Staff Hold

Straggling behind the mild 2003 success of cartoonist Chris Ware's first facsimile collection of his miscellaneous sketches, notes, and adolescent fantasies arrives this second volume, updating weary readers with Ware's clichéd and outmoded insights from the late twentieth century.

Working directly in pen and ink, watercolor, and white-out whenever he makes a mistake, Ware has cannily edited out all legally sensitive and personally incriminating material from his private journals, carefully recomposing each page to simulate the appearance of an ordered mind and established aesthetic directive. All phone numbers, references to ex-girlfriends, "false starts," and embarrassing experiments with unfamiliar drawing media have been generously excised to present the reader with the most pleasant and colorful sketchbook reading experience available. Included are Ware's frustrated doodles for his book covers, angry personal assaults on friends, half-finished comic strips, and lengthy and tiresome fulminations of personal disappointments both social and sexual, as well as his now-beloved drawings of the generally miserable inhabitants of the city of Chicago. All in all, a necessary volume for fans of fine art, water-based media, and personal diatribe. This hardcover is attractively designed and easy to resell.

What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863--with Abraham Lincoln in attendance--to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov's inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening's performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.

With a new afterword

Acts of Faith

is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel's story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people--and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.

In All Souls, our narrator, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. His stay of two years, he recalls, involved duties which were practically nil--Oxford is, without a doubt, one of the cities in the world where least work gets done, where simply being is far more important than doing or even acting. Yet so much goes into that simply being: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, back-stabbing. Marías has a sweet tooth for eccentricity, and his novel crackles with deliciously sly observations of Oxford mores, as James Woodall noted in the Independent. And yet further, All Souls is a story of love within a mysterious narrative, as The New Statesman noted, within a turmoil of choreographical stories.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was one of Russia's most influential and renowned filmmakers, despite an output of only seven feature films in twenty years. Revered by such filmmaking giants as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky is famous for his use of long takes, languid pacing, dreamlike metaphorical imagery, and meditations on spirituality and the human soul. His Andrei Roublev, Solaris, and The Mirror are considered landmarks of postwar Russian cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews is the first English-language collection of interviews with and profiles of the filmmaker. It includes conversations originally published in French, Italian, Russian, and British periodicals. With pieces from 1962 through 1986, the collection spans the breadth of Tarkovsky's career.

In the volume, Tarkovsky candidly and articulately discusses the difficulties of making films under the censors of the Soviet Union. He explores his aesthetic ideology, filmmakers he admires, and his eventual self-exile from Russia. He talks about recurring images in his movies--water, horses, fire, snow--but adamantly refuses to divulge what they mean, as he feels that would impose his own meaning onto the audience. At times cagey and resistant to interviewers, Tarkovsky nevertheless reveals his vision and his rigorous devotion to his art.

Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly.

Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, "Dixie"; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America.

In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection--before apples turned to ashes in their mouths--many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.

State capital and home of the University of Texas, Austin is the one city that belongs to all Texans. This finely written book, illustrated with historic photographs, tells the story of Austin's transformation from an "Indian haunted" frontier village into a residential mecca and high-tech hot spot.

Called by Sam Houston at its founding the "most unfortunate site upon earth for the seat of government," the infant community struggled for three decades against political enemies and competing towns before winning recognition as the permanent capital. The founding of the University of Texas turned the seat of politics into the seat of education, but Austin's nineteenth-century dreams of becoming a river port and a factory town came to naught.

A slave city in a slave state, Austin cast its lot with the Confederacy. Retaining a frontier flavor into the 1890s, post-Civil War Austin became the headquarters of the Texas gambling fraternity and a magnet for cowmen seeking "booze and women of the night."

Turning the nineteenth-century frontier town into an appealing twentieth-century residential community taxed the energies of civic leaders for several decades. Virtually parkless and with no paved streets in 1900, Austin by the 1940s boasted tree-lined boulevards, a cornucopia of parks and pools, and a leisurely lifestyle. But for African American residents these were years of oppressive segregation. Mexicans encountered similar treatment as Austin became a tri-ethnic community during the 1920s and 1930s.

Segregation gradually gave way in a divisive but nonviolent struggle. While adjusting to this, Austin experienced eye-popping expansion. Fearful that Austin would become "another Houston," residents sought to preserve the lifestyle that had made the capital city such an attractive place to live.

J. R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and the author of The Tender Bar, has selected the best in sports writing from the past year. Chosen from more than 350 national, regional, and specialty publications and, increasingly, the top sports blogs, this collection showcases those journalists who are at the top of their game.