New Releases by Sven Birkerts

One of America''s most honored essayists, Sven Birkerts returns with a riveting collection. In The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing, Birkerts reflects on questions every writer grapples with: What does it mean to write today?

Birkerts "examines the changes that he has observed in himself and others [since allowing a degree of everyday digital technology into his life]: the distraction induced by reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of ''hive'' behaviors. ''An unprecedented shift is underway,'' he argues, and ''this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation.'' He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and contemplates the countering energies available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are a threat to creativity"--Page 4 of cove

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature''s finest practioners. In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov''s Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf''s unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr''s The Liars'' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist''s essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

Other Walk is a series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow time Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country''s foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms. In this deeply appealing and engaging collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son''s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed. But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children''s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts belongs to the second wave of modernists who arrived in the United States from abroad, a group that includes Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli among others. This work presents his cultural perspectives as well as his family insights to bear, offering a unique portrait of a life and career. Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts belongs to the second wave of modernists who arrived in the United States from abroad, a group that includes Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli among others. Educated at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Birkerts worked first with Eero Saarinen in his now-legendary office in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and later was chief designer for Minoru Yamasaki. At that time both Saarinen and Yamasaki were developing their distinctive architectural signatures and building their international renown. Subsequently Birkerts established his own practice, evolving a design process and a philosophy with its own original profile. His approach does not seek a ''right style for the job'' in the manner of Saarinen. From the first, Birkerts'' work was tied to a program as well as a particular context - a place - to the extent that it became expressive of the surrounding landscape and accommodating to the existing vernacular. Birkerts'' designs, from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis to the Corning Museum of Glass to the Houston Arts Museum and recently the Latvian National Library, shows him exploring with ever greater resource and inventiveness the expressive possibilities of symbol and metaphor. Form, he believes, expresses function, and does so with its own rich, meaningful vocabulary. Birkerts uses visual metaphors to link program, client, and landscape in a resonant solution. His methodology of using metaphor - meaning - as a first principle, as a generator of design concept, is unusual in the profession, but it is vitally connected to his Latvian heritage and his family background as the son of a folklorist and writer. This heritage is given a new turn here, for the biographical text of the book has been written by his son, Sven Birkerts, who is a noted literary critic and author of the influential book "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age". He has also written a memoir, "My Sky Blue Trades" which describes at some length his coming of age struggles with his architect father. Now, years later, Sven brings his cultural perspectives as well as his family insights to bear, offering a unique portrait of a life and career. History and description are enlivened throughout by observations and reflections on the career - the destiny - of this master of the expressive concept. The book is richly illustrated and complemented by descriptive assessments of the projects by Martin Schwartz, who is an architect and writer and who teaches at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan.

Reading a selection of novels for a second time, Birkerts reflects on his first readings and what later readings reveal about the passing of time and of memory.

A renowned literary critic examines the impact of information technology on the experience of reading in this "thoughtful and heartfelt" essay collection ( Washington Post ). In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age, are we sacrificing our literary culture? Renowned critic Sven Birkerts believes the answer is an alarming yes. Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes the inner life. What does it mean to "hear" a book on audiotape, decipher its words on a screen, or interact with it on CD-ROM? Are books as we know them dead? At once a celebration of the complex pleasures of reading and a boldly original challenge to the new information technologies, The Gutenberg Elegies is an essential volume for anyone who cares about the past and future of books. Includes a new introduction and afterword by the author "Provocative . . . Compelling . . . Powerfully conveys why reading matters, why it is both a delight and a necessity." — The Harvard Review

Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. Donald Hall, National Book Critics Circle Award winner and Pulitzer Prize nominee, and Sven Birkerts, recipient of awards from the National Book Critics Circle and PEN, bring their talents to this concise, lively text that covers all aspects of writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs. Going beyond the basics of composition, the text teaches originality and elegance in writing, and encourages students to develop their own written voice. Sample student papers--including several works in progress--allow students to learn the writing process through the work of their peers. A brief handbook section rounds out the coverage. Sven Birkerts'' new Foreword to this Classic Edition explores the cultural context of Writing Well''s first edition and examines how it remains significant and useful over 30 years after its initial publication.

One of the nation''s great literary critics shares memories of growing up as an outcast in suburban Detroit, reaching deep back into his own family''s history to paint a portrait of a life lived as an outsider in America.

One of the pivotal critics of our times champions the creative spirit in an age of intense distraction, tackling such subjects as manufactured nostalgia and commercialism.

This anthology aims to bring an awareness of how the world of fiction, poetry and drama is expanding in a multicultural, global and electronic environment. Authors represented include a high proportion of women as well as writers from non-Western cultures and from a variety of American cultural traditions. For in-depth reading, career study sections in fiction and poetry focus on the work of James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Gary Snyder, and Adrienne Rich, while the drama section includes two plays by Sophocles, as well as Shakespeare''s Hamlet and The Tempest. In all, the text includes 46 short stories, 14 plays and 345 poems.

Award-winning writer Sven Birkerts takes on contemporary American fiction in this provocative new collection of essays. In these insightful pieces, Birkerts evaluates the postmodern literary scene and the effect the media, especially television, have had on the way we think and write. The most crucial essay, "The Talent in the Room", sets the theme for the book, as Birkerts discusses the diminished possibilities for the "great American novel" to be written. The essential connection between past and present has been severed, he argues, and a sense of history and depth, and the distinctions between high and low culture, have faded, only to be replaced with a glut of information from the computer age and the homogenized forces of television and mass communication. In other essays, Birkerts examines the diversity of the novelistic styles of such established writers as Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, and such writers just beginning to gain reputation as Paul Auster, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace. American Energies confirms Birkerts''s stature as one of the major essayists of our time.

Sven Birkerts explores the impacts of two world wars and the collapse of the assumption of Humanism on a diverse group of modern writers, bringing to light the aspect of a world literature promoting an international perspective. Photographs.