Laurie

A tribute to material culture, craftsmanship and skill in discerning the authentic from the schlock, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money is a fascinating foray into the world of antiques as well as a trove of unusual bits of Americana. It is both a brief history of collecting and a vivid look at the white-knuckle tension of auctions and the grueling labor of hauling hundreds of objects—from marbles to six-board chests—to weekend shows, setting up under tents, then packing it all up again. Stanton accompanied “Curt Avery,” the pseudonym of an itinerant antiques dealer, observing the phenomenal mix of research, luck, timing and the errors of others that allow a dealer to profit from an overlooked gem. Beyond the deals, Avery is simply passionate about the stuff. Always eager to educate customers about early American culture and handcrafts, he is never too exhausted by weekend shows to stop at a yard sale on the way home, because he just might find….

Why read a volume of business correspondence? When the business is The New Yorker and the correspondents are writers of the caliber of Elizabeth Bishop, William Maxwell, Katharine White and Howard Moss, any doubts about this project disappear. Far from being a gathering of sweepings meant to capitalize on Bishop’s popularity, these letters are a fascinating look at how a top literary magazine was run between 1934 and 1979. Even Bishop got rejections from The New Yorker. Those rejections are here, as are editors’ queries about lines, facts and punctuation, laying bare the editing process. As the poet and her editors got to know each other over the years, the letters grew more expansive and the personalities shine through, with a wit and warmth that’s still fresh and vivid. Today’s emails may be more efficient, but can emoticons ever achieve the charm of these old-fashioned missives?

Adler’s strategy for surviving the Holocaust (Theresienstadt, Buchenwald) was to remember everything, with the goal of bearing witness later. His literary approach to the material is to transform the unimaginable into a detailed chronicle of everyday life in Bohemia. The pressure to get everything down on paper before it’s lost results in a modernist stream-of-consciousness narrative with a powerful, compelling momentum. Like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this novel is a bildungsroman whose voice changes as its protagonist grows up. Yet Adler’s reality is one more familiar from Kafka (his narrator’s name is Josef Kramer) than from Joyce, Adler’s realism weighted with surrealism. Told in ten extended episodes, the story charts Josef’s life from age four, as he struggled to learn the “proper” ways of doing things, to his mid-thirties after release from a concentration camp where “proper” had lost all its former meanings. As Josef becomes more self-aware and worldly, so the recurrent motifs he observes—rules, authority, trains, the future—develop additional, often chilling, significance. Adler wrote a massive history of Theresienstadt, a book of philosophy, and five novels; no one genre, let alone single book, could contain all he’d experienced. Somewhere in Panorama’s continuum from normal to abnormal lies the point at which the world lost its mind; Adler has made a stunning work of art out of it.

This powerful first novel is the story of an unnamed Latin American country fresh from a decade of civil war. It’s a moving depiction of a traumatized society that retains its essential humanity; there’s brutality and betrayal, but also generosity and hope. To help people find their missing loved ones (or help them live with their losses), Norma—whose husband has disappeared—hosts a radio program devoted to naming names. Her own losses take surprising turns when a village boy comes to the capital and contacts her. Alarcón’s writing is strong and lyrical. He’s as adept at evoking the physical realities of jungle and city as he is at showing the psychological complexities of hurt, angry, and weary people. (See also Alarcón’s outstanding story collection,War by Candlelight.)

Overwhelmed by the loss of his parents and brothers in an accident, then by the loss of a second family to divorce, Petterson's protagonist drinks too much, gets into fights, can't work, and is frequently caught in an involuntary rush of memories. Petterson evokes the internal landscape of anguish beautifully, and when the spare, lyrical prose of Arvid’s emotional life has to give way to the demands of everyday reality, it's a shock—one often registered in brilliant images of mirrors and breaking glass, imagery Petterson uses to haunting effect. Petterson's quietly powerful novel of a man hitting bottom and starting to recover his life should encourage fans of Out Stealing Horses to investigate more of the work of this accomplished writer.

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 life. 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 completing 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, like Wesley she finds 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.”

First considered surrealist, then abstract expressionist, and later, pop, Joseph Cornell’s intricate shadow boxes and collages in truth belong to the category of the wonderful. What was he like, this unique artist who constructed miniature stage sets with images of ballerinas, birds, movie stars, and even Susan Sontag? This fascinating biography doesn’t try to explain the work, but presents the artist as a complicated, obsessive, painfully lonely man, one who lived nearly all his life with his mother; was devoted to his younger, disabled brother; who worked in his basement; never threw anything away; and suffered continual, torturous infatuations, even as what he created from his longing gained an audience, and he counted as friends the leading figures of the art world.

Sennett’s meditation on craft begins with a deep admiration and respect for the human hand. Working with mental capacities for focus, attention, and patience, the hand develops its innate capabilities into skills—and so does the mind. This may seem obvious, but Sennett expands on the point in fascinating ways. His approach is both historical and philosophical, drawing examples and analogies from Enlightenment ideas, Medieval goldsmithing techniques, early brick-working, weaving, and the fabrication of musical instruments. He looks at how techniques jump from one medium to another, with forms created in weaving taken up by boat builders and then by urban planners. What is the role of the craftsman in the digital age? While much design can be done virtually, Sennett argues that hands-on skills, developed through practice over time, and the satisfaction of work done well for its own sake, are as valuable as ever.

