Booknotes

We are currently highlighting our display - Around the World with Books - featuring novels for travelers. This week we want to draw your attention to Russian classic fiction.

Though implausible, the most chortlingly funny book I’ve read in years is about graduate school. Elif Batuman - blogger, New Yorker writer, and madcap academic - is a disarming story-teller; her relentless enthusiasm for books is contagious. In the seven essays of THE POSSESSED: My Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15), Batuman recaps her immoderate enamorment with Russian literature and how this love leads her to Stanford’s Comp Lit department and a cohort which she likens to the spiraling madness of Dostoevsky’s Demons (a. k. a. The Possessed). Her love also takes her farther afield, to a mystifying summer in Samarkand studying Old Uzbek epics; to an International Tolstoy Scholars Conference and suspicions of foul play; and to the Neva River to investigate the curiously sinister backstory of an ice palace for The New Yorker. Familiarity with Babel and Bakunin aren’t prerequisites; Batuman’s book is a clever treatise on the reasons we read. - Lila Stiff

In July, she appeared (along with John Waters) on Michael Silverblatt's program "Bookworm" on KCRW, to offer her top ten list of Russians to read. Click here to see her selections on our website. The Possessed was one of our 2010 Summer Favorites and is discounted 20% to P&P members.

Click here to see more our booksellers' recommendations, sorted by regions of the world.

And it so happens that Penny du Bois is teaching a class this fall on Chekhov!

We are currently highlighting our display - Around the World with Books - featuring novels for travelers. This week we want to draw your attention to books by Nancy and Jessica Mitford, as well as to biographies written about them and their sisters.

The Mitford Sisters: Lives of Notoriety

The Mitford Sisters, descended from a long line of English aristocrats, achieved contemporary notoriety for their disparate politics and public feuds during the Second World War.

Nancy and Jessica (Decca) became well-known writers. Nancy wrote mostly novels, many of which were recently reprinted by Vintage, with introductions from a cast of contemporary writers. These introductions really add value to revisiting these classics. In her introduction to Nancy’s most autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love ($14.95), novelist Zoe Heller notes that, much like the sisters, Nancy’s writing often met with fervor: “Mitford’s fiction is strong meat. Readers who love it....tend to love it with a dotty passion; others, who escape the enchantment, are apt to despise it...”

Decca tended toward muckrakers and memoirs, writing several volumes of each. She was a prolific letter writer; and Peter Y. Sussman has collected her letters in Decca (Knopf, $35). Interest in the sisters and their lives over recent years have lead to frequent publication of biographies about the family, notably The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (W. W. Norton, $18.95), by Mary S. Lovell, and The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper Pernnial, $19.95), edited by Charlotte Mosley.

Come and look at our display of books in the store. Click here to read more about books by - and about - the infamous Mitfords.

Click here to see books - sorted by regions of the world - recommended by our booksellers.

Two weeks ago we highlighted our display - Around the World with Books - featuring novels for travelers. This week, a new book from Australia has just arrived, a graphic novel from Paris was recently released, and we wanted to remind you of an older favorite from the American South.

THE PAGES, by Murray Bail (Other Press, $14.95)

The old adage claims that the unexamined life isn't worth living. But just as there are many ways to live, there are countless ways to examine that living. In his elegant, beguiling novel, told with great economy and sly wit, the Australian author of Eucalyptus considers questions of how to live and how to think. Wesley Antill, a sheep rancher turned philosopher, sets out to write a theory of emotion, only to see his philosophy turn into memoir. He dies before he completes his work and his family calls in an academic to assess the manuscript. As Erica delves into the mind and life of a man she never met, she finds, as Wesley had, that life keeps interfering with her efforts to understand it at a peaceful remove. Love, strained and patched friendship, accidents, chance—these are some of the prisms Bail's narrative employs to test the viability of "philosophy as a natural force." - Laurie Greer

CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC, by Tony Horwitz (Vintage, $16)

Join journalist Tony Horwitz on the most unusual American road trip you can imagine. Horwitz journeys throughout the former Confederacy to investigate the lingering, persistent fascination with the Civil War—and shows us why we should pay attention. Among other adventures, he brunches with the Daughters of the American Revolution and enlists with a particularly zealous bunch of "hardcore" reenactors (the guys who even other Civil War reenactors think are crazy). Tony Horwitz is ever mindful of the subtext of race, rural poverty and the strange, powerful beast of public memory. The War Between the States is not as over as you might think. - Elizabeth Sher

ON THE ODD HOURS by Eric Liberge (NBM/ComicsLit, $14.95)

Co-published with the Louvre Museum, On the Odd Hours, continues NBM's exciting series centered on one of the great art museums. Bastien is a deaf student seeking an internship at the museum, when one of the night guards pulls him into assisting with a special duty that only he can accomplish. Bastien's job entails speaking with the pieces of art, giving them attention, and listening to their desires. Bastien thinks this sounds crazy, but he goes along with the idea and descends deep into a world of hidden knowledge. This is a great addition to the Louvre's series of graphic novels. Liberge's clean line work, and toned-down colors add a graceful effect to the tale - and if you ever wondered how a deaf / mute man might communicate in a graphic novel, then check this out, it's nothing short of amazing! - Adam Waterreus

If you are interested in graphic literature, you might join the Graphic Novel Book Group on the fourth Wednesday of each month. Click here to see more Graphic Literature recommendations.

Click here to see our booksellers' recommendations, sorted by regions of the world.