Of all the literary genres, humor has the shortest shelf life—except for Archy and Mehitabel, that is. First published in 1916, it is a classic of American literature. Archy is a cockroach, inside whom resides the soul of a free-verse poet; he communicates with Don Marquis by leaping upon the keys of the columnist's typewriter. In poems of varying length, Archy pithily describes his wee world, the main fixture of which is Mehitabel, a devil-may-care alley cat. Views: 409
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith – a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of the day and of their subjects. Written with supreme powers of invective and an irrepressible sense of humour, this is an unrivalled glimpse into the palaces and prisons of the Italy of Michelangelo and the Medici. Views: 409
The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love, and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can never have imagined. . . .
Written with the same overwhelming simplicity and directness that made All Quiet on the Western Front a classic, Three Comrades portrays the greatness of the human spirit, manifested through characters who must find the inner resources to live in a world they did not make, but must endure. Views: 409
Rhodan had known it...They wanted to conquer the Arkonide realm and then bring all the intelligent races of the galaxy under their rule. And they would succeed unless someone took care at the right time that their advance was stopped. That's what Perry's doing there--UNDER THE STARS OF DRUUFON! Views: 409
Elizabeth is an only child, new in town, and the shortest kid in her class. She's also pretty lonely, until she meets Jennifer. Jennifer is...well, different. She's read Macbeth. She never wears jeans or shorts. She never says please or thank you. And she says she is a witch. It's not always easy being friends with a witch, but it's never boring. At first an apprentice and then a journeyman witch, Elizabeth learns to eat raw ends and how to cast small spells. And she and Jennifer collaborate on cooking up an ointment that will enable them to fly. That's when a marvelous toad, Hilary Ezra, enters their lives. And that's when trouble starts to brew. Views: 408
In Pursuit of the English is a novelist's account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about--though they are the real English. The cast of characters--if that term can be applied to real people--includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing's question "Don't you ever like sex?" with "If you're going to talk dirty, I'm not interested." In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliantpiece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read. Views: 407
An agent known only as Tarden is a former operative of the mysterious security agency "the Service." He has erased himself from all dossiers and transcripts. Now a fugitive, he moves across the landscape free of identity, in search of adventure and intrigue. But Tarden is a man of many disguises, and he is alternately avenger and savior, judge and trickster, as he enters the lives of others, forcing them into the arena of his judgement. In Cockpit, Kosinski is at his most startling and powerful, stripping away pretension and illusions of security to reveal the source of real strength within. Views: 407
In The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively explores the nature of history and memory as it is embodied in the life of a forty-year-old woman, Anne Linton, who unexpectedly learns that her father had a mistress. With this new knowledge, Linton must now examine the realities of her own life - of her childhood, her husband - and ask, What do they really know of her?
Deeply felt, beautifully controlled, The Road to Lichfield is a subtle exploration of memory and identity, of chance and consequence, of the intricate weave of generations across a past never fully known, a future never fully anticipated. Views: 407
Few men can say they have known Africa as Peter Hathaway Capstick has know it— leading safaris through lion country; tracking man-eating leopards along tangled jungle paths; running for cover as fear-maddened elephants stampede in all directions. And of the few who have known this dangerous way of life, fewer still can recount their adventures with the flair of this former professional hunter-turned-writer.Based on Capstick's own experiences and the personal accounts of his colleagues, Death in the Long Grass portrays the great killers of the African bush— not only the lion, leopard, and elephant, but the primitive rhino and the crocodile waiting for its unsuspecting prey, the titanic hippo and the Cape buffalo charging like an express train out of control. Capstick was a born raconteur whose colorful descriptions and eye for exciting, authentic detail bring us face to face with some of the most ferocious killers in the world—... Views: 407
(my conversion)“The
Earth had been made hopelessly radioactive and useless by atomic warfare, but
young Biron Farrill, a student in the University of Earth, nevertheless found
himself involved in a struggle that was worse because of the mystery in it, His
father, on another planet, had been murdered and the young man himself was
marked for violent death.
“The
only certainty was that his pursuers, whose identities were unknown to him,
were agents of would-be conquerors of everything and everybody in the galaxy.
But young Farrill had to find out why he and his father had been marked for
destruction. How he fought and what he found out while he even went into the
blackness of a nebula to save himself make a suspenseful story.
“This is
a Grade A item in the science-fiction category.”
Views: 407
The hell called Yuma Prison can destroy the soul of any man. And it's worse for those whose damning crime is the color of their skin. The law says Chiricahua Apache Raymond San Carlos and black-as-night former soldier Harold Jackson are murderers, and they'll stay behind bars until they're dead and rotting. But even in the worst place on Earth, there's hope. And for two hard and hated inmates -- first enemies, then allies by necessity -- it waits at the end of a mad and violent contest ... on a bloody trail that winds toward Arizona's five most dangerous men. Views: 406
In Zurich. . . in Moscow. . . in Washington. The machinery was already set in motion, while in a quiet suburb an odd assortment of men and women gathered for a momentous weekend. At stake was the very existence of the United States of America . . . and the future of the entire free world. Views: 406
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair (1847), a panoramic portrait of English society. Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, with a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Barry Lyndon in Barry Lyndon (1844) and Catherine in Catherine (1839). In his earliest works, writing under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle, he tended towards the savage in his attacks on high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage and hypocrisy. His writing career really began with a series of satirical sketches now usually known as The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837. Between May 1839 and February 1840, Fraser's published the work sometimes considered Thackeray's first novel, Catherine also notable among the later novels are The Fitz-Boodle Papers (1842), Men's Wives (1842), The History of Pendennis (1848), The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., (1852), The Newcomes (1853) and The Rose and the Ring (1855) . Views: 406
Durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Primo Levi, vingt-quatre ans, juif, lutte auxcotes des maquisards antifascistes du Piemont. Capture en 1943, il se retrouvepeu apres a Auschwitz, ou il demeurera plus d'un an avant d'etre libere par l'armeerusse en janvier 1945.Au camp, il observe tout. Il se souviendra de tout, racontera tout: la promiscuitedes blocks-dortoirs, les camarades qu'on y decouvre a l'aube, morts de froid et defaim; les humiliations et le travail quotidiens, sous les coups de trique des kapos;les selections periodiques ou l'on separe les malades des bien-portants pourles envoyer a la mort; les pendaisons pour l'exemple; les trains, bourres de juifset de tziganes, qu'on dirige des leur arrivee vers les crematoires...Et pourtant, dans ce recit, la dignite la plus impressionnante; aucune haine, aucunexces, aucune exploitation des souffrances personnelles, mais une reflexionmorale sur la douleur, sublimee en une vision de la vie.
Paru en 1946, Si c'est un homme est considere comme un des livres les plusimportants du XXe siecle.
Parce qu'il est familier des grands textes philosophiques, Raphael Enthoven resout avec une talentueuse sobriete la difficile equation que pose le texte de Primo Levi: comment nommer l'innommable ?
Remerciements a Benoit Peeters, ecrivain, pour sa lecture de l'interview de Primo Levi par Philippe Roth.
Avec le soutien de la Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah Views: 406
