As macabre as a Jacobean tragedy, as frivolous as a Restoration comedy, Iris Murdoch's fifth novel takes sombre themes - adultery, incest, castration, violence and suicide - and yet succeeds in making of them a book that is brilliantly enjoyable. Views: 1 183
The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America and England, and include some of Maugham's most famous tales; 'Flotsam and Jetsam', the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; 'The Man with the Scar', and notably the opening story 'The Vessel of Wrath', a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse and a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories, Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place. Views: 1 182
"West is still a satirist with few peers and no betters, and a writer of bleak, haunting power." — Kirkus Reviews. In this 1931 Dada-inspired work, the first novel of the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, the eponymous antihero stumbles across the Trojan Horse and climbs inside, embarking upon a dream within a dream. His journey through a mental jungle blends grandiose literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor, as he encounters a contentious guide, a biographer writing a biography of a biographer, and a mystic trying to crucify himself with thumbtacks. Innovative and original, West's novel takes an unforgettable look at the dark side of the American dream. Unabridged republication of the classic 1931 edition. Views: 1 182
Robert Heinlein says, ?This book is raw corn liquor ? you should serve a whiskbroom with each shot so the customer can brush the sawdust off after he gets up from the floor.? Perhaps a mooring cable might also be added as necessary equipment for reading these eight wonderful stories: They not only knock you down?they raise you to the stars. Passion is the keynote as you encounter the Harlequin and his nemesis, the dreaded Tictockman, in one of the most reprinted and widely taught stories in the English language; a pyretic who creates fire merely by willing it; the last surgeon in a world of robot physicians; a spaceship filled with hideous mutants rejected by the world that gave them birth. Touching and gentle and shocking stories from an incomparable master of impossible dreams and troubling truths.
Contents:
7 · New Introduction: Your Basic Crown of Thorns · in
19 · Spero Meliora · in
24 · Paingod · ss Fantastic Jun ’64
35 · “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman · ss Galaxy Dec ’65
49 · The Crackpots [Kyben] · nv If Jun ’56
89 · Sleeping Dogs · ss Analog Oct ’74
100 · Bright Eyes · ss Fantastic Apr ’65
112 · The Discarded [“The Abnormals”] · ss Fantastic Apr ’59
125 · Wanted in Surgery · nv If Aug ’57
156 · Deeper Than the Darkness · nv Infinity Science Fiction Apr ’57 Views: 1 182
Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.**
The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.
Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Views: 1 181
Killer in the Rain collects together eight classic short stories by Raymond Chandler.
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*It was in the pulp detective magazines of the 1930s that Raymond Chandler's definitive take on the hard-boiled detective story first appeared. Here then, from the well-thumbed pages of 'Black Mask' and 'Dime Detective Magazine', are eight of his finest stories including 'The Man Who Liked Dogs', 'The Lady in the Lake' and 'Bay City Blues'. Sharper than a hoodlum's switchblade, more exciting than an unexpected red-head and stronger than a double shot of whisky, they are packed full of the punchy poetry and laconic wit that makes Chandler the undisputed master of his genre.
'Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence' *Daily Telegraph *
'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times
'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess
Best-known as the creator of the original private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, and he is widely regarded as one of the very greatest writers of detective fiction. His books include The Big Sleep, The Little Sister, Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Good-bye, The Lady in the Lake, Playback, Killer in the Rain, The High Window and Trouble is My Business. Views: 1 181
William Wilkie Collins (1824 - 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868). Collins's works were classified at the time as "sensation novels," a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and Seek contained one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English literature. As did many writers of his time, Collins published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens's All the Year Round and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week. Sales of All The Year Round increased when The Woman in White followed A Tale of Two Cities. Views: 1 181
In To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer introduces readers to the awesome Riverworld, a planet that had been carved into one large river on whose shores all of humanity throughout the ages has seemingly been resurrected. In The Fabulous Riverboat, Farmer tells the tale of one person whose is uniquely suited to find the river's headwaters, riverboat captain and famous Earthly author Sam Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain). Clemens has been visited by "X," a mysterious being who claims to be a rebel among the group that created Riverworld. X tells Clemens where he can find a large deposit of iron and other materials that Clemens can use to build the greatest riverboat ever seen. Since there is virtually no metal on the planet, it will also give Clemens an unbeatable edge when it comes to battling the various warlike societies that dominate the Riverworld.
But Clemens is not alone in his quest for the iron, which arrives on the planet in the form of a giant meteorite. In fact, Clemens is besieged on all sides by forces determined to seize the precious ore, leading him to make a deadly pact with one of history's most notorious villains, John Lackland. Lackland's crimes during his reign as king of England were so hideous that no other English monarch will ever carry his name, and he's up to equally nefarious tricks on Riverworld. However, Clemens has a guardian angel in the form of Joe Miller, a giant subhuman with a big nose, a serious lisp, and a cutting wit. Miller has also been to the very headwaters of the river, where he saw a mysterious tower in the middle of the North Sea and where the creators of Riverworld are thought to reside. He will be an invaluable ally in completing the riverboat and sailing to the headwaters, but even an 800-pound giant may not be enough to help Clemens fulfill X's mission. --Craig E. Engler Views: 1 181
Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a master … who makes the ordinary extraordinary, the unnamable unforgettable,” beloved author Jim Harrison returns with a masterpiece—a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and finding redemption in unlikely places. Slowly dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, begins dictating family stories he has never shared with anyone, hoping to preserve history for his children. The dignity of Donald’s death and his legacy encourages his loved ones to find a way to redeem—and let go of—the past, whether through his daughter’s emersion in Chippewa religious ideas or his mourning wife’s attempt to escape the malevolent influence of her own father. A deeply moving book about origins and endings, and how to live with honor for the dead, Returning to Earth is one of the finest novels of Harrison’s long, storied career, and will confirm his standing as one of the most important American writers now working. Views: 1 180
It is 1939. Despite a law banning him from performing surgery, Ravic--a German doctor and refugee living in Paris--has been treating some of the city's most elite citizens for two years on the behalf of two less-than-skillful French physicians.
Forbidden to return to his own country, and dodging the everyday dangers of jail and deportation, Ravic manages to hang on--all the while searching for the Nazi who tortured him back in Germany. And though he's given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times. Views: 1 180
This children's story is one of a series of books about the Moomins that blend magic, humour and adventure in the setting of the small, but ever-changing Moominvalley. Views: 1 180
Published in 1913, this swashbuckling yet satirical adventure, set in the sixteenth century, tells of Agostino d'Anguissola, a nobleman raised in extreme piety by his devout mother. But Agostino finds himself exposed to the raw passion and deadly politics of the wider world upon learning more about his father's rebellious ways. Views: 1 179
The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.
Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 179
The honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his thuggish father-in-law, an American painter named Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse—Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience, though each is at once the hunter and the hunted in a duel composed of tension, hiding, and guessing, and at times punctuated by violence that, even as each manages to walk away, draws them nearer to death. Views: 1 178
For centuries, Dalemark has been a land divided by the warring earldoms of the North and South. Now, with the help of the Undying, the mysterious gods of Dalemark, four extraordinary young people -- from the past, present, and future -- must join forces to reunify their beloved land. When Moril inherits his father's prized instrument -- a Cwidder said to have belonged to one of the Undying -- he must learn to harness its strange power in time to prevent a destructive civil war. Views: 1 178
