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quarta-feira, 10 de maio de 2017

Shakespeare


He is no woodman that doth bend his bow
To strike a poor unreasonable doe.

Non c'è un cacciatore leale che tenda il suo arco
per colpire una povera cerva se non è stagione.


Lucrece / Lucrezia
Verses 580, 581.


sábado, 29 de outubro de 2016

SER OU NÃO SER



terça-feira, 12 de abril de 2016

MOVING






Beautiful hair...


com uma sensibilidade peculiar de quem gosta...
ela iniciava um passeio pelos cabelos..
mexendo as mechas sem pressa...
e o corpo dançando...
sensualmente ...
provocantemente...
fazia de forma particular...
num ambiente coletivo...
perceberia ele a provocação ?
tentaria uma nova dança...
viraria todo o corpo..
menos o olhar...

just enough to see a smile..
or better than that...
a desire !
and fortunally
she will see..
something in his body...
moving..
something in her body....
answering...

What exactly ?
perhaps...
some hair,
somewhere.

quinta-feira, 6 de agosto de 2015

Derek Walcott



Love after Love The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
(Derek Walcott)





Liebe nach Liebe
Die Zeit wird kommen, wenn du mit Schwung dich selbst an deiner eigenen Tür begrüßen wirst, in deinem eigenen Spiegel, und jeder wird beim Gruß des anderen lächeln
und sagen, setz dich hier hin. Iss. Du wirst wieder den Fremden lieben, der du warst. Gib Wein. Gib Brot. Gib dein Herz sich selbst zurück, dem Fremden der dich geliebt hat
dein ganzes Leben, den du wegen eines anderen übersahst, der dich inwendig kennt. Nimm die Liebesbriefe vom Bücherbord herunter,
die Photographien, die verzweifelten Zeilen, pelle dein Bild vom Spiegel ab. Setz dich. Schmause von deinem Leben.
(Übersetzer: Klaus Martens)

terça-feira, 17 de fevereiro de 2015

Bacchanal by Jean-Yves Klein !!!




The Bacchanal is having an effect. In the early hours of the evening, when the last of the daylight falls gently across the room, at night, when languorous thoughts are next to its scenery, and during the day when a heartfelt bliss dispels the austerity for a few hours. Whenever the allure of being seen strikes, it bestows on the experience a stunning scene, making a large imagined space truly sublime.

Whoever enters the Gendarmerie is welcomed. While people who seem to belong to a bygone era greet guests and fulfil their initial desires, the Bacchanal is still hesitant.

It is there, unmissable, elevated, even now strangely noticeable, but the gaze does not get caught up in it. We first of all need a fixed place in the room, a brief moment of having arrived, perhaps even a first drink, another look. Then, awareness of its size grows, followed by the realisation that something can be seen in it, testifying to a wonderful belief in the absolute necessity of art.

In this moment it opens up. It begins to vibrate, colours begin to shimmer, individual figures are discernible. It stirs and looks for those hopeful of a gathering which is dedicated to the power that has long been considered divine, intoxicated, and with complete abandon. Men and maenads, the latter being muses rather than frenzied women, idolise and confuse one another. 

There are the bacchantes and the hopelessly debauched. They search for the bacchanal of which they are part and guide us to its source and its shoots. They evoke the power of earlier feasts to venerate the Roman Bacchus, the mythological equivalent of the Greek Dionysus, venerated in more ancient times. These patrons of fertility and ecstasy were gods, but it is clear that everything associated with them, both then and now, is deeply human. Joy in this humanity can open a kaleidoscope, reach the best art with happiness. Its images unfold from the unique moment of the action which the motif can show. Here it is selected so incisively that it makes what comes before and after not only comprehensible but also viable. It is as if some lines of forgotten poetry composed by the blind Homer, who emerges from a cask on the left in black and white as he follows what is going on, had overcome the limits of painting with gently formulated suggestions and a subtle sensuality.