If you've read Mitchell's earlier, Man Booker-nominated novel, Cloud Atlas, then you know this young writer can do anything—Atlas was romance, history, mystery, science fiction, coming-of-age tale, all in the same book. Mitchell is also a writer of phenomenal energy, and his dialogue doesn't just crackle, it explodes (see Ghostwritten). The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is his fifth novel; Mitchell has matured. He's honed his prodigious talent and the craftsmanship is evident throughout this tale of 19th-century trade, love, loyalty and double dealing among the Dutch of the East India Company and the wary Japanese they do business with. The eponymous Jacob is an earnest, smart and upright clerk among earthy rogues and greedy superiors. Always trying to do the right thing, he repeatedly transgresses one rule after another. His predicaments are by turns funny, rueful and downright dangerous. He calls his superiors on their fraudulent trading figures. He falls in love with a Japanese woman. He stands up to a crew of British interlopers who plan to muscle in on Dutch markets in Japan. There's a lot of history here, well woven into the salty sailor talk, the poker games, and Jacob's bittersweet dreams of love.

How typical of his times was that most atypical genius, William Shakespeare? Jonathan Bate’s book, organized around the Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, is as much history as biography and literary criticism. Bate describes what young Will would have experienced growing up, and finds correspondences between the plays and Stratford events and personalities. He lays out the curriculum of the village grammar school Shakespeare attended and shows how the lessons in Latin rhetoric were transformed into some of the later, great speeches. He tracks down what Shakespeare read and the few books he probably owned. Bate’s research is deep and always apt. He has a gift for supplying the telling fact that puts a play in a new and intriguing light—and his chapter on “bawdy courts” is not to be missed.

On the basis of his journals, Thoreau was earnest, witty, philosophical, a little pedantic, a little righteous, an untiring autodidact, a loner but not a misanthrope. His days consisted mainly of taking long walks and writing them up. In all weather he hiked (or paddled or ice skated) from Concord to Walden, to the Great Meadows and up the north River. He explored seasons as well as places, and kept detailed records of plants and animals, temperatures, precipitation. Thoreau’s lists and facts are a curiously compelling accompaniment to his lyrical descriptions and apt, striking images. Truly “a man’s knowledge added to a child’s delight,” this journal is a vivid and immediate portrait of Thoreau and his world.

Anyone who loves books will feel an immediate affection for this one. Manguel is a warm and graceful writer who considers himself first and foremost a reader. The sheer joy of holding, opening, contemplating and recalling books comes through in everything he writes. His essays are as informative as they are enthusiastic. A Reader on Reading includes fascinating histories of the page, the period and the library. His political pieces on repression and censorship are powerful arguments for the essential role freedom of reading plays in every society. Manguel's extended looks at his favorite books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Don Quixote (he also loves detective novels) are erudite and insightful, but seem less literary criticism than heartfelt recommendations. Manguel, like every reader, has made these books his own. Reading is autobiography, Manguel says; the cumulative readings a book receives change it over time, bringing out its true character and richness.

Readers enchanted by Falconer’s first novel, The Service of Clouds, will be surprised, but not disappointed, by her second. Here, she channels the voice of the aging Captain Frederick Benteen (who really lived), a veteran of the Battle of Little Bighorn. This novel contains some stunning language—stunning for its powerful lyricism, for its moments of stillness, stunning for the brutality and coarseness it depicts. What was it like to be a soldier with Custer? Perhaps little different from what it’s like to be a soldier today: by turns tedious and depraved. On the warpath the men kept their sanity—when they kept it—by forging a special camaraderie based on their own brand of humor, dreams, and raw earthiness. “This is what you did before a battle…you had to fold your life like a jacket you would return to, and leave it…”

Marine biologist Julia Whitty’s her passion for all facets of oceanography (including myths, folklore, and the etymologies of sea creatures’ names) transcends any single project. This fascinating, beautifully evocative memoir of Whtty’s long relationship with the ocean is a heartfelt paean to an ecosystem she truly believes is the “deep blue home” of all earthly life. Deep Blue Home starts in 1980 on tiny Isla Rasa, a crucial breeding ground for gulls, terns, and storm petrels, moves to Newfoundland later in the decade and returns to Baja California in 2001. This chronicle covers seabirds, the history of whaling, overfished cod, the long lives of sea turtles (up to 200), the even longer lives of some amphibians (a quahog clam is pushing 400), the recent discovery of thriving ecosystems around vents in the ocean floor, and the heavy toll human activities have taken on the sea. Whitty’s timely book offers undeniable evidence of how essential the sea is to all life on this planet.

Like a South African Faulkner, Van Niekerk has written a stunning, densely layered narrative of race, class and frustrated dreams. Looking back from 1996, the paralyzed and mute Milla recalls her life on an Africaaner farm: She struggles to understand her bitter marriage, her son’s estrangement and, most of all, her complex relationship with Agaat. Over forty years ago Milla saved the black child from starvation and abuse and, but for the strictures of apartheid, would have continued to treat her as an adopted daughter instead of making her a servant. Now Milla’s sole caregiver, Agaat is capable and inscrutable, tender and petty. The two women know each other so intimately they communicate without speaking. They intuit each other’s needs and know how to inflict fresh pain, even as the wounds of the past continue to fester. Resentment, unspoken love and withheld secrets, make Milla’s last months as tense, dramatic and rich her life.