Louis Begley

From the master observer of upper-crust New York life comes a taut thriller that takes readers from the office suites of Manhattan to the tidy elegance of Sag Harbor and the rough-and-tumble western plains of Brazil. Find your next book club pick, read special features, and more. Join the Random House Reader s Circle.""Jack Dana, a star student at Yale, joins the military after 9/11 only to have sniper fire cut short his career as a Marine Corps infantry officer. While recovering at Walter Reed Hospital, he begins to write a novel about his wartime experience. Jack s uncle Harry, a surrogate father to him, as well as a partner at a leading New York law firm, helps Jack secure a publisher. Jack is thrilled when his book becomes a huge success, but after a celebratory trip to South America, Jack returns home to shocking news: Uncle Harry is dead, found hanged in his summer home. Horrified and incredulous, Jack digs into the facts surrounding the tragedy and comes to believe that his uncle s death was no suicide. Delays of law are not for Jack, so he takes matters into his own hands embarking on a dangerous journey of justice and revenge. Praise for "Killer, Come Hither" A stealthy, page-turning thriller. "Booklist " Louis Begley s award-winning fiction usually takes on bad behavior among the well-bred and prosperous. "Killer, Come Hither" ratchets up the intrigue and the evil. " The Wall Street Journal" Begley writes clean, crisp, graceful prose, the kind that s always rare and ever a blessing. "The Washington Post " "" "Killer, Come Hither" beckons. " Vanity Fair" "" Combines unexpected plot twists and narrative tension with Begley s trademark elegant prose. " Shelf Awareness""

Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the award-winning author of Wartime Lies, and his wife Anka Muhlstein have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their second home. The owners of their favourite restaurants have become their friends and they share the lives of the locals, far off the welltrodden tourist track. Begley tells the story of how he fell in love with and in Venice, though as he makes clear when writing on Venice's pivitol role in world literature, he was not the only one - Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are only three of his most illustrious predecessors.

From the prize-winning author of Wartime Lies, an anatomy of the infamous prosecution of a Jewish officer attached to the French Army’s General Staff, with profound implications for our own time. In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attaché in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards—committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another—against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army’s top brass in order to secure Dreyfus’s conviction. Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with?and in? Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman of twenty-seven, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped and left to fend for himself after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself?not an uncommon romance, as Begley’s brilliant literary essay on the city’s place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors.

Harvard, Anfang der fünfziger Jahre: Wo die Sprößlinge der Ostküstenelite ihre soziale Stellung einüben, zählen vor allem Stil, Prestige und die Einladungslisten der wichtigen Partys. Herkunft ist alles, doch Henry, ein rothaariger und obendrein schlecht angezogener Schlaks aus jüdischer Familie, hat nur Talent vorzuweisen, anders als seine Zimmergenossen Sam und Archie, die aus reichen Elternhäusern stammen. Der Außenseiter will seine Herkunft abschütteln und sich Zutritt zur mondänen Jeunesse dor?e verschaffen, doch der Preis des amerikanischen Traums ist hoch - und die Frau, die er liebt, scheint unerreichbar zu bleiben. Neben Lügen in Zeiten des Krieges ist Ehrensachen das persönlichste Buch, das Louis Begley geschrieben hat. Bis in die Gegenwart hinein folgt er dem Schicksal seiner Protagonisten und erzählt eine Geschichte von Selbsterfindung, Liebe und großer Freundschaft.

Poland, 1939. The comfortable, secure world of assimilated Jews is blown away by the invasion of the Third Reich. Maciek's father disappears into the war's vortex, leaving the orphaned child with his acerbic and beautiful Aunt Tania. It is her cool inventiveness, in their dramatic flight through a landscape of oppression, that will ensure their fragile survival.

A mesmerizing novel of deception and betrayal from the acclaimed author of Wartime Lies and About Schmidt. John North, a prize-winning American writer, is suddenly beset by dark suspicions about the real value of his work. Over endless hours and bottles of whiskey consumed in a mysterious caf called L'Entre Deux Mondes, he recounts, in counterpoint to his doubts, the one story he has never told before, perhaps the only important one he will ever tell. North's chosen interlocutor-who could be his doppelg nger-is transfixed by the revelations and becomes the narrator of North's tale. North has always been faithful to his wife, Lydia, but when one of his novels achieves a special success, he allows himself a dalliance with L a, a starstruck young journalist. Coolly planning to make sure that his life with Lydia will not be disturbed, North is taken off guard when L a becomes obsessed with him and he with her elaborate erotic games. As the hypnotic and serpentine confession unfurls, we gradually discover the extraordinary lengths to which North has gone to indulge a powerful desire for self-destruction. Shipwreck is a daring parable of the contradictory impulses that can rend a single soul-narcissism and self-loathing, refinement and lust.

Der hochangesehene Wirtschaftsanwalt Albert Schmidt, 'Schmidtie' genannt, gerät nach der Frühpensionierung und dem Krebstod seiner Frau in eine Lebenskrise. Wie ein Schlag trifft ihn die Ankündigung seiner Tochter, einen seiner ehemaligen Kanzleizöglinge zu heiraten: Ist jener Jon Riker nicht ein banaler Streber, ein kulturloser Karrierist, und nicht zuletzt - ein Jude? Es beginnt ein hartnäckiger Abwehrkampf gegen die Ambitionen der nachfolgenden Generation, ein Ringen um Vermögen, Anerkennung und Selbstwertgefühl. Noch während 'Schmidtie' mit dem Vorwurf des Antisemitismus, mit bitteren Erkenntnissen und subtilen Verletzungen beschäftigt ist, begegnet ihm in der Gastalt der jungen puertoricanischen Kellnerin Carrie die Chance für ein spätes Glück.

"Extraordinary... Rich in irony and regret... the] people and settings are vividly realized and his prose is] compelling in its simplicity." THE WALL STREET JOURNAL As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives--as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.