A panorama, both immovable and transitory, emerges for and with the composed space. The way in which its figures express themselves, the way in which their heads, their eyes, their hands and their garments, together with their forms and colours, operate beyond the motif, accounts for its effectiveness. Painters have thus always been able to induce belief in a romantic extension of one’s own existence. Since the Renaissance has also made public images of the sensual and the earthly heroic, these images are closely linked to spaces that serve the most distinguished events of courtly, civic and political culture. They perform a decorative function and also support the power of the imagination to integrate the self into more prestigious traditions. Abstract stories, which form part of the collective memory, are translated into an effective juxtaposition of a specific image and its lyrically construed interpretation by an artist’s portrayal, an artist who knows the power of imagination of his or her contemporary public. Hope grows of participation in a world that is far abstracted from the everyday yet suddenly seems to be palpable. The picture in the room supports the possibility of finally being able to physically experience the imagination, long dreamed-of and happily believed.

Viewing the Bacchanal in this way means encountering the dreamed-of. The painter’s imagination motivates the viewer. Whoever follows him will ultimately succeed in embracing life.

Wolfgang Schöddert, 14. August 2009http://www.jean-yves-klein.de/BACCHANAL.html

quarta-feira, 10 de dezembro de 2014

"As Time Goes By" music and words by Herman Hupfeld


This day and age we're living in 
Gives cause for apprehension 
With speed and new invention 
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein's theory.
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax relieve the tension
And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.]
You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.
And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.
Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny.
It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.
Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

© 1931 Warner Bros. Music Corporation, ASCAP

quarta-feira, 2 de abril de 2014

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798-1837)







L'infinito




Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle 
E questa siepe che da tanta parte 
De'll ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude. 
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati 
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani 
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete, 
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco 
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento 
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello 
Infinito silenzio a questa voce 
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l'eterno, 
E le morte stagioni, e la presente 
E viva, e'l suon di lei. Così tra questa 
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio: 
E'l naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.









IN ENGLISH :



Always dear to me was this lonely hill,


And this hedge, which from so much part

Of the ultimate horizon the view excludes.
But sitting and gazing, boundless
Spaces beyond that, and more than human
Silences and profoundest quiet
I in thoughts pretend to myself, where almost
The heart is overwhelmed. And as the wind
I hear rustle through these plants, I such
Infinite silence to this voice
Go on comparing: and come to mind the eternal
And the dead seasons, and the present
And the living, and the sound of it. So through this
Immensity is drowned my thoughts:
And being shipwrecked is sweet to me in this sea.












O Infinito 

Sempre cara me foi esta colina
Erma, e esta sebe, que de tanta parte
Do último horizonte, o olhar exclui.
Mas sentado a mirar, intermináveis
Espaços além dela, e sobre-humanos
Silêncios, e uma calma profundíssima
Eu crio em pensamentos, onde por pouco
Não treme o coração. E como o vento
Ouço fremir entre essas folhas, eu
O infinito silêncio àquela voz
Vou comparando, e vêm-me a eternidade
E as mortas estações, e esta, presente
E viva, e o seu ruído. Em meio a essa
Imensidão meu pensamento imerge
E é doce o naufragar-me nesse mar.


terça-feira, 7 de fevereiro de 2012

sábado, 28 de novembro de 2009

100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2009 by NEW YORK TIMES NEWSPAPER


100 Notable Books of 2009

The Book Review has made these selections from books reviewed since Dec. 7, 2008, when we published our previous Notables list. It was not easy picking the winners, and we doubtless made mistakes. To the authors who made the list: congratulations. To the equally deserving ones who did not: our apologies.

The ever expanding literary universe resists generalizing, but one heartening development has been the resurgence of the short story — and of the short-story writer. Twelve collections made our fiction list, and four biographies of short-story masters are on the nonfiction list.

This list will appear in print on Dec. 6, 2009. —The Editors

Previous Years: 2008 | 2007 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999

FICTION AND POETRY

'Amateur Barbarians'

By ROBERT COHEN
Cohen’s middle-aged protagonist heads to Africa, leaving his wife back home in New England with a younger rival. (Scribner, $27.)

'American Rust'

By PHILIPP MEYER
Meyer’s crime novel/road novel hybrid also manages to chronicle life in a dying mill town. (Spiegel & Grau, $24.95.)

'The Anthologist'

By NICHOLSON BAKER
Baker’s ardent novel about poetry — with its hero trying, and mostly failing, to write an anthology introduction — actually does justice to poetry. (Simon & Schuster, $25.)

'The Art Student’s War'

By BRAD LEITHAUSER
In midcentury Detroit, a young woman searches for authenticity and passion in art and in love. (Knopf, $28.95.)

