New York Review Books – serie

An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson's writings on the self and consciousness, naturalism and pan-psychism.Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly—in other words, he is a true essayist. Strawson also shares with Montaigne a particular fascination with the elastic and elusive nature of the self and of consciousness. Of the essays collected here, “A Fallacy of Our Age” (an inspiration for Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) takes issue with the commencement-address cliché that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. “The Sense of the Self” offers an alternative account, in part personal, of how a distinct sense of self is not at all incompatible with a sense of the self as discontinuous, leading Strawson to a position that he sees as in some ways Buddhist. “Real Naturalism” argues that a fully naturalist account of consciousness supports a belief in the immanence of consciousness in nature as a whole (also known as panpsychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s. Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.

The French film director Robert Bresson was one of the great artists of the twentieth century and among the most radical, original, and radiant stylists of any time. He worked with nonprofessional actors—models, as he called them—and deployed a starkly limited but hypnotic array of sounds and images to produce such classic works as A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Lancelot of the Lake. From the beginning to the end of his career, Bresson dedicated himself to making movies in which nothing is superfluous and everything is always at stake. Notes on the Cinematograph distills the essence of Bresson’s theory and practice as a filmmaker and artist. He discusses the fundamental differences between theater and film; parses the deep grammar of silence, music, and noise; and affirms the mysterious power of the image to unlock the human soul. This book, indispensable for admirers of this great director and for ­students of the cinema, will also prove an inspiration, much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, for anyone who responds to the claims of the imagination at its most searching and rigorous.

An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.   Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.   Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty  curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms to do what work there is to be done. When farmers and villagers greet her, she says nothing, and keeps walking. Once, she was a lighthearted girl from the best family in the valley; now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits, yearning for her mother to notice her, longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.Told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice, Crazy Genie is the second novel by Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie, together with her first novel, Free Day, confirms Cagnati's astonishing power as a writer.

Displaced after the fall of the Soviet Union, an indigenous family works to reclaim their former self-sufficient way of life in this lyrical work of anthropology and colonial Russian history.The work of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin has taken her to Alaska, where she worked with the indigenous Gwich'in people, and across the Bering Strait to Kamchatka, where she lived and studied among the Even community. Both regions, both peoples, had been on the front line of the Cold War and in its aftermath were placed in a new and anomalous relation to government authority. These vast and remote areas, long treated as colonies, now found themselves newly neglected and newly free. The family of the Even matriarch Daria, for example, known to readers of Martin's earlier book In the Eye of the Wild, decided to leave behind the urban existence enforced upon them in the Soviet period and return to the Icha forest to lead a self-sufficient life based on hunting, fishing, and gathering.The end of the Cold War brought the beginning of a new era in which the effects of global warming have proved ever more destructive. East of Dreams, like In the Eye of the Wild, mixes memoir and ethnography, as Martin looks at how indigenous peoples continue to take the measure of massive ongoing change. She also looks to them for new ways of understanding the relations between humankind, the human mind, and the larger world of nature, seen to exist on a vital continuum. East of Dreams offers a radical anthropological epistemology for our troubled times.

When The Sound of the One Hand came out in Japan in 1916 it caused a scandal. Zen was a secretive practice, its wisdom relayed from master to novice in strictest privacy. That a handbook existed recording not only the riddling koans that are central to Zen teaching but also detailing the answers to them seemed to mark Zen as rote, not revelatory.For all that, The Sound of the One Hand opens the door to Zen like no other book. Including koans that go back to the master who first brought the koan teaching method from China to Japan in the eighteenth century, this book offers, in the words of the translator, editor, and Zen initiate Yoel Hoffmann, “the clearest, most detailed, and most correct picture of Zen” that can be found. What we have here is an extraordinary introduction to Zen thought as lived thought, a treasury of problems, paradoxes, and performance that will appeal to artists, writers, and philosophers as well as Buddhists and students of religion.

On the envelopes of letters sent to a dear friend, the famed artist and writer Edward Gorey drew dozens of original illustrations—illustrations now collected in this volume along with marvelously playful selections from the correspondence, all never before seen by the public until now.From Ted to Tom will be published in the centenary year of Edward Gorey's birth.When Tom Fitzharris met Edward "Ted" Gorey in 1974, the two quickly struck up a friendship. Over the next year Gorey sent a total of fifty letters to Fitzharris. Every envelope Fitzharris received was illustrated by Gorey, and filled with surprises: typewritten letters with news and opinions from Gorey's life, handwritten note cards with unexpected quotes, sketches, inside jokes, and a host of other joyous miscellany.Assembled here for the first time, these envelopes and their contents deliver all the humor, imagination, gossip, and wonder that came with being Edward Gorey's pen pal.

In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. James's ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James's American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California, and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James's keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.