LETRAS

Obra cumbre, junto a Ana Karenina, de Lev Tolstói y de la narrativa del XIX, Guerra y paz constituye un vasto fresco histórico y épico.Con la campaña napoleónica contra Rusia como trasfondo -Austerliz, Borodino o el incendio de Moscú- entre los años 1805 y 1813, se nos cuenta la historia de dos familias de la nobleza rusa, los Bolkonski y los Rostov, protagonistas de un mundo que empieza a escenificar su propia desaparición.

When Jessica Chen entered the workforce, she felt like everything she had been taught growing up in a Quiet Culture household—where deference, humility, harmony, and dogged hard work were praised—failed to set her up for success in the “real world.” Her ingrained values were in direct contrast with what was actually needed to stand out in a Loud Culture workplace. The result? Feeling underappreciated, passed over for opportunities and promotions, and completely stuck. Building on the lessons she learned as an award-winning TV news journalist, Chen—who now speaks at Fortune 100 companies and whose LinkedIn Learning courses have been watched by over 2 million people—introduces a new way of getting noticed at work, without being loud, aggressive, or boastful. In Smart, Not Loud, Chen teaches readers how they can look within, to the values they already hold, to more effectively show up.

In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next thirty years of currency policy with the mantra, “A strong dollar is in America’s interest.” That mantra held, ushering in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis. For decades, America has preferred its currency superpower-strong, the basis of a “strong dollar” policy that attracted foreign investors and pleased consumers. Drawing on Mohsin’s unparalleled access to current and former Treasury officials like Robert Rubin, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen, Paper Soldiers traces that policy’s intended and unintended consequences, including the rise of populist sentiment and trade war with China—culminating in an unprecedented attack on the dollar’s pristine status during the Trump presidency—and connects the dollar’s weaponization from 9/11 to the deployment of crippling financial sanctions against Russia. Ultimately, Mohsin argues that, untethered from many of the economic assumptions of the last generation, the power and influence of the American dollar is now at stake. With first-hand reporting and fresh analysis that illustrates the vast, often unappreciated power that the Treasury Department wields at home and abroad, Paper Soldiers tells the inside story of how we really got here—and the future not only of the almighty dollar, but the nation’s teetering role as a democratic superpower.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a Happily Ever After, he kills off his entire cast. They’re polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke and bogged down with writer’s block. Then one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have. Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.

Alemania está en llamas. Sólo quedan unos meses para que suceda el colapso de Reich, pero, entretanto, Céline, actor y recitador al mismo tiempo, ha decidido exiliarse de París para escapar de una muerte segura. En Baden-Baden, un extraño castillo donde los manjares, como el caviar o el champán, importan más que los bombardeos, es evidente el asombro de la baronesa Von Seckt, superviviente de otro mundo, que juzga a Hitler: «El triunfo del diablo se debe principalmente a que las personas que lo conocían bien ya no están allí...». Y de ahí, a Berlín, y luego a Rostock... Y todo es ruinas. Céline y sus compañeros de desgracia –su esposa Lili, el actor Le Vigan, el gato Bébert– son enviados a Zornhof, a una enorme propiedad gobernada por un loco, allí donde la llanura se extiende hasta el infinito. Norte, último libro publicado en vida del autor, es la descripción de un viaje al infernal apocalipsis de la Alemania nazi. Este segundo volumen de la «Trilogía Norte» describe con incomparable maestría la desaparición de toda una sociedad, el ridículo de una aristocracia decadente y la desorientación de unos refugiados franceses perdidos en un mundo que pocos reconocen. Luego la frágil pero incandescente pluma de Céline hace el resto. Y, hasta hoy, nosotros, los lectores, lo reconocemos...