Mark Helprin Boeken

An old man's magnificent tale of love and war-a recapitulation of a life and a reckoning with mortality told by one of America's most acclaimed novelists.

This hardcover volume features a complete collection of Helprin's "Swan Lake" novellas, including "Swan Lake," "The Veil of Snows," and "A City in Winter," accompanied by 42 stunning full-color illustrations by Van Allsburg. The book is presented as a signed, numbered edition, limited to just 300 copies, and comes in a luxurious slipcase, making it a unique addition for collectors and fans of illustrated literature.

From Mark Helprin, acclaimed author of A Soldier of the Great War and A Winter's Tale, comes a miraculous song of the twentieth century. In a mountain garden in Brazil, an old American is writing his memoirs, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case. As he reminisces we learn he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, a multimillionaire, a man who was never not in love. He spent his adolescence in an insane asylum in Switzerland; he was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life, he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world's most insidious enslaver: coffee.

The two-time Caldecott medalist illustrates Mark Helprin's enchanting story of the characters in Tchaikovsky's famous ballet.

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying. Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature. [close]

"A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined to always do what's right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line's only prototype--Athena, Patrol Coastal 15--with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral. Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the new assignment in stride, and while supervising Athena's fitting out in New Orleans, encounters a brilliant lawyer, Katy Farrar, with whom he falls in last-chance love. Soon thereafter, he is deployed on a mission that subjects his integrity, morality, and skill to the ultimate test, and ensures that Athena will live forever in the annals of the Navy. As in the Odyssey, Katy is the force that keeps him alive and the beacon that lights the way home through seven battles, mutiny, and court martial"--

Presents a collection of stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada