Because he is born illegitimate, Friederich Kargan lacks even a social identity. Moving to Vienna, he becomes involved both in revolutionary agitation and a love affair before he is caught by the authorities on his first trip to Russia, enduring a Siberian interlude before escaping. He eventually returns to Russia after the February Revolution, becoming leader of the Red Army, but realizes during the civil war that the revolution seems to be over before it has begun; the cause has been betrayed, yesterday’s proletariat has become today’s bourgeoisie; exile might offer the only choice. A beautifully descriptive journey from loneliness into an illusory worldliness and back into loneliness, this is a haunting study in alienation by a master of realistic imagination. Views: 848
In the sixth century A.D. the Saxons ruled Southern England. After the great battle of Aquae Sulis, Owain, injured, wakes to find his father and brother killed during the fight. On the battlefield the only other living thing is a lean and hungry dog. This story covers the twelve years following the battle and describes the life and adventures of Owain during this time of historic change in the annals of England. Views: 848
**"The author…has built knowledge into artistic fiction."— *The New York Times Book Review *
Elisha is a young Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and an Israeli freedom fighter in British-controlled Palestine; John Dawson is the captured English officer he will murder at dawn in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The night-long wait for morning and death provides Dawn, Elie Wiesel's ever more timely novel, with its harrowingly taut, hour-by-hour narrative. Caught between the manifold horrors of the past and the troubling dilemmas of the present, Elisha wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and ultimately God as he waits for the appointed hour and his act of assassination. Dawn is an eloquent meditation on the compromises, justifications, and sacrifices that human beings make when they murder other human beings. Views: 846
This saga of the Irish Celts is re-told by Rosemary Sutcliff with a magical weaving together of passion and poetry. The boy who takes up the spear and shield of Manhood on this day will become the most renowned of all the warriors of Ireland, men will follow at his call to the world's end, and his enemies will shudder at the thunder of his chariot wheels. So the prophecy went, and as the boy Cuchulain heard it, he went forward to claim the weapons of his manhood. This is the story of how he became the greatest of heroes—the Hound of Ulster. Views: 846
With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. Views: 844
Writings on yoga practice and writing practice, how yoga and writing reflect, support or conflict with each other, by a widely published author and a long-time yoga practitioner. Practice, discipline, dreams, the body, tradition and life are some of its themes. First published in India and with a review by N Sjoman, author of The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace.What does a monster with an angel's soul do when a prince comes along to steal his girl? He wants to kill him, of course. When the gods meddle in the lives of mortals, personal disaster is assured, and disaster is coming for golem, girl and prince. In the land of Ulmenir, where kings boast the blood of gryphons, some things aren’t quite as they seem. (Third Edition. Content warning: Adult fiction. Also, this is the least GLBTQ book in the series.) The Gryphon Taint: Volume One is the fourth novel chronologically in The Soulstone Chronicles, a fantasy adventure about an enigmatic deity reborn as a human being. The Gryphon Taint set can be read first in the series, since it was written before the Bound in Stone set, which can be considered a prequel.For those who read the Bound in Stone set first, Herfod/Kehfrey returns to the series in a big way in The Gryphon Taint: Volume Three. He's also present in volume two of the Gryphon set. Views: 843
In a Pennsylvania meadow, a young fireman and an angry gambler are forced to build a wall of fifteenth-century stone. For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pusuit of "a life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single turn of a card." In Paul Auster's world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is redemption, nonetheless, in Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love. Views: 843
"Grendel prowled in, hating all men and all joy and hungry for human life. So swift was his attack that no man heard an outcry; but when the dawn came, thirty of Hothgar's best and noblest thanes were missing."
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Only Beowulf, foremost among warriors, has the strength and courage to battle with Grendel the Night-stalker.
In this thrilling re-telling of the Anglo-Saxon legend, Rosemary Sutcliff recounts Beowulf's most terrifying quests: against Grendel the man-wolf, against the hideous sea-hag and, most courageous of all - his fight to the death with the monstrous fire-drake. Views: 836
For Arthur Rowe, the trip to the charity fête was a joyful step back into adolescence, a chance to forget the nightmare of the Blitz and the aching guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was surviving alone, outside the war, until he happened to win a cake at the fête. From that moment, he is ruthlessly hunted by Nazi agents and finds himself the prey of malign and shadowy forces.
"A master thriller and a remarkable portrait of a twisted character." —Time
This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Alan Furst. Views: 835
First published in 1968, Desert Solitaire is one of Edward Abbey’s most critically acclaimed works and marks his first foray into the world of nonfiction writing. Written while Abbey was working as a ranger at Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, Desert Solitaire is a rare view of one man’s quest to experience nature in its purest form.
