Dandy Books

Dandy Books is a meme I began about books that are on my TBR list. They are mostly older books not necessarily from the current year. Hopefully I can make your list bigger! mwahahaha :D Just kidding. Well, a little bit :) Totally just copied and pasted that from the last Dandy Book ;)

Summer, sweltering, 1996. A book warehouse in western Massachusetts. A man at the beginning of his adult life -- and the end of his career rope -- becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. Most auspiciously of all, he runs across Itsik Malpesh, a ninetysomething Russian immigrant who claims to be the last Yiddish poet in America. When a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs surfaces -- twenty-two volumes brimming with adventure, drama, deception, passion, and wit -- the young man is compelled to translate them, telling Malpesh's story as his own life unfolds, and bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways.

Moving from revolutionary Russia to New York's Depression-era Lower East Side to millennium's-end Baltimore with drama, adventure, and boisterous, feisty charm to spare, the unpeeling of this friendship is a story of the entire twentieth century. For fans of Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Richard Powers, Amy Bloom, and Lore Segal, this book will amaze at every turn: narrated by two poets (one who doesn't know he is and one who doesn't know he isn't), it is a wise and warm look at the constant surprises and ineluctable ravages of time. It's a book about religion, love, and typesetting -- how one passion can be used to goad and thwart the other -- and most of all, about how faith in the power of words can survive even the death of a language.

A novel of faith lost and hope found in translation, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is at once an immigrant's epic saga, a love story for the ages, a Yiddish-inflected laughing-through-tears tour of world history forJews and Gentiles alike, and a testament to Manseau's ambitious genius.

Genova gives us a hauntingly accurate portrayal of a young woman's descent into Alzheimer's Disease from the prime of life and the loftiest of cerebral heights.
"I live for the capital; that's a fact, isn't it? And the best I can do with this fact is to like the situation. To believe it's meaningful. Otherwise I can't believe it's meaningful to die for." Thus blusters Dorrit Weger, the narrator of Ninni Holmqvist's savagely dystopian debut novel. At the age of 50, childless and her family "scattered to the winds like a dandelion clock," Dorrit has been shuttled from her cluttered farmhouse on the coast of Sweden to a pristine research facility, which operates, as one friend puts it, like "a free-range pig farm." There, in a sprawling complex -- topped by a transparent atrium, open to the passing clouds and the drumbeat of the rain -- human beings are tested, dissected, and eventually killed, their organs donated to needy residents in the "community" outside the unit gates.

The stories in this remarkable collection—including “An Anxious Man,” winner of the National Short Story Prize (UK)—are vibrant and gripping. James Lasdun’s great gift is his unfailing psychological instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. With forensic skill he exposes his characters’ hidden desires and fears, drawing back the folds of their familiar self-delusions, their images of themselves, their habits and routines, to reveal their interior lives with brilliant clarity.

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of

Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the full range of human passions. They rise to unexpected heights of decency or stumble into comic or tragic folly. They throw themselves open to lust, longing, and paranoia—always recognizably mirrors of our own conflicted selves.

As James Wood has written, “James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing . . . When we read him we know what language is for again.” This collection of haunting, richly humane pieces is further proof of the powers of an enormously inventive writer.

Find any of these interesting? Have you read any of them?