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Poems Below The Line

"B-side" poems on topics including love, politics, TV news, cat care, gun control, religion and celebrity."B-side" poems on topics including love, politics, TV news, cat care, gun control, religion and celebrity. Terry McCarty has written poems in, around and sometimes about Southern California since 1997. His poems appear in the anthologies So Luminous The Wildflowers(Tebot Bach) and The Long Way Home: The Best of the Little Red Books Series 1998-2008 (Lummox Press).
Views: 701

The Union Jack

"It was...unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: Everybody was." A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack—the British Flag—during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on "the absurd order of chance," he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening—an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertesz remembered: "I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded—and which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone..." The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.
Views: 659

Ghost Light

Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works. Rebellious and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. She has dozens of admirers but in the backstage of her life there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of loneliness and severity he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, often tender. Many years later, an old woman makes her way across London on the morning after a hurricane. Christmas is coming. As she wanders past bombsites and through the city's forlorn beauty, a snowdrift of memories and lost desires seems to swirl. She has twice been married: once widowed, once divorced, but an unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat as her dazzling career has faded. A story of love's commitment, of partings and reconciliations, of the courage involved in living on nobody else's terms, Ghost Light is a profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting novel.
Views: 620

Shiloh

This fictional re-creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 fulfills the standard set by his monumental history, conveying both the bloody choreography of two armies and the movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.
Views: 578

Old Man's Time

This short story (3200 words) is about an old man finding his place in a futuristic world; a world of space travel and space colonization. Earth is suffocating and new worlds are needed. An expedition with the aim of colonizing a new planet is sent out.Road to Gethsemane tells the story of two women Magdalene (Mags) and Eden. Mags is a woman in her prime jilted by her husband, her children have flown the nest. She finds her self in penury living in squalor and in a dead end job. In a moment of madness she decides to accept the offer of a free holiday from a known smuggler. Upon her return she soon begins to realize her error, but has to face the consequences of her actions. She becomes entangled in a group of smugglers. Among them her ex-husband and a crooked copper. Who has become the subject of an internal investigation. The story soon become a game of whose watching who. Mags meet Eden a beautiful young model with a complicated past. the two meet through a mutual acquaintance and instead of becoming victims of the puppet masters they hatch a plan which would leave them rich and their enemies behind bars. But will each wrong demand a reckoning?
Views: 560

The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler's Third Reich. The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler's Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe's historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war's bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come. Cornelius Ryan's compelling account of this final battle is a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.” It is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.
Views: 556

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

A fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before. The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history -- the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness. At the very center of this story is John Wilkes Booth, America's notorious villain. A Confederate sympathizer and a member of a celebrated acting family, Booth threw away his fame and wealth for a chance to avenge the South's defeat. For almost two weeks, he confounded the manhunters, slipping away from their every move and denying them the justice they sought. Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln's own blood relics, Manhunt is a fully documented work, but it is also a fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before.
Views: 547

Fatelessness

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.
Views: 544

Star of the Sea

In the bitter winter of 1847, The Star of the Sea sets sail from Ireland for New York. Amongst the passengers are a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an aspiring novelist and a maker of revolutionary ballads. All in search of a new home in the Promised land, each is yet connected more deeply than they can possibly know... and a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for vengeance and absolution.
Views: 486

an excerpt from AMBITION'S PROGRESS PT 1

This short excerpt from B Mathew's allegory is a recommended reading for English Literature students & lecturers.The author’s first literary work, and MASTERPIECE, written in 1981.Ambition’s Progress Part 1- what’s this book all about?This is a classical writing, a fictional poetic allegory, by a contemporary writer, B Mathew. In our present times where people only read, modern-day novels, fictions, science-fantasies, blog articles, daily news, sports, fashions, modern trends, politics, juicy biographies of movie personalities, etc, Ambition’s Progress Part 1 towers as a classic light-house in a sea of contemporary literature. The very word “Classic Writing” connotes expanded vocabulary rich & abundant, heightened imagination, that which brings about intellectual growth of the mind & inner spirit, enhanced writing & oratory skills and a capacity to develop sophisticated ideas. To put it in a nut-shell, a reading of Ambition’s Progress Part 1 would result in an enrichment and development of your mind, spirit, intellect and your overall perspective & discernment of life’s complexities. A spiritual & intellectual pauper taking a journey through Ambition’s Progress Part 1 will walk out as a Spiritual & Intellectual billionaire. A treasure and a marvelous discovery lay hidden and buried in the entire plot, story, verses and allusions in Ambition’s Progress Part 1.In this excerpt, you will see the tryst between the monster Unemployment and Sir Ambition.....
Views: 380

Fiasco

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government. * * Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has said, "is fiction founded on reality"—a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which, in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertesz' fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization—ours—that made Auschwitz possible. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 379

The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

Focused on the pivotal year of 1863, the second volume of Shelby Foote’s masterful narrative history brings to life some of the most dramatic and important moments in the Civil War, including the Battle of Gettysburg and Grant’s Vicksburg campaign.   “Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist’s skill in directing the reader’s attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be better.” —The Atlantic “Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been recounted hundreds of times, they have rarely been re-created with such vigor and such picturesque detail.” —The New York Times Book Review “The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist’s feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian’s scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequaled.” —Walter Mills
Views: 378

The Six River Motor Boat Boys on the St. Lawrence; Or, The Lost Channel

Henry Alfred \'Harry\' Gordon, CMG, AM was an Australian journalist, war correspondent, author, and historian of the Olympic Games. 
Views: 363

Remember the Alamo!

Remember the Alamo! is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by T. R. Fehrenbach is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of T. R. Fehrenbach then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
Views: 341

Kaddish for an Unborn Child

The first word in this mesmerizing novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is “No.” It is how the novel’s narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child. It is the answer he gave his wife (now ex-wife) years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two “no”s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertesz’s narrator addresses the child he couldn’t bear to bring into the world he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Kaddish for the Unborn Child is a work of staggering power, lit by flashes of perverse wit and fueled by the energy of its wholly original voice. Translated by Tim Wilkinson From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 336