Cordelia's Staff Picks
"Chaffee's fierce debut brings Hannah's struggles, discoveries, and sweet triumphs to life." --Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs
"There's an absorbing story here, a love story, a coming-of-age story, a gorgeous portrait of the city itself, its beauty and its decadence, but there's also the thrilling glimpse of a brilliant young writer just setting out." --National Book Award winner Alice McDermott in The Atlantic
A young American woman arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But Hannah is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food--as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God.
Hannah joins a local rowing club, where Francesca, a welcoming but predatory Milanese, and Luca, a seemingly steady Florentine with whom she becomes involved, draw her into Florence's vibrant present: the complex social dynamics at the club, soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city's past--the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose self-imposed isolation and ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles.
Both sides pull Hannah in: challenging her, defeating her, lifting her up. And when a figure from her past life in Boston reappears, threatening the delicate balance of her present, Hannah's feverish personal excavation becomes caught up with the long history of women's contention with body and spirit, desire and death.
A vivid, visceral debut echoing the novels of Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, and Catherine Lacey, Florence in Ecstasy gives us an arresting new vision of a woman's attempt to find meaning--and find herself--in an unstable world.
National Book Award Winner in poetry. Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork, translated into English by acclaimed poet Richard Howard, along with the original French text.
Scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal remains powerful and relevant for our time. In "Spleen et idéal," Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstacy and anguish--of sexual and romantic love. "Tableaux Parisiens" condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. "Le Vin" centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of "Fleurs du Mal" while rebellion is at the heart of "Révolte." The voice of Baudelaire lives in this masterful translation. "Richard Howard, generally esteemed as the finest American translator from the French of the postwar era, offers a new version of this masterpiece," wrote The Washington Post. "It is the English edition to acquire."
Another penetrating Neapolitan story from New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, and Peter Sarsgaard
Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina's family in this "arresting" novel by the author of the New York Times-bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series (Publishers Weekly).
"Although much of the drama takes place in [Leda's] head, Ferrante's gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral." --The New Yorker
"Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret." --Publishers Weekly
An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from "one of our culture's preeminent novelists" (Los Angeles Times)
Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area--the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon--he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.
Philosophy is not a theory, asserted Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), but an activity. In this 1921 opus, his only philosophical work published during his lifetime, Wittgenstein defined the object of philosophy as the logical clarification of thoughts and proposed the solution to most philosophic problems by means of a critical method of linguistic analysis. In proclaiming philosophy as a matter of logic rather than of metaphysics, Wittgenstein created a sensation among intellectual circles that influenced the development of logical positivism and changed the direction of 20th-century thought.
Beginning with the principles of symbolism and the necessary relations between words and objects, the author applies his theories to various branches of traditional philosophy, illustrating how mistakes arise from inappropriate use of symbolism and misuses of language. After examining the logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference, he discusses the theory of knowledge as well as principles of physics and ethics and aspects of the mystical.
Supervised by the author himself, this translation from the German by C. K. Ogden is regarded as the definitive text. A magisterial introduction by the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell hails Wittgenstein's achievement as extraordinarily important, one which no serious philosopher can afford to neglect. Introduction by Bertrand Russell.