Download or read book After the Banquet written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-02-22 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of a marriage in which lofty principles clash fatally with appetite and ambition—featuring a middle-aged restaurant owner who is "the biggest and the most profound thing Mishima has done so far in an already distinguished career" (The New Yorker). “One of the outstanding writers of the world." —The New York Times For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. But when the middle-aged entrepreneur falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her business in order to become his wife. In time, however, Kazu decides to resurrect her husband's political career. She embarks on a series of compromises and evasions that will force her to choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality.
Download or read book The Banquet Bug written by Geling Yan and published by Hyperion. This book was released on 2006-07-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When factory worker Dan Dong accidentally discovers how easy it is to infiltrate state- and corporate-sponsored banquets by posing as a journalist, he quickly becomes addicted to the insane luxury of these meals. For the first time, he tastes crab-claw tips, exotic fungi, and a dish made from thousands of pigeon tongues arranged in the shape of a chrysanthemum. But when Dan's disguise enables him to become privy to a deep-rooted scandal, his conscience compels him to cross the line between subterfuge and reality by actually writing an expose. With the help of the witty, jaded reporter Happy Gao, Dan embarks on a journey that will take him from the highest rungs of society to its most sordid depths." "Throughout the book, food - from the spicy, oily fare Dan orders for a high-class prostitute at a restaurant called Pink Chamber, to the humble noodle dishes prepared by his long-suffering wife, Little Plum - is present on almost every page, described so vividly that you can almost smell and taste it. But by the final page of The Banquet Bug, it has become clear that the perils of consumption run parallel to its pleasures."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Last Banquet written by Jonathan Grimwood and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, the delectable decadence of Versailles, and the French Revolution, The Last Banquet is an intimate epic that tells the story of one man’s quest to know the world through its many and marvelous flavors. Jean-Marie d’Aumout will try anything once, with consequences that are at times mouthwatering and at others fascinatingly macabre (Three Snake Bouillabaisse anyone? Or perhaps some pickled Wolf's Heart?). When he is not obsessively searching for a new taste d’Aumout is a fast friend, a loving husband, a doting father, and an imaginative lover. He befriends Ben Franklin, corresponds with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, becomes a favorite at Versailles, thwarts a peasant uprising, improves upon traditional French methods of contraception, plays an instrumental role in the Corsican War of Independence, and constructs France’s finest menagerie. But d’Aumout’s every adventurous turn is decided by his at times dark obsession to know all the world’s flavors before that world changes irreversibly. As gripping as Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, as gloriously ambitious as Daniel Kehlman’s Measuring the World, and as prize-worthy as Andrew Miller’s Pure, The Last Banquet is a hugely appealing novel about food and flavor, about the Age of Reason and the ages of man, and our obsessions and about how, if we manage to survive them, they can bequeath us wisdom and consolation in old age.
Download or read book After the Banquet written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book After Prayer written by Malcolm Guite and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert’s exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as ‘the church's banquet’, ‘reversed thunder’, ‘the Milky Way’, ‘the bird of paradise’ and ‘something understood’. In conversation with each of these, Malcolm’s sonnets offer profound insights into the nature of communion with God in all circumstances and conditions. Recognising that all poetry is a pursuit of prayer, After Prayer also includes forty five more widely ranging new poems, including a sonnet sequence on the seven heavens.
Download or read book After the Banquet written by Yukio Mishima and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dark Banquet written by Bill Schutt and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A witty, scientifically accurate, and often intensely creepy exploration of sanguivorous creatures.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Bill Schutt turns whatever fear and disgust you may feel towards nature’s vampires into a healthy respect for evolution’s power to fill every conceivable niche.”—Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex and Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life For centuries, blood feeders have inhabited our nightmares and horror stories, as well as the shadowy realms of scientific knowledge. In Dark Banquet, zoologist Bill Schutt takes us on a fascinating voyage into the world of some of nature’s strangest creatures—the sanguivores. Using a sharp eye and mordant wit, Schutt makes a remarkably persuasive case that blood feeders, from bats to bedbugs, are as deserving of our curiosity as warmer and fuzzier species are—and that many of them are even worthy of conservation. Examining the substance that sustains nature’s vampires, Schutt reveals just how little we actually knew about blood until well into the twentieth century. We revisit George Washington on his deathbed to learn how ideas about blood and the supposedly therapeutic value of bloodletting, first devised by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, survived into relatively modern times. Dark Banquet details our dangerous and sometimes deadly encounters with ticks, chiggers, and mites (the latter implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder—currently devastating honey bees worldwide). Then there are the truly weird—vampire finches. And if you thought piranha were scary, some people believe that the candiru (or willy fish) is the best reason to avoid swimming in the Amazon. Enlightening and alarming, Dark Banquet peers into a part of the natural world to which we are, through our blood, inextricably linked.
Download or read book Banquet for the Damned written by Adam Nevill and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few believed Professor Coldwell could communicate with spirits. But in Scotland's oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. Now, the young are being haunted by night terrors and those who are visited disappear. This is certainly not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and burned-out explorer have of surviving their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it? A chilling occult thriller from award-winning author Adam Nevill, Banquet for the Damned is both a homage to the great age of British ghost stories and a pacey modern tale of Devil worship and witchcraft.
