Bøger udgivet af PAUL DRY BOOKS

"A granular, meditative, and beautiful portrait of a fascinating life."--Booklist"Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life."--William Giraldi, author of The Hero's BodyThis powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a "backward boy" in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another.Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart's searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of "Dark-Land" in Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a "conversion" in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic.Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.

"In this brilliant analysis of the coming to be of Strauss, Plato, and Nietzsche as philosophers and poets, Laurence Lampert reaches new heights and plumbs new depths. An extraordinarily rich and insightful book, thoughtful and beautiful in its execution. A masterful performance by a thinker and author at the height of his power."--Michael Allen Gillespie, author of Nietzsche's Final Teaching Six essays from a well-known Nietzsche scholar on Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche, and the history of western philosophy In The Beijing Lectures: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche, Laurence Lampert presents what he calls the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche. This "new" history takes seriously Nietzsche's claim that "the greatest thoughts are the greatest events." To put it even more assertively that "genuine philosophers are commanders and legislators."Beginning with Leo Strauss and how his recovery of the philosophers' art of writing can change our way of viewing the history of philosophy, Lampert then focuses on six Platonic dialogues--Protagoras, Charmides, Republic, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium. These, he believes, mark a turning point in Western history and set the pattern for the whole Western philosophic tradition. In the third and final section, Lampert considers Nietzsche in order to show how he revolutionized our understanding of the world, and in particular why it is appropriate to view him as "the first comprehensive ecological philosopher."

In forty short and charming chapters, a former "great books" teacher from New York City adapts to his new role on a small Southern farm by observing the natural world and drawing connections to his reading life."Erudite and engaging."--BooklistIn late middle-age, Harry Kavros and his wife, Peri, pack up all the household belongings that will fit into their car and leave Manhattan, bound for their new home on a twenty-two-acre patch of pine-filled land in Hillsborough, North Carolina. As Mr. Kavros spends long hours clearing the acreage, not for farming but for sightlines, he muses about the land, the exhausting work it requires, and the rewards the effort offers. Every task he undertakes prompts him to recall and meditate over scenes from his reading life. From the great Greek epics to the writings of Frederick Law Olmstead on landscape, to Thoreau, to modern poets, to a veritable treasury of references, for the author life in the country is also life in among his reading.Witty and perceptive, Observations of an Accidental Farmer--and a Mindful Reader is about cultivation, of one's land and one's life.

"Wes Davis' fast-paced tale of wartime sabotage reads more like an Ian Fleming thriller than a mere retelling of events."―Wall Street Journal"The story unfolds with the rich characterization and perfectly calibrated suspense of a great novel. It can be hard at points to remember the book is actually a work of nonfiction."―Christian Science MonitorThe Ariadne Objective is the extraordinary story of the Nazi occupation of Crete told from the perspective of an eccentric band of British gentleman spies. These amateur soldiers―writers, scholars, archaeologists―included Patrick Leigh Fermor, a future travel-writing luminary; John Pendlebury, a pioneering archaeologist whose walking stick concealed a sword; Xan Fielding, who would later translate books like Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes into English; Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter; and W. Stanley Moss, who would write up his account of their exploits in Ill Met By Moonlight (Paul Dry Books, Inc.).Alongside Cretan partisans, these British intelligence officers carried out a daring plan to sabotage Nazi maneuvers, culminating in a high-risk plot to abduct the island's German commander. Wes Davis presents the scintillating story of these legends in the making and their adventures in one of the war's most exotic locales.Includes 17 black and white photographs.

"Among the finest poets of his generation."--Richard Wilbur, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry"Like Frost before him, Brock has the power to make earthbound words take flight."--Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other PoemsThe title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, After, works in two ways. Many of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father, who was also a poet. And many are in some way "after"--as in, in the manner of--other poems or works of art. Such texts, often called "versions" or "imitations," have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson's words, "a kind of middle composition between translation and original design."Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but distinct tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it's a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets owe debts to other poets as surely as each of us does to those who raised us, and After is a partial account of such personal and poetic inheritances.

