Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: 7208 books

“Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later...

“The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.” –Ernest Newman   In Seventeen Famous Operas, renowned musicologist and music critic Ernest Newman goes beyond simply retelling the plots of the operas he has chosen to feature in this...

This book contains the definitive treatment of the stories, texts, and music of Turandot, Gianni Schicchi, The Barber of Bagdad, Thaïs, Eugen Onegin, Prince Igor, The Golden Cockerel, Elektra, Orfeo ed Euridice, Lakmé, Les Huguenots, Così fan tutte, The Seraglio, Les Troyens, Don Pasquale, La Juive,...

From renowned music critic and musicologist Ernest Newman comes the first of four volumes chronicling the life of legendary German composer Richard Wagner. This first volume takes us through the early years of Richard’s life: his birth in Leipzig; his childhood in Dresden and the sparks of his interest...

Thirty Years' Musical Recollections, first published in 1862, is a year-by-year commentary on the European operas, ballets, singers and dancers popular in London from 1830 to 1859. Its author was music critic of The Athaneum for over thirty years and also wrote book reviews, novels, plays and poems....

In the vast literature on Richard Wagner, Ernest Newman's classic four-volume Life remains unsurpassed. Volume III covers the years 1859-66 including the Tannhäuser debacle in Paris, the crisis with Minna, the first production of Tristan und Isolde and the flight from Munich.

Poets on the march: 50 crucial poems written in response to the current political climate, selected and introduced by the Ohio Poet Laureate—and son of immigrants—Amit Majmudar. In a political atmosphere where language and even meaning itself are continually under threat, poetry has a critical...

Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewis’s fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who...

Excerpt: . . . Composition, it is rather curious that while I was writing on our too great readiness to admire everything a classic does, merely because he is a classic, someone in the Times Literary Supplement should have been regarding much the same fallacy--more particularly in poetry and...

THE JOKE-TELLERS HANDBOOK OR 1,999 BELLY LAUGHS   ROBERT ORBEN   “Good ladies, evening and gentlemen . . . That does it! Next time I’ll rehearse everything! . . .” That’s the only one example of what you’ll find in this unusual collection of modern humor—professional humor—the...

"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth." Louis S. Auchincloss An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade...

A rich and revelatory biography of one of the crucial cultural figures of the twentieth century. Lincoln Kirstein’s contributions to the nation’s life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary...

The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150. The human, business,...

The first full-scale life of the controversial, greatly admired yet often underrated director/producer who was known as “Otto the Terrible.” Nothing about Otto Preminger was small, trivial, or self-denying, from his privileged upbringing in Vienna as the son of an improbably successful...