A young married couple moves into a San Francisco aprtment formerly owned by the silent star Marian Marsh. Her ghost still inhabits the place and takes over the wife's body, goes to Hollywood, and tries to re-enter films. The couple meets a film buff, living in Vilma Banky's old home, and he has prints of all the lost films including the complete Greed.
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In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that are just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of *Cannery Row*, the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter. Views: 555
Set in medieval Norway, the books follow Olav and Ingunn, who, though raised as brother and sister, have become lovers in a world caught between the fading sphere of pagan worship and vendettas and the expansion of Christianity. Views: 555
Five Union prisoners escape from the siege of Richmond in a balloon, are blown off course and crash on an uncharted island. They must learn to rebuild a society for themselves while awaiting rescue. Views: 555
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 555
This is an unforgettable novel of a titanic family, of the greed that nourished them and of the strange, haunted love that even their immense power could not crush. Views: 555
In 1865, English author CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON (1832-1898), aka Lewis Carroll, wrote a fantastical adventure story for the young daughters of a friend. The adventures of Alice-named for one of the little girls to whom the book was dedicated-who journeys down a rabbit hole and into a whimsical underworld realm instantly struck a chord with the British public, and then with readers around the world. In 1872, in reaction to the universal acclaim Alice's Adventures in Wonderland received, Dodgson published this sequel. Nothing is quite what it seems once Alice journeys through the looking-glass, and Dodgson's wit is infectious as he explores concepts of mirror imagery, time running backward, and strategies of chess-all wrapped up in the exploits of a spirited young girl who parries with the Red Queen, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and other unlikely characters. In many ways, this sequel has had an even greater impact on today's pop culture than the first book. Views: 555
Now substantially revised by Edward Snow, whom Denise Levertov once called "far and away Rilke's best translator," this bilingual edition of The Book of Images contains a number of the great poet's previously untranslated pieces. Also included are several of Rilke's best-loved lyrics, such as "Autumn," "Childhood," "Lament," "Evening," and "Entrance." Views: 555
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence. Views: 554
My Conversion
A solid collection of
science fiction stories from the mid-1940s which can be divided into two main
groups: tales of mutations induced by nuclear war, leading to the next step in
human evolution, and plain humourous tales. The former are very much products
of their time (and nothing wrong with that), with the atomic bomb at the
forefront of everybody's consciousness in the immediate post-war era.
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Classic pulp crime thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s. In their time, the Hank Janson novels, with their sleazy covers and no-holds-barred tales, were a guilty pleasure for millions of readers, but incurred the wrath of the establishment! Kill Her If You Can sees Chicago Chronicle's ace reporter Hank Janson back on the case as he is sent to investigate a bomb blast at an apartment and gets caught up in a web of intrigue and deception. The apartment's owner, the headstrong, independent young woman Beryl Pinder, gives Hank more trouble than he bargained for, as he finds himself having to save her – and himself! – from a series of murder attempts. When it first appeared in March 1952, this book was the final entry in the third series of classic Hank Janson novels. It is reissued here complete with its superb original Reginald Heade cover art. Views: 554
The novels of Harry Crews have consistently been praised for their mysterious and convincing grasp of the recognizably human feelings that lodge amidst the demonic and the strange, in what the New York Times Book Review has called a "Hieronymus Bosch landscape." Here, his remarkable talents bring us even further into the realm of unexpected emotional possibilities—leaving us moved, even almost charmed rather than horrifed, by the dreadful and implacable fulfillment of "The Gypsy's Curse." From Kirkus ReviewsIt's not anybody who could write a bawdy, often hilarious, totally unsentimental novel about a legless deaf-mute who earns his keep by doing one-finger stands on arms the size of your average giant's thighs. Marvin Molar lives in a gym with Al -- a former stunt man who did tricks like having a car run over his body -- an old punchdrunk Negro fighter named Peter and an equally punchy young one named Leroy -- and finally, Hester, a "normal" whose revolving thighs drive Marvin absolutely insane. She is the "gypsy's curse" ("Find a cunt that fits you and you'll never be the same") -- especially when she abandons Marvin for an occasional fling with her former lover Aristotle -- the kind of dumb Greek spic Marvin particularly dislikes. But he stands it, at least for awhile, both because Hester gives him nightly bliss and because she charms everything but the pants off his other gym pals -- all the while subtly but purposefully sowing seeds of disaster that will result in the splitting apart not only of their semi-family but of her pretty little head. The novel is narrated by Marvin, who can reel off tough-sounding detective patter with the best of them -- and then some. Views: 554
It was not a planet in the normal sense. It was actually a vast disc, 600 kilometers wide, above which the bell-shaped defense screen arched invisibly. The extensive disc below them contained every aspect of beauty that was to be found in the cosmos. Brazo Alkher and Stant Nolinov would have preferred to look at this miracle for hours on end but they were under the Chief's orders to fly toward a circular clearing, two km wide, on the edge of which stood a slender, fragile-looking spire that towered more than 2,300 meters into the artificial blue sky of-- PLANET MECHANICA! Views: 554
Although it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, this stirring novel about World War I remains far less known than Cather's established classics such as My �ntonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. In the lucid, unadorned prose that was her hallmark, Cather brings to life the simple Nebraska farm folk and their tranquil rural lifestyle, showing how the Great War, seemingly so far away on the Old Continent, eventually touches them all.
More than half of the novel is devoted to the slow rhythms of the prairie farmland centering on the Wheeler homestead. The novel's protagonist, Claude Wheeler, a strong, healthy, red-headed farm boy, is physically a typical representative of his sturdy sodbuster family and hard-working neighbors. But mentally the boy has little in common with their narrow outlooks, and the limited horizons of his parochial community make him restless and filled with a barely suppressed discontent. Through a series of striking vignettes, Cather brilliantly reveals Claude's search for some greater purpose to his life beyond the routines of farm life.
Gradually, the widening war in Europe sneaks up on the rural Nebraska region, as newspaper reports of refugees and German atrocities begin to stir the emotions of the local young men. When the United States finally enters the conflict, Claude is one of the first to enlist, seeing purpose, adventure, and commitment to some larger ideal in the call to arms.
Claude's longings for radically new experiences are more than amply realized overseas in sobering encounters with suffering French women and children, the battle-scarred English "Tommies," and the tenacious German enemy.
One of Ours is a memorable testament to the shattering effects of war on youth and ideals, a powerful depiction of mechanized battle, and its life-changing effects on one Nebraska farm boy and the people he left behind. Views: 553
Theodore Honey is a shy, inconspicuous engineer whose eccentric interests are frowned upon in aviation circles. When a passenger plane crashes in Newfoundland under unexplained circumstances, Honey is determined to prove his unorthodox theory about what went wrong to his superiors, before more lives are lost. But while flying to the crash scene to investigate, Honey discovers to his horror that he is on board one of the defective planes and that he and his fellow passengers, including a friendly young stewardess and an aging movie actress, are in imminent peril. Views: 553
