Product Description
Explores the life of Norbert Kosky, a fifty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor, immigrant to America, and successful but tortured writer in search of spiritual order and freedom. ... Read more

Product Description
Dies ist der Bericht von der Odyssee eines Jungen in den Kriegsgreuein Osteuropas. Das heftig diskutierte Buch "stellt einen Versuch dar, die Welt ihres Glanzes zu entkleiden, das Leben ohne die bequemen Täuschungen zu betrachten, mit denen wir die wahrnehmbare Realität zu verschönern pflegen." [Text in German] ... Read more

Product Description
Through Kosinski's Lenses: Identity, Sex, and Violence is a critical examination of the literary work of Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991). Once a source of international controversy, Kosinski now deserves to be studied for his artistic products, not his biography. Kosinski's work explores a world in flux and defies theoretical labels. His books offer an intelligent yet veiled examination of moral, political, and economic systems via stories that remain popular, intriguing, and disturbing. This analysis focuses on three of Kosinski's thematic lenses: identity, sex, and violence. Also featured are materials from the author's interviews with noted Kosinski scholars and friends_ most importantly, with his widow, Mrs. Katherina von Fraunhofer-Kosinski. ... Read more

Product Description

From Agate Nesaule, acclaimed by writers across the globe from Doris Lessing to Tim O?Brien, comes a long-awaited novel. In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is a story of courage and persistence, exploring in fiction the themes that gripped readers of Nesaule?s award-winning memoir, A Woman in Amber.

Customer Reviews (7)

In Love With Jerzy Kosinski And Herself
Nesaule's skills as a writer and story-teller are solid. However, her endless excuses for the chronically stuck, self-pitying Anna, heroine of this story, become cloying and frustrating. There are serious questions which must be asked: how long after a traumatic event in childhood may it be used as an all-purpose excuse for the adult not to do the work, hard thought or decision-making she plainly needs to do? Why would Anna, who's described as intelligent and highly sensitive, stay with brutish Stanley for twenty five years? She's childless, so could not use the common excuse of "keeping the family together." And moreover, the excuse she gives herself for childlessness is a damaging cliche: she "wouldn't think of" bringing a child into "this terrible world." Her friend Sara, another war survivor, offers the same excuse although their present-day world is actually quite safe and comfortable. One suspects these two women don't want children because, if they had them, they would have to focus on providing a healthy future for them--and could no longer focus exclusively on themselves.

Another question might be, Why does Anna constantly mention her disturbed late father, and lavish his character with sympathy in her mind, but give her own mother such short shrift? The mother is mentioned only briefly and dismissively. The reader wonders what happened to her, especially since her war experiences were evidently far more horrifying than Anna's. (In Nesaule's first book, an autobiography, she implies that her mother was sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers as well as undergoing other life-threatening experiences.) This strange, cold lack of empathy--in a character who is constantly congratulating herself on her "sensitivity"--is very odd.

For most of the book Anna seems comfortable with lies: her own, her lover's, and those of the titular Jerzy Kosinski. Even after the lover is caught robbing her blind, and even after Jerzy Kosinski is exposed as a fraud for his pretensions of severe hardship during World War II, Anna's fierce determination to keep her delusions intact has her making excuses for them. Is this really supposed to show emotional progress? It is only when the liars' exploitations become too outrageous to ignore, that Anna (grudgingly and reluctantly) wakes up...sort of.

In the very last scene, Anna is enjoying an outing at the American Players Theater. A very handsome, middle-aged man sitting behind her makes himself known to her, but she decides to ignore him. After all, she tells herself, she has no guarantee that he has her depth and intelligence. That's right, of course; but she also has no guarantee that he lacks these qualities. A normally alert person doesn't make damaging assumptions about other people. She finds out.

In the end, Anna is a depressing companion. There's an Italian saying that kept occurring to me as I read: "With great effort she broke through an open door." Anna never seems to fully understand that the door is open, and goes on fruitlessly (and boringly) pounding on it long after the patient reader has lost interest.

A story that needs to be told
Since the publication of "Woman in Amber," Agate Nesaule has been one of my favorite authors.After"In Love with Jerzy Kosinski," she continues to occupy a place of honor. The story Agate tells is one we all need to hear.

