Download or read book Casanova in Bolzano written by Sandor Marai and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-11-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another rediscovered masterpiece from the Hungarian novelist whose Embers became an international bestseller—a sensuous, suspenseful, aphoristic novel about the world’s most notorious seducer and the encounter that changes him forever. In 1756 Giacomo Casanova escapes from a Venetian prison and resurfaces in the Italian village of Bolzano. Here he receives an unwelcome visitor: the aging but still fearsome Duke of Parma, who years before had defeated Casanova in a duel over a ravishing girl named Francesca and spared his life on condition that he never see her again. Now the duke has taken Francesca as his wife—and intercepted a love letter from her to his old rival. Rather than kill Casanova on the spot, he makes him a startling offer, one that is logical, perverse, and irresistible. Turning an historical episode into a dazzling fictional exploration of the clasp of desire and death, Casanova in Bolzano is further proof that Sándor Márai is one of the most distinctive voices of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Casanova in Bolzano written by Sandor Marai and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-11-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another rediscovered masterpiece from the Hungarian novelist whose Embers became an international bestseller—a sensuous, suspenseful, aphoristic novel about the world’s most notorious seducer and the encounter that changes him forever. In 1756 Giacomo Casanova escapes from a Venetian prison and resurfaces in the Italian village of Bolzano. Here he receives an unwelcome visitor: the aging but still fearsome Duke of Parma, who years before had defeated Casanova in a duel over a ravishing girl named Francesca and spared his life on condition that he never see her again. Now the duke has taken Francesca as his wife—and intercepted a love letter from her to his old rival. Rather than kill Casanova on the spot, he makes him a startling offer, one that is logical, perverse, and irresistible. Turning an historical episode into a dazzling fictional exploration of the clasp of desire and death, Casanova in Bolzano is further proof that Sándor Márai is one of the most distinctive voices of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Conversations in Bolzano written by Sándor Márai and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is midnight, October 31st 1758 and Giacomo Casanova has escaped from a Venetian prison after sixteen months consigned to darkness and the underworld. Shaking off the enforced solitude, Casanova makes his way to Bolzano - the small village where he was dealt a cruel hand. A place full of memories, Bolzano was the scene of a moonlit duel fought with the Duke of Parma when Casanova and he were both in pursuit of the beguiling Francesca. The quest was lost and Casanova was left with three scars above his heart and one option: he could live, but only on the condition he never saw Francesca again. But now Casanova is back having secured a loan from an old friend, and is determined to win this time whilst the Duke has an offer Casanova simply cannot refuse and that just might spell his undoing.
Download or read book The Melancholy of Resistance written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize
Download or read book Embers written by Christopher Hampton and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remote 18th-century Hungarian castle is the setting for a dramatic meeting. Forty-one years after a tragic event two former friends must confront each other in a devastating bid to lay the past to rest. Betrayal, love, truth and friendship all come to the fore in this unforgettable play based on Sándor Márai's bestselling novel. Embers premiered at the Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End in February 2006.
Download or read book Conversations in Bolzano written by Sándor Márai and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is midnight, October 31st 1758 and Giacomo Casanova has escaped from a Venetian prison after sixteen months consigned to darkness and the underworld. Shaking off the enforced solitude, Casanova makes his way to Bolzano - the small village where he was dealt a cruel hand. A place full of memories, Bolzano was the scene of a moonlit duel fought with the Duke of Parma when Casanova and he were both in pursuit of the beguiling Francesca. The quest was lost and Casanova was left with three scars above his heart and one option: he could live, but only on the condition he never saw Francesca again. But now Casanova is back having secured a loan from an old friend, and is determined to win this time whilst the Duke has an offer Casanova simply cannot refuse and that just might spell his undoing.
Download or read book Portraits of a Marriage written by Sandor Marai and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rediscovered masterwork from famed Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage tracks the lifelong entanglement of a man and two women haunted by class differences and misdirected longings. Peter and Ilonka are a wealthy couple whose outwardly perfect marriage is undone by secrets. The insecure Ilonka believes she can never be elegant and refined enough for her husband, while Peter has long been tormented by his forbidden love for Judit, a peasant and servant in his childhood home. What Judit longs for most, however, is freedom from the constraints of the society that has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss. Set against the backdrop of Hungary between the wars, in a world on the verge of dramatic change, this exquisite novel offers further posthumous evidence of Marai’s brilliance. Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
Download or read book Last Times written by Victor Serge and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France. Last Times, Victor Serge’s epic novel of the fall of France, is based—like much of his fiction—on firsthand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris in June 1940 and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941. Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience. The book begins in a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government, the suburbs already noisy with gunfire. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists join the flood of refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas, and finally make their way to wartime Marseille. Last Times offers a vivid eyewitness account of the city’s criminal underground and no less criminal Vichy authorities, of collaborators and of the growing resistance, of crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last—hoped-for—ship to the New World.
