Books published by W W Norton & Co Ltd

In this biography, published on the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, the author demonstrates the connection between the composer's life and music, showing how his inventiveness pervaded his career as musician, composer, performer, scholar and teacher.

Patrick O'Brian has emerged, in the opinion of many, as one of the greatest novelists in English. His fame rests mainly on the achievement of the epic Aubrey/Maturin novels, but few readers know that O'Brian first made his reputation as a writer of short fiction. Collected here are twenty-seven stories that O'Brian wished to preserve: stories of uncommon lyricism and beauty that will confirm his rightful place in the front rank of short-story writers as well as of novelists.Although the tone of this collection ranges effortlessly from the humorous to the dramatic, the most characteristic and memorable stories often have to do with a glimpse of savage, destructive forces through the fragile shell of human civilization. The threatened chaos may be psychological, as in "On the Wolfsberg," or it may be lurking in the natural world, as in "A Passage of the Frontier," or, as in the dark masterpiece "The Chian Wine," it is suddenly discovered in the ancient, irrational impulses of human nature.The setting may be the marshes of western Ireland, the Pyrenees, or the claustrophobic confines of a clockmender's house, but each story is a showcase for Patrick O'Brian's fresh and meticulous prose; each story reaffirms his sympathetic understanding of human passion and suffering. This collection proves that O'Brian is not simply the master of a genre, but an author who will long be honored as one of our most eminent literary figures.

The author seeks to show how its success in building up its authority and its legal and administrative machinery militated against its claim to spiritual leadership, and how an institution which rose through furthering the cause of reform later became an obstacle to reform and itself in need of reformation. In other words, he is concerned with the great dichotomies - to say nothing of the conflicting ideals and contrasting personalities - which make the history of the medieval papacy so dramatic and instructive. Professor Barraclough's writings on papal history cover a period of more than thirty years. They are based on extensive research in the Vatican Archives and other major manuscript libraries. The present volume is refreshingly original in judgment and constantly surprises the reader by its ability to place even the best-known episodes and personalities in anew and revealing light.

A finalist for the 1996 National Book Award, "Sun Under Wood" is full of wit and energy, sadness and humor, and a passion for language and experiences, words and ideas. Now in paperback, this collection explores family life, nature, history, and literature in Hass' singular intelligence and unmistakable voice.

The education Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (formerly the Science Teaching Center) was established to study the process of instruction, aids thereto, and the learning process itself, with special reference to science teaching at the university level. Generous support from the National Science Foundation and from the Kettering, Shell, Victoria, W. T. Grant, and Bing Foundations provided the means for assembling and maintaining an experienced staff to cooperate with members of the Institute's Physics Department in the examination, improvement, and development of physics curriculum materials for students planning a career in the sciences.After careful analysis of objectives and the problems involved, preliminary versions of textbooks were prepared, tested through classroom use at M.I.T. and other institutions, re-evaluated, rewritten, and tried again. Only then were the final manuscripts undertaken.In general the books in the series will be brief. Most may be covered in a single term or less. Each will be available in either cloth or paper binding. Their brevity and structure (as well as their reasonable price) will make it possible for teachers to select topics and organize courses according to individual needs and preferences.

A collection of short stories from R.K. Narayan, spanning five decades. Characters include a storyteller whose magical source of tales dries up, and a love-stricken husband who is told by astrologers that he must sleep with a prostitute to save his dying wife.

A classic artistic parody from two of the world's most satiric minds. Moss uncovers remarkable historical anecdotes, which are accompanied by Gorey's absurdly deadpan drawings. Although the insightful scenarios involving Emily Dickinson, Mozart, Henrik Ibsen, and El Greco are all the product of Moss's fertile imagination, his uncanny emulation of style makes us believe they (just possibly) might be true. 25 illustrations.

