South of No North contains some of Bukowski's best work. Among the short stories collected in the book are Love for $17.50, about a man named Robert whose infatuation with a mannequin in a junk shop leads him first to buy it, then make love to it, and then eventually fall in love with "her," much to the consternation of his real-life girlfriend; Maja Thurup, about a South American tribesman with an enormous penis who is brought to Los Angeles by the woman anthropologist who has "discovered" him and become his lover; and The Devil is Hot, about an encounter with Old Nick at an amusement pier in Santa Monica, where Scratch himself is caged and on display, fed only peanut butter and dogfood, exploited by a cynical carnie.
The collection also features two of Bukowski's finest and most famous short stories: All the Assholes in the World Plus Mine, an autobiographical rumination on the treatment of his hemorrhoids, and Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts. (The latter story originally was published as a chapbook of 500 copies by Bensenville Mimeo Press in 1965.)
The short stories collected in the volume are evocative of Bukowski at his best, when he was one of the premier short story writers still at the top of his talent.
- Wikipedia Views: 165
This multi-award winning novel set in southern Iran follows an Iranian-Armenian housewife’s struggles to find fulfilment within her family’s expectations. A model 1960s wife and mother, Clarisse leads an unremarkable life. She has all she’s ever wanted: a well-respected engineer husband and three children, tucked away in a wealthy, middle-class neighbourhood of Abadan. Swaddled in the comforting monotony of cleaning, cooking, sewing, shopping, and dining at the Oil Company club, Clarisse’s greatest anxiety is keeping the peace with her critical mother, unmarried sister, distant husband, and quarrelling children. But her tranquillity ends forever with the arrival of an enigmatic Armenian family across the street. The debonair widower, his beguiling tween daughter, and his mother, a domineering aristocrat with an exotic past, steal their way into Clarisse’s home. And before she has time to understand what’s happening, passions, politics, and a plague of locusts have whipped up emotions that she never knew she had. Suddenly, there are options, opinions, desires, a wholly different life ready for the taking – but only if she can figure out what they are. Published to instant acclaim in Pirzad’s native Iran and winning multiple awards, including the prestigious Houshang Golshiri award for Best Novel of the Year, I Turn Out the Light is a humorous yet poignant insight into the hopes and aspirations of Iranians in the years that led to the Islamist Revolution. Zoya Pirzad is a renowned Iranian-Armenian writer and novelist. She has written two novels and three collections of short stories, all of which have enjoyed international success. Her most recent collection of stories, The Bitter Taste of Persimmon, won the prize for Best Foreign Book of 2009 in France. She grew up in Abadan, where this novel is set, and now lives in Tehran. Views: 163
ames Dickey, the Carolina Professor and poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, continues to examine the relationship of man and nature in "The Eagle's Mile." That same relationship appears, with many nuances about myth and machismo, in his novel and film, "Deliverance." The title poem in his new collection is dedicated to the late Justice William O. Douglas, a noted outdoorsman. Mr. Dickey's verse meanders down the page in rivulets that eventually join together in a rushing mainstream of language:
Where Douglas you once walked in a white shirt as a man
In the early fall, fire-breathing with oak-leaves,
Your patched tunnel-gaze exactly right
For the buried track
Mr. Dickey, who loves to link words, tells a tale of Manhattan that is alternately amusing and frightening in a poem called "Spring-Shock." In it, a driver rolls down a car window; his voice is "home-born Southern." A potential mugging seems to be in the spring air. The passenger-narrator, "manhandling my overcoat," slides into the car and orders him to go to the St. Moritz Hotel. The poet emerges in a single phrase that breaks into the narrative: Central Park South is described as "A war-safety zone." Then something happens between mugger and victim that raises the poem into a surprising statement of courage.
The waiting room in a maternity ward is perfectly re-created in a poem called "Daughter." The clock in the room is unwound; the hospital is a place of "plastic, manned rubber and wrong light." And then:
A doctor with a blanket
Comes round a blind corner.
"Who gets this little girl?"
I peer into wool: a creature
Somewhat strangely more than red.
Dipped in fire.
In all the poems in "The Eagle's Mile," original phrases stop the reader's eye on the page: "No emergency but birth." An overweight man's "pizza-fed fury." Houses in Los Angeles that are made of "packaged hard candy." A race in which a middle-aged man is "a world-class second."
In "The Eagle's Mile," James Dickey continues to extend his vision as a major American poet.
