So begins Guilt, Ferdinand von Schirach’s tense, riveting collection of stories based on real crimes he has known. In these brief, succinct tales, von Schirach calls into question the nature of guilt and the toll it takes—or fails to take—on ordinary people. In “The Illuminati,” the popular mean crowd at an all-boys’ boarding school wages a vicious attack against an outsider schoolmate, and ends up accidentally killing the boy’s beloved teacher. Attempting to hurdle through a midlife crisis, a housewife begins to steal trivial things no one will miss, an act that gives her a rush and staves off depression in “Desire.” And in “Snow,” an old man whose home is used as a way station for a heroin ring agrees to protect the identity of the lead drug runner, who receives his comeuppance in due course.

Compassionate and seen with the same cool, controlled eye that propelled Ferdinand von Schirach’s debut collection, Crime, onto best-seller lists, Guilt is a stunning follow-up from one of Germany’s finest new writers.

Ferdinand von Schirach was born in Munich in 1964. Since 1994, he has worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Berlin. Among his clients have been the former member of the Politburo Günter Schabowski, the former East German spy Norbert Juretzko, and members of the underworld.

A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers.

It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust). He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved (the Nobel Prize–winner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust).

Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts—the sentence.

Gass embraces the avant-garde but applies a classic standard of writing to all literature, which is clear in these essays, or, as he describes them, literary judgments and accounts.

Life Sentences is William Gass at his Gassian best.

William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of two novels, The Tunnel and Omensetter’s Luck, and eight books of essays, including A Temple of Texts, Tests of Time, and Finding a Form. Gass is a former professor of philosophy at Washington University. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, the architect Mary Henderson Gass.

“History of a Pleasure Seeker is an educated and refined novel, in which pleasures and gilded life are predominant.” – Italian Vanity Fair

“The operative word … is pleasure” – Publishers Weekly

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Richard Mason has produced an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s belle époque. Written in the grand tradition yet with a lightness of touch that is modern and original, History of a Pleasure Seeker opens in Amsterdam, moves to New York during the1907 financial crisis, and proceeds onboard a luxury liner headed for Cape Town. It is about Piet Barol, a young man with an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. Son of a dour administrator at Holland’s oldest university and a singing teacher who, before she died, gave him a thorough grounding in the arts of charm, Piet is hired by Europe’s leading hotelier as tutor to a troubled child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As the young man enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets—and soon finds his life transformed as he in turn transforms the lives of those around him. History of a Pleasure Seeker is a brilliantly rendered portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those seeking it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it, need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do those they love.

Reception and book-signing to follow.

“A wonderfully readable book. I kept going back to its charming pages drawn by the success story of this remarkably engaging young man.” Sheila Kohler, author of Love Child and Becoming Jane Eyre

Richard Mason was born in South Africa, educated in England and lives in New York. The author of three novels, his first, The Drowning People, published while he was still at Oxford, was an international best-seller and won the Grinzane Cavour Prize. In 1999, Mason started the Kay Mason Foundation, which awards scholarships to disadvantaged students in South Africa.

The series is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made online here, by calling 212-729-2910, or emailing olga.barskaya@mhc.cuny.edu. Macaulay is located at 35 West 67th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.
Contacts: Olga Barskaya, Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, 212/729-2910
Kathryn Zuckerman, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 212/572-2105 kzuckerman@randomhouse.com

He’s put in charge of the highest-profile criminal case in Thailand—an attempt to bring an end to trafficking in human organs. He sets in motion a massive sting operation and stays at its center, traveling to Phuket, Hong Kong, Dubai, Shanghai, and Monte Carlo. He draws in a host of unwitting players that includes an aging rock star wearing out his second liver and the mysterious, diabolical, albeit gorgeous co-queenpins of the international body-parts trade: the Chinese twins known as the Vultures. And yet, it’s closer to home that Sonchai will discover things getting really dicey: rumors will reach him suggesting that his ex-prostitute wife, Chanya, is having an affair. Will Sonchai be enlightened enough—forget Buddha, think jealous husband—to cope with his very own compromised and compromising world?

All will be revealed here, in John Burdett’s most mordantly funny, propulsive, fiendishly entertaining novel yet.

John Burdett is the author of A Personal History of Thirst, The Last Six Million Seconds, Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, and Bangkok Haunts. He divides his time between Thailand and France.

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In this grand and astonishing tale, Alec Wilkinson brings us the story of S. A. Andrée, the visionary Swedish aeronaut who, in 1897, during the great age of Arctic endeavor, left to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon. Called by a British military officer “the most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration,” Andrée’s expedition was followed by nearly the entire world, and it made him an international legend.

The Ice Balloon begins in the late nineteenth century, when nations, compelled by vanity, commerce, and science, competed with one another for the greatest discoveries, and newspapers covered every journey. Wilkinson describes how in Andrée several contemporary themes intersected. He was the first modern explorer—the first to depart for the Arctic unencumbered by notions of the Romantic age, and the first to be equipped with the newest technologies. No explorer had ever left with more uncertainty regarding his fate, since none had ever flown over the horizon and into the forbidding region of ice.

