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Her passion for reading is infectious - and it resonates on every page.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49531638448401,"sku":"GOR009488737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50134609101073,"sku":"CIN1250062098G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51021834551569,"sku":"NIN9781250062093","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51325211803921,"sku":"CIN1250062098VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52403439141137,"sku":"NLS9781250062093","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53004927009041,"sku":"CIN1250062098A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1250062098.jpg?v=1750711578"},{"product_id":"why-i-read-book-wendy-lesser-9780374289201","title":"Why I Read","description":"\"Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics,\" writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished little magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe a life lived in and through literature. As Lesser writes in her foreword, \"Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it.\" Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as \"Character and Plot,\" \"Novelty,\" \"Grandeur and Intimacy,\" and \"Authority,\" Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favour of reading. A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49595445412113,"sku":"GOR007346210","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49651585712401,"sku":"GOR006814713","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50467688677649,"sku":"CIN0374289204G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415744610577,"sku":"CIN0374289204VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52598691725585,"sku":"GOR008671639","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374289204.jpg?v=1751228776"},{"product_id":"director-calls-book-wendy-lesser-9780571190706","title":"A Director Calls","description":"Stephen Daldry's reputation as a brilliant showman whose bold vision has revitalized the Royal Court Theatre is tempered by his detractors' assertion that he takes third-rate plays and fashions them into a triumph of style over content. In this study Lesser looks at the man and his work.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49611177361681,"sku":"GOR001641417","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51021982302481,"sku":"GOR001378425","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571190707.jpg?v=1751359844"},{"product_id":"room-for-doubt-book-wendy-lesser-9780307274960","title":"Room for Doubt","description":"\u003ci\u003eRoom for Doubt \u003c\/i\u003eis Wendy Lesser's account of three separate but interlocking occasions for doubt: her stay in Berlin, a city she had never expected to visit; her unwritten book on the philosopher David Hume; and her long friendship with the writer Leonard Michaels, which constantly broke down and yet endured. Through this unusual journey, Lesser in the end shows us how, once examined, things are never quite what she thought they were.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49622767206673,"sku":"GOR007413857","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346851303697,"sku":"CIN0307274969G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0307274969.jpg?v=1751037335"},{"product_id":"scandinavian-noir-book-wendy-lesser-9780374216979","title":"Scandinavian Noir","description":"A deep dive into Scandinavian crime fiction and Scandinavian culture at large","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49623094493457,"sku":"GOR012978979","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49933613039889,"sku":"CIN0374216975G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50140526018833,"sku":"CIN0374216975VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50293927936273,"sku":"CIN0374216975A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51433154314513,"sku":"GOR014273706","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374216975.jpg?v=1750974858"},{"product_id":"genius-of-language-book-wendy-lesser-9781400033232","title":"The Genius of Language","description":"Fifteen outstanding writers answered editor Wendy Lesser’s call for original essays on the subject of language–the one they grew up with, and the English in which they write.Despite American assumptions about polite Chinese discourse, Amy Tan believes that there was nothing discreet about the Chinese language with which she grew up. Leonard Michaels spoke only Yiddish until he was five, and still found its traces in his English language writing. Belgian-born Luc Sante loved his French Tintin and his Sartre, but only in English could he find “words of one syllable” that evoke American bars and bus stops. And although Louis Begley writes novels in English and addresses family members in Polish, he still speaks French with his wife–the language of their courtship. As intimate as one’s dreams, as private as a secret identity, these essays examine and reveal the writers’ pride, pain, and pleasure in learning a new tongue, revisiting an old one, and reconciling the joys and frustrations of each.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49654029943057,"sku":"GOR007244180","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50379867095313,"sku":"CIN1400033233G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51024377282833,"sku":"NIN9781400033232","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323891974417,"sku":"CIN1400033233VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52430073725201,"sku":"NLS9781400033232","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1400033233.jpg?v=1750794243"},{"product_id":"music-for-silenced-voices-book-wendy-lesser-9780300181593","title":"Music for Silenced Voices","description":"A new biography of Shostakovich that views him through the intimate music of his string quartets   Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a \"diary, the story of his soul.\" The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.  Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730763620625,"sku":"NGR9780300181593","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50839348543761,"sku":"GOR007733932","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52726169075985,"sku":"GOR014600931","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300181590.jpg?v=1751102159"},{"product_id":"jerome-robbins-book-wendy-lesser-9780300197594","title":"Jerome Robbins","description":"From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a lively and inspired biography celebrating the master choreographer, dancer, and stage director Jerome Robbins  \"A compact and incisive portrait of the great dancer and choreographer.\"—Kirkus Reviews  \"This brisk biography . . . is light and bright, utterly persuaded by its subject and intoxicatingly in love with movement.