled and will he be set free, though when that comes to pass-well, that's when the whole story takes a new turn. Within this framework, Oceans of Cruelty unfolds a suite of tales of suicidal passion, clever deceit, patriarchal oppression, obligatory self-sacrifice, changing bodies, and narrow escapes from death. Here are all the passions, and here is the play of appearance and desire from which stories are drawn and that make us come back hungry for story, wondering how will the story end and when at last will we be done with all those stories? Douglas Penick's recreation of this ancient work brings out all its humor and horror and vitality, as well its unmistakeable relevance in a world of stories gone viral"--