Bøger udgivet af PAUL DRY BOOKS

"Looking at opera from the standpoint of its texts, as only a gifted poet and librettist can do, Dana Gioia examines why a surprisingly small number of operas have attained a secure place in the repertory. His insight into the workings of this uniquely lyrical fusion of the arts makes Weep, Shudder, Die not only a definitive assessment of the importance of poetry to the operatic undertaking, but a gift to opera lovers everywhere. Read...Reflect...Delight!"--Ted Libbey, author of The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music"Weep, Shudder, Die should be read by anyone who enjoys opera, or who cares about its place in today's world. Dana Gioia explores, with imagination and insight, the relationship between the libretto and the music. I learned a great deal in reading it, and at the same time enjoyed the experience immensely."--Henry Fogel, Former President, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and League of American OrchestrasA unique book about opera--personal, impassioned, and provocative. Weep, Shudder, Die explores opera from the perspective by which the art was originally created, as the most intense form of poetic drama. The great operas have an essential connection to poetry, song, and the primal power of the human voice. The aim of opera is irrational enchantment, the unleashing of emotions and visionary imagination.Gioia rejects the conventional view of opera which assumes that great operas can be built on execrable texts. He insists that in opera, words matter. Operas begin as words; strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them. Ultimately, singers embody the words to give the music a human form for the audience.Weep, Shudder, Die is a poet's book about opera. To some, that statement will suggest writing that is airy, impressionistic, and unreliable, but a poet also brings a practical sense of how words animate opera, lend life to imaginary characters, and give human shape to music. Written from a lifelong devotion to the art, Gioia's book is for anyone who has wept in the dark of an opera house.

"Gioia joins W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, and D. H. Lawrence in embracing criticism that is insightfully intellectual and surprisingly personal . . . Always a canny discussant of contemporary poetics, Gioia again provides vital guidance for evaluating poetry that will appeal to tenured professors and armchair aficionados alike."―Booklist"Few critics write more engagingly and perceptively about poetry than Dana Gioia . . ."―Michael Dirda, Washington PostDana Gioia, one of America's leading poet-critics, explains why poetry exists and why we need it in this sparkling collection of essays. More personal than any of Gioia's earlier works, Poetry as Enchantment reflects a lifetime of thought and experience. Gioia, the author of Can Poetry Matter?, talks about poetry in a radically different way than it is currently being taught or discussed. In the title essay, he explains that poetry is speech raised to the level of song, and though poetry may often be misunderstood as intellectual, it moves us the way music does. Poetry charms its readers, creating a heightened experience of attention. It addresses readers in the fullness of their humanity, simultaneously speaking to the mind, emotions, imagination, memory, and physical senses. Without academic jargon, Poetry as Enchantment relates literature to the questions of life.

The tiny, fictional island of Outermark sits thirty miles off the coast in the waters between Maine and Nova Scotia. When Corson Wills, one of the last people to have lived on the island, is asked to recount its history, he begins by describing it as "a rock in the ocean where no one lives anymore." Corson's tale, and those of his ancestors who also lived there, ferry the reader between the 1980s, when lobster fishing is the only remaining industry, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, days of great sailing ships to the East Indies but also of conflicts between the earliest Native residents and newly arrived colonial settlers.

"Move over, Onegin--we've a new Eugene for the ages. In Michael Weingrad's wildly charming and profound telling, young Eugene Nadelman's adolescence in 1980s Philadelphia unfolds in iambic tetrameter, with each crush and clash and heartache feeling as epic as they do for the young and the hopeful. If you've ever spun the bottle or leered furtively at someone across the dancefloor, you'll find yourself transformed by Weingrad's wit, wonder, and heart, and, like young Eugene himself, grow wiser."--Liel Leibovitz, editor at large, Tablet Magazine"[A] wistful and emotionally resonant novel that finds true poetry in teenage life."--Foreword ReviewsFull of humor, pathos, and pop cultural references, Eugene Nadelman is a tale of young love and American manners in the era of Ronald Reagan and MTV--written in the witty sonnet form of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.It's 1982, and teenaged Eugene attends his cousin's bar mitzvah in suburban Philadelphia. There he meets a kindred spirit in the savvy, sensitive Abigail. But when Eugene's best friend also becomes smitten with Abby, a tragic rivalry ensues and, just as in the Pushkin poem, one character kills another in a duel. (Well, in a Dungeons & Dragons game, in this case.) Eugene and Abby's romance deepens against a backdrop of '80s music, fashion, and VHS rentals--with serious world events like AIDS and the Cold War hovering overhead. But when Eugene leaves for sleepaway camp and Abby for Europe, temptations abound, and one question becomes paramount: can their love survive a summer separation?

"In Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, Adrienne Su contemplates her own use of food as a recurring metaphor, influential teachers and peers, the push and pull between cooking and writing, changing expectations around English usage, and craft questions such as: Why does some subject matter refuse to cooperate in the creative process, even when it appears close to home? How does one write a good poem about being happy? Why write in rhyme when it's time-consuming and mostly out of style? What is a poem's responsibility to the literal truth? Su's essays are driven by the tensions between worlds that overlap and collide: social conventions of the northern and southern United States; notions of what's American and what's Asian American; the demands of the page and the demands of the home; the solitariness of writing and the meaningful connection a poem can create between writer and reader. In interviews, often with fellow poets, she discusses a range of topics, from her early days in the Nuyorican poetry-slam scene to the solace of poetry and cooking during Covid-19 lockdown. While Su's previous books are all collections of poetry, she has been publishing individual essays for many years. Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet gathers the best of them into one volume for the first time"--

"In forty short and charming chapters, a former "great books" teacher from New York City adapts to his new role on a small Southern farm by observing the natural world and drawing connections to his reading life. n late middle-age, Harry Kavros and his wife, Peri, pack up all the household belongings that will fit into their car and leave Manhattan, bound for their new home on a twenty-two-acre patch of pine-filled land in Hillsborough, North Carolina. As Mr. Kavros spends long hours clearing the acreage, not for farming but for sightlines, he muses about the land, the exhausting work it requires, and the rewards the effort offers. Every task he undertakes prompts him to recall and meditate over scenes from his reading life. From the great Greek epics to the writings of Frederick Law Olmstead on landscape, to Thoreau, to modern poets, to a veritable treasury of references, for the author life in the country is also life in among his reading."--

"In this brilliant analysis of the coming to be of Strauss, Plato, and Nietzsche as philosophers and poets, Laurence Lampert reaches new heights and plumbs new depths. An extraordinarily rich and insightful book, thoughtful and beautiful in its execution. A masterful performance by a thinker and author at the height of his power."--Michael Allen Gillespie, author of Nietzsche's Final Teaching Six essays from a well-known Nietzsche scholar on Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche, and the history of western philosophy In The Beijing Lectures: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche, Laurence Lampert presents what he calls the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche. This "new" history takes seriously Nietzsche's claim that "the greatest thoughts are the greatest events." To put it even more assertively that "genuine philosophers are commanders and legislators."Beginning with Leo Strauss and how his recovery of the philosophers' art of writing can change our way of viewing the history of philosophy, Lampert then focuses on six Platonic dialogues--Protagoras, Charmides, Republic, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium. These, he believes, mark a turning point in Western history and set the pattern for the whole Western philosophic tradition. In the third and final section, Lampert considers Nietzsche in order to show how he revolutionized our understanding of the world, and in particular why it is appropriate to view him as "the first comprehensive ecological philosopher."

"A granular, meditative, and beautiful portrait of a fascinating life."--Booklist"Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life."--William Giraldi, author of The Hero's Body"Of all the memoirs and autobiographies I've ever read--literary or otherwise--Dark-Land is among the very best . . . [A] genuinely astonishing achievement."--John Wilson, The Washington ExaminerThis powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a "backward boy" in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another.Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart's searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of "Dark-Land" in Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a "conversion" in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic.Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.

"The title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, After, is meant to work in two ways. A number of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father, who was also a poet. Some of those and many of the others are also in some way "after"-as in, in the manner of-other poems or works of art. Such texts are often called "imitations" and have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson's words, "a kind of middle composition between translation and original design." Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but clearly separate tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it's a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets are indebted to other poets as surely as each of us is indebted to those who raised us, and the poems in After attempt to account for such personal and poetic inheritances"--