Download or read book The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories written by Liz Williams and published by Night Shade. This book was released on 2005-08-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In such novels as The Poison Master, Empire of Bones, and Nine Layers of Sky, Liz Williams sparked readers' imaginations by creating worlds at once strange and familiar. Now this bold new writer brings her best short fiction together in one stunning collection. The stories featured in The Banquet of the Lords of Night have appeared in Asimov's, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and The Third Alternative, among others. The stories within the covers of The Banquet of the Lords of Night are varied in style and subject matter, but they are all powerfully written. From the breathtaking title story, "Banquet of the Lords of Night" about an Earth plunged into a world of darkness where light is against the law to the stunning "The Man from the Ministry" in which we learn the how far a mother will go where her family is concerned; Williams displays an astonishing breadth and variety of writing styles. Williams is equally at home writing galaxy-spanning science fiction like "Quantum Anthropology" as she is weaving a tale like "Adventures in the Ghost Trade" which incorporates demons, magic, the afterlife, and private detectives. "Williams's unique cross-genre voice is a reinvigorating one for SF, fantasy and horror." Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Download or read book WHORES FOR GLORIA written by William T. Vollmann and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his first three works of fiction—the novels You Bright and Risen Angels and The Ice-Shirt, and the collection The Rainbow Stories—William T. Vollmann announced himself as a writer of rare and ferocious talent, with critics comparing him to William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and T.C. Boyle. His new novel is the story of Jimmy, who has been deserted by his lover, a prostitute by the name of Gloria. In the despair of his loneliness, and his drunken grief, he reassembles Gloria’s presence out of whatever he can buy from the hookers on the street—the fragments of their lives and dreams, and locks of hair they are willing to share for a price. In his search for these snatches of intimacy he meets the hustlers, drunks, and prostitutes of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district: Candy, who beats her customers when they ask for it but refuses to let them call her a bitch; Snake, who pimps his wife; Nicole, whose job it is to give men AIDS; Jack, who shoots his woman’s earnings into his arm but still likes Chopin even though he doesn’t have a record player; and Gloria, who may or may not be a figment of Jimmy’s imagination. Vollmann writes with explosive power of the inner city, unflinching in the way he confronts the solitude of the homeless and unloved, the insulted and the injured of skid-row America. His exhilarating, high-voltage style and lyric language touch the heart and retrieve a jubilant integrity from the harsh struggles of his characters. Here is a world of harrowing truth, beautifully expressed by a writer of prodigious gifts.
Download or read book Spring Snow written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A classic of Japanese literature" (Chicago Sun-Times) and the first novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, set in 1912 Tokyo, featuring an aspiring lawyer who believes he has met the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Shigekuni Honda, an aspiring lawyer and his childhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae, are the sons of two such families. As they come of age amidst the growing tensions between old and new, Kiyoaki is plagued by his simultaneous love for and loathing of the spirited young woman Ayakura Satoko. But Kiyoaki’s true feelings only become apparent when her sudden engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion—and leads to a love affair both doomed and inevitable.
Download or read book A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts written by Ying Chang Compestine and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Chinese tradition, those who die hungry or unjustly come back to haunt the living. Some are appeased with food. But not all ghosts are successfully mollified. In this chilling collection of stories,Ying Chang Compestine takes readers on a journey through time and across different parts of China. From the building of the GreatWall in 200 BCE to themodern day of iPods, hungry ghosts continue to torment those who wronged them. At once a window into the history and culture of China and an ode to Chinese cuisine, this assortment of frightening tales—complete with historical notes and delectable recipes—will both scare and satiate!
Download or read book Eros at the Banquet written by Louise Pratt and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After studying ancient Greek for a year, students often become discouraged when presented with unabridged classical texts that offer only minimal supportive apparatus. In welcome contrast, this intermediate-level textbook reinforces the first-year lessons and enables students to read Plato's Symposium, one of the most engaging works in Attic Greek, the dialect taught in most first-year courses. To meet the needs of students who are reading extended passages of challenging Greek for the first time, Louise Pratt, a classical scholar with more than twenty years' teaching experience, has lightly condensed the early readings, supplementing them with review exercises and new vocabulary. She includes the remaining portion of the dialogue in its entirety to give students the experience of reading Plato's imaginative dialogue in all its richness. All readings are glossed, with explanatory notes appearing on the same page as the relevant texts. Enlivened by twenty-five illustrations, Eros at the Banquet also features an introduction explaining the Symposium's historical and philosophical significance, a comprehensive glossary, and an up-to-date bibliography. Instructors may also supplement this volume with Pratt's The Essentials of Greek Grammar: A Reference for Intermediate Readers of Attic Greek, which includes many examples from the Symposium.
Download or read book A Guest at the Shooters Banquet written by Rita Gabis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In prose as beautiful as it is powerful, Rita Gabis follows the trail of her grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis; a trail riddled with secrets, slaughter, mystery, and discovery. Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in. Five years ago, Gabis discovered an unthinkable dimension to her family story: from 1941 to 1943, her grandfather had been Chief of Security Police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942, the local Polish population was also hunted down. Gabis felt compelled to find out the complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done. Built around dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship, and mesmerizing in its lyricism, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and family memoir like no other, documenting “the holocaust by bullets” in a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her grandfather's birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.
Download or read book Life for Sale written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.
Download or read book After the Banquet written by Yukio Mishima and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Life is a Banquet written by Rosalind Russell, Chris Chase and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
