Yale University Press: 2009 books

Since his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn’s music and personality have been both admired and denigrated to extraordinary degrees. In this valuable book Clive Brown weaves together a rich array of documents-letters, diaries, memoirs, reviews, news reports, and more-to present a balanced and fascinating...

Unlike all previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each...

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin,...

In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility...

How and why has the saga of Scarlett O’Hara kept such a tenacious hold on our national imagination for almost three-quarters of a century? In the first book ever to deal simultaneously with Margaret Mitchell’s beloved novel and David Selznick’s spectacular film version of Gone with the Wind, film...

“If good design tells the truth,” writes Robert Grudin in this path-breaking book on esthetics and authority, “poor design  tells a lie,  a lie usually related . . . to the  getting or  abusing of power.”From the ornate cathedrals of Renaissance Europe to the much-maligned Ford Edsel...

In Carlos Rojas’s imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel’s Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theater in this private hell, viewing scenes from his own...

Acclaimed translator Edith Grossman brings to English-language readers Rojas’s imaginative vision of Francisco de Goya and the reverberations of his art in Fascist Spain This historical novel by one of Spain’s most celebrated authors weaves a tale of disparate time periods: the early years...

“Not only a memoir, it’s also a fierce reply to those who criticized German-Jewish assimilation and the tardiness of many families in leaving Germany” (Publishers Weekly). In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany...

One hundred years have passed since Marcel Proust published the first volume of what was to become a seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. In the intervening century his famously compelling novel has never been out of print and has been translated into dozens of languages. English-language...