\"—Helen Shaw, New York Times Book Review   Jerome Robbins (1918–1998) was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz and grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, where his Russian-Jewish immigrant parents owned the Comfort Corset Company. Robbins, who was drawn to dance at a young age, resisted the idea of joining the family business. In 1936 he began working with Gluck Sandor, who ran a dance group and convinced him to change his name to Jerome Robbins. He went on to become a choreographer and director who worked in ballet, on Broadway, and in film. His stage productions include West Side Story, Peter Pan, and Fiddler on the Roof. In this deft biography, Wendy Lesser presents Jerome Robbins’s life through his major dances, providing a sympathetic, detailed portrait of her subject.  About Jewish Lives:    Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.   In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.  More praise for Jewish Lives:   \"Excellent\" –New York Times   \"Exemplary\" –Wall Street Journal   \"Distinguished\" –New Yorker   \"Superb\" –The Guardian","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49762428420369,"sku":"GOR010695831","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50761686253841,"sku":"CIN0300197594VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50761686810897,"sku":"CIN0300197594G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300197594.jpg?v=1751228286"},{"product_id":"you-say-to-brick-book-wendy-lesser-9780374279974","title":"You Say to Brick","description":". Drawing on extensive original research; lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students; and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Wendy Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive man, which reveals the mind behind some of the twentieth century's most celebrated architecture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49788793815313,"sku":"CIN0374279977VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49899181375761,"sku":"CIN0374279977G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374279977.jpg?v=1750910324"},{"product_id":"nothing-remains-the-same-book-wendy-lesser-9780618082933","title":"Nothing Remains the Same","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the esteemed cultural critic and journalist Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same is a bibliophile's dream: a book about the pleasures and surprises of rereading, a witty, intelligent exploration of what books can mean to our lives. Compared with reading, the act of rereading is far more personal -- it involves the interaction of our past selves, our present selves, and literature. With candor, humor, and grace, Lesser takes us on a guided tour of her own return to books she once knew, from the plays of Shakespeare to twentieth-century novels by Kingsley Amis and Ian McEwan, from the childhood favorite I Capture the Castle to classic novels such as Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, from nonfiction by Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth. Lesser conveys an infectious love of reading and inspires us all to take another look at the books we've read to find the unexpected treasures they might offer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49908928577809,"sku":"CIN061808293XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50357247672593,"sku":"CIN061808293XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52895604244753,"sku":"GOR001925470","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/061808293X.jpg?v=1750699623"},{"product_id":"amateur-book-wendy-lesser-9780375703812","title":"The Amateur","description":"In this unusual memoir of the life of the mind, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review reflects upon the choices she has made in pursuit of her vocation as a self-described eighteenth-century man of letters. Wendy Lesser, one of our shrewdest cultural observers, describes how her education, her experiences, and the works of her favorite writers, artists, and performers have shaped and deepened her understanding of the world. She shows us how she has created an independent life as a writer, editor, and critic, free to follow her enthusiasms where they lead her. Above all, she offers an engaging inquiry into how we discover our passions and how they discover us.\u003cp\u003eWhether her subject is Mark Morris's choreography, the delights of e-mail, the odd assortment of words that were born the same year she was, or the moral implications of giving to beggars (pondered by way of Dickens and Henry James), Lesser's acute wisdom and elegant prose render a beguiling portrait of a remarkable mind at work.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49909843624209,"sku":"CIN0375703810G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50208683393297,"sku":"CIN0375703810VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001895387409,"sku":"NIN9780375703812","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52771311255825,"sku":"GOR014614163","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375703810.jpg?v=1751166239"},{"product_id":"genius-of-language-book-wendy-lesser-9780375422386","title":"The Genius of Language","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49926667010321,"sku":"CIN0375422382A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50095532278033,"sku":"CIN0375422382G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50253684343057,"sku":"GOR005377934","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375422382.jpg?v=1751197081"},{"product_id":"music-for-silenced-voices-book-wendy-lesser-9780300169331","title":"Music for Silenced Voices","description":"Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. \"Music for Silenced Voices\" looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a 'diary, the story of his soul'. The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and, the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works. Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, \"Music for Silenced Voices\" is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. 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Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both existed and did not exist. With vivid storytelling and an astonishing command of the literature, Wendy Lesser's Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery illuminates the vast, peculiar world of this imagined Scandinavia - first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and finally as it exists in reality.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50325478867217,"sku":"CIN125079840XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52476664086801,"sku":"NLS9781250798404","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52602041893137,"sku":"NIN9781250798404","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53474454438161,"sku":"GOR013599446","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/125079840X.jpg?v=1751369035"},{"product_id":"you-say-to-brick-book-wendy-lesser-9780374537630","title":"You Say to Brick","description":"Born to a Jewish family in Estonia in 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia; by the time of his death in 1974, he was widely recognised as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life.  Perfectly complementing Nathaniel Kahn’s award-winning documentary, My Architect, Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Eschewing the usual corporate skyscrapers, hotels, and condominiums, he focused on medical and educational research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, parks, religious buildings, and other structures that would serve the public good. Yet this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive and mysterious character hiding behind a series of masks.  Drawing on extensive original research; lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students; and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive man, which reveals the mind behind some of the twentieth century's most celebrated architecture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348935610641,"sku":"CIN0374537631A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50690107801873,"sku":"CIN0374537631G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001894830353,"sku":"NIN9780374537630","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52138460905745,"sku":"NLS9780374537630","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374537631.jpg?v=1750813572"},{"product_id":"amateur-an-independent-life-book-wendy-lesser-9780375404023","title":"The Amateur: an Independent Life","description":"In this unusual memoir of the life of the mind, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review reflects upon the choices she has made in pursuit of her vocation as a self-described eighteenth-century man of letters. 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Placing such particulars within the framework of Plato's myth of the divided beings and psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, Lesser sets out before the reader an art that responds to and even attempts to overcome division.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50355464536337,"sku":"CIN0674392116G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50762562601233,"sku":"CIN0674392116VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51018857939217,"sku":"GOR002209188","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674392116.jpg?v=1751167847"},{"product_id":"pictures-at-an-execution-book-wendy-lesser-9780674667358","title":"Pictures at an Execution","description":"This book is about murder - in life and in art - and about how we look at it and feel about it. At the centre of Wendy Lesser's investigation is a groundbreaking legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television. Our grim and seemingly endless fascination with murder gets its day in court as Lesser conducts us through the proceedings, pausing along the way to reflect on the circumstances of violent death in our culture. Her book, itself a murder mystery of sorts, circling suspensefully around a central point, is also a meditation on murder in a civilized society - what we make of it in law, morality, and art. Lesser narrates the trial with a sharp eye for detail and an absorbing sense of character. Questions that arise in the courtroom conjure other, broader ones: why are we drawn to murder, as an act and as a spectacle? Who in a murder story are we drawn to - victim, murderer, detective? Is such interest, even pleasure, morally suspect? Lesser's reflections on these questions follow the culture in its \"danse macabre\", from Norman Mailer's \"Executioner\"s Song\" to the Jacobean play \"The Changeling\" from Errol Morris's documentary \"The Thin Blue Line to Crime and Punishment\", from Janet Malcolm's \"The Journalist and the Murderer\" to Jim Thompson's \"The Killer Inside Me\", from Weegee's photographs to television's movie of the week. Always anchored in the courtroom, where the question of murder as theatre is being settled in immediate, human terms, this circle of thought widens outward to the increasingly blurred borderline between real and fictional murder, between event and story, between murder as news and as art. \"Pictures at an Execution\" ultimately brings the reader face to face with his\/her own most disturbing cultural impulses.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50355873186065,"sku":"CIN0674667352G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51686358057233,"sku":"GOR014360407","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674667352.jpg?v=1751231895"},{"product_id":"nothing-remains-the-same-book-wendy-lesser-9780618340811","title":"Nothing Remains the Same","description":"Wendy Lesser's new book is 'an inspired intellectual romp: part memoir, part criticism, though actually a bracing, larkish reinvention of them both' (Lawrence Weschler). Revisiting her favorite books after the passage of twenty or thirty years, Lesser is stirred by the changes she finds-in the books, in herself, and in the wider world. If NOTHING REMAINS THE SAME is a book about reading, it is also a book about time, with rereading as a special form of time travel.  From classic novels such as ANNA KARENINA and THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY to a charming tale for young adults called I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, from nonfiction by George Orwell and Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth and Milton, from the deeply American HUCKLEBERRY FINN to works in translation like DON QUIXOTE and THE IDIOT, Lesser covers the whole literary spectrum. 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At the center of Wendy Lesser’s investigation is a groundbreaking legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television. Our grim and seemingly endless fascination with murder gets its day in court as Lesser conducts us through the proceedings, pausing along the way to reflect on the circumstances of violent death in our culture. Her book, itself a murder mystery of sorts, circling suspensefully around a central point, is also a meditation on murder in a civilized society—what we make of it in law, morality, and art.  Lesser narrates the trial with a sharp eye for detail and an absorbing sense of character. Questions that arise in the courtroom conjure other, broader ones: why are we drawn to murder, as an act and as a spectacle? Who in a murder story are we drawn to—victim, murderer, detective? Is such interest, even pleasure, morally suspect? Lesser’s reflections on these questions follow the culture in its danse macabre, from Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song to the Jacobean play The Changeling, from Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line to Crime and Punishment, from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer to Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, from Weegee’s photographs to television’s movie of the week. Always anchored in the courtroom, where the question of murder as theater is being settled in immediate, human terms, this circle of thought widens outward to the increasingly blurred borderline between real and fictional murder, between event and story, between murder as news and as art. 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