In the early 1970s, the writer left a small town in Ohio to move to a loft in lower Manhattan. This book is his account of the city over the thirty years he's lived there. It also features street scenes from every corner of the metropolis, where every block is an event and where the denizens are larger than life.
Features articles by: Tim Parks, on the joys of commuting from Verona to Milan every day; Christopher de Bellaigue, on tracking down the Armenians in Turkey; Jeremy Treglown, following in the footsteps of V. S. Pritchett in Spain; Jeremy Seabrook, on being separated from his twin; and, Todd McEwen, on Cary Grant's trousers.
Hoping to improve her Chinese and broaden her cultural horizons, Rachel deWoskin went to work for an American PR firm in China. Before she knew it, she was not just exploring but making Chinese culture as part of a wildly successful soap opera.
Wayne McLennan tells the story of his extraordinary life through a series of adventures after he leaves his home town in Australia, desperate to avoid following his father and his grandfather into the mines.
In his first venture into non-fiction, the celebrated novelist Rupert Thomson has produced one of the most extraordinary and unforgettable memoirs of recent years. On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers get word that their father, who suffered chronic lung damage during the war, has died alone in hospital. In an attempt to come to terms both with their own loss and with their parents' legacies, the three brothers move back into their father's house. The time they spend in this decadent, anarchic commune leads to a rift between Thomson and his youngest brother, a rift that will not be addressed for more than two decades. "This Party's Got to Stop" works Thomson's memories into a powerful mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic and often heartbreaking detail. It is both a love letter to a lost brother and a chronicle of the murderousness and longing that can characterize blood relationships.