'Asterios Polyp'

Written and illustrated by DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI
A graphic novel 10 years in the making combines a modernist style, a formalist structure and a story about a bristly academic. (Pantheon, $29.95.)

'Await Your Reply'

By DAN CHAON
Three essentially separate story lines, with morbidly alienated main characters, link up at the end of Chaon’s unremittingly dark and provocative novel. (Ballantine, $25.)

'Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It'

By MAILE MELOY
Meloy’s calm, intelligent prose renders her stories’ self-sabotaging characters — lawyers, unfaithful spouses, eccentric older women, Montanans — eminently understandable. (Riverhead, $25.95.)

'The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein'

By PETER ACKROYD
This clever novel’s Frankenstein hobnobs with the Shelleys. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.)

'Chronic City'

By JONATHAN LETHEM
Beneath the gaudy makeup of this dancing showgirl of a novel, set in an alternate-reality Manhattan, is the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. (Doubleday, $27.95.)

'The Confessions of Edward Day'

By VALERIE MARTIN
An actor, saved from drowning by an unsavory rival, learns that gratitude never follows humiliation. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.)

'Dearest Creature'

By AMY GERSTLER
Gerstler’s poems — skillful in every kind of comedy, yet deeply serious — show a fondness for animals without sentimentalizing them. (Penguin Poets, paper, $18.)

'Do Not Deny Me: Stories'

By JEAN THOMPSON
The woes dramatized here are no less painful for being unexceptional. (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, $14.)

'Don’t Cry: Stories'

By MARY GAITSKILL
Gaitskill implicates the reader in what feels like a violation of her own characters, whose lives are more often broken than in any way admirable. (Pantheon, $23.95.)

'Every Man Dies Alone'

By HANS FALLADA; translated by MICHAEL HOFMANN
This is the first English version of Fallada’s 1947 novel, based on a real-life German couple who mounted modest but suicidal resistance against Hitler. (Melville House, $27.)

'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned'

By WELLS TOWER
This polished story collection takes its sustenance from class conflict, rough men and strong women, and the intersection between hotheads and cool customers. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.)

'Family Album'

By PENELOPE LIVELY
It’s the slow, inexorable way everyone comes to acknowledge the suppressed event at the heart of this domestic novel that makes it quietly devastating. (Viking, $25.95.)

'Follow Me'

By JOANNA SCOTT
A heroine bent on reinvention is at the center of this densely stitched crazy quilt of a novel, which spans six decades and a wealth of genres while evoking a quintessential American mythology. (Little, Brown, $24.99.)

'A Gate at the Stairs'

By LORRIE MOORE
Moore’s latest novel, about a Midwestern college student who hires on as a nanny for a brainy couple on the eve of adoption, brandishes some big material — war, racism — in a resolutely insouciant key. (Knopf, $25.95.)

'Generosity: An Enhancement'

By RICHARD POWERS
This novel’s central figure is a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)

'Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel'

By JEANNETTE WALLS
Assuming her maternal grandmother’s voice, Walls, the author of “The Glass Castle,” recreates an adrenaline-charged existence on the rough-and-tumble Southwest frontier. (Scribner, $26.)

'How it Ended: New and Collected Stories'

By JAY McINERNEY
This collection, from a career now reaching nearly three decades, reminds us how broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across our national experience. (Knopf, $25.95.)

'In Other Rooms, Other Wonders'

By DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN
The eight linked stories here follow the scheming of a rich and powerful Pakistani family and their employees. (Norton, $23.95.)

'Invisible'

By PAUL AUSTER
The student-hero of Auster’s masterly novel learns about love from several characters, but an affair with his sister permanently defines his personality. (Frances Coady/Holt, $25.)

'Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi'

By GEOFF DYER
This haunting novel is like a rough guide to transformation: moving from scenes of erotic decadence to scenes of squalor, the death it describes is that of craving, of intention, even of self. (Pantheon, $24.)

'The Lacuna'

By BARBARA KINGSOLVER
This novel, about a boy’s memorable bonds with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, is a call to conscience and connection. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)

'Lark and Termite'

By JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
Phillips’s inspired novel, with its Faulknerian echoes, revolves around a loyal sister and her impaired brother, who sees what others don’t. (Knopf, $24.)

