The paradox of love

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Anita Brookner

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory.' Elizabeth and Betsy are old school friends. Born in 1948 and unready for the sixties, they had high hopes of the lives they would lead, even though their circumstances were so different. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth, married to the safe, older Digby is relieving the boredom of a cosy but childless marriage with an affair. Betsy seems to have found real romance in Paris. Are their lives taking off, or are they just making more of the wrong choices without even realising it?

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Nicolas Abraham

Despite Nicolas Abraham's fame as a psychoanalyst and philosopher, few people are aware of the direct relevance of his work to issues of poetics and literary theory. The fourth volume of his posthumous publication, Rhythms explores the relationship between the interpretation of texts and psychoanalysis. The three essays offer a new approach to the problem of literary creation and a psychoanalytic definition of temporality. In contradistinction to both Husserl and Heidegger in the German tradition, and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in France, Abraham links the emergence of human time to a form of poetic creation. He identifies in rhythm a previously unexplored mode of inquiry elicited by poetry and by what may be called one's life as a work of art. In Rhythms, Abraham develops a systematic theory of the poetic position of writers, readers, and psychoanalysts.

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Hester Vaizey

Telling the stories of mothers, fathers and children in their own words, Vaizey recreates the experience of family life in Nazi Germany. From last letters of doomed soldiers at Stalingrad to diaries kept by women trying to keep their families alive in cities under attack, the book vividly describes family life under the most extreme conditions.

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Michael C. Fitzgerald

Picasso's stature as the foremost artist of this century is inseparable from his profound engagement with the art market. In making modernism, Michael C. Fitzgerald illustrates how Picasso enhanced his reputation in the art world - and in so doing transformed that world - by adroitly orchestrating the commercial presentation of his work. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence between Picasso and his dealers and museum curators. Fitzgerald follows the artist from his search for a gallery in Paris through his acceptance by the renowned dealers Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein to the acclaimed 1939 retrospective of his work at the museum of modern art in New York. As a leader of the avant-garde, Picasso was a model for other artists, and Fitzgerald's analysis of his commercial strategies reveals the modern-art market to be no mere site of exchange but the dynamo of the art world, where critics, collectors, and curators join with artists and dealers to confer artistic standing. Rich in anecdote and observation, Making Modernism is a groundbreaking book, one that changes our view of the artist's studio, the dealer's gallery, and the world's great museums - indeed, our view of art itself.