11 livros selecionados pelo New York Times - John Williams

O do Patrick Boucheron sobre Maquiavel, vou procurar ler na edição original em francês. Os outros ficam a critério dos meus seguidores neste blog.
A Amazon.fr tem pelo menos OITO páginas de referências a livros de, ou co-organizados por esse grande professor do Collège de France, amigo de vários outros grandes historiadores: 
https://www.amazon.fr/s?k=Patrick+Boucheron&i=stripbooks&__mk_fr_FR=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&qid=1582497784&ref=sr_pg_1
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

11 New Books We Recommend This Week

The New York Times, February 20, 2020

Editors’ Choice

Machiavelli certainly knew about seduction of a sort, the kind that can be used to seize and maintain power. An energetic new book by Patrick Boucheron offers a knowing guide to the Renaissance statesman and writer’s life and work. Clement Knox’s “Seduction” is a wide-ranging look at how the art has influenced politics, literature and social movements. “It turns out that we were just as conflicted about seduction centuries ago as we are now,” our reviewer Alex Kuczynski writes. “Depending on whom you ask and when, the seducer is either a manipulative villain exploiting innocents or a heroic figure of sexual liberation.”

Lots of fiction to choose from on this week’s list, including Isabel Allende’s new novel, which revisits the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and a novella by Lily Tuck that reimagines “Wuthering Heights.” Other new works of fiction feature a medieval Frenchwoman, an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant in Australia, a woman whose life changes for the better (or so she thinks), capitalism’s exploitative structures and a dystopia set in the distant past.

There are two visual treats as well: “Return to Romance!” collects comics about love from the early 1960s by an unsung master, and “The Cursed Hermit” is a graphic novel about strange doings at a secluded school.

John Williams
Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

AMNESTY, by Aravind Adiga. (Scribner, $26.) In Adiga’s latest novel, an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant in Australia believes he knows who committed a murder, but isn’t sure what to do with the information. “Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “No one in his novels is simple to understand. Adiga may not agree with everything that gets said or thought, but there is no gauze on his mental windshield. Nice people are often skewered, as if on kabobs. Reading him you get a sense of having your finger on the planet’s pulse.” You come to this novel, Garner adds, “for its author’s authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants’ lives.”

MACHIAVELLI: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear, by Patrick Boucheron. Translated by Willard Wood. (Other Press, $14.99.) Boucheron’s energetic little book, which started out as a series of talks for French public radio in 2016, offers a knowing guide to Machiavelli’s life and work. He presents his subject as “an inveterate dramatist and irrepressible trickster,” according to our critic Jennifer Szalai: “It’s not so much the content of ‘The Prince’ as its approach, with its ‘theatrical energy’ and ‘sure and rapid pace,’ that offers a way to think about politics not as static and immutable but as stubbornly contingent. Cultivating republican institutions and the rule of law requires certain techniques; sheer political survival requires others.”

SEDUCTION: A History From the Enlightenment to the Present, by Clement Knox. (Pegasus, $28.95.) Like an R-rated version of “A Christmas Carol,” Knox’s history whisks readers away to meet enticers past, from Casanova to the flappers of the 1920s, showing how the art of seduction has influenced politics and power, literature and social movements. It turns out we have long been conflicted about this art: Is it villainy or sexual liberation? Knox also discusses the book on a recent episode of the Book Review’s podcast.

THE CONVERT, by Stefan Hertmans. Translated by David McKay. (Pantheon, $27.95.) In both “The Convert” and his previous novel, the highly praised “War and Turpentine,” the Belgian novelist Stefan Hertmans habitually treats the reader to his process. Weaving research and personal travel with his fiction writer’s historical imagination, in “The Convert” he reconstructs the life of a medieval Frenchwoman, Sarah Hamoutal Todros (née Vigdis Adelais Gudbrandr), who defied her aristocratic Christian family to marry a Jewish yeshiva student from another town. Our reviewer Valerie Martin writes that this novel is “an imaginative flight, full of darkness and light, lively characters, life-altering conflicts, violence and kindness, birth, death and, oddly, a lot of snakes.”

