New Releases by Peter Cameron

A man leaves his American life behind him and travels to La Plata, Andorra where he settles and gradually meets the city''s most prominent citizens. As he becomes involved in their lives, the mystery surrounding his deepens.

Peter Cameron erzählt die Geschichte des 18-jährigen James, der sich den Spielregeln seiner erfolgreichen Eltern vehement verweigert. James sucht seinen Platz nicht in der dekadenten Welt der New Yorker Upper Class, sondern im echten Leben fern aller Heuchelei und Verlogenheit. Ein Fänger im Roggen des 21. Jahrhunderts- provokant, klug und zornig. Es ist ein heißer Sommer in New York City, aber James leidet nicht nur unter der Hitze, sondern auch unter der Forderung seiner Eltern, endlich vernünftig und erwachsen zu werden. Im Herbst soll er auf die Universität gehen, die Eltern haben seine Zukunft haargenau geplant, alles ist entschieden. Doch für James ist die Vorstellung, genau so zu enden wie seine Eltern, ein Gräuel. Seine Mutter hat gerade ihre dritte Ehe in den Sand gesetzt, sein Vater hat nichts anderes im Kopf, als den besten Schönheitschirurgen für seine Tränensäcke zu finden. Auf gar keinen Fall will James so werden wie seine Eltern. Für eine Welt, in der man mit Hunden mehr spricht als mit Menschen, in der man sich ständig belügt und die eigene Angst und Hilflosigkeit hinter Floskeln verbirgt, hat er nichts übrig. Er will ein sinnvolles Leben führen. Mit der naiven Arroganz eines 18-jährigen fordert er die Erwachsenen heraus. Dabei gerät er in einen Sog aus Zweifel und Mutlosigkeit, bevor er schließlich seinen eigenen Weg findet.

It’s time for eighteen-year-old James Sveck to begin his freshman year at Brown. Instead, he’s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary—a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he’s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope—or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James’s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James’s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie. In the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Booklist has hailed Cameron as “one of the best writers about middle-class youth since Salinger”), Peter Cameron paints an indelible portrait of a teenage hero holding out for a better grownup world. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children''s Book of the Year.

The most important bilateral relationship in Asia since the end of World War II is assuredly between the United States and Japan. Despite the geographical and cultural differences between these two nations, as well as the bitterness leftover from the war, an amicable and prosperous relationship has developed between the two countries boasting the world''s largest economies. As the 21st century progresses, the continuing goodwill between the U.S. and Japan is of the utmost importance, as the peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific depends on their cooperation and efforts to contain destabilizing factors in the area. The Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan Relations traces this one hundred and fifty year relationship through a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on key persons, places, events, institutions, and organizations. Covering everything from Walt Whitman''s poem, A Broadway Pageant, commemorating the visit of the Shogun''s Embassy to the U.S. in 1860, to zaibatsu, this ready reference is an excellent starting point for the study of Japan''s dealings with the U.S.

A comic valentine to a frenzied era, "Leap Year" takes place in 1988, just two years away from "the decade of friendship", while there is still time on the clock for all the greed and need of the 1980s to wreak havoc on the lives of an ensemble cast of distressed but endearing New Yorkers.

In this collection of short stories, Peter Cameron describes lives of quiet desperation: people trapped in unfulfilling commitments, overcome by their own indifference, confronted with life''s inevitable changes. With remarkable grace, acuity, and humor, he examines the small dramas of ordinary life and brilliantly captures the serene poignancy of daily struggles.

In the woods of upstate New York, three friends gather on the anniversary of a man''s death who was related to them by blood or love. Their idyll is disturbed by the presence of two outsiders, an Italian dinner guest and a young gay man, now involved with the dead man''s lover. Thus each event is charged with the tension of trying to recapture something lost.

Combinatorics is a subject of increasing importance, owing to its links with computer science, statistics and algebra. This is a textbook aimed at second-year undergraduates to beginning graduates. It stresses common techniques (such as generating functions and recursive construction) which underlie the great variety of subject matter and also stresses the fact that a constructive or algorithmic proof is more valuable than an existence proof. The book is divided into two parts, the second at a higher level and with a wider range than the first. Historical notes are included which give a wider perspective on the subject. More advanced topics are given as projects and there are a number of exercises, some with solutions given.

Collection of 30 papers on aspects of Christianity, which had their origin in sermons and other addresses. The opening essay, a sermon on the place of women in Christianity, resulted in the author being found guilty of heresy by the Presbyterian Church of Australia. Many of the essays challenge fundamentalist notions of the Bible and Christianity. The author is principal of St Andrew''s College at the University of Sydney. He has studied both law and theology, and worked as a public prosecutor and as a lecturer in New Testament studies.

Diverse characters who find themselves at an impasse that is often as much emotional as it is the result of forces outside them. The uncertainties of their youth have developed into something more serious, and more tragic, for promises that have been held out to them all their lives - the comforts of love and the satisfaction of success - have proved to be elusive, equivocal, or, at worst, hollow. We meet a woman whose casualapparently dispassionate - affair with a.