Bøger udgivet af Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"e;A terrifically exciting account of [Slaght's] time in the Russian Far East studying Blakiston's fish owls, huge, shaggy-feathered, yellow-eyed, and elusive birds that hunt fish by wading in icy water . . . Even on the hottest summer days this book will transport you."e; -Helen Macdonald, author of H is for HawkA field scientist and conservationist tracks the elusive Blakiston's Fish Owl in the forbidding reaches of eastern RussiaI saw my first Blakiston's fish owl in the Russian province of Primorye, a coastal talon of land hooking south into the belly of Northeast Asia . . . No scientist had seen a Blakiston's fish owl so far south in a hundred years . . . When he was just a fledgling birdwatcher, Jonathan C. Slaght had a chance encounter with one of the most mysterious birds on Earth. Bigger than any owl he knew, it looked like a small bear with decorative feathers. He snapped a quick photo and shared it with experts. Soon he was on a five-year journey, searching for this enormous, enigmatic creature in the lush, remote forests of eastern Russia. That first sighting set his calling as a scientist.Despite a wingspan of six feet and a height of over two feet, the Blakiston's fish owl is highly elusive. They are easiest to find in winter, when their tracks mark the snowy banks of the rivers where they feed. They are also endangered. And so, as Slaght and his devoted team set out to locate the owls, they aim to craft a conservation plan that helps ensure the species' survival. This quest sends them on all-night monitoring missions in freezing tents, mad dashes across thawing rivers, and free-climbs up rotting trees to check nests for precious eggs. They use cutting-edge tracking technology and improvise ingenious traps. And all along, they must keep watch against a run-in with a bear or an Amur tiger. At the heart of Slaght's story are the fish owls themselves: cunning hunters, devoted parents, singers of eerie duets, and survivors in a harsh and shrinking habitat.Through this rare glimpse into the everyday life of a field scientist and conservationist, Owls of the Eastern Ice testifies to the determination and creativity essential to scientific advancement and serves as a powerful reminder of the beauty, strength, and vulnerability of the natural world.

In this brief, intense, gemlike book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Joseph Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of forty-eight short chapters-each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly twenty years)-Watermark associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character. Brodsky writes in Watermark that water "stores our reflections for when we are long gone." This reissued edition of one of Brodsky's most important titles, on the occasion of the late Nobel laureate's eightieth birthday, allows the reader to visit the canals of Brodsky's Venice and rediscover the reflection of the writer himself.

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career "e;He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."e; Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like "e;In My Eighteenth Year,"e; published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like "e;A Far Cry from Africa,"e; which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like "e;The Schooner Flight"e; from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender "e;Sixty Years After,"e; from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

A debut novel of love, narcissism, and ailing cattleIdiopathy (?d?'?p??i): a disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown.Idiopathy: a novel as unexpected as its title, in which Katherine, Daniel, and Nathan-three characters you won't forget in a hurry-unsuccessfully try to figure out how they feel about one another and how they might best live their lives in a world gone mad. Featuring a mysterious cattle epidemic, a humiliating stint in rehab, an unwanted pregnancy, a mom-turned-media personality ("e;Mother Courage"e;), and a workplace with a bio-dome housing a perfectly engineered cornfield, it is at once a scathing satire and a moving meditation on love and loneliness. With unusual verbal finesse and great humor, Sam Byers neatly skewers the tangled relationships and unhinged narcissism of a self-obsessed generation in a remarkable, uproarious first novel.

First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, Sylvia draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.

Four undocumented Mexican American students, two great teachers, one robot-building contest . . . and a major motion pictureIn 2004, four Latino teenagers arrived at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They were born in Mexico but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where they attended an underfunded public high school. No one had ever suggested to Oscar, Cristian, Luis, or Lorenzo that they might amount to much-but two inspiring science teachers had convinced these impoverished, undocumented kids from the desert who had never even seen the ocean that they should try to build an underwater robot. And build a robot they did. Their robot wasn't pretty, especially compared to those of the competition. They were going up against some of the best collegiate engineers in the country, including a team from MIT backed by a $10,000 grant from ExxonMobil. The Phoenix teenagers had scraped together less than $1,000 and built their robot out of scavenged parts. This was never a level competition-and yet, against all odds . . . they won! But this is just the beginning for these four, whose story-which became a key inspiration to the DREAMers movement-will go on to include first-generation college graduations, deportation, bean-picking in Mexico, and service in Afghanistan. Joshua Davis's Spare Parts is a story about overcoming insurmountable odds and four young men who proved they were among the most patriotic and talented Americans in this country-even as the country tried to kick them out.

First published in 1955, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle--that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues: Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "e;reasonable"e; modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writers acutely alert to where the sacred lives and to where it does not.

Now in eBook, the first full account of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's role in the struggle against Burma's military junta. Included is a new afterword by the author, which covers events from the time of the original publication in 1998 to Aung San Suu Kyi's release from house arrest in May 2002.

A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "e;sweet science of bruising"e; bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time.

Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book has been unavailable to the general reader since its original publication in the 1920s.Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her fellow modernists were thrilled by her originality, her "e;clear, flawless"e; language--to them she was "e;a rafter holding up . . . our uncompleted building."e; Equally forceful for subsequent generations, Observations was an "e;eye-opener"e; to the young Elizabeth Bishop, its poems "e;miracles of language and construction."e; John Ashbery has called "e;An Octopus"e; the finest poem of "e;our greatest modern poet."e; Moore's heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on multiculturalism, biodiversity, and individual liberty make her work uniquely suited to our times.Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers.

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for GodIn the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "e;Christ-haunted"e; literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "e;predicament shared in common."e;A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

Fourteen years ago, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved with her husband and daughter to Parma, a prosperous city in northern Italy. Searching for a way to find a place within a city that has existed since Roman times, she conducted a highly personal investigation of the often baffling, closed way of life she encountered. Mother Tongue explores Parma, largely through the lives of its women, some historical figures-Giuseppe Verdi, Correggio, the Renaissance badessa Giovanna Piacenza-and other extraordinary individuals. It is also a remarkable, probing evocation of an American life that has been tried and tempered by two very different societies. No other book evokes so poignantly and profoundly the role of food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life and, by reflection, in our own.

I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself-to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,an eelnet made by man for the eel fightingmy eyes have seen what my hand did.Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include the letters that Robert Lowell's wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that "e;art just isn't worth that much."e; Nevertheless, these poems are a powerful document of an impulsive love, and a moving record of Lowell's change from one life and marriage in America to a new life on new terms with a new family in England, rendered with the stunning technical power and control for which he was so celebrated. This new edition, which follows the 1973 edition, includes scans of the pages of Lowell's original manuscript, giving us a look into the brilliant and complicated mind of one of our most beloved and distinguished poets.

No one knows more about everything-especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling-than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world's great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: "Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all."Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author's personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters' most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book-another instant Waters classic."Waters doesn't kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent." -Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post"Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America's desolate freeway nodes-though they're brilliantly evoked-but of American fame itself." -Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

A crucial new voice explores sexuality, trauma, and the resilience of the Black woman in dayliGht, a debut poetry collection from spoken word poet Roya Marsh