In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini meet in Salzburg where they agree on a renewed assault on the Soviet Union. Launched in the summer, the campaign soon picks up speed, as the routed Red Army is driven back to the industrial center of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. In the rubble of the bombed-out city, Soviet forces dig in for a last stand. The story told in Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters include mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political activists, steelworkers, and peasants, along with Hitler and other historical figures. At the heart of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family. Even as the Germans advance, the matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna, refuses to leave Stalingrad. Far from the front, her eldest daughter, Ludmila, is unhappily married to the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum. Viktor's research may be of crucial military importance, but he is... Views: 405
Lulia Vasile is the daughter of a Romany princess and an Earl's second son. She grew up playing roles in a traveling theater, performing at county fairs, and has dabbled in fortune telling. She makes no apologies for who she is, and lives life as she pleases.Finley Prescott, the Duke of Clare, doesn't leave his townhouse unless it's necessary. He has responsibilities and people who depend on him. All he wants is to disappear from the world. He doesn't do well in large gatherings and lacks social graces.Fin and Lulia have a history. One that neither one has forgotten. When they meet again they are drawn together. After that chance meeting they share a magical kiss. Along the way they discover that sometimes the one thing a person needs isn't what they would expect. Views: 404
A Place in the Country is W. G. Sebald’s meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind—and the last of this great writer’s major works to be translated into English.
This edition includes more than 40 pieces of art, all originally selected by W. G. Sebald.
This extraordinary collection of interlinked essays about place, memory, and creativity captures the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his masterly and mysterious style—part critical essay, part memoir—Sebald weaves their lives and art with his own migrations and rise in the literary world.
Here are people gifted with talent and courage yet in some cases cursed by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries inhospitable or even hostile to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is conjured on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, hiding from his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where two centuries later Sebald took rooms adjacent to his. Eighteenth-century author Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite and delicate nature writing, expressing the eternal balance of both the outside world and human emotions. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his 1850 novel Green Henry, is praised for his prescient insights into a Germany where “the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider.”
Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the nineteenth-century German poet beset by mood swings, depression, and fainting spells in an increasingly shallow society, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose nearly indecipherable scrawls seemed an attempt to “duck down below the level of language and obliterate himself” (and whose physical appearance and year of death mirrored those of Sebald’s grandfather). Finally, Sebald spies a cognizance of death’s inevitability in painter Jan Peter Tripp’s lovingly exact reproductions of life.
Featuring the same kinds of suggestive and unexplained illustrations that appear in his masterworks Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait as seen through the experiences of others, a glimpse of his own ghosts alongside those of the men who influenced him. It is an essential addition to his stunning body of work.
Praise for A Place in the Country
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“Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s] books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review***
“In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death. The scholarly craft of gathering scattered sources and weaving them into a coherent whole is transformed here into something beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate
“Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News
“Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.” —The Nation **
“Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—*New York*
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 404
“The Lost Tales of Mercia” are ten short stories set in England near the end of the Viking Age. These swashbuckling tales, based heavily on true events, educate and entertain simultaneously. In the Sixth Tale, a royal retainer named Hastings fights for his country and the Golden Cross, but entertains unrealistic notions of how his mistress, Aetheling Aydith, might reward him.Martyn took a steadying breath and peered around the boulder. The dragon appeared in no hurry to devour them, taking its time stretching and folding its leathery wings. It wasn't as big as a longboat as the stories said, but it was still huge – four times the size of a horse, plus the tail, long neck, and a head the size of a coffin. It was beautiful in a chilling sort of way, its skin a scaly rainbow of glittering copper, amber, emerald and bronze, the colors changing in liquid ripples as the fading sunlight swept across its body while it crept toward their feeble hideout. Views: 404
Soldiers - Season 1 - Episode 1: Regret's Mission This edition in the hugely successful Bitesize Read format! A roller-coaster 1-hour read!When Regret marches with his regiment to Mons they don't know they are 80,000 facing an army of 500,000 menStaggering away from the carnage, Regret is given the most important and dangerous mission of his life. One that could change the course of the war!Regret's Mission > Soldiers > Season 1 > Episode 1This edition in the hugely successful Bitesize Read format! A rip-roaring 1-hour read!"A edge-of-your-seat Saturday matinee! An action-packed adventure set at the very start of the Great War!"When Regret marches with his regiment to Mons they think they re going to give the invading Huns a bloody nose.They don’t know that their 80,000 comrades are about to face a highly trained and well-equipped army of 500,000 men.Their battle at Nimy Canal is brief and horrific and marks the end of the British Expeditionary Force.Staggering away from the carnage, Regret is given the most important and dangerous mission of his life. One that could change the course of the war to end all wars.Regret is going to need all his skill and courage if he and his exhausted squad are to survive the explosive adventures to come!It doesn't pretend to be Bernard Cornwell, but was inspired by the great Sharpe stories. Though historical accurate, it’s not a Historical Novel, it’s a roller-coaster adventure in 12 1-hour episodes. Each one is a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. And a cliff-hanger, it the true tradition of the Matinee genre. Views: 404
Requiem For Eden: Season 1: Episode 1: No Good Deed… The Eden series continues!"A edge-of-your-seat Saturday matinee!" With Lucid’s invasion driven back to the Dark Continent and his attempt to take over The Other Place thwarted, Eden should be the tranquil haven it was meant to be. If only…Requiem For Eden: Season 1: Episode 1: No Good Deed… "A edge-of-your-seat Saturday matinee!" Now in the hugely successful Bitesize Read format! A 1 hour episode.With Lucid’s invasion driven back to the Dark Continent and his attempt to take over The Other Place thwarted, Eden should be the tranquil haven it was meant to be. If only…Like the flap of a butterfly’s wing, the storm that threatens to engulf Eden is started by a single, apparently insignificant decision. The icy blast is too much for the old stork delivering her bundles to their new homes. She changes the schedule and delivers them to a Guardian Knight in Trinity. Nobody will ever know.And now the dark clouds are gathering in the far north, and the Archangel Michael, the Guardian Supreme Commander, and the Leader of the Senate watch the Games that mark the graduation of Trinity’s Knight School in the desperate hope they will find a hero to lead their army against the coming hordes.They need a miracle, but since magic was outlawed by the Senate, miracles have been in short supply. They think they have found Woe and his sister, Anella—the cuckoos the stork left—to fill the hero vacancy. But they have no idea just what they have found.And the Norsemen are coming.The Eden Series was inspired by the Discworld novels. Requiem for Eden is an adventure in 10 1-hour episodes. Each one a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. And a cliff-hanger ending, it the true tradition of the Saturday Matinee genre. Views: 404
The Castle Keeper vignettes provide a glimpse into the time between Shadows in the Stone and Scattered Stones. You’ll have already met many of the characters, but some you will meet in Scattered Stones.These vignettes are not complete stories, only 300 words of a moment. Volume 01 contains the first twelve in a series of vignettes to be written.Almost five years has passed since Isla of Maura was kidnapped and Bronwyn Darrow left Maskil in search of her. In many ways, not much has happened; the inhabitants of the Land of Ath-o’Lea have continued their daily routine. But if you look deeper into the individual lives you’ll see much has changed in little ways.The Castle Keeper vignettes provide a glimpse into the time between Shadows in the Stone and Scattered Stones. You’ll have already met many of the characters, but some you will meet in Scattered Stones.These vignettes are not complete stories, only 300 words of a moment. Volume 01 contains the first twelve in a series of vignettes to be written. Views: 404