Richard Hubert ("Hubie") Ward is a wily young actor from the Easternmost world of prep schools and summers on the Cape. By the time he is twenty-five, he has lied, cheated, and seduced his way to the big-time on the Coast. Hollywood prizes Hubie for his air of respectability: "He was not a Latin or a Jew...he was not a booze artist...he was not actorish, he was not pugnacious...he was of the theater, he had been given good notices in an Art picture, he was not confused by an oyster fork, he stood up when ladies entered the room..". But Hubie's blind ambition quickly strips away the guise. He blackmails the man who gave him his first acting job, then spends an amorous afternoon with the wife of a studio head who happens to be his boss. Nothing, it seems, can stop the self-destructive philandering that dogs this shooting star.

American Noise is a rapturous exploration of American culture and landscape. With compassionate wit and insight, Campbell McGrath transports us on a journey through contemporary society, transforming the commonplace into scenes of profound revelation. From late-night bars to early-morning diners, suburban malls to the Mojave Desert, McGrath's meticulously detailed vision defines singular moments of joy and melancholy.

The Barracks Thief is the story of three young paratroopers waiting to be shipped out to Vietnam. Brought together one sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from being alarmed by this discovery, they are exhilarated by it; they emerge from their common danger full of confidence in their own manhood and in the bond of friendship they have formed.This confidence is shaken when a series of thefts occur. The author embraces the perspectives of both the betrayer and the betrayed, forcing us to participate in lives that we might otherwise condemn, and to recognize the kinship of those lives to our own.

What did it mean for Germany, and the world, to have William II on the throne for the First World War? In The Kaiser and His Times, Michael Balfour analyzes the social, constitutional, and economic forces at work in imperial Germany, and sets the complex and disputed character of the Kaiser, who occupied such a central position in the three decades before 1918, in the context of his family background and the history of Germany.

A detailed reconstruction of Leonardo's emotional life from his earliest years, it represents Freud's first sustained venture into biography from a psychoanalytic perspective, and also his effort to trace one route that homosexual development can take.

A devastating revelation of violence, exploitation, and corrupt politics, Coming to Jakarta derives its title from the role played by the CIA, banks, and oil companies in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians. A former Canadian diplomat and now a scholar at the University of California, Peter Dale Scott has said that the poem "is triggered by what we know of the bloody Indonesian massacre... However it is not so much a narrative of exotic foreign murder as one person's account of what it is like to live in the 20th century, possessing enough access to information and power to feel guilty about global human oppression, but not enough to deal with it. The usual result is a kind of daily schizophrenia by which we desensitize ourselves to our own responses to what we read in the newspapers. The psychic self-alienation which ensues makes integrative poetry difficult but necessary." With a brilliant use of collage, placing the political against the personal--childhood acquaintances are among the darkly powerful figures--Scott works in the tradition of Pound's Cantos, but his substance is completely his own.

As a general background, the first two chapters of the book discuss characteristics of Malay rural society, especially in the coastal area, in Kelantan; the main features of Malay marine fishing; and the particular situation of the fisheries in Kelantan and Trengganu. The body of the book then deals with what is in effect an historical case study in economic anthropology, a community of peasant fishermen analyzed in detail. Finally, Professor Firth gives an account on a comparative basis of recent developments in the same community, to bring out some of the underlying social and economic forces that have been at work during the past generation.

Girl with Curious Hair is replete with David Foster Wallace's remarkable and unsettling reimaginations of reality. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, where terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, the familiar strange.

Federico García Lorca's position as one of the few geniuses of the modern theatre was firmly established in the English-speaking world with his Three Tragedies. Here, with an introduction by the dramatist's brother, Francisco García Lorca, are five of his "comedies," in the authorized translations, extensively revised to reflect recent Lorca scholarship and to convey the sparkle, freshness, and magic of the original Spanish. The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife tells of a young beauty married to an old man, a theme that often concerned Lorca. The resolution for the earnest shoemaker, who leaves home and comes back disguised as a puppeteer, is lighthearted, but there is underlying pathos. The Love of Don Perlimplin is again about a girl who weds someone much older, this time a bookish, 18th-century gentleman, who seeks an original but sardonic way out of the situation. According to Lorca himself, "Dona Rosita is the outer gentleness and inner scorching of a girl in Granada who, little by little, turns into that grotesque and moving thing - an old maid in Spain."