'Let the Great World Spin'

By COLUM McCANN
Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers is pivotal to all the lives in this deeply affecting New York novel. (Random House, $25.)

'The Little Stranger'

By SARAH WATERS
In Waters’s novel of postwar anxiety, members of a decaying upper-crust English family start to come to sticky ends in their creepy mansion. (Riverhead, $26.95.)

'Love and Obstacles: Stories'

By ALEKSANDAR HEMON
The worldly eccentric who narrates these tales declares a specialty in “those brainy postmodern setups” somehow tied to identity. (Riverhead, $25.95.)

'Love and Summer'

By WILLIAM TREVOR
A heartbreaking and satisfying novel about the relationship between a restless amateur photographer and a shy young Irish farm wife. (Viking, $25.95.)

'The Museum of Innocence'

By ORHAN PAMUK; translated by MAUREEN FREELY
The city of Istanbul is on exhibit in Pamuk’s novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime. (Knopf, $28.95.)

'My Father’s Tears: And Other Stories'

By JOHN UPDIKE
In his final collection of new fiction, Updike relives the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease and death. (Knopf, $25.95.)

'Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall'

By KAZUO ISHIGURO
First-person tales of human emotion in the waning hours of light. (Knopf, $25.)

'Nothing Right: Short Stories'

By ANTONYA NELSON
Nelson is drawn to the damage that results when strong women foolishly trust weak men. (Bloomsbury, $25.)

'Once the Shore: Stories'

By PAUL YOON
Elemental tales of lives on a South Korean island, in spare and beautiful prose. (Sarabande, paper, $15.95.)

'One D.O.A., One on the Way'

By MARY ROBISON
An angry heroine is thrust into the volatile world of her dying husband’s family, which includes his “utterly identical” twin. (Counterpoint, $23.)

'Sag Harbor'

By COLSON WHITEHEAD
Benji, the well-off 15-year-old black hero of Whitehead’s memoiristic fourth novel, lives in a world where life doesn’t assault him but rather affords him the time to figure out who he wants to be. (Doubleday, $24.95.)

'A Short History of Women'

By KATE WALBERT
Improbably, this spare and wrenching novel lives up to its name, hopscotching through time and alternating among the lives of a British suffragist and her descendants. (Scribner, $24.)

'The Sky Below'

By STACEY D’ERASMO
It’s hard not to be seduced by D’Erasmo’s selfish hero, an artist whose hunger for expression, for a father and for a home embodies a sense of entrapment that could make anyone behave badly. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.)

'The Song Is You'

By ARTHUR PHILLIPS
Phillips turns the notion of the artistic muse on its head and gives it a spin, delineating a pas de deux between a young singer-songwriter and the older man who actively, obsessively inspires her. (Random House, $25.)

'Too Much Happiness'

By ALICE MUNRO
Munro’s stories take on pulp fiction’s sensational subjects. But episodes of murder, suicide and adultery turn out to be just anterooms to an echo chamber filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations. (Knopf, $25.95.)

'Typhoon'

By CHARLES CUMMING
British and American spies clash in the buildup to the Beijing Olympics. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.)

'A Village Life'

By LOUISE GLÜCK
In a stylistic departure, Glück’s poems use the village as a lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her life without. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.)

'Wolf Hall'

By HILARY MANTEL
Tolerant, passionate and humane, Thomas Cromwell is cast as the picaresque hero of this Man Booker Prize-winning novel of Henry VIII’s turbulent court. (John Macrae/Holt, $27.)

'The Year of the Flood'

By MARGARET ATWOOD
Through other mouths, Atwood has brilliantly retold her 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake,” showing how the kids Glenn and Jimmy became Crake and the Snowman. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.)

NONFICTION

'The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn'

By LOUISA GILDER
Gilder’s book brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities, which she handles with verve. (Knopf, $27.50.)

'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science'

By RICHARD HOLMES
The twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate through this study of “the second scientific revolution.” (Pantheon, $40.)

'Ayn Rand and the World She Made'

By ANNE C. HELLER
Heller maintains critical perspective while conveying the conviction and odd charisma of Rand, whose angry message resonates today among the anti-Obama right. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35.)

'Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater'

By FRANK BRUNI
A memoir by The Times’s former restaurant critic, who writes of food, family, friendship and being fat. (Penguin Press, $25.)

