The Noise Of Time

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR 1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.

'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE' - OBSERVER In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return. ‘Stunning’ Sunday Times ‘A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power... It is a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding... I don’t think Barnes has written a finer, more truthful or more profound book’ Scotsman ‘A tour de force by a master novelist at the top of his game’ Daily Express

Osip Mandelstam has come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. This volume includes his autobiographical sketches, The Noise of Time; his novella The Egyptian Stamp; Fourth Prose; and his travel memoirs. There are essays by Clarence Brown.

A masterful novel dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of"The Sense of an Ending." The book begins in 1936, with Dmitri Shostakovich petrified at the age of thirty and fearing for his livelihood and even his life. His opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" has just been denounced in Pravda in an article that certainly reflects the opinion of Joseph Stalin himself. Every night he waits on the landing outside his apartment, expecting NKVD agents to come and whisk him away. Shostakovich reflects on not only his predicament but also his own personal history, his parents and his various women and wives and his children, and all who are still alive themselves hang in the balance of his fate. When the interrogation he fears does eventually arrive, a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming a casualty of the Great Terror that claims so many of his friends and contemporaries--"chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped." Still, the spectre of the government hovers over him for several further decades, forcing him to constantly weigh the merits of appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through subsequent stages of Shostakovich's life, from being ground into the dirt under the thumb of despotism to being made to serve as a figurehead of Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York, and finally being forced into joining the Party. The trajectory of his career illuminates the evolution of the Soviet Union, with Nikita Khrushchev assuming its leadership, this providing no great joy to Shostakovich. " The Noise of Time" is both a heartbreaking account of a relentlessly fascinating man's experience and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society."

A Financial Times Book of the Year Though we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of empire. This is the first and only history of twentieth century poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside. Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the most important issues of their times - and were in their turn affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the transformative beauty and power of poetry.

He cites improvements in the performance, reliability, and cost effectiveness of modern wind turbines to support his contention that wind energy has come of age as a commercial technology.

In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of time how it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk pieces sometimes called talk poems or simply talks began as improvisations at museums, universities, and poetry centers where Antin was invited to come and think out loud. Serious and playful, they move rapidly from keen analysis to powerful storytelling to passages of pure comedy, as they range kaleidoscopically across Antin's experiences: in the New York City of his childhood and youth, the Eastern Europe of family and friends, and the New York and Southern California of his art and literary career. The author's analysis and abrasive comedy have been described as a mix of Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his commitment to verbal invention and narrative as a fusion of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Taken together, these pieces provide a rich oral history of and critical context for the evolution of the California art scene from the 1960s onward."

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years.

This book brings together the collected writings of Daniel Asia from the last 10 years. The articles, reviews, and essays gathered here originally appeared in noted publications such as The New Criterion and Academic Questions, and as blog entries with the Huffington Post. Topics discussed include classical music, universities, Judaism, politics, and American culture. All essays are presented in clear and elegant non-academic prose, and are often imbued with a wry and delicate sense of humor. This book is a fine introduction to the current state of high culture in America, with an emphasis on classical music and its recent and current best composers. As such, it is perfect for the curious lay person seeking knowledge in these areas, and for academics and their students working in the areas of music composition, music history, introduction to music, sociology, politics, education, American studies and Jewish studies.

This book explores the concept of ‘quiet’ – an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles – and argues for the term’s application to the study of contemporary American fiction. In doing so, it makes two critical interventions. Firstly, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions, arguing that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, the Western tradition is filled with quiet characters. Secondly, it asks what it means for a novel to be quiet and how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy. Examining recent works by Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, among others, the book argues that quiet can be a multi-faceted state of existence, one that is communicative and expressive in as many ways as noise but filled with potential for radical discourse by its marginalisation as a mode of expression.

The new edition of the leading resource on designing digital frequency synthesizers from microwave and wireless applications, fully updated to reflect the most modern integrated circuits and semiconductors Microwave and Wireless Synthesizers: Theory and Design, Second Edition, remains the standard text on the subject by providing complete and up-to-date coverage of both practical and theoretical aspects of modern frequency synthesizers and their components. Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, this classic volume describes loop fundamentals, noise and spurious responses, special loops, loop components, multiloop synthesizers, and more. Practical synthesizer examples illustrate the design of a high-performance hybrid synthesizer and performance measurement techniques—offering readers clear instruction on the various design steps and design rules. The second edition includes extensively revised content throughout, including a modern approach to dealing with the noise and spurious response of loops and updated material on digital signal processing and architectures. Reflecting today’s technology, new practical and validated examples cover a combination of analog and digital synthesizers and hybrid systems. Enhanced and expanded chapters discuss implementations of direct digital synthesis (DDS) architectures, the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), crystal and other high-Q based oscillators, arbitrary waveform generation, vector signal generation, and other current tools and techniques. Now requiring no additional literature to be useful, this comprehensive, one-stop resource: Provides a fully reviewed, updated, and enhanced presentation of microwave and wireless synthesizers Presents a clear mathematical method for designing oscillators for best noise performance at both RF and microwave frequencies Contains new illustrations, figures, diagrams, and examples Includes extensive appendices to aid in calculating phase noise in free-running oscillators, designing VHF and UHF oscillators with CAD software, using state-of-the-art synthesizer chips, and generating millimeter wave frequencies using the delay line principle Containing numerous designs of proven circuits and more than 500 relevant citations from scientific journal and papers, Microwave and Wireless Synthesizers: Theory and Design, Second Edition, is a must-have reference for engineers working in the field of radio communication, and the perfect textbook for advanced electri

This book presents a pioneering critical study of Complicite’s work throughout the years. Drawing on an extensive overview of the available research material – including interviews, manuscripts and the company’s own archive – the book is framed within a clearly defined research perspective and explores the singularity of theatre communication. The book results from an encounter between the London-based – but cosmopolitan in scope – company, and a fresh application of the form-oriented scholarship of Eastern Europe, Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere in particular. Focused on the aesthetics of Complicite, this study achieves a critical distance and undertakes multidimensional scrutiny of the available research material. By identifying the principles of Complicite’s aesthetics, the book attempts to grasp the company’s artistic paradigm. It focuses on ways of creating, preserving, and decoding meanings, rather than on the nuances of performance or contextual issues.

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police. Drawing on Schlögel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.