INDELICACY, by Amina Cain. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) An aspiring writer marries a man she meets while mopping the floor at the museum where she works. He seems like the ticket to the life she wants — and yet. “You’re a little bit jealous of this woman until you realize how miserable she is,” writes Elisabeth Egan, who chose Cain’s novel for Group Text, the Book Review’s monthly column for readers and book clubs. “She has exactly what she thought she wanted, but the next phase of her life unfolds hypnotically as ‘Indelicacy’ morphs from a modern ‘Pygmalion’ into a fable infused with an old-fashioned moral: Be careful what you wish for.” Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic.

RETURN TO ROMANCE! The Strange Love Stories of Ogden Whitney, edited by Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro. (New York Review Comics, $19.95.) The cartoonist Liana Finck introduces this collection of delirious, daftly satisfying love comics from the early 1960s by an unsung master. “These stories are ridiculous,” she writes. They’re also unexpected and complicated. “At first glance, the collection’s title is a misnomer,” our reviewer Ed Park writes. “There’s hardly anything strange about attractive (white, cis) men and women overcoming obstacles — psychological and otherwise — and finding their way to each other at last. Yet even the most hackneyed plots reveal a perverse fascination with fate, and perhaps a witty critique of the entire business of love.”

THE CURSED HERMIT, by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes. (Conundrum, $20.) In the second of the graphic novel series Hobtown Mystery Stories, a pair of teenage sleuths are thrown into a loopy adventure at Knotty Pines, a vast and secluded boarding school, thick with bad mojo and elaborate wallpaper, where Lovecraftian evil lurks. Picture Nancy Drew but darker, and watch the creepiness go off the charts.

A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA, by Isabel Allende. Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. (Ballantine, $28.) Spanning generations and continents, Allende’s 17th novel follows a couple after they escape the ugly aftermath of the Spanish Civil War on the poet Pablo Neruda’s “ship of hope,” a cargo ship that carried over 2,000 refugees who sought political asylum. Our reviewer Paula McLain writes that Allende “has deftly woven fact and fiction, history and memory, to create one of the most richly imagined portrayals of the Spanish Civil War to date, and one of the strongest and most affecting works in her long career.”

HEATHCLIFF REDUX: A Novella and Stories, by Lily Tuck. (Atlantic Monthly, $23.) In the novella that anchors this collection, Tuck uses the same flat, fragmentary style of her most recent novel, “Sisters,” to reimagine Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” as a tale of self-delusion and internal conflict in 1960s Virginia. The story is written in a series of short, clipped sections, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, others no more than a line or two per page. The “restrained but remarkably arresting” result, our reviewer Lucy Scholes writes, is “a master class in digression as a narrative device.”

THE RECIPE FOR REVOLUTION, by Carolyn Chute. (Grove, $30.) This sprawling novel about capitalist exploitation and the delusions of growth features a wide-ranging cast, including militia groups, media figures, cultists, callous entrepreneurs, economic outcasts and Republican wives. “The events of the novel take place circa-Y2K, but Chute’s concerns seem very 2020: how reality is named, created, fragmented, trolled, distorted,” our reviewer Nathan Hill writes.

THE ILLNESS LESSON, by Clare Beams. (Doubleday, $26.95.) Much of the feminist dystopian fiction published over the last few years takes place in the future, in worlds uncomfortably similar to our own. “The Illness Lesson,” however, proves that books can fit squarely within that genre even when set in the past — in this case, small-town Massachusetts in 1871. “Think ‘City Upon a Hill’ ideals and ‘The Scarlet Letter’-style misogyny and you’ll have a pretty good idea of this sly debut novel,” our reviewer Siobhan Jones writes, “which scarily hints that, since the 19th century, perhaps not a whole lot has changed.”