I am married to a man who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany after WWII and raised in an Eastern European immigrant community in Indiana.From the first time I met my husband's family, I was struck by the way that people in that community, and in other post-WWII immigrant communities in the U.S. and Canada, kept their stories to themselves.As a result, the suffering, the seemingly arcane political complications, and the social and psychological fallout that affected so many people, in so many different ways, remains almost unknown.

In both of her books, Agate Nesaule has done a masterful job of bringing a part of this story, as she lived it, to light.I particularly appreciate the new and different depths she is able to plumb with the novel."In Love with Jerzy Kosinski" doesn't compete with "Woman in Amber,"it completes it. Thank you Agate for brilliantly confronting some truths.

Somewhat Disappointing
After reading Agate Nesaule's memoir "A Woman in Amber," I'd looked forward to reading whatever she wrote next.Unfortunately, this book doesn't begin to measure up to her previous nonfiction account of her life as an immigrant girl who ends up marrying a dominating man unworthy of her.

This novel, perhaps, picks up where "Amber" left off, with the heroine's leaving her husband Stanley and recreating a life for herself on her own.Unfortunately, her new young lover is never as real as Stanley and the plotting is a bit ponderous and perfunctory.When Anna confronts her boyfriend's "other" lover, it strains credulity to the point that the reader no longer believes in Anna as a character.

Better are the author's renderings of women's consciousness groups, Anna's realization that her husband is as stupid as her friends thought, and interactions that the protagonist has with her students.Still, the most interesting character remains Stanley, and he disappears early on in the story.The author may be done with her husband, but the reader longs to know more about this grandiose and deluded character who seems, perversely, to love his wife.

unfinished business

This is a tale about old issues and grudges.
The plot and the characters seemed superficial and not fully developed to their potential.
I was looking for insights on these peoples inner lives and motivations.
The rich Eastern European immigrant experience deserves a story with depth.

A Liberating and emotional journey
This is a read that you will not be able to put down until you have travelled (emotionally and physically) with Anna to her destination (emotionally and physically). The reader will perhaps recognize certain characteristics in Anna's abusive husband Stanley who so denigrates her she almost loses her way.(I think we all have known a Stanley or two).
Anna will introduce the reader to her childhood memories in Latvia and a predominately Latvian neighborhood in Indianapolis.The author creates scenes with her writing that takes us there and has us seeing, tasting, dancing and feeling what the characters life is actually like. I had a hard time putting the novel down as I felt I needed to be right next to Anna to see that she arrives safely where she needed to be. ... Read more

Product Description
Eis Chance, um jardineiro analfabeto e solitário, confinado ao jardim da enorme mansão. Certo dia, o destino obriga-o a abrir os portões e a enfrentar o mundo que fica para além dos altos muros e que ele conhece apenas da televisão . . . Há quarenta anos, Jerzy Kosinski colocou a hipótese de a vacuidade aceder ao poder numa sociedade democrática "evoluída" Não é difícil reconhecer hoje a actualidade e a urgência desta parábola brilhante, tão divertida quanto desconfortável. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

More like a wrestling match than a reading experience...


Allegedly Kosinski's response to charges of plagiarism, autobiographical dishonesty, and using ghost-writers to pen his bestsellers, *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a book--not a novel in the ordinary sense of that term--that not only defies classification, but defies you to read it at all.

Cluttered with footnotes, asides, and quotations that are sometimes illuminating, occasionally fascinating, but just as often tedious and unnecessary, the conceit of this book is announced in the subtitle: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky. The idea being that very few authors write a book entirely by themselves even if the finished work belongs indisputably to one man--instead a book is shaped and brought to fruition by the efforts of a team of people, editors, typists, proofreaders, etc. Thus, by presenting these original `working papers,' Kosinski seeks, in part, to refute the charges that were leveled against him late in his career.

How well he does that--and if his argument holds water--is a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of authors are helped by editors, but just as certainly a lot arent, or, at least, not to the degree that Kosinski seems to argue.

