Word: knopf
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...first glance, the heroine-narrator of Susanna Moore's fourth novel, In the Cut (Knopf; 180 pages, $21), seems to fit perfectly into the polite cast of contemporary fiction. Frannie Thorstin, 34, lives on Washington Square in lower Manhattan, where the ghost of Henry James still whispers to the sensitive. She teaches creative writing in a city program for teenagers "of what is called low achievement and high intelligence." She is also writing a book on dialects and regional slang, particularly as they occur in the five boroughs of New York City. She notes, "The words themselves--in their...
...calls them, remain wary of all gadje (non-Gypsies.) An American of Hispanic and Hungarian-Jewish parentage who lives in London, Fonseca used her painstakingly acquired knowledge of Romany, the Gypsy language, to gain insight into a scattered nation of 12 million people without a homeland. Bury Me Standing (Knopf; 322 pages; $25) is both a history of the tribe and an account of the author's personal quest to uncover its secrets...
...drawn to the subject of privacy. Following the law-for-the-layman formula of the bestselling In Our Defense, a book on the Bill of Rights that she and Ellen Alderman, a friend from Columbia Law School, wrote in 1991, Kennedy and Alderman have produced The Right to Privacy (Knopf; $25). The new book skillfully weaves together unfamiliar, dramatic case histories with a survey of the laws governing what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called "the right to be let alone." Looking at assaults on privacy by, among others, law-enforcement agencies, the press and new technologies, the authors...
...rambling psychobiography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (Knopf; 757 pages; $35), Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny examines her subject's troubled life and problematic writings in microscopic detail. Sereny extensively interviewed Speer and his wife Margret at their retirement home in Heidelberg and talked with dozens of acquaintances. Her conclusion: emotionally crippled by an unhappy childhood, Speer was a frustrated romantic whose reciprocated love for Hitler--a sublimated, nonsexual but homoerotic devotion--blinded him to dark realities he chose not to see or hear. In effect, Speer existed in what the Dutch Protestant theologian Willem Visser 't Hooft...
...great American road novel Lolita are cleverly defended against casual entry. Nabokov's short fictions, on the other hand, are thresholds to his themes and some of the most nape-tingling prose and devilish inventions in 20th century letters. So better late than never, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf; 659 pages; $35) is a welcome edition to the shelves of old admirers and a chance for entry-level fans to sample the author's delights...