 The new book of essays from Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom. Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. Now, a new collection of Franzen's non-fiction brings fresh demonstrations of his vivid, moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a master noticer, social critic, and self-investigator. In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, the writer returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing from the reader. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. 'Farther Away' is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.
Review:
Praise for 'Freedom':
'Deeper, funnier, sadder and truer than a work of fiction has any right to be' Independent on Sunday
'Head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over' Sam Mendes, Observer, Books of the Year
'A cat's cradle of family life, and if the measure of a good book is its afterburn, 'Freedom' is a great book' Kirsty Wark Observer, Books of the Year '
I loved 'Freedom'. His acute observations of emotional faultlines, his dialogue and above all his wry humour are delightful' Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year
'Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own' David Hare, Guardian, Books of the Year
'No question about it: 'Freedom' swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls. There was no novel to touch it in 2010' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
'By the end of 'Freedom' you may feel you understand its protagonists better than you know anyone in the world around you' Nicholas Hytner, Evening Standard, Books of the Year
'The novel of the year. Its portrait of a marriage, luminously and wittily drawn against a backdrop of modern America, is as good as literature gets' Sarah Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year
Author Biography: Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and graduated from Swarthmore College. He has lived in Boston, Spain, New York, Colorado Springs and Philadelphia. His other novels are 'The Twenty-Seventh City', 'Strong Motion', 'The Corrections' and 'Freedom'. He is also the author of 'How To Be Alone', a collection of non-fiction, and 'The Discomfort Zone', a memoir. His fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in the 'New Yorker' and 'Harper's', and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by 'Granta' and the 'New Yorker'. He lives in New York City.
 In his essay on Tennessee Williams, Colm Toibin reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, Toibin examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals Toibin makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. "Educating an intellectual woman," Cheever remarked, "is like letting a rattlesnake into the house." In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Toibin illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.
Author description:
Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six previous novels, collections of short stories (Mothers and Sons, and The Empty Family) and many works of non-fiction. He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004), and longlisted for Brooklyn. The Master won The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2006), and Brooklyn won the Costa Novel Award. He currently lives in Dublin.
 From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, a dazzling collection of essays written with Siri Hustvedt's customary intelligence, wit and ability to convey complex ideas in a clear and lively way. Divided into three sections - Living, which draws on Siri's own life; Thinking, on memory, emotion and the imagination; and Looking, on art and artists - the essays range across the humanities and science as Siri explores how we see, remember, feel and interact with others, what it means to sleep, dream and speak, and what we mean by 'self'. The combination offers a profound and fascinating insight into ourselves as thinking, feeling beings.
Reviews:
'Provocative but often funny, encyclopedic but down to earth...Hustvedt's erudite book deepens one's wonder about the relation of body and mind.' -- Oliver Sacks
'Readers of Oliver Sacks will rate this book highly; as with Sacks, scientific knowledge and a powerful capacity for empathy are closely linked...It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' -- Hilary Mantel, Guardian
'She thinks her way through complex subject matter with the effortless clarity of a poised and sceptical outsider...a short book with an encyclopaedic breadth' -- Lisa Appignanesi, Independent
'She has an enviable ability to digest and reframe her discoveries into clear, accessible prose' -- Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph
'Fascinating...what gives the book its originality is that she wavers on the edge of the various disciplines, preferring her own imaginative, deeply personal reflections to the potential certainty that might be offered by doctors...Although a desire for clear-cut answers is understandable, Hustvedt suggests that this is often far from possible. And she leaves the reader thinking about his or her own bouts of illness in a thoroughly fresh way.' -- Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph
Author Biography: Siri Hustvedt's first novel, THE BLINDFOLD, was published by Sceptre in 1993 and her second, THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL, followed in 1997. Both were highly acclaimed and translated around the world, while part of THE BLINDFOLD was made into a film (Of Women and Magic, directed by Claude Miller). Her third novel, WHAT I LOVED, was published in 2003 to even greater acclaim and has been an international success; her next novel, THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN, followed in 2008. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories, and she is also the author of READING TO YOU, a poetry collection, and three collections of essays, YONDER, MYSTERIES OF THE RECTANGLE: Essays on Painting, and A PLEA FOR EROS, and a non-fiction work, THE SHAKING WOMAN: A HISTORY OF MY NERVES. Her most recent novel is THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Paul Auster.
Release Date:
June 2012
 Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one.
Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard.
In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician.
Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal.
This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.
Release Date: June 2012
 _In The Best Australian Essays 2011, Ramona Koval compiles a diverse and invigorating collection of the year's best non-fiction. Describing world-altering events as well as moments of introspection, and ranging from the provocative to the life affirming, these illuminating essays are certain to stimulate conversation for years to come. Previous contributors include Helen Garner, J.M. Coetzee, Tim Flannery, Inga Clendinnen, Robyn Davidson, Clive James, Chloe Hooper, David Marr, David Malouf, Robert Manne, Noel Pearson and many more.
 IN OTHER WORLDS: SF AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION is Margaret Atwood's account of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as 'science fiction'. This relationship has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestors of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three Ellman Lectures on 2010 - 'Flying Rabbits', which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; 'Burning Bushes', which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and 'Dire Cartographies', which investigates Ustopias -Utopia/Dystopia - including her own ventures into those constructions. IN OTHER WORLDS also reprints some of Atwood's key reviews and speculations about the form, or forms - for she also elucidates the differences - as she sees them - between 'science fiction' proper, and 'speculative fiction', not to mention 'sword and sorcery/fantasy' and 'slipstream fiction'.
y: Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty works, including fiction, poetry and critical essays, and her books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She has won many literary awards and prizes.
Promotional Information: * The new non-fiction from the inimitable Margaret Atwood - IN OTHER WORLDS is a must
 He raises hackles or receives resounding cheers, he's loved or hated but never ignored. Christopher Hitchens is possibly the most provocative writer of our time, fearless and forthright with no subject off limits. This volume of essays spans a remarkable four decades of writing. From early articles in the New Statesman, where he worked alongside writers such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, through to his pieces for Salon, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, these articles display his rare genius, indomitable wit and singular command of language. World figures from Clinton to Mother Teresa, Kissinger to Benazir Bhutto go under his unforgiving microscope. Issues from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan to Iran and literary musings on the leading writers of the last fifty years form the richest tapestry a reader could ask. 'Don't mince words' is the title of one of these pieces. Nor does he, nor has he over the course of a dozen books of which the most recent are the best-selling God is not Great and Hitch-22, and hundreds of articles of which the cream of the crop is here.
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