Peter Bush

Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him--the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason--despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.

'the social kaleidoscope was shifting' The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, provides a transition from the realm of adolescence into the adult social world of Belle Epoque Paris. Its pages buzz with worldly conversations, with bravado and posturing, infatuation, scandal, prejudice, and intrigue. To the fore is Proust's ear for spoken language and how it provides a stage for human foibles as well as inventiveness and panache. This is a broad canvas studded with amusing anecdotes, surprising vignettes and touching scenes, as well as fascinating characters including the indomitable Duchesse de Guermantes and her enigmatic relation the Baron de Charlus. The Guermantes Way immerses readers into a society in flux, as the old aristocracy cedes to a wealthy, rising bourgeoisie and everyone, regardless of class or standing, must navigate the perilous waters of the Dreyfus Affair. Through these lenses, Proust explores questions of substance and superficiality, and identity and belonging, in highly memorable scenes concerning friendship, love, mortality, and loss. The novel is an extraordinary chronicle of pre-war Paris as well as a vital stepping stone in Proust's novel, building on the formative, partially learned lessons of the second volume, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, and preparing the ground for the portentous challenges of the volumes that lie ahead. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A new translation of one of Balzac's finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess--a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover. A story of baffled and irrepressible desire, Balzac's The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. His protagonist, Felix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, has been sent by his family to a ball in honor of a local dignitary. A wallflower at the party, his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress. She turns away from him, and, helpless, he stands, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him off. He leaves the party in shame. The woman at the party is Henriette de Montsauf, married to a much older count, the mother of two children whose health has been compromised by their father's past debauchery. Time passes, and Felix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins between the younger man and the still young mother, a courtship whose premise is that Felix will worship her without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits upon her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He developes a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Felix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the all too unconventional and uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Returning to the provinces, he learns Henriette is dying. She writes him, "Do you still today remember your kisses? They have dominated my life. They cut a furrow through my soul.... I am dying because of them." Balzac the great realist is an incomparable witness to the fantasies that are the stuff of ordinary life and of the countless excuses that so-called virtue makes for eagerly imagined vice. The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love--and hate. Peter Bush's new translation, the first in over a century, brings out psychological dynamics of one of Balzac's masterpieces.

Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

Leonardo Balada: A Transatlantic Gaze tells the story of how composer Leonardo Balada journeyed from a childhood and youth overshadowed by the violence of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath of "the years of hunger" to a new life as a budding composer in New York. Through meticulous historical research and hours of interviews conducted with Balada over six years, biographer Juan Francisco de Dios has produced a unique portrait of the making of an artist. His imaginative eye for detail recreates a sequence of fascinating episodes in social history. We meet adolescent Balada at school, the only boy in a class of girls, view his suffering as a military conscript in the mountains, witness behind-the-scenes conflicts and rivalries in the production of his opera in Barcelona, and get a glimpse of a more settled life when he became an educator of musicians-to-be at Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout, Francisco de Dios delivers riveting description of Balada's music and development as a composer. This biography is an essential contribution to the understanding of a musician who spans continents and the contemporary history and culture of Spain and the United States.

Havana, 2003, fourteen years since Mario Conde retired from the police force and much has changed in Cuba. He now makes a living trading in antique books bought from families selling off their libraries in order to survive. In the house of Alcides de Montes de Oca, a rich Cuban who fled after the fall of Batista, Conde discovers an extraordinary book collection and, buried therein, a newspaper article about Violeta del Rio, a beautiful bolero singer of the 1950's, who disappeared mysteriously. Conde's intuition sets him off on an investigation that leads him into a darker Cuba, now flooded with dollars, populated by pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and other hunters of the night. But this novel also allows Padura to evoke the Havana of Batista, the city of a hundred night clubs where Marlon Brando and Josephine Baker listened to boleros, mambos and jazz. Probably Padura's best book, "Havana Fever" is many things: a suspenseful crime novel, a cruel family saga and an ode to literature and his beloved, ravaged island.

Deeply ingrained in Western culture, and in the minds of most church leaders, is the belief that there is a solution to every problem. Peter bush offers a powerful challenge to this approach, arguing that for new life, energy, and passion to arise in congregations, they must die--die to one way of being the church in order that a new way may rise. Bush identifies two types of dying congregations. Some congregations need to close their doors, bringing to an end years of ministry. Other congregations need to dramatically change their culture and ways of doing ministry. Such change may not entail literally closing the congregation's doors, but it will require people giving up deeply held understandings of the life and purpose of the congregation. All congregations, Bush contends, even ones that see themselves as healthy, need to be prepared to die, to take up their cross, so God can make them alive. A skillful storyteller, Bush shows readers why churches must confront their mortality. He examines the role of the prophetic leader, who proclaims both the congregation's death and its resurrection. He explores spiritual practices and the habits of wonder, remember, and risk taking for congregations that know they are dying--or need to die. Only by dying, Bush says, will a congregation find resurrection life, given by God who raises the dead to life

While worship is the primary purpose of all churches, worship in the small church is distinctive. Whether a house church, a new church plant, a rural church along a country road, or a city church whose neighborhood demographics have shifted, these small faith communities present unique opportunities and challenges for worship leaders. Peter Bush and Christine O'Reilly draw on their passion and experience equipping lay people to plan and lead worship to answer the question, what makes for effective worship