Download or read book Esther s Inheritance written by Sándor Márai and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two decades after leaving her, the great love of Esther’s life sends her a telegram. Tomorrow, he tells her, he is coming back. Esther and her cousin Nunu are thrown into confusion: until now their existence has been tranquil, self-governing, and they know that the mercurial Lajos will change all of that. Esther has not forgotten that her dazzling lover is a fantasist and a liar, nor that he caused her unimaginable hurt. But she also remembers how he made her feel, that he woke a part of her that has since been sleeping for twenty years. Her friends come to her aid, a lavish meal is prepared, a car arrives at the house, and so begins an afternoon of high drama. Bringing two lives to converge on a single day in late summer, each one charged with emotion and acts that cannot be undone, this taut, evocative novel presents a remarkable heroine in Esther as she recounts, with dignity and wry humour, the final flare of her love. 'Márai delivers profound meditations on the nature of friendship, domestic bliss and hopeless passion' Paul Bailey
Download or read book Gunnar s Daughter written by Sigrid Undset and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998-04-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Kristin Lavransdatter A Penguin Classic More than a decade before writing Kristin Lavransdatter, the trilogy about fourteenth-century Norway that won her the Nobel Prize, Sigrid Undset published Gunnar’s Daughter, a brief, swiftly moving tale about a more violent period of her country’s history, the Saga Age. Set in Norway and Iceland at the beginning of the eleventh century, Gunnar's Daughter is the story of the beautiful, spoiled Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, who is raped by the man she had wanted to love. A woman of courage and intelligence, Vigdis is toughened by adversity. Alone she raises the child conceived in violence, repeatedly defending her autonomy in a world governed by men. Alone she rebuilds her life and restores her family's honor—until an unremitting social code propels her to take the action that again destroys her happiness. First published in 1909, Gunnar's Daughter was in part a response to the rise of nationalism and Norway's search for a national identity in its Viking past. But unlike most of the Viking-inspired art of its period, Gunnar's Daughter is not a historical romance. It is a skillful conversation between two historical moments about questions as troublesome in Undset's own time—and in ours—as they were in the Saga Age: rape and revenge, civil and domestic violence, troubled marriages, and children made victims of their parents' problems.
Download or read book The Flanders Road written by Claude Simon and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII. On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper. This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon’s own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death. Georges reviews the circumstances and sense—or senselessness—of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain’s widow, Corinne. As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne’s prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain’s orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges’s childhood home; Georges’s learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism. The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.
Download or read book The Rebels written by Sandor Marai and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-03-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An early novel from the great rediscovered Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, The Rebels is a haunting story of a group of alienated boys on the cusp of adult life—and possibly death—during World War I. It is the summer of 1918, and four boys approaching graduation are living in a ghost town bereft of fathers, uncles, and older brothers, who are off fighting at the front. The boys know they will very soon be sent to join their elders, and in their final weeks of freedom they begin acting out their frustrations and fears in a series of subversive games and petty thefts. But when they attract the attention of a stranger in town—an actor with a traveling theater company—their games, and their lives, begin to move in a direction they could not have predicted and cannot control, and one that reveals them to be strangers to one another. Resisting and defying adulthood, they find themselves still subject to its baffling power even in their attempted rebellion.
Download or read book Goodness and the Literary Imagination written by Toni Morrison and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.
Download or read book The Clerkenwell Tales written by Peter Ackroyd and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2005-11-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the foremost contemporary chronicler of London’s history, a suspenseful novel that ingeniously draws on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to recreate the city’s 14th century religious and political intrigues. London, 1399. Sister Clarice, a nun born below Clerkenwell convent, is predicting the death of King Richard II and the demise of the Church. Her visions can be dismissed as madness, until she accurately foretells a series of terrorist explosions. What is the role of the apocalyptic Predestined Men? And the clandestine Dominus? And what powers, ultimately, will prevail?In Peter Ackroyd’s deft and suprising narrative, The Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath and other characters from Canterbury Tales pursue these mysteries through a pungently vivid medieval London.
Download or read book Skylark written by Dezso Kosztolanyi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kosztolanyi's Skylark is a portrait of provincial life in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the turn of the century. Set in the autumn of 1899, it focuses on one extraordinary week in the otherwise uneventful lives of an elderly Hungarian couple and their ugly spinster daughter, Skylark.
Download or read book Commedia dell Arte in Context written by Christopher B. Balme and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The commedia dell'arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell'arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell'arte.
Download or read book A Practical Approach to High Performance Computing written by Sergei Kurgalin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book discusses the fundamentals of high-performance computing. The authors combine visualization, comprehensibility, and strictness in their material presentation, and thus influence the reader towards practical application and learning how to solve real computing problems. They address both key approaches to programming modern computing systems: multithreading-based parallelizing in shared memory systems, and applying message-passing technologies in distributed systems. The book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, and for researchers and practitioners engaged with high-performance computing systems. Each chapter begins with a theoretical part, where the relevant terminology is introduced along with the basic theoretical results and methods of parallel programming, and concludes with a list of test questions and problems of varying difficulty. The authors include many solutions and hints, and often sample code.
