Download or read book The Line of Beauty written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-17 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Man Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review International Bestseller From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Download or read book The Stranger s Child written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families’ lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them. Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism—The Stranger’s Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
Download or read book The Folding Star written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-10-03 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obsessed with one of his pupils, teacher Edward Manners becomes embroiled in affairs with two other men, but only after discovering the life and work of Symbolist painter Edgard Orst does he come to understand the implications of obsession. Reprint.
Download or read book The Spell written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The "spell" of the title is both the power of drugs, at the heart of the book, and the "sex-magic" that variously possesses - but then deserts - each of its main characters." -- The Guardian Discover this ‘sparkling celebration of sexual intrigue’ (Telegraph, London) from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty. The Spell is a comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin, an architect in his late forties, who is trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his younger lover, Justin; Robin's 22 year old son Danny, a volatile beauty who lives for clubbing and casual sex; and the shy Alex, who is Justin's ex-boyfriend. As each in turn falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life. At once lyrical, sceptical and romantic, The Spell confirms Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain's most important novelists.
Download or read book The Blue Flower written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1997 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie, newly introduced by Candia McWilliam. The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his fathers permission to announce his engagement to his hearts desire: twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?
Download or read book The Swimming Pool Library written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.
Download or read book The Complete Fiction written by Francis Wyndham and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his more than eighty years, Francis Wyndham has published very little—one novella and two collections of stories—but his is one of the most individual and compelling bodies of work by a contemporary English writer. As Alan Hollinghurst has said, Wyndham’s fiction stands in the tradition of social comedy that goes back through Henry James to Jane Austen, with this difference: Wyndham writes about the lives of privileged and even titled people, but he is drawn to outcasts and odd ducks, adolescents, lonely women, addicts, eccentrics, and idlers. The earliest stories here, gathered under the title Out of the War, are brilliant vignettes of deprivation and desire written during World War II. The later Mrs Henderson and Other Stories, by contrast, offers scrupulously observed tragicomic pictures of the vagaries of upper-class English family life. Finally, in the Whitbread Prize–winning short novel The Other Garden, a shy teenage boy living in the country strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kay, the thirty-something daughter of neighbors, sister to a famous actor, and black sheep of her family. Kay, with her whims and crazes and boyfriends, is unable to hold her own against her family’s disapproval, and the narrator watches with helpless fascination as her small but very real tragedy is played out against the background of the Second World War.
Download or read book Loving written by Henry Green and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drama unfolds between the servants and masters of an aristocratic Irish household in this “classic upstairs-downstairs story” set during World War II—for fans of Downton Abbey (Time) The war has led to a scarcity of experienced staff at the vast hereditary house of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. When Eldon the butler dies, Raunce—the head footman—is assigned his job. The other servants are taken aback by this irregular promotion, but lovely young Edith, a recent hire, is quite attracted to the older Raunce and a flirtation begins. And it is Edith who discovers Mrs. Tennant’s daughter-in-law, whose husband is fighting at the front, in bed with a neighbor one morning, scandalizing the whole household. When the Tennants depart for England, Raunce is left in charge of the house and struggles to control its disputatious inhabitants as well as to secure the love of Edith, especially after a precious family jewel disappears. In Loving, Henry Green explores the deeply precarious nature of ordinary life against the background of the larger world at war.
Download or read book Unmaking Love written by Ashley T. Shelden and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love—it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference. Comparing contemporary and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations, Unmaking Love locates queerness in the novelistic strategies of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru. In their work, "queer love" becomes more than shorthand for sexual identity. It comes to embody thwarted expectations, disarticulated organization, and unnerving multiplicity. In queer love, social forms are deformed, affective bonds do not bind, and social structures threaten to come undone. Unmaking Love draws on psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love's role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity.
Download or read book Alan Hollinghurst written by Michele Mendelssohn and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of Britain's most important contemporary novelist. It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures and representations, to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. The book reveals the fascinating intellectual and affective matter that lies beneath the polished control and dazzling style of Hollinghurst's work. Alongside contributions by distinguished British and American critics, the book includes an unpublished interview with Hollinghurst. Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the influence uses a creative range of critical approaches to provide the most authoritative and innovative account available of Hollinghurst's works.
Download or read book Put Out More Flags written by Evelyn Waugh and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upper-class scoundrel Basil Seal, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, creates havoc wherever he goes, much to the despair of the three women in his life-his sister, his mother, and his mistress. When Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for more action and adventure. So Basil follows the call to arms and sets forth to enjoy his finest hour-as a war hero. Basil's instincts for self-preservation come to the fore as he insinuates himself into the Ministry of Information and a little-known section of Military Security. With Europe frozen in the "phoney war," when will Basil's big chance to fight finally arrive?
Download or read book The Country House Revisited written by Tereza Topolovská and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides an insight into English country house fiction by twentieth and twenty-first century authors, with a focus on the works of E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. The country house is explored within the wider social and cultural contexts of the period, including contemporary architectural development. The variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings which can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture and poetics of space, the country house, given its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities, accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.
Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.
Download or read book Confidential Chats with Boys written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mortal Heart written by Robin LaFevers and published by Clarion Books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powerful third book in Robin LaFever's critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling His Fair Assassins series perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Kristin Cashore, and Victoria Aveyard leaves Annith with a desperate decision to make that not only affects the future of Brittany, but the destiny of the god of Death Himself. In the powerful third book in Robin LaFever's critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling His Fair Assassins series, tensions between Brittany and Frace continue to rise as Annith watches her gifted sisters at the convent come and go, carrying out their dark dealings in the name of St. Mortain, patiently awaiting her own turn to serve Death. But her worst fears are realized when she discovers she is being groomed by the abbess as a Seeress, to be forever sequestered in the rock and stone womb of the convent. Feeling sorely betrayed, Annith decides to strike out on her own. She has spent her whole life training to be an assassin. Just because the convent has changed its mind, doesn't mean she has. Combining romance, action, and political intrigue, Mortal Heart delivers a breathtaking conclusion to the war between Brittany and France...for now.
Download or read book Hollinghurst Camp and Closet written by Serkan Ertin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume analyses the terms “camp” and “the closet” in Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction, since all four of his novels – The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1993), The Spell (1998), and The Line of Beauty (2004) – investigate the gay male experience throughout the late-twentieth century. The book analyses these terms in Hollinghurst’s work in order to find out whether the author writes from the margin or from the centre to recreate the origin. Gay subjectivities are of great concern to this study, though it is not a product of identity politics, given the latter’s propensity to re-establish the binary structure of the Western thought. As such, this book explores how Hollinghurst, by camping and closeting the gay male, re-produces homosexuality as a distinct identity with a subculture of its own.
Download or read book A Landing on the Sun written by Michael Frayn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, "an unconditional triumph" (The Washington Post Book World) For fifteen years, ever since the taciturn civil servant Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, there have been rumors. So Brian Jessel, a young member of the Cabinet Office, is diverted from his routine work and asked to prepare an internal report. Slowly, from the archives in the Cabinet Office Registry, Jessel begins to reconstruct Summerchild's last months. It begins to emerge that, at a time when America had just put men on the moon, the British were involved in an even bolder project, and that Summerchild was investigating a phenomenon as common as sunlight, but as powerful and dangerous as any of the forces that modern science has known. The secret world into which Brian Jessel stumbles turns out to be even more extraordinary than his department had feared.
