Word: knopf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Looking is not seeing," writes Henry Grunwald in Twilight (Knopf; 130 pages; $20), and often we really see something only when it is about to leave us. For Grunwald, the beginning of such a loss came seven years ago, when a routine examination revealed that he was legally blind in his left eye and was one of roughly 15 million Americans who suffer from macular degeneration, a gradual diminishing of eyesight (often caused by age) for which there is no cure...
...husbands and countless lovers, both male and female; exploring the Paris demimonde; even, strapped for cash, starting a beauty business at age 58. Such a life--one that has been copiously documented, by Colette and others--presents Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf; 592 pages; $30), with both an embarrassment of riches and a Sisyphean task. Despite working on this book for nine years, Thurman, who won a National Book Award in 1983 for her biography of Isak Dinesen (and has been nominated again for this book), acknowledges that Colette remains an elusive...
Purdy's mind, however, is another matter. With the publication of his first book--For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today (Knopf; 256 pages; $20)--the brainy nature boy has stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of modern passionlessness. Reduced to simple headlines, Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letter- man. "The ironic individual," he writes, "is a bit like Seinfeld without a script; at ease in banter, versed...
...very well, placing among Amazon.com's top books. Older, more established writers have had luck too. Annie Proulx's newest collection of strikingly uncommercial short stories, Close Range, has sold nearly 100,000 copies. Scribner, the book's publisher, would have considered half that number a success. And at Knopf, senior editor Anne Close says short-story collections such as Lorrie Moore's Birds of America have fared very well this year...
Among the best new collections are two that loosely chronicle the immigrant experience: Gish Jen's Who's Irish? (Knopf; 208 pages; $22) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner; 198 pages; $12). Lahiri has a gift for illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships--with lovers, family friends, those met in travel. A more lasting bond--the one between fathers and daughters--is elegantly explored in Bliss Broyard's My Father, Dancing...