In addition to portraying the period, The Ice Balloon gives us a brief history of the exploration of the northern polar regions, both myth and fact, including detailed versions of the two record-setting expeditions just prior to Andrée’s—one led by U.S. Army lieutenant Adolphus Greely from Ellesmere Island; the other by Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who initially sought to reach the pole by embedding his ship in the pack ice and drifting toward it with the current.

Woven throughout is Andrée’s own history, and how he came by his brave and singular idea. We also get to know Andrée’s family, the woman who loves him, and the two men who accompany him—Nils Strindberg, a cousin of the famous playwright, with a tender love affair of his own, and Knut Fraenkel, a willing and hearty young man.

Andrée’s flight and the journey, based on the expedition’s diaries and photographs, dramatically recovered thirty-three years after the balloon came down, along with Wilkinson’s research, provide a book filled with suspense and adventure, a haunting story of high ambition and courage, made tangible with the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling in “the realm of Death,” as one Arctic explorer put it.

Alec Wilkinson began writing for The New Yorker in 1980. Before that he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that he was a rock-and-roll musician. He has published nine other books—two memoirs, two collections of essays, three biographical portraits, and two pieces of reporting—most of which first appeared in The New Yorker. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lyndhurst Prize, and a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He lives with his wife and son in New York City.

From our Q&A with the author:

Q: What made S. A. Andree’s expedition to the Arctic in 1897 unique?

A: Several things.  To begin with, he was the first person to attempt to fly to the north pole, and the first to fly in the Arctic.  The first to use the air as a means of discovery.  Beforehand, for hundreds of years, the Pole had been approached only by men in ships which the ice often carved up practically into splinters and on sledges and neither had taken anyone far enough.  In fact, the Pole was still so elusive that until the early Twentieth century no one even knew what was there.  (It is difficult to imagine that even as late as the early part of the last century, many scientists believed that the Pole was encircled by a temperate sea; its warmth is what caused icebergs to separate themselves from the larger body of ice).  

Andree was not so much an explorer in a line of explorers, using their methods and refining them, but a pioneer, the advance figure of a new means of approach.  A visionary.  Finally, he was the first explorer to head into the Arctic unencumbered by notions of the Romantic age, which had shaped thoughts and images and impressions of the Arctic for hundreds of years as a place of severe purity, an outpost of the god seeking world, a sanctified ground. 

Q: Who was Andree and what drew you to his story?

A: Andree was a Swedish engineer enraptured by the notions and practical means of flight.  He saw the upper atmosphere as a broad highway from the west toward the east, following the winds, over which balloons could travel with passengers and freight, faster than ships and to places ships and sledges could never reach.  He was a science-minded prophet, absorbed with imagining a future almost entirely different from the one his contemporaries held in mind.  Rather than spend months of arduous, even fatal toil trying to reach the Pole through the ice, he proposed flying to it in fewer than two days and settling for all time the mystery of what circumstances, what kind of territory, it encompassed.  

My wife found a photograph of his balloon in a small, obscure book on ballooning, which had been on the shelf at my friend William Maxwell’s house.  She took it down, saw the photograph, and said, “Have you ever heard of S.A. Andree?”  The photograph—of the balloon on its side in a white landscape—seemed an impossible image, as likely to be truthful as a photograph of an airplane on the moon.  I assumed it was a stunt, a Victorian prank.

(…read the rest)

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Pulses are racing across the UK over The Fear Index:

“A tour de force” —The Sunday Times

“An escapist thriller to rank with the best of them” —The Economist

“Reminiscent of everyone from Michael Crichton to Ian Fleming, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock” —Financial Times

“Unputdownable . . . I gorged myself, devouring his dystopian vision of free markets enslaved by a sinister artificial intelligence in one breakneck sitting.” —The Daily Telegraph

At the nexus of high finance and sophisticated computer programming, a terrifying future may be unfolding even now.

Dr. Alex Hoffmann’s name is carefully guarded from the general public, but within the secretive inner circles of the ultrarich he is a legend. He has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that predicts movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions. But one morning before dawn, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of his lakeside mansion, and so begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him.

Fiendishly smart and suspenseful, The Fear Index gives us a searing glimpse into an all-too-recognizable world of greed and panic. It is a novel that forces us to confront the question of what it means to be human—and it is Robert Harris’s most spellbinding and audacious novel to date.

Robert Harris’s previous books include Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, Conspirata, and The Ghost Writer (originally published as The Ghost). His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been a television correspondent for the BBC, political editor of The Observer, and a columnist for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He lives in a village near Hungerford in Berkshire, England.

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In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself.

Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.

Pico Iyer is the author of several books about cultures converging, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and, most recently, Abandon. His articles appear often in such magazines as Harper’s, Time, and the New York Review of Books. He lives in suburban Japan.