When Everyday Jews was first published in Poland in 1935, the Jewish Left was scandalized by the sex scenes, and I. B. Singer complained that the novel was too bleak to be psychologically credible. Yet within two years, Perle’s novel was heralded as a modern Yiddish masterpiece. Offering a unique blend of raw sexuality and romantic love, thwarted desire and spiritual longing, Everyday Jews is now considered Perle’s consummate achievement.The voice of Mendl, the novel’s twelve-year-old narrator, is precisely captured by this artfully simple translation. Mendl’s impoverished and dysfunctional family struggles to survive in a nameless Polish provincial town. In this unsettled world, most ordinary people yearn to be somewhere else—or someone else. As Mendl journeys to adulthood, Perle captures the complex interplay of Christians and Jews, weekdays and Sabbaths, town and country, dream and reality, against a relentless and never-ending battle of the sexes. Views: 62
A story of the unfolding secret of Margaret whose determination to be near and protect the orphan, Sweetie, is part of the crucial years at the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital. For Sweetie has set her heart on Ginger, and Ginger is geared only for trouble, while the new head, Dr. Trump, dreams of nothing but reforms when he replaces the loved, kindly Canon Mallow. Margaret's intervention at the orphanage during a polio epidemic costs her her job with autocratic Dame Eleanor but she is unable to save Sweetie from incurring Trump's wrath or cure her of her obsession for Ginger.The climax comes when Sweetie runs away with Ginger and tries to commit suicide when pursuit catches up with them and more drama and discovery unfolds... Views: 62
Take this route to… Oblivion. Expressway to an uncharted sphere. “They’re about!” the woman whispered, and Crane abruptly saw a strange light shining through the heavy black curtains that shrouded the house. He crossed to the window and before anyone could stop him he drew the curtain back. At first he did not understand what he saw: a round gleaming, color-running orb stared unwinkingly back into his face. It was… an eye. An immense sad eye staring at him through the chink of the curtains, an eye surrounded by a living whorl of flame that he had last seen engulfing poor Barney in the parking lot. At least three others had disappeared into the strange world from which those aliens had come, and a girl had been driven insane by them. And before Crane’s quest to unravel the secret of the Map Country was complete, the fate of two worlds would hang in the balance. Views: 62
The explosive debut novel—told entirely through surveillance recordings, eyewitness reports, and other “official” documents—by New York Times bestselling author Lawrence SandersNew York City. Summer 1968.*Newly sprung from prison, professional burglar John Anderson is preparing for the biggest heist of his criminal career. The mark is a Manhattan luxury apartment building with the tony address of 535 East Seventy-Third Street. Enlisting a crew of scouts, con artists, and a getaway driver, Anderson orchestrates what he believes to be a foolproof plan. To pull off the big score, he needs one last thing: the permission of the local mafia, who expect a piece of the action. But no one inside Anderson’s operation knows that the police have recorded their conversations. The New York Police Department has hatched a plot of its own—but even its task force may not be enough to stop such a cunningly planned robbery. Views: 62
The engrossing, moving biography of one of China?s better-known Christians, the dedicated evangelist and gifted Bible teacher Watchman Nee. Views: 62
The title of Banville's first novel, Nightspawn (1971), involves a pun: "night spawn," "night's pawn," and "knight's pawn," heralding the ludic nature of the whole book. Nightspawn plays with literary conventions in order to show their exhaustive nature. It is an inside-out novel, one of the very few metanovels to have come out of Ireland. Ben White tells of a coup d'etat in Greece and his embroilment therein. White is a writer and he succeeds in working his account into a gripping thriller. But Nightspawn is anything but a straitlaced thriller; it is a parody of the narrative genre. Most scenes end in farce. Behind all the parodying, the playful turning upside-down of conventions and self-reflexive commenting, there lies a most serious intention: the age-old desire of the artist to express the things in their essence, to transfix beauty and truth. Like Beckett's narrators, White permanently urges himself on 'to express it all.' But he fails, is bound to fail, because every artist must necessarily fail in this respect, beauty and truth defying efforts. 'They took everything from me. Everything.' So says the central character of Nightspawn, John Banville's elusive, first novel, in which the author rehearses now familiar attributes: his humour, ironies, and brilliant knowing. In the arid setting of the Aegean, Ben White indulges in an obsessive quest: to assemble his 'story' and to untangle his relationships with a cast of improbable figures. Banville's subversive, Beckettian fiction embraces themes of freedom and betrayal, and toys with an implausible plot, the stuff of an ordinary 'thriller' shadowed by political intrigue. In this elaborate artifact, Banville's characters 'sometimes lose the meaning of things, and everything is just . . . funny.' There begins their search for 'the magic to combat any force'. Views: 62
Standing at the controls, beside me, the silent steersman raised his hand for a moment to point forward through the pilot room's transparent wall. "Canopus at last," he said, and I nodded. Together, and in silence, we gazed ahead. Before and around us there stretched away the magnificent panorama of interstellar space, familiar enough to our eyes but ever new, a vast reach of deep black sky dotted thickly with the glittering hosts of stars. The blood-red of Antares, the pale green of great Sirius, the warm, golden light of Capella, they flamed in the firmament about us like spendid jewels of light. And dead ahead there shone the one orb that dwarfed and dimmed all the others, a titanic radiant white sun whose blazing circle seemed to fill the heavens before us, the mighty star of Canopus, vastest of all the Galaxy's thronging suns… Views: 62
