Like Kafka’s The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude,” an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence; they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit. One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” — John Updike
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The body was on the pointed rocks alongside the stream. The artist might have fallen from the cliff where he was painting, but there are too many suspicious elements - particularly the medical evidence that proves he'd been dead nearly half a day, though eyewitnesses had seen him alive a scant hour earlier. And then there are the six prime suspects - all of them artists, all of whom wished him dead. Five are red herrings, but one has created a masterpiece of murder that baffles everyone, including Lord Peter Wimsey. Views: 1 143
With a Foreword by the author. The Sound and the Fury, selections from other novels, three novellas, nine stories, the Nobel Prize address, etc. Views: 1 142
Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, “as if I were a man enclosing another man within.” In its brevity and piercing simplicity, it may be Mailer’s most accessible, direct, and heartfelt work.
Praise for The Gospel According to the Son
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“Quietly penetrating . . . [Norman Mailer’s] gospel is written in a direct, rather relaxed English that yet has an eerie, neo-Biblical dignity.”—John Updike, The New Yorker
“A book of considerable intellectual force . . . The writer’s powerful mind works in a specialized way, not by theological argumentation but by telling or retelling a story.”—The New York Review of Books
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“Challenges readers on the religious right and the atheist left with equally rich interpretive tasks.”—The Dallas Morning News
“An informed and believable work of fiction . . . of what may have been going through the mind of Jesus during his epic ministry.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post**
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 1 142
When a 12-year-old boy discovers a skull from an upturned grave, he feels suddenly weak. The trees swirl above him and he dreams the life of Robin Hood. Michael Morpurgo transforms a traditional legend into a dramatically suspenseful adventure story with an unforgettable ending. Full color. Views: 1 141
An atmospheric and beautifully written adventure, from the award-winning author of the Ingo series.
Morveren lives with her parents and twin sister Jenna on an island off the coast of Cornwall.
As Morveren and Jenna’s relationship shifts and changes, like driftwood on the tide, Morveren finds a beautiful teenage boy in a rock pool after a storm. Going to his rescue, she is shocked to see that he is not human but a Mer boy.
With Jenna refusing to face the truth, Morveren finds herself alone at the worst possible time. Because when the worlds of Air and Mer meet, the consequences can be terrible… Views: 1 141
A novel that probes moral devastation following a Nazi retaliation in a Dutch town. The Assault has been translated and published to great critical acclaim throughout Europe and in the United States.
It is the winter of 1945, the last dark days of the ware in occupied Holland. A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides on his bicycle. The Germans retaliate by slaughtering an innocent family: only the youngest son, twelve-year-old Anton, survives.
The Assault traces the complex repercussions of this nightmarish event on Anton's life. Determined not to forget, he opts for a carefully normal existence—a prudent marriage, a successful career, and colorless passivity. But the past keeps breaking through, in relentless memories and in chance encounters with the other actors in the drama, until Anton finally learns what really happened that night in 1945, and why.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 139
Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. “Taken together,” as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’” Bolano’s career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his “ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior”: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels.” Views: 1 137
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers one hundred poems written between 1957 and 1996. Chosen by the author, these pieces have been selected from each of nine previously published collections. The rich work in this volume reflects the development of Berry’s poetic sensibility over four decades. Focusing on themes that have occupied his work for years--land and nature, family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture-- The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry celebrates the broad range of this vital and transforming poet. Views: 1 135
ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see himnow. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queerhandkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of allthe known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; itsomehow mildly reminded him of his mortality. Views: 1 134
The internationally acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street gives us a deeply moving tale of loss, grief, and healing: a lyrically told, richly illustrated fable for grown-ups about a woman’s search for a cat who goes missing in the wake of her mother’s death.
The word “orphan” might not seem to apply to a fifty-three-year-old woman. Yet this is exactly how Sandra feels as she finds herself motherless, alone like “a glove left behind at the bus station.” What just might save her is her search for someone else gone missing: Marie, the black-and-white cat of her friend, Roz, who ran off the day they arrived from Tacoma. As Sandra and Roz scour the streets of San Antonio, posting flyers and asking everywhere, “Have you seen Marie?” the pursuit of this one small creature takes on unexpected urgency and meaning. With full-color illustrations that bring this transformative quest to vivid life, Have You Seen Marie? showcases a beloved author’s storytelling magic, in a tale that reminds us how love, even when it goes astray, does not stay lost forever. Views: 1 134
The SHADOWS IN FLIGHT enhanced ebook is a lavishly illustrated novel that will make the most of your e-reader or tablet device. Orson Scott Card’s novel is brought to vivid life by artist Nick Greenwood.
"The author has always superbly written about children, and here he's in top form….If you still prefer Ender to Bean after this, you're really hardcore." -*-Kirkus Reviews *on SHADOWS IN FLIGHT* *Set in the Ender’s Game universe, SHADOWS IN FLIGHT is the fifth book in Orson Scott Card’s "Ender’s Shadow" sequence. At the end of SHADOW OF THE GIANT, Julian Delphiki, called "Bean" by everyone, stole away from the wars of Earth with three of his children – the three who share his genetic mutation that gives brilliance and a short life. A ship to the stars will give them a chance – a chance for the scientists of Earth to find a treatment, if not for him then for his children. As the long decades on Earth flash by in a moment on their near-light-speed ship, they flee into the future. The three, called Ender, Carlotta and Sergeant, work to learn enough to help in the effort, and then lead it. But Earth holds no minds more brilliant that those of Bean and his children, and there is no cure. As the generations pass on Earth, there comes a time when no one remembers them, save as a voice on the ansible, a distant whisper from the stars. And then their ship’s life-support begins to fail, and Bean’s children must save themselves. Views: 1 133
'I truly thought I'd never make it back.'Ten of the most memorable and most terrifying cantos from Dante's Inferno.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Dante's works available in Penguin Classics are Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, The Divine Comedy and Vita Nuova. Views: 1 133
Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modern stage, "Mother Courage and Her Children" is Bertolt Brecht's most passionate and profound statement against war. Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling -- "Mother Courage" -- an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe's religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes -- her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy. Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in the literature of drama. Views: 1 132
In 1962 the poet, musician, and performer Maya Angelou claimed another piece of her identity by moving to Ghana, joining a community of "Revolutionist Returnees" inspired by the promise of pan-Africanism. All God's Children Need Walking Shoes is her lyrical and acutely perceptive exploration of what it means to be an African American on the mother continent, where color no longer matters but where American-ness keeps asserting itself in ways both puzzling and heartbreaking. As it builds on the personal narrative of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, this book confirms Maya Angelou’s stature as one of the most gifted autobiographers of our time.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 130
