The philosopher's demise

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Robert Dessaix

"Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest novelists of Russia's Golden Age, spent forty years in love with the diva Pauline Viardot. He followed her and her husband around Europe until the day he died." "And yet, as far as we can tell, their connection was chaste. Both had passionate relationships with other people; Monsieur Viardot and Turgenev became great friends; and from time to time Turgenev lived amicably as part of the Viardot household." "What, then, did Turgenev mean by 'love', the word at the core of his life and work?" "Robert Dessaix has had his own forty-year relationship with Turgenev, first as a student of Russian in both Australia and Russia, then as a teacher and now as what he calls a 'close friend'." "Works such as Turgenev's Hunter's Notes and Fathers and Sons, still widely read around the world, were pivotal in transforming the Russian social landscape. However, as Dessaix follows Turgenev across Germany, France and Russia, he comes to see his life and work as, above all, an expression of a turning point in the history of love - the moment the Romantic became rational, and love unravelled into sentiment and eroticism."--Jacket.

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Alan Paul

Based on the Wall Street journal online column, "The expat life", Alan Paul tells his story of moving his family to Beijing and becoming an unlikely success as a blues musician there.

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Hooman Majd

A revealing look at Iran by an American journalist with an insider's access behind Persian wallsThe grandson of an eminent ayatollah and the son of an Iranian diplomat, now an American citizen, Hooman Majd is, in a way, both 100 percent Iranian and 100 percent American, combining an insider's knowledge of how Iran works with a remarkable ability to explain its history and its quirks to Western readers. In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, he paints a portrait of a country that is fiercely proud of its Persian heritage, mystified by its outsider status, and scornful of the idea that the United States can dictate how it should interact with the community of nations.With wit, style, and an unusual ability to get past the typical sound bite on Iran, Majd reveals the paradoxes inherent in the Iranian character which have baffled Americans for more than thirty years. Meeting with sartorially challenged government officials in the presidential palace; smoking opium with an addicted cleric, his family, and friends; drinking fine whiskey at parties in fashionable North Tehran; and gingerly self-flagellating in a celebration of Ashura, Majd takes readers on a rare tour of Iran and shares insights shaped by his complex heritage. He considers Iran as a Muslim country, as a Shiite country, and, perhaps above all, as a Persian one. Majd shows that as Shiites marked by an inferiority complex, and Persians marked by a superiority complex, Iranians are fiercely devoted to protecting their rights, a factor that has contributed to their intransigence over their nuclear programs. He points to the importance of the Persian view of privacy, arguing that the stability of the current regime owes much to the freedom Iranians have to behave as they wish behind "Persian walls." And with wry affection, Majd describes the Persian concept of ta'arouf, an exaggerated form of polite self-deprecation that may explain some of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's more bizarre public moments. With unforgettable portraits of Iranians, from government figures to women cab drivers to reform-minded Ayatollahs, Majd brings to life a country that is deeply religious yet highly cosmopolitan, authoritarian yet with democratic and reformist traditions--an Iran that is a more nuanced nemesis to the United States than it is typically portrayed to be.

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Homa Katouzian

Sadeq Hedayat is the most famous and the most enigmatic Iranian writer of the twentieth century. He was born in 1903 and he lived a troubled life which ended in 1951 with his suicide in Paris. His most celebrated novel, The Blind Owl, has made an impact far beyond Iranian literary circles and has drawn the attention of Western critics. But Hedayat's impact on the development of modern fiction and on the lives of generations of Iranian intellectuals derives also from his. Other works and from what was a unique approach to life and art in a rapidly changing society. This book is the first comprehensive study of Hedayat's life and works set against the background of literary and political developments in Iran over the first half of the twentieth century. Homa Katouzian discusses Hedayat's life and times and the literary and political circles with which he was associated. But he also emphasises the uniqueness and universality of those ideas. That have set Hedayat apart from other Iranian writers of the period and have given him a mystique that has been instrumental in his posthumous success.