She’s back, pimpin’ out notable new releases to place on your radar!
THE STALIN EPIGRAM by Robert Littell — The book is a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, and one of the few artists in Soviet Russia who daringly refused to pay creative homage to Joseph Stalin. The poet’s defiance of the Kremlin dictator and the Bolshevik regime reached its climax in 1934 when Mandelstam, putting his life on the line, composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a 16-line epigram and secretly recited it to a handful of friends and fellow artists. Would Stalin and his merciless state security apparatus get wind of this brazenly insulting poem? Would the poet’s body and spirit be crushed under the weight of the state if they did?
THE SIGN by Raymond Khoury — In Antarctica, a scientific expedition drops anchor for a live news feed. As the CNN journalist begins her report, a massive, shimmering sphere of light suddenly appears in the sky, enveloping the ship in luminous white light before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived — the entire event witnessed by an incredulous world audience. Meanwhile in a dusty bar in Egypt, a dozen men are lazily discussing the state of the world when the brilliant, glowing symbol on the television stops them cold. One man breaks out in a sweat, crosses himself repeatedly, and rushes out of the bar muttering the same phrase over and over again: It can’t be.
STEP BY STEP: A PEDESTRIAN MEMOIR by Lawrence Block — Before Lawrence Block was the author of bestselling novels, he was a walker. As a child, he walked home from school. As a college student, he walked until he was able to buy his first car. As an adult, he ran marathons until he discovered what would become a lifelong obsession — never mind if some people didn’t think it was a real sport — racewalking. By that time Block had already spent plenty of time walking through the city of New York. But racewalking ended up taking him all over the country, from New Orleans to Anchorage, from marathons in the punishing heat to marathons in the pouring rain. And along the way, he found that in life, as in writing, you just need to take one step after the other.
A DAY IN THE LIFE: ONE FAMILY, THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, AND THE END OF THE SIXTIES by Robert Greenfield — This is the story of an ideal marriage between two young, rich and extraordinarily beautiful members of the English upper class. Their union eventually degenerated into a hellish nightmare of drugs, decadence, madness and death as the psychedelic dreams of the 1960s gave way to the harsh realities of the 1970s, and as the international jet set collided head-on with the counterculture. The supporting cast of characters includes Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg; Mick and Bianca Jagger; Eric Clapton and Alice Ormsby-Gore; George Harrison and the Beatles; actresses Fiona Lewis, Sally Fiel, and Charlotte Rampling; film directors John Frankenheimer and Lucchino Visconti; LSD guru Timothy Leary and Joanna Harcourt-Smith; and many others.
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