Knopf imprint: 1739 books

This book contains the definitive treatment of the stories, texts, and music of Turandot, Gianni Schicchi, The Barber of Bagdad, Thaïs, Eugen Onegin, Prince Igor, The Golden Cockerel, Elektra, Orfeo ed Euridice, Lakmé, Les Huguenots, Così fan tutte, The Seraglio, Les Troyens, Don Pasquale, La Juive,...

From renowned music critic and musicologist Ernest Newman comes the first of four volumes chronicling the life of legendary German composer Richard Wagner. This first volume takes us through the early years of Richard’s life: his birth in Leipzig; his childhood in Dresden and the sparks of his interest...

Thirty Years' Musical Recollections, first published in 1862, is a year-by-year commentary on the European operas, ballets, singers and dancers popular in London from 1830 to 1859. Its author was music critic of The Athaneum for over thirty years and also wrote book reviews, novels, plays and poems....

In the vast literature on Richard Wagner, Ernest Newman's classic four-volume Life remains unsurpassed. Volume III covers the years 1859-66 including the Tannhäuser debacle in Paris, the crisis with Minna, the first production of Tristan und Isolde and the flight from Munich.

Poets on the march: 50 crucial poems written in response to the current political climate, selected and introduced by the Ohio Poet Laureate—and son of immigrants—Amit Majmudar. In a political atmosphere where language and even meaning itself are continually under threat, poetry has a critical...

How do four instrumentalists with strong individual tastes and temperaments manage to forge a distinctive approach to the music they play? This extraordinary book ushers readers into the workshop of one of the world's most accomplished string quartets. In rich and probing conversations with their...

Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewis’s fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who...

Excerpt: . . . Composition, it is rather curious that while I was writing on our too great readiness to admire everything a classic does, merely because he is a classic, someone in the Times Literary Supplement should have been regarding much the same fallacy--more particularly in poetry and...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail) ** ** Finalist for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction [2014] Longlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize [2014] A moving memoir about growing up with a gay father in the 1980s, and a tribute to the power of truth, humour, acceptance and familial...

"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth." Louis S. Auchincloss An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade...

Foran's book is IT: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century. The first major biography with access to family letters...

A rich and revelatory biography of one of the crucial cultural figures of the twentieth century. Lincoln Kirstein’s contributions to the nation’s life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary...

“This is the best autobiography I’ve read by a prominent American in I don’t know how many years. It is endlessly absorbing and I believe this is because it concerns a man who is looking to find a coherent philosophy that will be tough enough to contain all that is ugly in his person and his...

The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150. The human, business,...