NY Times - book review October 27, 1990 Views: 163
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was one of the greatest exemplars of the revolutionary 1960s, a man whose heroic adventures were essential to the success of the Cuban Revolution and whose legend fired the imaginations of a whole generation. In 1965, amid worldwide conjecture, Guevara left Cuba, where he was a minister in Fidel Castro's postrevolutionary government, and traveled incognito to the heart of Africa. People's hero Patrice Lumumba had recently been assassinated, and Guevara was to put his theories of guerrilla warfare to use helping the oppressed people of the Congo throw off the yoke of colonial imperialism. The first task was to assist the young Laurent Kabila in his struggle against Mobutu and Tshombe, the two key figures in the newly independent nation. For the first time, The African Dream collects Guevara's unabridged journals of the expedition. They are the record of the bitter failure of a political and ideological dream, and a telling complement to the subsequent rise of Kabila and his recent demise. Most of all, the diaries afford the reader a very personal insight into the thoughts and emotions of Che Guevara, the twentieth century's great revolutionary martyr. Views: 163
From the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without EndEven when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live.Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole.Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Told in Sebastian Barry's gorgeous, lyrical prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman's journey, of her determination to write her own future, and of the enduring human capacity for love.'Nobody writes like, nobody takes lyrical risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the... Views: 161
Erdrich has added five new ``chapters'' to what in 1984 was originally called a novel. Then, and especially now (given the easy add-ons, the ready slotting of the new material), this formal insistence seems hollow and a bit pointless. The stories--which is what they are: none comes with narrative inter-hooks other than the times and constellation of Indian characters they encompass--remain vivid, often haunting, as at ease with the spirit world as they are able to mourn yet not discount the awful worldly circumstances that surround. The new stories are not equal to the best of the old here, but also do no particular damage to the net effect. Views: 161
Creepy. Peculiar. Fairy. Goblin. Liar. Weirdo. Crank. Genius.
No one knows what to make of Juliet Slater, not even her mother. And clothes, boys, school, friends, the changing seasons and what other people think - none of these things seem to matter to Juliet. She spends hours in her room with incomprehensible mathematical text books, her mind voyaging in strange seas of thought, alone. Is she a genius? It might take the rest of her life to find out.
While Stella Gibbons was celebrated for her beloved bestseller Cold Comfort Farm, the manuscript for Pure Juliet lay unseen and forgotten until it was brought to light by her family in 2014, and is published here for the first time in Vintage Classics. A tale that travels from an eco-millionaire's British country idyll to an Arabian Nights-style fantasy of the Middle East, this is a treat for fans of this witty, curious and always surprising author. Views: 161
Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the internationally best-selling, award-winning novelist (Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault) and poet.
In* All We Saw, * Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death . . . give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers--so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive. Views: 161
Jake's father disappears while working on mysterious experiments with the obsessive, reclusive Oberon Venn. Jake is convinced Venn has murdered him. But the truth he finds at the snow-bound Wintercombe Abbey is far stranger ... The experiments concerned a black mirror, which is a portal to both the past and the future. Venn is not alone in wanting to use its powers. Strangers begin gathering in and around Venn's estate: Sarah - a runaway, who appears out of nowhere and is clearly not what she says, Maskelyne - who claims the mirror was stolen from him in some past century. There are others, a product of the mirror's power to twist time. And a tribe of elemental beings surround this isolated estate, fey, cold, untrustworthy, and filled with hate for humans. But of them all, Jake is hell-bent on using the mirror to get to the truth. Whatever the cost, he must learn what really happened to his father. Views: 161
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Views: 158
Possibility of Being is a selection of poems by one of the most moving and original writers of this century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1857-l926). The title (taken from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus, ''Ibis is the Creature") reflects the central concern of both Rilke's life and art: the achievement of "being," which this most spiritual yet least doctrinaire of modern German poets defined as "the experiencing of the completest possible inner intensity.''The eighty-four poems included in this small volume will serve as a sound and inviting introduction to Rilke's strategies in the pursuit of "being." And just as the unicorn in "This Is the Creature" has an eternal "possibility of being" but only becomes visible in the mirror held by a virgin, so can our own possibilities become manifest in the mirror held by the sensitive artist. The poems are chosen from The Book of Hours (1899-1903), The Book of Images (1902 and 1906), New Poems (1907 and 1908),... Views: 158
