Bøger udgivet af Counterpoint

Overwhelmed by debts despite the success of his Pacific Northwest restaurant, Jeremy Papier agonizes over turning control over to a family friend who would bail him out of his troubles despite the firm objections of his chef, a situation that is further complicated when his eccentric father involves him in an urban murder mystery.

A debut anthology of short fiction captures the lives of a group of women as they grapple with the complex mysteries of sex, intimacy, adulthood, love, family, faith, and reality.The women in Victoria Lancelotta's debut collection of stories live in the space between memory and desire, where what they see around them and what they know to be true can be vastly different things. They live in a world where time is malleable, stones are food, the body is an altar, the confessional is a difficult paradise; and the family is the last place to look for home. Edgy, brilliant, and disturbing, Here in the World presents us with short stories about women who, however flawed or compromised, are fierce and unforgettable.

This is a novel about movie love. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Harriet is a woman so saturated with the movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she forms a Friday night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named Dinah for Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon this quiet backwater, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the faded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. They are Harsh Reality. With them come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness and sudden death. But what chance does real life stand when we can watch movies instead? What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is an easy option? In this comedy of secondhand desire, movies and movie lovers come first.

As the author of the Word Court columns that appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Wallraff is one of America's most widely read and beloved writers on language. Now, in Your Own Words, Wallraff guides the reader through a variety of intriguing questions about English-and simultaneously explains how you, too, can be a language expert. On one level, Your Own Words is about dictionaries, stylebooks, usage manuals, visual dictionaries, thesauri, writing guides, and the Internet: the strengths and weaknesses of these and other language- reference sources, where the sources disagree, and the ways in which even educated people misunderstand them. On a deeper level, however, Your Own Words is about how to make good form your own-to reach your own conclusions and develop a style that expresses you at your best. Illuminated throughout with anecdotes and selections from the Word Court columns, Your Own Words accomplishes what very few books on usage even attempt: It shows everyone with an interest in words-amateur, professional, student, or graduate -how to think about what goes into good style.

Here are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, and linguistics, stories of the Anasazi, the "old ones" of the south-western desert, of the great explorers, eccentrics, dreamers, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. "There's no end to the list, of course, " Connell says, "because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard."

From one of our most daring writers comes this intimate and seductive book: a working journal of pregnancy that was both a Lambda Literary Awards finalist and a Village Voice pick for Best Books of 2000. Maso chronicles with great tenderness and awe the months of her pregnancy, from its charmed conception through the auspicious arrival of Rose.

Twenty years ago Frederick Barthelme began publishing stories that turned readers' expectations on their heads. In The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, and elsewhere he published story after story that confounded the prevailing literary assumptions, treating our very ordinary lives with a new kind of careful and loving attention and imagination. He wrote intimate, funny, odd, detailed, laugh-out-loud stories about relationships that almost happen and ones that almost don't, about the ways we look at each other when we mean things we cannot bring ourselves to say.Before there were slackers, or kids in parking lots, or stories that took the mundane seriously, there were these prescient stories by Frederick Barthelme. He took a post-ironic stance before the post-ironic had a name. He took fiction where few were then willing to go, took as his subject small romances, private fears, suburban estrangement, office angst, cultural isolation, apparently insignificant humiliations, and the growing information surplus (CNN is a sociological novel, he once remarked). He wrote--and continues to write--with a laser-surgery precision that stuns and delights both readers and critics. If he arrived at the new-literature party a little earlier than the other guests, he has not left early, and is thus well represented in The Law of Averages, with old and new stories side by side, ready to give up their abundant pleasures.

Peter Wexler is 40 and obsessed with what's wrong in the world, including his marriage. Deciding that a change of scenery might help, Peter leaves his wife and their son in search of a resolution to the confusion, estrangement, fatigue, and adultery that have confounded his life.

Irish-American writer Maeve Brennan, who died in 1993, is justly admired for her stories and articles for the New Yorker, and this novella - written in the 1940s but not published until 2001 - gives added evidence of her gifts. The story has a wrenching sadness that leaves a mark on the reader, its tale of rejection and loneliness almost too hard to bear. The title - as spare and forthright as the writer's style - is exactly right At 16 Anastasia left her home in Dublin to follow her mother to exile in Paris. Now, six years later, she is coming home to her grandmother only to find that that word is denied to her as she is asked how long she intends to stay. A meticulous evocation of the old lady, her equally aged servant and the preserved past of their house creates an atmosphere of musty despair. Increasingly dislocated from ordinary life, Anastasia persists in her hope that she will be welcomed and loved. She rebuffs suggestions that she should make her life elsewhere and refuses to acknowledge her grandmother's polite coldness. As Anastasia begins to lose hope Brennan demonstrates her gift for conveying the deadliness of spite without exaggeration. In a chilling few lines she shows the girl withdrawing from normal life: 'Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people round it.' Anastasia wants to be loved in that world with walls around it but she is locked out. (Kirkus UK)

Sent away from home for the first time, Neil Pritchard spends the summer of 1962 with his Aunt Nessie on the Solway Firth. Neil soon becomes involved with Euan Bone, a young Scottish composer. Suddenly, however, Neil is expelled from his Eden - with devastating consequences for all.

For fifty years, Peter Brook's opera, stage, and film productions have held audiences spellbound. His visionary directing has created some of the most influential productions in contemporary theater. Now at the pinnacle of his career, Brook has given us his memoir, a luminous, inspiring work in which he reflects on his artistic fortunes, his idols and teachers, his philosophical path and personal journey. In this autobiography, the man The New York Times has called "the English-speaking world's most eminent director" and The London Times has named "theater's living legend" reveals the myriad sources behind his lifelong passion to find the most expressive way of telling a story. Whether in India's epic Mahabharata or a stage adaptation of Oliver Sask's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, South Africa's Woza Albert or The Cherry Orchard, Brook's unique blend of practicality and vision creates unforgettable experiences for audiences worldwide.