Elegy for Iris

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Catherine Texier

Breakup is the erotically charged chronicle of the tempestuous final months of an eighteen-year romantic and literary partnership, self-destructing in the aftermath of the ultimate betrayal. Fearlessly and courageously, Texier chronicles the end of the love as it is wrecked by infidelity and deceit in a literary tour de force reminiscent by turns of Marguerite Duras and Henry Miller. Texier writes in harrowing detail about the powerful sexual relationship she shared with her husband even during their breakup, how sex between them became a substitute for real intimacy, and how the fabric of a marriage (a shared cup of cafe au lait on a yellow table every morning, the memories of giving birth to two glorious daughters, of coediting their own literary magazine) is brutally dissolved.

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Sudhir Venkatesh

First introduced in Freakonomics, here is the full story of Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated one of Chicago's most notorious gangs The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrance into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment. When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student hoping to impress his professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack-selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure. In Hollywood-speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets Harvard University. It's a brazen, page turning, and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT-two young and ambitious men a universe apart.

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Anatole Broyard

"Nineteen forty-six was a good time - perhaps the best time - in the twentieth century. The war was over and there was a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing life. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had." Broyard made his first bid for happiness by moving in with a young painter, the difficult and challenging Sheri Donatti - a protegee of Anais Nin - who never wore underpants and who "embodied the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis." Broyard tells their story; by turns comic and poignant, while describing along the way his meetings with Caitlan and Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald, Maya Deren, William Gaddis, and other writers and artists just beginning their careers. He opens a bookstore on Cornelia Street ("If it hadn't been for books we would have been entirely at the mercy of sex. Books steadied us, they gave us gravity."). He goes to the New School and listens to Eric Fromm, Karen Horney and Meyer Shapiro ("I went to him as students, twenty years later, would go to India."). He tries going to a psychoanalysist ("I never gave him a chance. l had a literature rather than a personality."). In dazzling prose, Broyard captures with crystalline clarity the feeling of a particular time and place "when everything mattered, everything was serious." With economy, style, wit, flair, and astounding powers of observation, Broyard has left us a most remarkable memoir.

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Carol Felsenthal

Citizen Newhouse: Portrait Of A Media Merchant by Carol Felsenthal is a hard-hitting expose of the inner workings of a media empire, from its early days at the Staten Island Advance to the latest shake-up at the New Yorker. This unauthorized investigative biography paints an intriguing portrait of Si Newhouse and his family dynasty by revealing the machinations of these atypically elusive media moguls within the high-stakes world of today's entertainment conglomerates. The book opens in the manner of a classic American family saga, with Si's father, Sam Newhouse, who quit school after the eighth grade, as paterfamilias. Having concocted a formula for creating newspaper monopolies in small metropolitan markets, be built the huge family fortune. Si took over the magazine portion of the vast empire, while his brother, Donald, managed the family's newspaper and cable television holdings. Citizen Newhouse spotlights the life and career of Si Newhouse - one of America's most powerful yet unexamined figures. Felsenthal shows how his quirky behavior as a shy and awkward outsider has had a farreaching impact on the properties he owns, affecting - and in the opinion of some, compromising - the quality of the Newhouse "product."