The rest of *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a kind of encyclopedic text of all things Kosinski. A fictionalized autobiography--Kosinski calls it `autofiction'--that brings together his lifelong obsessions with sex, spirituality, freedom, Judaism, the Holocaust, and the vocation of writing in terms of the metaphor of swimming and/or floating. A lot of this is of interest to writers--and being one myself ((*Hardcore Romeo*)), I can't accurately gauge how interesting it would be to non-writers. One thing is for certain: this is not the kind of book to read if you're looking for a `good story.' There are some interesting `behind-the-scenes' peeks at Kosinski's Oscar appearance and his flirtation with Hollywood via the film version of his novel *Being There* and his appearance in *Reds* and it can be fun to speculate who the "real people" are that Kosinski is satirizing, but otherwise this text is a little like surfing the internet or looking into a filing cabinet of someone's personal documents and notes--a grab-bag of stuff all loosely connected and every once in a while something that really surprises you.

In the end, I found this an interesting book, perhaps because of and made all the more poignant by the fact that it was Kosinski's last and his suicide followed not long after its publication--a suicide foreshadowed in these very pages. It is a very personal book by a man infamous for hiding behind a kaleidoscope of persona, a very truthful book, it strikes me, by a man whose entire life, so his accusers charge, was nothing but a series of lies. A failed experiment, if you judge such things by sales figures, an unread book, a `confession' no one wanted to hear, let alone forgive...a prayer lost like those of the victims of a Holocaust that in the end he didn't so much escape, as delay.




... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

No Third Path
This is an outstanding and most unusual report from the Soviet Union. By virtue of his education, profession, and partly Russian background the author, a social scientist from one of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, was able to combine extensive research in the Soviet Union with all the advantages of exact scholastic knowledge of Soviet theory and practice.

The fundamental intellectual goal of this penetrating study is to give an authentic picture of the working of the Soviet system, to discover the mechanism of the socialist collective and its impact upon the individual and his values and beliefs.

The reader of this provacative, grim, and deeply disturbing book will not be able to accept the Communist challenge lightly. He will realize that we are facing more than just military power and a few fanatically dedicated men who want to force Communism upon the Western World. Mr. Novak's book is a timely and significant warning to all of those who oversimplify, who are asleep or who are confused - and many of us fall into one of these categories.
--- from book's dustjacket ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

More like a wrestling match than a reading experience...

Allegedly Kosinski's response to charges of plagiarism, autobiographical dishonesty, and using ghost-writers to pen his bestsellers, *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a book--not a novel in the ordinary sense of that term--that not only defies classification, but defies you to read it at all.

Cluttered with footnotes, asides, and quotations that are sometimes illuminating, occasionally fascinating, but just as often tedious and unnecessary, the conceit of this book is announced in the subtitle: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky. The idea being that very few authors write a book entirely by themselves even if the finished work belongs indisputably to one man--instead a book is shaped and brought to fruition by the efforts of a team of people, editors, typists, proofreaders, etc. Thus, by presenting these original `working papers,' Kosinski seeks, in part, to refute the charges that were leveled against him late in his career.

How well he does that--and if his argument holds water--is a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of authors are helped by editors, but just as certainly a lot arent, or, at least, not to the degree that Kosinski seems to argue.

The rest of *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a kind of encyclopedic text of all things Kosinski. A fictionalized autobiography--Kosinski calls it `autofiction'--that brings together his lifelong obsessions with sex, spirituality, freedom, Judaism, the Holocaust, and the vocation of writing in terms of the metaphor of swimming and/or floating. A lot of this is of interest to writers--and being one myself ((*Hardcore Romeo*)), I can't accurately gauge how interesting it would be to non-writers. One thing is for certain: this is not the kind of book to read if you're looking for a `good story.' There are some interesting `behind-the-scenes' peeks at Kosinski's Oscar appearance and his flirtation with Hollywood via the film version of his novel *Being There* and his appearance in *Reds* and it can be fun to speculate who the "real people" are that Kosinski is satirizing, but otherwise this text is a little like surfing the internet or looking into a filing cabinet of someone's personal documents and notes--a grab-bag of stuff all loosely connected and every once in a while something that really surprises you.

In the end, I found this an interesting book, perhaps because of and made all the more poignant by the fact that it was Kosinski's last and his suicide followed not long after its publication--a suicide foreshadowed in these very pages. It is a very personal book by a man infamous for hiding behind a kaleidoscope of persona, a very truthful book, it strikes me, by a man whose entire life, so his accusers charge, was nothing but a series of lies. A failed experiment, if you judge such things by sales figures, an unread book, a `confession' no one wanted to hear, let alone forgive...a prayer lost like those of the victims of a Holocaust that in the end he didn't so much escape, as delay.
... Read more