Through prose that is by turns passionate and poetic, Abbey reflects on the condition of our remaining wilderness and the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world as well as his own internal struggle with morality. As the world continues its rapid development, Abbey’s cry to maintain the natural beauty of the West remains just as relevant today as when this book was written. Views: 834
Mary is alone when her car breaks down on some god forsaken back road in the middle of nowhere. Then she hears singing and follows it... to discover something quite unexpected.Carsyn’s future is homelessness and starvation. He doesn’t care about the world. But when an underground group of “lunatics” find him, telling him he’s in danger while also successfully predicting the president’s death, Carsyn is offered a new future. He leaves his past, makes a few friends, and soon learns of his connection with Grandfather, a group of extremists who are secretly taking control of the government.He finds himself unexpectedly intertwined with the infamous group, learning how dangerous they truly are. Carsyn starts to care about the world, wanting others to see what’s truly happening within the government. He wants to help the underground group destroy Grandfather. Nothing goes as planned, and Carsyn must ask himself if all he did was make things worse.Grandfather is a Ya Pre-Apocalyptic novel that focuses on events leading up to a dystopian society rather than the rebellion and fall of power. Join Carsyn in a mysterious journey that will have you wanting to know more about the futuristic world and the power controlling it. Views: 827
When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary man—Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic—steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last words—a plea for silence—and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town’s last days and nights of terror.
For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath—until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man’s loyalty to the dead confronts head-on another’s reason to go on living.
One of Wiesel’s strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was when first published in 1973. Views: 816
She sits in a jail cell. They say she killed her lover and fed his body to the crocodiles. She will tell no one what happened on that fateful last day they were seen together.She knows an awful secret but is determined to hide it forever. It is written in this man's diary but she has hidden that too.And there is a buried box which no one must find.The search, gets closer. She must stop themEnglish backpacker, Susan, is on trial for murder in Australia . The tabloids say she killed her lover, fed his body to crocodiles then hid the evidence.She refuses to say what happened. She is trapped within a jail cell and inside her mind in a place of guilt,horror and emptiness. Her only companion is a dark creature, a spirit of an ancient crocodile, which inhabits her dreams.Only one person knows and can help her. But he and his helicopter have vanished in the place that locals call The Empty Place. Only a few fragments of metal found washed out to sea indicate where he went. Everyone is convinced he has perished. Is there any way out for Susan. She is determined to plead guilty to protect her child from the deeds of the father. She refuses to reveal what occurred. She awaits conviction and sentencing, expecting to spend her life in jail. But the detective who discovered Susan's identity continues to seek the truth. He knows there must be another story to explain why. He must discover the past of this man she murdered to unlock the secret. The rest of officialdom just wants to lock this girl up and throw away the key.As time ticks away towards the trial, Susan's sanity is falling apart - guilt for what she has done, lonely depression at the prospect of years in prison without her child. She lost hope when the helicopter vanishes and lives inside herself in her own empty place. Yet she must still keep alive the fathers good legacy for the sake of the child.In her mind she sees an escape, she will return to her lover and his crocodile spirit - end it all and be free of this misery.Her friends and the detective suspect her suicide plans. They are desperate to help but powerless to protect her from herself. They must keep seeking truth. It is a race against time. Can the truth be uncovered before the trial ends.Susan is increasingly desperate too. She wants her escape, she must keep the truth hidden, the investigation is closing in. She must divert them. She has a plan, her own death will be the diversion and will bury the secret forever. Views: 814
Mi vida en rose es el nuevo libro de relatos de David Sedaris, el maestro de la sátira, un brillante humorista estadounidense que sigue la tradición de Woody Allen o Groucho Marx. Delirantes y desternillantes, políticamente incorrectos, mordaces y en ocasiones impertinentes, estos relatos nos hablan, entre otras cosas, de cómo aprender francés a una edad adulta y los inconvenientes que conlleva esta valiente decisión, y nos presentan a un niño que hace terapia de pronunciación y a un profesor de escritura creativa que comete los más elementales fallos ortográficos y gramaticales. Sedaris vuelve a hacer una disección del absurdo de algunas conductas y de la vulgaridad de la vida cotidiana y familiar, esta vez desde el relativo anonimato de París, donde se ha refugiado tras haberse convertido en una estrella mediática en Estados Unidos Views: 811
A recurring theme throughout Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is the comforting premise that readers are never alone. "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but never really a stranger. My real, true world." Later, she quotes editor Hazel Rochman: "Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere." Indeed, Quindlen's essays are full of the names of "friends," real or fictional--Anne of Green Gables and Heidi; Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, to name just a few--who have comforted, inspired, educated, and delighted her throughout her life. In four short essays Quindlen shares her thoughts on the act of reading itself ("It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light"); analyzes the difference between how men and women read ("there are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers"); and cheerfully defends middlebrow literature:
Most of those so-called middlebrow readers would have readily admitted that the Iliad set a standard that could not be matched by What Makes Sammy Run? or Exodus. But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated and that some of them are not addressed by Homer.
The Canon, censorship, and the future of publishing, not to mention that of reading itself, are all subjects Quindlen addresses with intelligence and optimism in a book that may not change your life, but will no doubt remind you of other books that did. --Alix Wilber(less) Views: 810
