Nicholas Christopher

On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in Lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, a photographer named Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality--a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragonpoints and Tibetan mysticism where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica's father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White's disappearance was no accident: he was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present.Until Veronica finds Leo...From the Trade Paperback edition.

Faced with her disintegrating family life, Dr. Ruby Cardillo enlists her daughter to accompany her on a trip up the East Coast to discover her family's ties to a long-rumored Edison cylinder recording of jazz musician Buddy Bolden.

"After his success with Desperate Characters (LJ 9/1/88), a novella-in-verse, Christopher has returned to his lyric mode, characterized by short, unadorned lines and lots of kinky, almost surreal detail. He likes to jazz up his poems with ''girls, '' who often seem to be dropped into the landscape: ''In summer a girl sat/ there every afternoon/ in a yellow bikini, / fedora, and wraparound/ sunglasses . . ./ drinking Campari.'' ''Girls'' also appear naked, wearing turbans, as comic strip characters, as lovers, as barefoot beggars, in silk pantaloons, in Columbus's dreams, in red leather, raped by imperialists, and made up as Mussolini, and Christopher's campy way of being serious can grow tiresome. But there are some gems here--''On the Peninsula, '' for example, in which a sensuous sea floor of torch-lit fish and yellow crabs become ''where our bodies, locked fast, /turn under a blue sheet.''-- Ellen Kauf man, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York (fantasticfiction.co.uk).

A modern bestiary of made-up fantastical creatures organized from A to Z, along with an ampersand and an invisible letter, featuring some of the best and most respected fantasists from around the world, including Karen Lord, Dexter Palmer, Brian Evenson, China Mieville, Felix Gilman, Catherynne M. Valente, Rikki Ducornet, and Karin Lowachee.

In verses elegiac and surreal we are taken from the lush islands of Hawaii to the streets of Greenwich Village after midnight, from a sparsely attended Las Vegas funeral to a children's tea party. Whether he is describing items lost and found or a woman drowning in a stormy sea, Christopher's poetry is filled with moments of spiritual illumination that confirm his reputation as one of today's most gifted poets.

"I'll be thirty-six years old this spring, which is young for a retired concert soloist, but old for a virgin. I started out as a musical prodigy....". So begins the third paragraph of the opening chapter of this incandescent novel. As an adolescent, Renne Sundheimer had the musical world at his feet; hailed as potentially the greatest cellist who ever lived, he toured the world's concert halls, basking in the adoration of his fans and the admiration of the critics. Then suddenly, at the age of eighteen, his gift deserted him, and for the last fifteen years he has made his living as a cello teacher at a large university in Southern California, practicing five or six hours a day in the hope that his gift will return. Suddenly Renne's life is altered radically by two disparate events: receiving a summons to jury duty, where he unwillingly becomes a juror in a murder trial for the brutal killing of a Buddhist monk; and becoming the teacher of another cello prodigy, an unprepossessing nine-year-old Korean boy whose brilliant talent, potential and musicianship remind Renne of his own past. The Soloist is an extraordinary achievement, and one that Random House feels privileged to publish.

"Atomic Field presents two extended poems set in the years 1962 and 1972. Each year includes forty-five poems that evoke the life of a young boy and, later, a young man, during those alternately calm and turbulent decades. Comic books, television, the threat of nuclear war, drug experimentation, travel to Europe, love affairs - these subjects and more form a common thread of growing up in middle-class America and of a young man entering the adult world, feeling and trying to understand its complexities, pains, and joys."--BOOK JACKET.

Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance.

On a visit to her childhood home a woman recalls the experiences she and her brother had while living there during World War II and especially the reasons they decided to run away.