Best European Fiction 2010

Edited by Aleksandar  Hemon with a Preface by Zadie Smith

Dalkey Archive Press inaugurates a planned series of annual anthologies of European fiction with this impressive first volume, which gathers short stories from 30 countries. Readers for whom the expression "foreign literature" means the work of Canada's Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia). Even tiny Liechtenstein is represented, by a correlatively tiny but pungent story, "In the Snow," about two teenage boys hiking to another town that promises great entertainment. The stories are arranged alphabetically by home country. The first, then, is from Albania, a piece called "The Country Where No One Ever Dies," a beautifully composed and marvelously entertaining expression of Albanian cultural eccentricities. Certainly not all stories are conventional in construction or easy to decipher, but every piece benefits serious fiction lovers' reading experience. The book contains an insightful preface by novelist Zadie Smith, who overviews the included stories' commonalities and differences, as well as an introduction by Bosnian writer and volume editorHemon, author of the highly acclaimed novel The Lazarus Project (2008) and now a Chicago resident, who eloquently insists that the short story is hardly a moribund literary form.

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You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation

 By Susannah Gora
Concentrating on the making of such seminal films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Say Anything, Home Alone, and, of course, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Gora's celebration of writer-director John Hughes (1950–2009) tends to be exhaustive and often exhausts. Gora cites the New York Times' A. O. Scott on Hughes he "was our Godard", and Roger Ebert's characterization of him as "the philosopher of adolescence" to orient her essay exploring what she calls cine-sociology, "the concrete sociological impact that movies can have on our lives." She discusses the origin of the sobriquet Brat Pack, offers biographical portraits of Hughes and many of the actors most associated with his movies, discusses the music of the so-called Brat Pack films (it was a crucial factor in their success), and considers how the Brat Pack films changed a generation. Although probably too self-important for its own good, this is still a must for Hughes admirers and students of American pop culture. Check Catalog

How to Read Music

By Helen Cooper

Even if you have never read a note of music before, this book will teach you how--easily and quickly. If you could once read music but have forgotten how, this book will quickly refresh your memory. Reading music will come easy to you once again. Contains every term and sign you are likely to come across when studying music.

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Fortune's Fool: Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis

By Fred Goodman

The compellingly told story of the Seagram heir's music-business adventures at Universal and Warner Music, and what went terribly wrong.Music journalist Goodman (The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, and Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce, 1997) takes a deep look at a chaotic couple of decades in the embattled industry, in which Edgar Bronfman Jr. played a central role. Scion of an iron-fisted Canadian distilling clan who dominated the global liquor business, and Bronfman, enamored of show business from youth, tinkered in movie production and songwriting before setting his sights on an executive role in entertainment. In 1995, Seagram acquired 80 percent of MCA from Japanese electronics firm Matsushita. The music division was renamed Universal Music Group and became the biggest label unit in the world with the 1998 acquisition of PolyGram. But Bronfman's ambitions were mocked after the 2000 purchase of Seagram by Vivendi led to near-bankruptcy, thanks to profligate spending by the French firm's chairman Jean-Marie Messier. Bronfman next took control of Warner Music Group, once the U.S. market leader, in a 2004 purchase engineered with private-equity money. Rocked by mismanagement during the '90s, Warner's fortunes continued to sink in the new millennium, as online piracy exploded, CD sales plummeted and the Internet and mobile bonanzas envisioned by Bronfman never materialized. Goodman tells the story briskly, with total command of both the financial and aesthetic elements of his tale. Especially engrossing is his account of Warner's catastrophic decline under corporate hatchet men Robert Morgado and Michael Fuchs. The executives who played key roles in the latter-day fortunes of Universal and Warner: canny vet Doug Morris, rap-savvy combatants Jimmy Iovine and Lyor Cohen, are all sharply delineated. Bronfman, who has often been raked in the press as a dilettante who grievously mishandled his music assets, receives sympathetic treatment, somewhat belying the book's tart title, and makes a good case for himself in interviews with the author.Deftly balanced and well-sourced, one of the most solid music-biz bios in recent memory.

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Bridges: The Science and Art of the World's Most Inspiring Structures

By David Blockley

Bridges vault valleys and leap rivers, but how? British civil-engineering professor Blockley answers in this "attempt to help nontechnical readers understand the technical issues bridge builders have to face." Emanating from the engineer's abiding anxiety to ensure against structural failure, such issues are successfully clarified in the author's engaging presentation. Essentially, the bridge engineer calculates the physical forces acting on the materials and shapes used to construct a bridge, but, as Blockley iterates throughout, engineering knowledge about how a bridge will perform has finite or indeterminable dimensions. The bridge collapses he describes were typically caused by some previously unrecognized behavior, and the collection of behaviors learned through bridge-building experience infuses Blockley's arrangement of bridges into four classifications—beams, arches, trusses, and suspensions. If we cross bridges unmindful of the forces they tame, Blockley's text, sketches, simple equations, and photographs instill appreciation for a physical dynamism that the engineer aspires to control. Also discussing the architectural beauty of bridges, this is a model explanation of technological design for a general audience.

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Langford's Basic Photography: The Guide for Serious Photographers

By Michael Langford, Anna Fox & Richard Sawdon Smith

Langford's Basic Photography is a seminal photography text. First published in 1965, it has informed the work and career of many of the world's leading photographers.

This ninth edition continues the tradition of its predecessors, reflecting the same comprehensive mix of scholarly and practical information while covering every aspect of photography from capture through to output. As well as an emphasis on explaining the `how to' of the medium, Langford's Basic Photography also includes in-depth coverage of the fundamental principles that govern the art, such as how light behaves, optics, and the sensor. This ensure that you come away not only with a good grasp of photographic technique, but also an in-depth knowledge of the fundamentals that will help you to better understand how great photographs are made.

The new edition has been fully updated to reflect dynamic changes in the industry, and new elements include an expansion and overhaul of the information on digital cameras and digital printing, a wider range of photography from around the world, and a fully edited and updated photography timeline.

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The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum

 By Rebecca Loncraine

This diligently researched, gracefully written biography provides a comprehensive account of Baum (1856-1919), who created what Loncraine (independent scholar) calls the US's modern fairy tale. Providing an exquisite portrait of the period from the mid-1800s to the second decade of the 20th century, the author describes how Baum's first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), reflected his experience in New York State's Finger Lakes region, the Great Plains, and other parts of the Midwest. According to Loncraine, when Baum completed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he knew that he had done his best work. The book seemed more like a discovery than an invention, Loncraine observes, and because it took on a life of its own Baum found himself in the thrall of an audience that demanded more stories from Oz (he wrote 13 sequels). Loncraine does not stint in her evocation of Baum's later years, when he tried to replicate the success of his book in Hollywood films, all of which flopped. A concluding chapter describes the period between Baum's death and the appearance in 1939 of the Technicolor transformation that turned The Wizard of Oz into a national epic.

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