Walk Through Walls

Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In Becoming Myself, his long-awaited memoir, he turns his therapeutic eye on himself, delving into the relationships that shaped him and the groundbreaking work that made him famous. The first-generation child of immigrant Russian Jews, Yalom grew up in a lower-class neighbourhood in Washington, DC. Determined to escape its confines, he set his sights on becoming a doctor. An incredible ascent followed.

As well as being a prize-winning, best-selling novelist, Siri Hustvedt is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the fields of neurology, feminism, art criticism and philosophy. She believes passionately that art and science are too often kept separate and that conversations across disciplines are vital to increasing our knowledge of the human mind and body, how they connect and how we think, feel and see.

Marina Abramovic, the legendary performance artist, is legendary for a reason. She has spent four decades making traumatic and transcendent artworks using her own body as a material, breaking through the boundaries of the acceptable in visual art. In the early 1970s alone, she lost consciousness while lying in the center of a burning five-pointed star (symbol of the communism of her native Yugoslavia), took pills to induce hyperactivity and then catatonia, and remained determinedly passive as an audience member pushed a loaded gun to her neck.

Der Held des neuesten Romans von Haruki Murakami, ein namenloser junger Maler, hatte sich mit den Jahren in Tokio einen Ruf als hervorragender Porträtist erworben. Doch mit der Trennung von seiner Frau lehnt er schlagartig sämtliche Aufträge ab. Er will sein Leben neu ordnen und zieht sich in ein abgelegenes Haus zurück. Dort legt ihm sein Agent eines Tages ein äußerst lukratives Angebot vor. Er soll das Porträt eines steinreichen Mannes anfertigen. Nach einigem Zögern nimmt er an.

From one of America's greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. In Why Buddhism Is True, Wright leads listeners on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age.

After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.

Der Geschmack einer Madeleine, das Licht einer Laterna Magica, der Duft der Weißdornhecke: Schlüsselerlebnisse, die im Kopf des Erzählers Marcel unwillkürlich Erinnerungen hervorrufen. Kunstfertig und detailgetreu entsteht das Panorama des alten Combray und der Stadt Paris mit ihren Salons und Bällen. Kurz: einer Zeit, die verloren und doch gegenwärtig scheint.

Veit Kolbe verbringt ein paar Monate am Mondsee, unter der Drachenwand, und trifft hier zwei junge Frauen. Doch Veit ist Soldat auf Urlaub, in Russland verwundet. Was Margot und Margarete mit ihm teilen, ist seine Hoffnung, dass irgendwann wieder das Leben beginnt. Es ist 1944, der Weltkrieg verloren, doch wie lang dauert er noch? Arno Geiger erzählt von Veits Alpträumen, vom "Brasilianer", der von der Rückkehr nach Rio de Janeiro träumt, von der seltsamen Normalität in diesem Dorf in Österreich.

Das eigene Leben offen, schonungslos und radikal zum Gegenstand des Schreibens zu machen - dies ist das Konzept, zu dem sich Karl Ove Knausgård in einem furiosen Mammutprojekt entschlossen hat. Radikal ehrlich und mit unglaublicher sprachlicher Kraft nähert er sich in "Sterben", dem ersten Roman einer sechsbändigen Serie, seinem schwierigen Verhältnis zum Vater, das ihn grundlegend geprägt hat.

The long-awaited first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill.

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....

Eindringlich erzählt Biermann vom Vater, der als Jude in Auschwitz ermordet wurde, von der Mutter, die ihn aus dem Hamburger Bombeninferno rettete, vom väterlichen Freund Robert Havemann, mit dem er das Los des Geächteten teilte. Er führt uns in die absurde Welt der DDR-Diktatur. Und er erzählt die Geschichten seiner in den Westen geschmuggelten, im Osten heimlich kursierenden Lieder, deren "Verskunst, robuste Rhetorik und gewaltige Sprachkraft" Marcel Reich-Ranicki lobte.

Tokyo, ferne Gegenwart: Zwischen Wirklichkeit und virtueller Realität. Datendiebstahl ist an der Tagesordnung: Einem genialen greisen Wissenschaftler ist es gelungen, bei einer Gruppe professioneller Datenfälscher eine Gehirnwäsche durchzuführen. Er entnimmt ihnen Informationen, die er in Gehirne von unwissenden Versuchspersonen einspeist. Der 35-jährige Held und Ich-Erzähler ist der Einzige, der die Prozedur überlebt.

How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford's parents - Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman - were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the 20th century. Married in 1928, they lived "alone together" on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944.