Benjamin Moser Boeken

Written in agony, this book features elegiac meditation on the creation of life, and of art.

Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant, serious mind combined with her striking image, her rigorous intellectualism and her ground-breaking inquiries into what was then seen as 'low culture' - celebrity, photographs, camp - propelled her into her own unique, inimitable category and made her famous the world over, emblematic of twentieth-century New York literary glamour. Sontag is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted personal archives and on hundreds of interviews conducted with many people around the world who spoke freely for the first time about Susan Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait of an endlessly complex, dazzling woman; one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, who lived one of its most fascinating lives.

'That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,' Clarice Lispector was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary modernist writers. The brilliant, beautiful and enigmatic daughter of Russian-Jewish émigrés, she achieved instant celebrity at the age of twenty-three with her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, and became a literary icon in Latin America. In Why This World Benjamin Moser unravels the turbulent life of an elusive genius: her birth in the nightmarish landscape of postwar Ukraine, her long exile in Brazil, her stormy personal life, her fierce talent, and how she transformed her struggles into a universally resonant art. 'A great book . . . Clarice Lispector is one of the hidden geniuses of twentieth-century literature.' Colm Tóibín 'One of the twentieth century's most mysterious writers is finally revealed in all her vibrant colours.' Orhan Pamuk 'Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce. Benjamin Moser has brought to life her essentially tragic nature in all its complexity.' Edmund White 'As Moser begins to unpeel the layers of her complicated life, Why This World sucks you into its subject's strange vortex.' Dwight Garner, The New York Times 'After finishing it, you will be in love with her.' Guillermo Arriaga

Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of this new place, he threw himself into the Dutch museums. Soon, he found himself unearthing the strange, inspiring and sometimes terrifying stories of the artists who shaped one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity, the Dutch Golden Age. As he explored the hidden world of the Dutch Masters (and one Mistress), Moser met a crowd of fascinating personalities- the stormy Rembrandt, the intimate Ter Borch, the mysterious Vermeer. Through their art, he got to know their country, too- from Pieter Saenredam's translucent churches to Paulus Potter's muddy barnyards, and from Pieter de Hooch's cozy hearths to Jacob van Ruisdael's tragic trees. Over the years, Moser found himself on increasingly intimate terms with these centuries-dead artists, and found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions he was. Why do we make art? What is art, anyway - and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail? The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads- to look, and then to look again. It is a brilliant, colourful and learned book for anyone, whether lifelong scholar or curious tourist, who has ever felt the lure of the Dutch galleries. It shows us art, and artists, as we have never seen them before.

Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia on a scholarship, and later received degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Making It is his blistering account of fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally of his induction into the ranks of what he calls The Family, the small group of left-wing and largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions came to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene in the fifties and sixties. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still pertinent analysis of the tense and more than a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power. The Family responded to Podhoretz's book with outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he remains to this day. Fifty years after its first publication, this controversial and legendary book remains a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life

This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.” The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”

Portret totalny jednej z najwybitniejszych intelektualistek XX wieku Susan Sontag pisała o sztuce i polityce, feminizmie i homoseksualizmie, sławie i stylu, medycynie i narkotykach, radykalizmie i faszyzmie oraz freudyzmie, komunizmie i amerykanizmie – jej dzieła stały się kluczem do zrozumienia współczesnej kultury. Benjamin Moser analizuje dzieła Sontag ukazując geniusz jej twórczości, radykalnej myśli i społecznego aktywizmu oraz sięga głębiej, poza publiczny wizerunek, i ujawnia nieznane prywatne oblicze pisarki. Snując tę fascynującą opowieść, wykorzystuje setki wywiadów przeprowadzonych od Maui po Sztokholm i od Londynu po Sarajewo oraz przedstawia blisko sto fotografii. „Sontag. Życie i twórczość” to pierwsza książką oparta na zamkniętych dla świata rodzinnych archiwach i świadectwach osób, które nigdy wcześniej nie mówiły o Susan Sontag, jak na przykład jej życiowa partnerka i światowej sławy fotografka Annie Leibovitz. Biografia „Sontag. Życie i twórczość” (ang. „Sontag: Her Life and Work”) otrzymała Nagrodę Pulitzera 2020. „To dzieło podparte wielką pewnością siebie, jednocześnie wzniosłe i finezyjne, w którym uchwycone zostały geniusz i człowieczeństwo pisarki wraz z jej nałogami, seksualnymi dwuznacznościami oraz chwiejnymi fascynacjami” – napisało Jury nagrody o książce.

Sie ist eine brasilianische Ikone und zählt zu den Stars der lateinamerikanischen Literatur. Mit ihrer Schönheit, ihrem Geist und ihrer einzigartigen Stimme faszinierte Clarice Lispector die literarische Intelligenz ihres Landes ebenso wie das breite Publikum. Ihr Werk umfasst eigenwillige, moderne Romane und Erzählungen, mit denen sie bisweilen an die Grenzen des Sagbaren ging. Der amerikanische Literaturwissenschaftler Benjamin Moser hat sich von Podolien bis Pernambuco, von New York bis Buenos Aires und Rio de Janeiro auf ihre Spuren begeben und einzigartige Dokumente ihrer Herkunft gefunden. Daraus hat er ein ebenso spannendes wie einfühlsames Porträt einer widersprüchlichen, von ihren jüdischen Wurzeln stark geprägten Persönlichkeit geschaffen. Anschaulich und fesselnd beschreibt Benjamin Moser die Stationen ihres wechselvollen Schicksals und erhellt die Grundmotive ihres Schreibens. Seine mit einem ausführlichen Bildteil angereicherte Lebensdarstellung wurde in zahlreiche Sprachen übersetzt, vielfach ausgezeichnet und für den National Book Critics Circle Award nominiert.

Hoffnungen, Wünsche und Erwartungen, Höhen und Tiefen – das sind 130 Jahre Hertha BSC. Seit langer Zeit spielt der Verein so Fußball, wie das Leben funktioniert: mit Auf- und Abstiegen, mit Siegen und Niederlagen, mit Frustrationen und Festen… ehrlich und bodenständig, abgehoben und wahnsinnig. – Aber dieses Buch ist keine Vereinschronik oder Festschrift zum 130. Geburtstag. Vielmehr erinnert sich der Autor mit leichter Feder einfach an besondere Momente im Vereinsleben, an Spiele und Ereignisse, an Dramen und Komödien, an große und an kleine Namen – und erzählt, wie sich die Fans den Verein zurückgeholt haben. Dies alles mit viel Liebe und Leidenschaft… so, wie es sich für einen echten Herthaner gehört.