"A well-rendered portrait of an intense medical life devoted to equally intense research."--Kirkus Reviews"This is a wonderful account of a nonpareil physician-scientist and, in recent decades, a creator of drug therapies and a lifesci macher. Carl Nathan illuminates his memoir with great storytelling and deeply considered reflections (regularly summed up in pithy 'life lessons') on how his person and his personal journey prepared, and propelled, him. Like Carl, I am a scientist whose asthma and serial pneumonias meant swapping a lot of childhood companionship for finding out young how rewarding adventures of the mind can be. An Arrow's Arc belongs on your bookshelf right next to Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"--Professor K. Barry Sharpless, PhD, Scripps Research Institute, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in ChemistryAs a physician and renowned medical researcher, Carl Nathan has been at the forefront of discoveries in microbiology and immunology. In An Arrow's Arc, he reflects on how his youthful experiences and passions moved him toward medicine and science, and how his five decades as a doctor and scientist have, in turn, shaped him.As a child, Nathan struggled with severe asthma, and he saw breast cancer take his mother's life during his senior year of college, on the very same day he was accepted to Harvard Medical School. These experiences, among others, fueled his abiding interest in medicine and his determined efforts to understand how the immune system duels with cancer and infectious diseases.While a half-century dedicated to his patients and to biomedical research provided Dr. Nathan with a hard-won biological perspective on death's role in life, he's known since he was young that he could die at any time. He calls this a liberating thought, a gift, a call to action. Full of warmth and wisdom, An Arrow's Arc is a beautiful reminder to all of us "that now is the time to love, to wonder, and to build."

"Music and the Idea of a World explores the bond between music and world by reflecting on great musical compositions and works by great thinkers from antiquity to the present. World, here, has several meanings. It is the natural world or cosmos, the inner world of feeling and thought, world history, and the world of tones (the musical universe). The book is intended for philosophic-minded readers who are fascinated by music and music lovers who enjoy thinking about the philosophic questions that music raises."--

When thirteen-year-old Wilder and his friends Sunny and Corndog go down to the river for a horse ride, something panics Corndog into running away. Wilder and Sunny reluctantly return home without him, and the next day a strange man comes to Wilder's house looking for Corndog. He seems to know an awful lot about the small, red-haired, foster kid's past. So Wilder, Sunny, and another friend, Big, set out to find Corndog before someone else does. If they succeed, can the group of friends convince Corndog to trust the world enough to rejoin it?

"Originally published at Ludzie bezdomni in 1900"--Title page verso.

"Ear Training gathers thirty essays and reviews by one of America's most playful critics. Known for his long career as a professor and writer of critical biographies, for this collection William H. Pritchard has selected some of his favorite shorter pieces on a wide range of topics. United by Pritchard's philosophy of literature, which he calls "ear training", pieces on subjects from John Updike to Emily Dickinson to Frank Sinatra to the soap opera The Young and the Restless urge us to consider how literature sounds and how a sense of play in our approach to the world can uncover buried truths and meanings. Also included are the series of letters Pritchard wrote to his students in the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, meant to offer commentary on four English writers--Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Throughout the collection Pritchard urges the reader to engage with texts he has found particularly delightful and illuminating, taking us on a tour of the world as he has heard it through poetry, prose, music, and the voices of people he has known."--Amazon.com.

"If the LOLSOB emoji could write verse that both sings and stings, the result would be Satan Talks to His Therapist."--Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman "Balmain treads that fine line between comedy and tragedy in poems graced by telling details, surprising turns, and a keen sense of the absurd ... Satan Talks to His Therapist is a serious book that's very funny, and Melissa Balmain's gift is being able to tilt toward humor without losing the ache beneath the laughter."--Literary MattersIn Satan Talks to His Therapist, Melissa Balmain explores the lighter side of dark times. Playful yet poignant, her poems perfectly capture our human fallibility and comedic sense of importance. The collection begins with "On Looking at an MRI Cross-Section," in which Balmain peeks inside her own skull to consider the jumble of thoughts and memories harbored there. After this introduction to the poet's inner world, the book divides into three sections: Spiraling Down, In Limbo, and Climbing Out. The poems in this lyrical descent and ascent are about climate change, social media, pandemics, politics (sexual and otherwise), parenthood, consumerism, aging, loss, and ills, both physical and societal. Balmain writes in meter and rhyme, and she uses traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles, terza rima) as well as ones she's coined for the moment. The poems in Satan Talks to His Therapist provide clarity and comedy in a time that feels anything but clear or comic, and they hint at the consolations of art, kindness, maturity, persistence, love, and, of course, humor.

"Joe Sachs is a national treasure. His brilliant translations from the Greek, spanning works from Homer to Aristotle, have long enriched scholars and students alike. He crowns those achievements with this exquisite rendering of two of Plato's most beautiful dialogues, with an introduction that evidences his deft ability to drill down to 'the thing itself.'"--Thomas Sheehan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Stanford University The Phaedrus and Symposium are Plato's two dialoguesabout Eros--that is, desirous longing. In these new translations byformer St. John's College tutor Joe Sachs, the reader imaginatively becomes a>While both dialogues are about love, they differ in intriguingand important ways. The conversation of the Phaedrus takes place in thecountryside and that of the Symposium in Athens. In the Phaedrus onlySocrates and Phaedrus are present; in the Symposium many participate inthe drinking party. But in both, Socrates presents singularly abiding images: The winged horses and chariot in the Phaedrus; the ladder of love in theSymposium. These compelling images attract and move the reader to ask>The interplay of the two texts may spark an unfolding in the reader's thinkingabout love, but for the dialectical motion that mustoccur between the speeches and between the lines of Plato's texts, the readermust do the work, provoked, invited, and assisted by what they contain. The context for our thinking includes inone case the subject of tragedy and comedy, in the other the nature of rhetoricand writing, but it is philosophy, and not poetry or politics, that persistentlyclaims the center of attention. The dialogues themselves seem as different asnight from day, as urbane wit from rustic charm--but do they point to opposingor converging attitudes toward erotic love?

"Dry's keen visual sensibility propels her graceful and intriguing chronicle . . . She introduces James Perry Wilson, a master diorama landscape painter, and analyzes the power of those mesmerizing museum displays and her own wondrously soothing memoryscapes. Dry has channeled the 'magical presence' of both into drawings, photographs, and her own small dioramas, visual works that deepen this unique and evocative inquiry into perception and 'how images work for us.'"--BooklistWhen Constance Dry began to experience spontaneous mental images brought on by chronic migraine disease, she termed them "memoryscapes." These memoryscapes were inspired by the landscape of Circle Z Ranch where Dry has spent time since childhood, and they have helped alleviate the pain of migraine. In In Search of Circle Z, Dry explores the relationship between these unbidden images and habitat dioramas, specifically those in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through a series of photographs, drawings, and mini-dioramas, she illustrates their similarity and explains how her internal imagery works to provide a place of refuge from pain and a source of new experiences each time they are viewed.Illustrated with color photographs throughout.

"The essays in Politics, Nature, and Piety take up the central question of political philosophy: What is the good life, and what place do nature, politics, and piety have in that life? 'The unity of the essays,' Alex Priou writes in his introduction, 'lies in the various tensions explored: between ancients and moderns, religion and philosophy, magnanimity and prudence, justice and friendship, and, most fundamentally, spiritedness and the intellect.' Laurence Berns proves an excellent guide for beginning one's study of the great books of political philosophy, from Plato to the present." --Publisher's descriptio

"Frank "Ace" Renzetti has been installing carpet for forty years, working the upscale neighborhoods of Philadelphia's Main Line. At a time when he should be considering retirement, Frank takes on one of the biggest-and strangest-jobs of his career. The house is owned by a volatile and eccentric divorcee, its rooms teeming with weary contractors, many of whom have been on the job for months. A pampered dog regularly sabotages everyone's work, and the general contractor patrols the site as if it's the border. Amid this week-long circus, Frank's body starts to fail him, and when he loses both his helpers to a drug bust, he is left to complete the job by himself on one good leg. Desperate, he poaches a day-laborer from his competitor and finds that the young, paperless El Salvadoran has a way with carpet and just might be the future of the trade. As the physical challenges of the job mount, the fate of Frank's business, and, with that, the fate of his blue-collar genius, become increasingly uncertain. Wry and insightful, Rug Man is a tribute to a bygone era of craftsmen whose work was the source of their greatest suffering but also their greatest pride"--

A moving twelfth collection from New Formalist poet Mark Jarman.

Essays on writers from Pablo Neruda to Sylvia Plath allow poet and essayist David Mason to explore the many changes we experience during a lifetime.

Thirty-eight illuminating essays, reviews, and lectures by a legendary teacher in the Great Books program at St. John's College

Arden thinks the world has ended when her parents decide to trade their large house (where she has her own purple bedroom with a window seat!) for a small backyard guesthouse, built like a wooden boat. The worst part: it's not big enough for their dog to come along. Things get even worse when her best friend moves away and a pandemic shuts school, leaving Arden's family quarantined in very little space. Arden just wishes life would go back to normal. As neighbors leave town, shut themselves away, and get sick, their pets are left behind, and Arden becomes the safe-keeper of all the abandoned animals. When the pandemic touches home, Arden must use all her creativity and courage to help those she loves-family, friends, and dogs!

"Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, ... author and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish girl living in Hungary during World War II"--Page 4 of cover.