'The Case for God'

By KAREN ARMSTRONG
Armstrong, a former nun, wants to rescue the idea of the Deity from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. (Knopf, $27.95.)

'Cheever: A Life'

By BLAKE BAILEY
This detailed biography follows John Cheever’s path step by stumbling step, disclosing the addictive urges and bawling self-pity to which he subjected himself and those in his household. (Knopf, $35.)

'City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s'

By EDMUND WHITE
Friends and sheer perseverance got the novelist through his years of desire, poverty and thwarted ambition. (Bloomsbury, $26.)

'Closing Time: A Memoir'

By JOE QUEENAN
In Queenan’s account of his life, the belligerent priests, the poverty, the girls and the music all pale beside the rages of his drunken, violently abusive father. (Viking, $26.95.)

'Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places'

By BILL STREEVER
From the physics of absolute zero to the cold-resistant gluttony of small birds, Streever reports on the extreme regions of low temperatures and the scientists who love them. (Little, Brown, $24.99.)

'Columbine'

By DAVE CULLEN
Cullen’s nuanced account anatomizes the massacre, showing how readily truth was obscured by myth. (Twelve, $26.99.)

'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent'

By ROBERT W. MERRY
How the 1840s paved the way to the Civil War. (Simon & Schuster, $30.)

'Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker'

By JAMES McMANUS
This copious, lively history treats the game, and the qualities it demands, as characteristically American. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.)

'Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression'

By MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Dickstein demonstrates how glorious entertainments thrived in a decade of crisis. (Norton, $29.95.)

'Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits'

By LINDA GORDON
An absorbing, well-researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in modern photojournalism. (Norton, $35.)

'Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815'

By GORDON S. WOOD
A grand, fascinating account of America’s first quarter-century, presented with great insight and scholarship. (Oxford University, $35.)

'The Evolution of God'

By ROBERT WRIGHT
In his careful yet provocative contemplation of religious history, Wright sees continuous positive moral change over time but denies the specialness of any individual faith. (Little, Brown, $25.99.)

'A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon'

By NEIL SHEEHAN
Sheehan fully sets Schriever, a crucial figure behind the creation of America’s ICBM force, in the context of the cold war’s early years. (Random House, $32.)

'The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found'

By MARY BEARD
A Cambridge classics professor leads a fine tour, turning up surprises around every corner. (Belknap/Harvard University, $26.95.)

'The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt'

By T. J. STILES
Stiles writes with care and panache about the quintessential “robber baron,” a man widely revered as well as hated. (Knopf, $37.50.)

'Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor'

By BRAD GOOCH
Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave, O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so. But Gooch strives to make it all quite normal. (Little, Brown, $30.)

'Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City'

By GREG GRANDIN
Ford tried and failed to build an ideal American society on an Amazonian rubber plantation. (Metropolitan/Holt, $27.50.)

'The Good Soldiers'

By DAVID FINKEL
Finkel’s harrowing chronicle of modern combat is based on the eight months he spent with an Army battalion in Iraq. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)

'The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11'

By JOHN FARMER
A senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission assails the Bush administration’s depiction of the event as so much public relations flimflam. (Riverhead, $26.95.)

'Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme'

By TRACY DAUGHERTY
Not dwelling on Barthelme’s dark soul or his uneven work, Daugherty has created a convincing narrative from a life that was engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled. (St. Martin’s, $35.)

'Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan'

By DOUG STANTON
An uplifting account of how Special Forces soldiers joined with mounted local militias to beat back the Taliban in 2001. (Scribner, $28.)

'In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic'

By DAVID WESSEL
A hair-raising tale of the race to stave off a depression. (Crown Business, $26.99.)

'The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America'

By STEVEN JOHNSON
A satisfying genre-blending consideration of Joseph Priestley and his fertile ideas. (Riverhead, $25.95.)

'The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China'

By HANNAH PAKULA
Pakula’s often absorbing biography presents Madame Chiang as far more complicated, awful and brilliant than we had imagined. (Simon & Schuster, $35.)

'Lit: A Memoir'

By MARY KARR
Despite the deep seriousness of the topics here — motherhood, disintegrating marriage, alcoholism, depression, God — nothing can keep Karr from being funny. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.)

'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'

By LIAQUAT AHAMED
In a sweeping narrative built around four powerful central bankers, Ahamed describes the cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression. (Penguin Press, $32.95.)

'Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir'

By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
In its moments of real ambivalence, this loving and funny filial memoir of Bill and Pat Buckley is surprisingly strong drink. (Twelve, $24.99.)

'The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story'

By JULIE MYERSON
Myerson interweaves powerful scenes of her son’s drug addiction with the story of a young consumptive who died in 1838. (Bloomsbury, $26.)

'The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon'

By DAVID GRANN
Grann follows the trail of the English adventurer/explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925. (Doubleday, $27.50.)

'Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever'

By WALTER KIRN
The witty, self-castigating story of how Kirn’s schooling left him “not so much educated as wised up.” (Doubleday, $24.95.)

'Louis D. Brandeis: A Life'

By MELVIN I. UROFSKY
An admiring biography of the Supreme Court justice as a reformer and legal innovator. (Pantheon, $40.)

'The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks'

By ROBIN ROMM
Romm’s fury over her mother’s cancer is magnetic, with the power to both repel and attract, and here it is transformed into an instrument for pursuing truth. (Scribner, $22.)

'Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town'

By NICK REDING
In his unnerving portrait of Oelwein, Iowa, Reding depicts a catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions, precipitated by the loss of jobs and the rise of methamphetamines. (Bloomsbury, $25.)

'My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times'

By HAROLD EVANS
Evans was a large part of the era of British newspapers he describes, when journalists were literate buccaneers. (Little, Brown, $27.99.)

'The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street'

By JUSTIN FOX
In this essential account, Fox zeroes in on the academics whose efficient-market theories enabled abuses. (Harper Business/HarperCollins, $27.99.)

'Open: An Autobiography'

By ANDRE AGASSI
Bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily, Agassi’s is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete. (Knopf, $28.95.)

'A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster'

By REBECCA SOLNIT
A powerful work that offers an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters. (Viking, $27.95.)

'Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life'

By CAROL SKLENICKA
Sklenicka’s biography is invaluable as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer, particularly in its account of his difficult, ultimately poisonous relationship with the editor Gordon Lish. (Scribner, $35.)

'Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend'

By LARRY TYE
Along with athletic ability, showmanship helped make Satchel Paige the most lasting symbol of black baseball. (Random House, $26.)

'Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force — the NYPD'

By CHRISTOPHER DICKEY
Much credit for success goes to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. (Simon & Schuster, $26.)

'Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work'

By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD
An encomium to manual skills, by a political philosophy Ph.D. who can rebuild VW engines. (Penguin Press, $25.95.)

'The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom'

By GRAHAM FARMELO
The quantum pioneer had an almost miraculous apprehension of the physical world, coupled with an innocent incomprehension of other people. (Basic Books, $29.95.)

'Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original'

By ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
A superbly textured, compassionate biography. (Free Press, $30.)

'The Third Reich at War'

By RICHARD J. EVANS
This riveting final volume to Evans’s magisterial trilogy illuminates the endless human capacity for evil and self-justification. (Penguin Press, $40.)

'The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny'

By WENDELL STEAVENSON
This elegantly told story weaves together the Iraqi past and present. (Collins/HarperCollins, $24.99.)

'When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present'

By GAIL COLLINS
A Times columnist’s thorough, smart and often wry account of American women’s strides and the hurdles they still face. (Little, Brown, $27.99.)

'Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector'

By BENJAMIN MOSER
The Brazilian writer was born to remorse, shaken by trauma and imbued with a deep sense of alienation. (Oxford University, $29.95.)

'The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America'

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
Roosevelt, as shown in this vast, energetic book, saw conservation as crucial to America’s military and moral standing. (Harper/HarperCollins, $34.99.)

'Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity'

By DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN
A sense of urgency runs through this disturbing exploration of the motives and actions that have led to mass murder. (PublicAffairs, $29.95.)

'Yours Ever: People and Their Letters'

By THOMAS MALLON
Mallon’s fine meditation on the art of letter-writing embraces old friends — Flaubert, Freud, the Mitfords — and plenty of unknowns as well. (Pantheon, $26.95.)

'Zeitoun'

By DAVE EGGERS
This suspenseful nonfiction account of what happened to a Syrian-American man and his family after Hurricane Katrina is a powerful indictment of Bush-era policies. (McSweeney’s, $24.)