David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair
Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irиne Nйmirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Franзaise. But Suite Franзaise was only the coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, magnificent novelist. Here in one volume are four of Nйmirovsky's other novels -- all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time.
David Golder is the novel that established Nйirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and lonliness, the story of a self-made business man, once wealthy, now suffering a breakdown as he nears the lonely end of his life. The Courilof Affair tells the story of a Russian revolutionary living out his last days -- and his recollections of his first infamous assassination. Also included are two short, gemlike novels: The Ball, a pointed exploration of adolescence and the obsession with status among the bourgeoisie, and Snow in Autumn, an evocative tale of White Russian йmigrйs in Paris after the Russian Revolution.
Introduced by celebrated novelist Claire Messud, this collection of four spellbinding novels offers the same storytelling mastery, powerful clarity of language, and empathic grasp of human behavior that would give shape to Suite Franзaise.
Irиne Nйmirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a wealthy banking family and emigrated to France during the Russian Revolution. After attending the Sorbonne in Paris she began to write and swiftly achieved success with David Golder, which was followed by more than a dozen other books. Throughout her lifetime she published widely in French newspapers and literary journals. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. More than sixty years later, Suite Franзaise was published posthumously, for the first time, in 2006.
Claire Messud is the award-winning author of four works of fiction: When the World Was Steady, The Hunters, The Last Life, and, The Emperor's Children.
The New York Times - Thomas Mallon
…with the reissue of four short works of Nemirovsky's early fiction—including David Golder, which made her reputation, at 26, when it appeared in 1929—present-day readers have the chance to gain a fuller sense of this writer's considerable power and youthful weaknesses…Claire Messud's graceful introduction supplements the chance this collection provides to see Nemirovsky's career at least somewhat removed from the disaster that engulfed her. These short fictions may often be punctuated with the rhetorical shrugs of Russian fatalism, but this is really just a tic of self-indulgence the young Nemirovsky gives to her creations. What interests her most in characters like Golder and Courilof is tenacity, a desire for survival she can appreciate, as yet, only instinctively.
Publishers Weekly
Through the 1920s and '30s Russian-Jewish émigré Némirovsky, author of the recently rediscovered and internationally bestselling Suite Française, was a popular and critically acclaimed novelist in her adopted France. These four short early novels reveal her clear-eyed view into the deeply compromised human heart. David Golder, her third novel and the only one in the volume previously available in English, is saturated with the despairing mood of its title character, an embittered Jewish business- and family man in ill health, left after the suicide of his bankrupt partner to question the value of the great petroleum fortune he has amassed. The Courilof Affairis narrated by Léon M., a dying Russian revolutionary: he recounts his relationship with Valerian Courilof, the minister of education in imperial Russia. Léon grew to like the decrepit, politically ruined Courilof, even as he was ordered to kill him. The Ballis a psychologically acute account of the relationship between a narcissistic French mother-married to her former boss, a rich German Jew-and their enraged adolescent daughter, Antoinette; the similarly brief Snow in Autumnis a tender portrait of an old, devoted Russian nanny who cannot adjust to life as an émigré in Paris. These four early works by Némirovsky reveal her impressive range, bitingly exact settings and insight into profoundly flawed and compromised characters. (Jan.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationSee also: Facing Up to the American Dream or The Social Meaning of Money
How to Change the World: Social Enterpreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Author: David Bornstein
Now published in more than twenty countries, David Bornstein's How to Change the World has become the bible for social entrepreneurship-in which men and women around the world are finding innovative solutions to a wide variety of social and economic problems. Whether delivering solar energy to Brazilian villagers, expanding work opportunities for disabled people across India, creating a network of home-care agencies to serve poor people with AIDS in South Africa, or bridging the college-access gap in the United States, social entrepreneurs are pioneering problem-solving models that will reshape the 21st century.
How to Change the World provides vivid profiles of many such individuals and what they have in common. The book is an In Search of Excellence for social initiatives, intertwining personal stories, anecdotes, and analysis. Readers will discover how one person can make an astonishing difference in the world.
The case studies in the book include Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign against landmines she ran by e-mail from her Vermont home; Roberto Baggio, a 31-year old Brazilian who has established eighty computer schools in the slums of Brazil; and Diana Propper, who has used investment banking techniques to make American corporations responsive to environmental dangers.
The paperback edition will offer a new foreword by the author that shows how the concept of social entrepreneurship has expanded and unfolded over the last few years, including the Gates-Buffetts charitable partnership, the rise of Google, and the increased mainstream coverage of the subject. The book will also update the stories of individual socialentrepreneurs that appeared in the cloth edition.
Table of Contents:
Preface ixRestless People 1
From Little Acorns Do Great Trees Grow 11
The Light in My Head Went On: Fabio Rosa, Brazil: Rural Electrification 21
The Fixed Determination of an Indomitable Will: Florence Nightingale, England: Nursing 41
A Very Significant Force: Bill Drayton, United States: The Bubble 48
Why Was I Never Told about This? 62
Ten-Nine-Eight-Childline!: Jeroo Billimoria, India: Child Protection 70
The Role of the Social Entrepreneur 92
"What Sort of a Mother Are You?": Erzsebet Szekeres, Hungary: Assisted Living for the Disabled 101
Are They Possessed, Really Possessed, by an Idea? 120
If the World Is to Be Put in Order: Vera Cordeiro, Brazil: Reforming Healthcare 130
In Search of Social Excellence 151
The Talent Is Out There: J. B. Schramm, United States: College Access 164
New Opportunities, New Challenges 183
Something Needed to Be Done: Veronica Khosa, South Africa: Care for AIDS Patients 188
Four Practices of Innovative Organizations 205
This Country Has to Change: Javed Abidi, India: Disability Rights 214
Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs 238
Morality MustMarch with Capacity: James Grant, United States: The Child Survival Revolution 247
Blueprint Copying 262
Conclusion: The Emergence of the Citizen Sector 271
Epilogue 289
Afterword 292
Notes 307
Selected Readings 329
Resource Guide 333
Index 341
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