In Naguib Mahfouz's suspenseful novel a bitter and ambitious nihilist, a beautiful and impoverished student, and a corrupt official engage in a doomed ménage à trois.
Cairo of the 1930s is a place of vast social and economic inequities. It is also a time of change, when the universities have just opened to women and heady new philosophies imported from Europe are stirring up debates among the young. Mahgub is a fiercely proud student who is determined to keep both his poverty and his lack of principles secret from his idealistic friends. When he finds that there are no jobs for those without connections, out of desperation he agrees to participate in an elaborate deception. But what begins as a mere strategy for survival soon becomes much more for both Mahgub and his partner in crime, an equally desperate young woman named Ihsan. As they make their way through Cairo's lavish high society their precarious charade begins to unravel and the terrible price of Mahgub's Faustian bargain becomes clear.
Translated by William M. Hutchins
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 114
It's their very first adventure, and the Secret Seven super-sleuths are already on the trail of some really weird clues. It's snowing and the Seven are dressed in disguise, following a lead to a spooky old house - and a mystery. Views: 1 113
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held. Views: 1 113
Out of their minds and the force of their imagination, men have created countless beings, from demons and monsters of legend to comic-strip characters. What if their world were real--if dragons, devils and Don Quixote hobnobbed with Dagwood Bumstead and Charlie Brown? Such a world would have its facinations..and its dreadful perils--if it existed. Horton Smith found out that it did..and that he was right in the middle of it! Views: 1 113
In 1888, the last sane year of his life Nietsche produced these two brief but devastating books.
Twilight of the Idols, 'a grand declaration of war' on all the prevalent ideas of his time, offers a lightning tour of his whole philosophy. It also prepares the way for The Anti-Christ, a final assault on institutional Christianity. Yet although Nietzsche makes a compelling case for the 'Dionysian' artist and celebrates magnificently two of his great heroes, Goethe and Cesare Borgia, he also gives a moving, almost ecstatic portrait of his only worthy opponent: Christ. Both works show Nietsche lashing out at self-deception, astounded at how often morality is based on vengefulness and resentment. Both combine utterly unfair attacks on individuals with amazingly acute surveys of the whole contemporary cultural scene. Both reveal a profound understanding of human mean-spiritedness which still cannot destroy the underlying optimism of Nietzsche, the supreme affirmer among the great philosophers. Views: 1 112
A few months of married bliss, a lovers' nest in Darrowby and the wonders of home cooking are rudely interrupted for James Herriot by the Second World War. James Herriot's fifth volume of memoirs relocates him to a training camp somewhere in England. And in between square pounding and digging for victory, he dreams of the people and livestock he left behind him.
'There are funny cases, sad cases, farm animals and pets, downright farmers, ladies of refinement, hard-bitten NCOs and of course, the immortal Siegfried and Tristan' The "Sunday Times"
'Another winner... as always hilariously funny' The "Sunday Telegraph"
'It is a pleasure to be in James Herriot's company' "Observer" Views: 1 112
Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires. Views: 1 112
The author of "The Velveteen Rabbit" returns to the secret life of toys with the rollicking tale of a wooden dog who sets out to explore the world. Illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Views: 1 111
Young pilot Donald Ross has little in common with the Oxford archaeologist who has employed him on an expedition to the Arctic—and still less with his beautiful but stubborn daughter, Alix. But once the three of them reach the treacherous shores of Greenland, in search of the ruins of early Viking settlements, their destinies are inextricably bound by the events that unfold there. Views: 1 110
Prefaced by the famous Atlantic Monthly essay of the same name, in which he argues the virtues of the hard-boiled detective novel, this collection mostly drawn from stories he wrote for the pulps demonstrates Chandler's imaginative, entertaining facility with the form.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 110
In *Island*, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope. Views: 1 110
Blood is thicker than water and that's doubly true for the King family who have built a considerable fortune through decades of ruthless violence and bloodshed such as Oklahoma has never seen. Ike King taught his boys well: when you see something you want all you need is a clever mind, two fists and a powerful hunk of metal. But Ike may have taught them too well. Now the King brothers are using their childhood lessons against their father and each other Arlie thought he had won the battle when he murdered his brother, but then Crich shows up with a U.S. Marshal tight on his tail and complicates matters. This may just be the largest showcase of violence and greed that the dysfunctional King family has ever experienced. Views: 1 109
The Newbery Award-winning novel
From the author of Across Five Aprils and No Promises in the Wind comes her most beloved story of a girl's coming of age.
After her mother's death, Julie goes to live with Aunt Cordelia, a spinster schoolteacher, where she experiences many emotions and changes as she grows from seven to eighteen. Views: 1 109
The story of a woman dancing on the edge of a difficult life.
Ever since her husband left her—seemingly vanishing into thin air—Charleen Forrest has supported herself and her fifteen-year-old son on what she earns as an obscure poet and part-time gofer for an even more obscure scientific journal. But when her estranged mother remarries, prompting an unplanned reunion, Charleen finds herself moving out of her familiar existence.
A dazzling counterpoint to Shields’s debut novel, Small Ceremonies, imbued with her scathing wit and dead-on observations, The Box Garden is an unforgettable portrait of a woman who finds transformation—and happiness—where she least expects it. Views: 1 109
One morning, six-year old Sonny is awoken by his crying mother, who tells him that, come tomorrow morning, they are leaving to go to "Gran'mom's" house—without Sonny's father, Eddie. Later that morning, Sonny witnesses a fight between his parents, which revolves around his father having stayed out late the night before because his car had broken down. Eddie has apparently been neglecting his wife and son, devoting his free time instead to repairing his old car. In order to win back his wife, Eddie—with Sonny in tow—pays a visit to Madame Toussaint, an old lady knowledgeable in the ways of voodoo, who tells Eddie that the only way to save his marriage is by burning his car to the ground.
This unforgettable story leads the reader through an eventful day on a Southern sugarcane plantation, and shows, through the eyes of a child, what life was like in the rural South of the 1940s. This new edition of A Long Day in November features Ernest J. Gaines's original introduction, as well as the black-and-white illustrations that accompanied the first edition of the book.
Ernest J. Gaines's 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and was an Oprah Book Club pick. Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier. He lives in Oscar, Louisiana. Views: 1 108