"Wes Davis' fast-paced tale of wartime sabotage reads more like an Ian Fleming thriller than a mere retelling of events."―Wall Street Journal"The story unfolds with the rich characterization and perfectly calibrated suspense of a great novel. It can be hard at points to remember the book is actually a work of nonfiction."―Christian Science MonitorThe Ariadne Objective is the extraordinary story of the Nazi occupation of Crete told from the perspective of an eccentric band of British gentleman spies. These amateur soldiers―writers, scholars, archaeologists―included Patrick Leigh Fermor, a future travel-writing luminary; John Pendlebury, a pioneering archaeologist whose walking stick concealed a sword; Xan Fielding, who would later translate books like Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes into English; Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter; and W. Stanley Moss, who would write up his account of their exploits in Ill Met By Moonlight (Paul Dry Books, Inc.).Alongside Cretan partisans, these British intelligence officers carried out a daring plan to sabotage Nazi maneuvers, culminating in a high-risk plot to abduct the island's German commander. Wes Davis presents the scintillating story of these legends in the making and their adventures in one of the war's most exotic locales.Includes 17 black and white photographs.

"Music and the Idea of a World explores the bond between music and world by reflecting on great musical compositions and works by great thinkers from antiquity to the present. World, here, has several meanings. It is the natural world or cosmos, the inner world of feeling and thought, world history, and the world of tones (the musical universe). The book is intended for philosophic-minded readers who are fascinated by music and music lovers who enjoy thinking about the philosophic questions that music raises."--

"A well-rendered portrait of an intense medical life devoted to equally intense research."--Kirkus Reviews"This is a wonderful account of a nonpareil physician-scientist and, in recent decades, a creator of drug therapies and a lifesci macher. Carl Nathan illuminates his memoir with great storytelling and deeply considered reflections (regularly summed up in pithy 'life lessons') on how his person and his personal journey prepared, and propelled, him. Like Carl, I am a scientist whose asthma and serial pneumonias meant swapping a lot of childhood companionship for finding out young how rewarding adventures of the mind can be. An Arrow's Arc belongs on your bookshelf right next to Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"--Professor K. Barry Sharpless, PhD, Scripps Research Institute, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in ChemistryAs a physician and renowned medical researcher, Carl Nathan has been at the forefront of discoveries in microbiology and immunology. In An Arrow's Arc, he reflects on how his youthful experiences and passions moved him toward medicine and science, and how his five decades as a doctor and scientist have, in turn, shaped him.As a child, Nathan struggled with severe asthma, and he saw breast cancer take his mother's life during his senior year of college, on the very same day he was accepted to Harvard Medical School. These experiences, among others, fueled his abiding interest in medicine and his determined efforts to understand how the immune system duels with cancer and infectious diseases.While a half-century dedicated to his patients and to biomedical research provided Dr. Nathan with a hard-won biological perspective on death's role in life, he's known since he was young that he could die at any time. He calls this a liberating thought, a gift, a call to action. Full of warmth and wisdom, An Arrow's Arc is a beautiful reminder to all of us "that now is the time to love, to wonder, and to build."

"Originally published at Ludzie bezdomni in 1900"--Title page verso.

When thirteen-year-old Wilder and his friends Sunny and Corndog go down to the river for a horse ride, something panics Corndog into running away. Wilder and Sunny reluctantly return home without him, and the next day a strange man comes to Wilder's house looking for Corndog. He seems to know an awful lot about the small, red-haired, foster kid's past. So Wilder, Sunny, and another friend, Big, set out to find Corndog before someone else does. If they succeed, can the group of friends convince Corndog to trust the world enough to rejoin it?

"Ear Training gathers thirty essays and reviews by one of America's most playful critics. Known for his long career as a professor and writer of critical biographies, for this collection William H. Pritchard has selected some of his favorite shorter pieces on a wide range of topics. United by Pritchard's philosophy of literature, which he calls "ear training", pieces on subjects from John Updike to Emily Dickinson to Frank Sinatra to the soap opera The Young and the Restless urge us to consider how literature sounds and how a sense of play in our approach to the world can uncover buried truths and meanings. Also included are the series of letters Pritchard wrote to his students in the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, meant to offer commentary on four English writers--Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Throughout the collection Pritchard urges the reader to engage with texts he has found particularly delightful and illuminating, taking us on a tour of the world as he has heard it through poetry, prose, music, and the voices of people he has known."--Amazon.com.

