Among his many books, perhaps none have sparked more outrage than The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens's meticulous and searing study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa--and it is now available as a Signal deluxe paperback.
A Nobel Peace Prize recipient canonized by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions--not the other way around.
With characteristic elan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary in a light she has never before been seen in. Views: 566
Includes the classic anthologies originally published as * The Celestial Omnibus and * The Eternal Moment, as well as three important stories published after Forster's death: "Dr. Woolacott," "The Life to Come," and "The Other Boat." Views: 550
In this luminous novel -- winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize -- John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's private moments. Views: 546
"The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer's writer-- but a reader's too-- an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language." -- Newsweek
"All in all they comprise the best collection of shorter fiction to have been published in America during the past twenty years." -- Theodore Solotaroff, Book Week
"When I read Flannery O'Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor." -- Thomas Merton
Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else. Views: 545
Berger presents a collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that together make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self-portrait of their author. Using careful, intensely visual prose snapping frozen vignettes of life, these twenty-nine "photocopies" teach us about lying and self-invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage. Overflowing with the sights, sounds, and smells of life, Photocopies is a masterpiece from one of the most important chroniclers of our time.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 542
The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though blindly dedicated to the cause, its nubile foot soldiers have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory—or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow.
Keith Nearing is stuck in an exquisite limbo. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith’s subsequent love life for decades to come. Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 536
Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.With Eve's Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Francis Ford Coppola's short-lived City. Whether profiling Hollywood darlings, getting to the bottom of health crazes like yoga and acupuncture, remembering friends and lovers from her days hobnobbing with rock stars at the Troubadour and art stars at the Ferus Gallery, or writing about her beloved,... Views: 533
One of the most distinguished critics and innovative authors of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published two novels before this collection appeared in 1921. However, it was these early stories that first earned her a reputation as a writer with "the liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time." Influenced by Joyce, Proust, and the theories of William James, Bergson, and Freud, she strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the continuous flow of consciousness, time's passage as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, and the essential indefinability of character.
Readers can discover these and other aspects of her influential style in the eight stories collected here, among them a delightful, feminist put-down of the male intellect in "A Society" and a brilliant and sensitive portrayal of nature in "Kew Gardens." Also included are "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "A Haunted House," "Blue & Green," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story.
In recent years, Woolf's fiction, feminism, and high-minded sensibilities have earned her an ever-growing audience of readers. This splendid collection offers those readers not only the inestimable pleasures of the stories themselves, but an excellent entrée into the larger body of Woolf's work. Views: 532
Contains five short stories. In the title story a loving and contented husband discovers the true nature of his marriage, as though he has walked through a mirror and found that the life held in the glass was not his own at all. Views: 529
In this quietly revolutionary work of social observation and medical philosophy, Booker Prize-winning writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr train their gaze on an English country doctor and find a universal man--one who has taken it upon himself to recognize his patient's humanity when illness and the fear of death have made them unrecognizable to themselves. In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tend the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. And as Berger and Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life. First published thirty years ago, A Fortunate Man remains moving and deeply relevant--no other book has offered such a close and passionate investigation of the roles doctors play in their society.
"In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience."--Susan Sontag Views: 528
'Married five times. Mother. Lover. Aunt. Friend.She plays many roles round here. And neverScared to tell the whole of her truth, whetherOr not anyone wants to hear it. WifeOf Willesden: pissed enough to tell her lifeStory to whoever has ears and eyes . . .'Zadie Smith's first time writing for the stage, The Wife of Willesden is a riotous twenty-first century translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's classic The Wife of Bath's Prologue, brought to glorious life on the Kilburn High Road.Commissioned to celebrate Brent's year as Borough of Culture 2020, The Wife of Willesden will premiere at the Kiln Theatre, London in September 2020. Views: 527
Urbane stories – almost all set in Mexico City. The weakest tales here simply exploit a single metaphor: in «Chac-Mool», a collector buys a pre-Columbian statue of a god, and the god turns into flesh; in «In a Flemish Garden», a Europeanized house is haunted by the Empress Carlotta. But the strongest of them take on Mexico City's schizoid energy in total. An old bachelor, mother-stifled, lives alone in a crumbling house and keeps to the genteel practices of 30 years before (wakes late, eats in one restaurant, wears spats and a bowler): he's eventually murdered by the street hustlers who are his cultural opposites. «The Two Elenas» portrays a young woman so desperate to be hip and ‘with-it’, decultured, that she becomes a mirror image of herself, her own bouncing infinity. And the final story, «The Son of Andres Aparacio», is perhaps the best: a rolling, careening, ashy tale of a young man without prospect who becomes involved with a neo-Fascist brigade of terrorists: here Fuentes is able to run without a leash what he knows best – disappointment. In general, however, stories are a less hospitable form for this writer than are novels, and the single ideas here mostly seem merely tantalizing, not a full measure. Views: 520
London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch? Views: 519
Hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz is Carlos Fuentes's haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico. Its acknowledged place in Latin American fiction and its appeal to a fresh generation of readers have warranted this new translation by Alfred Mac Adam, translator (with the author) of Fuentes's Christopher Unborn.
As in all his fiction, but perhaps most powerfully in this book, Fuentes is a passionate guide to the ironies of Mexican history, the burden of its past, and the anguish of its present. Views: 514
61 people live on a remote South Pacific island.Why are they there?What does this place have to do with a drug rehabilitation institute in Birmingham, England?And why are both of these places consuming the thoughts of the British Prime Minister? For every answer this story affords you, you'll be another step away from where you thought you'd be.Welcome to Ducie!Cheeps the Chick is a gorgeous illustrated children's book about a silly little baby chicken named Cheeps. Cheeps is very adventurous and loves to explore! One day he decides to find out what is on the other side of the fence (with the help of his best friend, Chuck). Little do they know, there's a fox nearby. What happens next? The illustrations in the kid's picture book are optimized to be superior quality and vivid for tablets and e-readers to improve the story and bring it to life for early and beginner readers!This is an excellent read for beginning and early readers.This book is great for a quick bedtime story or a cute tale to be read aloud with friends and family.* Excellent for early and beginning readers* Great for reading aloud with friends and family* Cute short story that is great for a quick bedtime story* Big and beautiful illustrations for kidsThis books is especially great for traveling, waiting rooms, and reading aloud at home! Views: 507
