David Bellos – författare

In a seamless mosaic of dreams and games, a young boy reflects on events as his hometown in Albania falls to a series of invaders. Amid floods and bombings, his own innocence and wonder are lost forever in the madness and brutality of the Second World War.A disturbing mix of tragedy and comedy, politics and sexuality, Chronicle in Stone is a fascinating masterpiece about what it means to grow up in a turbulent world.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos asks: how do we really make ourselves understood to other people? This funny, wise and life-affirming language book shows how, from puns to poetry, news bulletins to the Bible, Asterix to Swedish films, translation is at the heart of everything we do - and makes us who we are.Selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2011'A wonderful, witty book ... richly original, endlessly fascinating ... for anyone interested in words' Economist, Books of the Year 'A scintillating bouillabaisse ... spiced with good and provocative things' Literary Review'Dazzlingly inventive' The New York Times'Clear and lively ... There is nothing quite like it' Spectator

'Never mind those self-help manuals urging that some classic novel may change your life; in this sparkling study of the birth, growth and afterlife of Hugo's evergreen blockbuster, David Bellos argues that Les Misérables already has' Boyd Tonkin, Economist'Any reader who hasn't yet embarked on Hugo's book might be converted to the idea by this one' Daniel Hahn, SpectatorThe extraordinary story of how a simple tale of love and revolution, the poor and the downtrodden - Victor Hugo's beloved classic Les Misérables - conquered the world.There has never been a book like it. It is the most widely read and frequently adapted story of all time, on stage and on film. But why is Les Misérables the novel of the century? David Bellos's remarkable new book brings to life the extraordinary story of how Hugo managed to write his epic novel despite a revolution, a coup d'état and political exile; how he pulled off the deal of the century to get it published, and set it on course to become the novel that epitomizes the grand sweep of history in the nineteenth century. Packed full of information about the background and design of Les Misérables, this biography of a masterpiece nonetheless insists that the moral and social message of Hugo's ever-popular novel is just as important for our century as it was for its own. The Novel of the Century is a book as rich, remarkable and long-lasting as the novel at its heart.Les Misérables is available as a Penguin Classic, in an acclaimed new translation by Christine Donougher, with an introduction by Robert Tombs.

The undisputed master of stylistic criticism, Leo Spitzer combined phenomenal learning in historical and comparative linguistics with brilliant and original critical insight. He was born in Vienna in 1887. He studied Romance Philology at the Universities of Vienna and Paris and then taught at Vienna, Bonn, Marburg and Cologne. After escaping from Germany in 1933, he taught briefly at Istanbul and then at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He died in 1960. He was the author of over 800 books, articles, reviews and notes on the language and literatures of France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Germany, England and America from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. This translation brings together for the first time in any language all of Spitzer's work on the literature of seventeenth-century France, including 'Racine's classical piano' (1928) and 'Saint-Simon's portrait of Louis XIV' (1928). Each of the essays demonstrates in practical rather than theoretical terms the essential unity of literary and linguistic study. David Bellos's introduction sets Spitzer's method of textual and stylistic interpretation in its historical context and sketches out the career of this supremely knowledgeable reader for whom knowledge was less important than understanding.

This up-to-date account of the novel's composition, structure, and achievement provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to make sense of the text. Professor Bellos explains how Balzac challenged prevailing nineteenth-century expectations of what novels should be like.

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday TimesWinner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation.David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec".His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete."Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

'Fascinating' Telegraph'Thorough and engaging' Washington Post'Lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely' New Yorker'[A] robust and readable polemic history' Financial Times'A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright ... Not just authors, but artists in many media, scientists, mathematicians and every one of us with our own unique individual faces ... should read this book' SpectatorThis is the story of a relatively simple idea - that authors have rights in the works they create - which through many strange and startling twists and turns has come to frame and to constrain a wide range of things we do, for the benefit not of the many, but of the few.Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties - making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws covering almost all products of human creativity.Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers' control of books. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century concentrated ownership of immaterial goods into very few hands.Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.

'Fascinating' Telegraph'Thorough and engaging' Washington Post'Lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely' New Yorker'[A] robust and readable polemic history' Financial Times'A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright ... Not just authors, but artists in many media, scientists, mathematicians and every one of us with our own unique individual faces ... should read this book' SpectatorThis is the story of a relatively simple idea - that authors have rights in the works they create - which through many strange and startling twists and turns has come to frame and to constrain a wide range of things we do, for the benefit not of the many, but of the few.On December 16, 2021, Sony Music Group announced that it had acquired the rights to the work of singer songwriter Bruce Springsteen. The sale price was over half a billion dollars. The reason why a catalogue of songs and recordings can now be sold for the price of a fleet of small aircraft is the whole subject of this book: copyright. Who Owns this Sentence? is a fascinating and comprehensive cultural, legal and global history of how intangible things can be owned, and reveals how copyright is no longer for the benefit of creators but has been transformed into an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.