Who Wrote the Book of Love?

Thomas Farber

Avon/Books

In his first novel, Thomas Farber gives us an unusually honest look inside the heart of a man trying to understand the curves of pursuit in his own life. His ties, for example, to his older brother: as boys and on into adulthood, the two communicate best with a football, sending each other out for passes, cheering each other on with their private polylingual wordplay. The pattern that exists with the parents is another, a curve of pursuit marked always by the imminence and the memory of death. And so too with his marriage, where all that is between him and his wife is richly verbal, intricate, and in real jeopardy, and where their cats are the witnesses to the intensity of what binds them. Despite the narrator's feeling of loss, and despite his remorse, we begin to see with them perhaps certain connections which simply cannot be severed. That whatever else is also true, the bonds of love may persist.

Curves of Pursuit

Literature & Fiction

Women's Fiction

AVON.

Hazards to the Human Heart

Dutton Adult

A RARE AND gifted photographer; Levin takes the reader on journeys through underwater landscapes from the waters of the Hawaiian Islands to Costa Rica and Micronesia. Levin's photographs have appeared in magazines and books including Kalaupapa, A Portrait and Kaho`olawe, Na Leo o Kanaloa. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Wayne Levin has photographs in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and the Hawai`i State Foundation on Culture and the ArtsThomas Farber has been awarded Guggenheim, National Endowment, and Rockefeller fellowships for his fiction and creative nonfiction. His books include, The Price of the Ride, On Water, and Learning to Love It. Farber has been Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai`i, Fullbright Scholar for Pacific Island Studies, and recipient of the Dorothea Lange - Paul Taylor Prize.

Through a Liquid Mirror

Arts & Photography

Wayne Levin

Individual Artists

Bess Press, Inc.

FOR CENTURIES, akule have been bountiful here in Hawai'i. In earlier times, villages posted lookouts, kiloi'a, above the bays, to alert everyone to the akule's seasonal arrivals. Easy to see when gathering in the shallows, the dense schools would form riverine patterns, like ribbons blown afloat, unfurling scrolls, the tails of kites, silk scarves carried away in the wind, bursts of fireworks - then suddenly contract into a writhing sculpture, a vortex, unscrolling again and moving on. The Hawaiian language distinguishes each growth stage of the species. The small ones, pa'a'a, are two to three inches long; halalu are five to six inches long; and the adult akule are seven to twelve inches. The immature akule arrive in autumn. Too small for netting, the little halalu are caught by hook - sometimes without bait - bunching together tightly to feed. In spring, the school returns as mature fish. While observing the many kapu involved with fishing, entire communities of Native Hawaiians once swam out with baskets, or loaded their caneos with olona nets to gather them. Today, commerical fishermen use aircraft and sonar to locate akule, then net them by the ton. Wayne Levin's images command our attention whether or not we have any special knowledge about akule, What's harder to account for and name are the emotions and sensations they evoke in us.

Akule

Frank Stewart

On Water

Okeanos Press

Collecting Thomas Farber's nonfiction on writing and the writing life, A Lover's Quarrel contains this gifted author's meditation on his vocation. Anatomist, ironist, and moralist, Farber achieves effects of luminous integrity with deceptively simple means. A gift to writers who seek to understand what informs and haunts their métier, A Lover's Quarrel is also for any readers whose lives have been shaped-or saved-by story.

A Lover's Quarrel: On Writing and the Writing Life

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Ellsberg Books

The Twoness of Oneness

Andrea Young Arts

In mathematics, a two-body problem is about the trajectories of two objects interacting only with each other (a star and a planet, for example). This kind of problem has a simple mathematical solution. Not so for two human bodies, however (two lovers, or two friends) as we learn from this story about the limits of art or math, those realms of perfection. In a beach town in the South of France, a writer and a mathematician happen to meet, start trading stories about bachelor life, relationships, loves lost. Encountering several young women as the day passes, they banter with them about art and mathematics, playfully, passionately, seductively. The two men also begin to see both what bonds them and the ways in which they may greatly differ. That evening, the two men and the women met earlier are partying when a surprising guest shows up, and tensions apparent earlier reach an unexpected conclusion. The Two-Body Problem evokes the male adventurers of Sideways and Swingers; the mathematical allegories of Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and the TV show Numb3rs; and the intricate plotting of Swimming Pool.

The Two-Body Problem [Revised]

Edward Frenkel

Foregone Conclusions: Equivoques, Aperçus, Spars & Catarrhs

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Books by Thomas Farber