"In Satan Talks to His Therapist, Melissa Balmain explores the lighter side of dark times. Playful yet poignant, her poems perfectly capture our human fallibility and comedic sense of importance. The collection begins with "On Looking at an MRI Cross-Section," in which Balmain peeks inside her own skull to consider the jumble of thoughts and memories harbored there. After this introduction to the poet's inner world, the book divides into three sections: Spiraling Down, In Limbo, and Climbing Out. The poems in this lyrical descent and ascent are about climate change, social media, pandemics, politics (sexual and otherwise), parenthood, consumerism, aging, loss, and ills, both physical and societal. Balmain writes in meter and rhyme, and she uses traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles, terza rima) as well as ones she's coined for the moment. The poems in Satan Talks to His Therapist provide clarity and comedy in a time that feels anything but clear or comic, and they hint at the consolations of art, kindness, maturity, persistence, love, and, of course, humor"--

"Joe Sachs is a national treasure. His brilliant translations from the Greek, spanning works from Homer to Aristotle, have long enriched scholars and students alike. He crowns those achievements with this exquisite rendering of two of Plato's most beautiful dialogues, with an introduction that evidences his deft ability to drill down to 'the thing itself.'"--Thomas Sheehan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Stanford University The Phaedrus and Symposium are Plato's two dialoguesabout Eros--that is, desirous longing. In these new translations byformer St. John's College tutor Joe Sachs, the reader imaginatively becomes a>While both dialogues are about love, they differ in intriguingand important ways. The conversation of the Phaedrus takes place in thecountryside and that of the Symposium in Athens. In the Phaedrus onlySocrates and Phaedrus are present; in the Symposium many participate inthe drinking party. But in both, Socrates presents singularly abiding images: The winged horses and chariot in the Phaedrus; the ladder of love in theSymposium. These compelling images attract and move the reader to ask>The interplay of the two texts may spark an unfolding in the reader's thinkingabout love, but for the dialectical motion that mustoccur between the speeches and between the lines of Plato's texts, the readermust do the work, provoked, invited, and assisted by what they contain. The context for our thinking includes inone case the subject of tragedy and comedy, in the other the nature of rhetoricand writing, but it is philosophy, and not poetry or politics, that persistentlyclaims the center of attention. The dialogues themselves seem as different asnight from day, as urbane wit from rustic charm--but do they point to opposingor converging attitudes toward erotic love?

When Constance Dry began to experience spontaneous mental images brought on by chronic migraine disease, she termed them "memoryscapes." These memoryscapes were inspired by the landscape of Circle Z Ranch where Dry has spent time since childhood, and they have helped alleviate the pain of migraine. In "In Search of Circle Z", Dry explores the relationship between these unbidden images and habitat dioramas, specifically those in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through a series of photographs, drawings, and mini-dioramas, she illustrates their similarity and explains how her internal imagery works to provide a place of refuge from pain and a source of new experiences each time they are viewed." - flap of cover

"The essays in Politics, Nature, and Piety take up the central question of political philosophy: What is the good life, and what place do nature, politics, and piety have in that life? 'The unity of the essays,' Alex Priou writes in his introduction, 'lies in the various tensions explored: between ancients and moderns, religion and philosophy, magnanimity and prudence, justice and friendship, and, most fundamentally, spiritedness and the intellect.' Laurence Berns proves an excellent guide for beginning one's study of the great books of political philosophy, from Plato to the present." --Publisher's descriptio

"Frank "Ace" Renzetti has been installing carpet for forty years, working the upscale neighborhoods of Philadelphia's Main Line. At a time when he should be considering retirement, Frank takes on one of the biggest-and strangest-jobs of his career. The house is owned by a volatile and eccentric divorcee, its rooms teeming with weary contractors, many of whom have been on the job for months. A pampered dog regularly sabotages everyone's work, and the general contractor patrols the site as if it's the border. Amid this week-long circus, Frank's body starts to fail him, and when he loses both his helpers to a drug bust, he is left to complete the job by himself on one good leg. Desperate, he poaches a day-laborer from his competitor and finds that the young, paperless El Salvadoran has a way with carpet and just might be the future of the trade. As the physical challenges of the job mount, the fate of Frank's business, and, with that, the fate of his blue-collar genius, become increasingly uncertain. Wry and insightful, Rug Man is a tribute to a bygone era of craftsmen whose work was the source of their greatest suffering but also their greatest pride"--

Essays on writers from Pablo Neruda to Sylvia Plath allow poet and essayist David Mason to explore the many changes we experience during a lifetime.

A moving twelfth collection from New Formalist poet Mark Jarman.