Knopf imprint: 1739 books

The third volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt. "You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed."-D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books "A...

Franz Liszt--child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, co-founder with Chopin and Schumann of the Romantic movement in music--has been the subject of literally hundreds of biographies, but it is only in the last few decades that the importance of Liszt the composer, as opposed to Liszt the Romantic hero, has...

When he is hired as the personal piano tuner for a brilliant pianist, Brodie Moncur suddenly finds himself swept up into a life of luxury that he could never have imagined. But while accompanying his new employer on tours from Paris to St. Petersburg, Brodie falls madly in love with the Russian soprano...

**“Lars Kepler … [has] a taste for the macabre and a surefire recipe for the lurid serial-killer thriller. … This is not a book for anyone on heart medication. Kepler is a virtuoso at delivering scenes of suspense.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review The internationally...

Edmund White’s charming, funny, telling series of vignettes of the Paris neighborhood where he and his lover, French architect and illustrator Hubert Sorin, lived. In this ode to Pairs, the everyday becomes extraordinary with White’s observations accompanied by Sorin’s illustrations. With characters...

Sharon Olds's dazzling new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths...

From Arthur Laurents, playwright, screenwriter, director—a mesmerizing book about theater, the art, the artist, the insider, the outsider—and the making of two of the greatest musicals of the American stage, West Side Story and Gypsy. It is a book profoundly enriched by the author’s two loves,...

Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students and lovers of opera.

The Nobel Lecture in Literature, delivered by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans) at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 7, 2017, in an elegant, clothbound edition.        In their announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy...

The foremost authority on Wagner presents in this comprehensive volume all that the opera-goer, radio listener, music-love, and confirmed Wagnerite will wish to know about: The Flying Dutchman Tannhäuser Lohengrin Tristan and Isolde The Mastersingers of Nuremberg The Nibelung’s Ring The...

In the vast literature on Richard Wagner, Ernest Newman's classic four-volume Life remains unsurpassed. Volume II carries the story from 1848 to 1860. It describes the important, formative years in Wagner's life and reconstructs his role in the Dresden rising of 1849. Newman also discusses...

The first major biography of the author of Suite Française The posthumous publication of Suite Française won Irène Némirovsky international acclaim and brought millions of readers to her work. But the story of her own life was no less dramatic and moving than her most powerful fiction. With...

“Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later...

“The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.” –Ernest Newman   In Seventeen Famous Operas, renowned musicologist and music critic Ernest Newman goes beyond simply retelling the plots of the operas he has chosen to feature in this...