Download or read book Cleaning Nabokov s House written by Leslie Daniels and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her marriage fails and she loses her home and custody of her children, Barb Barrett moves into Vladimir Nabokov's old house, discovering what could be his last unpublished manuscript and embarking on a journey toward redemption.
Download or read book My Grandma Loves This written by Ethan Colling and published by Lennex. This book was released on 2013-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, we have hand-picked the most sophisticated, unanticipated, absorbing (if not at times crackpot!), original and musing book reviews of "Cleaning Nabokov's House." Don't say we didn't warn you: these reviews are known to shock with their unconventionality or intimacy. Some may be startled by their biting sincerity; others may be spellbound by their unbridled flights of fantasy. Don't buy this book if: 1. You don't have nerves of steel. 2. You expect to get pregnant in the next five minutes. 3. You've heard it all.
Download or read book The Home for Unwed Husbands written by Molly Giles and published by Leapfrog Press. This book was released on 2023-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At forty-four, Kay Sorensen has quit drinking, smoking, and overeating, and she has almost quit reading self-help books about quitting drinking, smoking and overeating. She has divorced her deadbeat husband, finished college, and landed a job she loves directing a small branch of the county library. But Kay still has one unconquered addiction: she just can't say no to someone who needs her. So when her architect father insists he needs her to move back home and care-take the empty house she grew up in, Kay is forced to return to the site of her bitterly unhappy childhood, trying her best to ignore the ghostly presence of her dead mother and make a home for her and her son. But she soon finds herself returning to the patterns of her childhood, where she spent years trying to please her thankless father and placate her invalid mother. When her dogmatic, born-again brother arrives, along with a slew of men from her past all seeking a home, Kay is suddenly playing housewife and host to five men with needs and demands she is struggling to meet while consistently ignoring her own. In order to find freedom and regain her selfhood, Kay must travel halfway across the world, finally face the chattering ghosts of her past, and break out of the mold that has been set for her by the men who have controlled her whole life.
Download or read book Rough Translations written by Molly Giles and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1993-10-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Molly Giles's engaging collection of stories was the winner not only of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction but also of the 1985 San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) Award for Fiction and the 1986 Boston Globe Fiction Award. Many of the stories in Rough Translations have been anthologized and adapted for radio performance. A master of the complexities of language, Molly Giles writes of the missed connections in life and of the rough translations that we employ when we try to convey, through words and gestures, what we are thinking and what we want from our loved ones.
Download or read book Pnin written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity. “Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator. Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.
Download or read book Big Bad written by Whitney Collins and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the thirteen stories of Whitney Collins’s Big Bad dwells a hunger that’s dark, deep, and hilarious. Part domestic horror, part flyover gothic, Big Bad serves up real-world predicaments in unremarkable places (motels, dormitories, tiki bars), all with Collins’s heart-wrenching flavor of magical realism. A young woman must give birth to future iterations of herself; a widower kills a horse en route to his grandson’s circumcision; a conflicted summer camper is haunted by a glass eye and motorcycle crash. Collins’s cast of characters must repeatedly choose to fight or flee the “big bad” that dwells within us all. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and boasting a 2020 Pushcart-winning story, Big Bad simultaneously entertains and disconcerts.
Download or read book Figures of Catastrophe written by Francis Mulhern and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new vision of the modern English novel The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre: the condition of culture novel. Reading across and against the grain of received patterns of literary association, tracing a line from Hardy and Forster, through Woolf, Waugh and Bowen, to Barstow, Fowles, Rendell, Naipaul, Amis, Kureishi and Smith, he elucidates the recurring topics and narrative logics of the genre, showing how culture emerges as a special ground of social conflict, above all between classes. The narrative evaluations of culture’s ends—the aspirations and the destinies of those whose lives are the subject of these novels—grow steadily darker over time, and the writing itself grows more introverted. A concluding discussion elicits the characteristics of the English condition of culture novel, in an international setting, and closes in, finally, on the central conundrum of the genre: its uncanny reprise, in its own plane, of the historical arc of the modern labour movement in Britain, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century through its post-war heyday to the seemingly inexorable decline of recent decades.
Download or read book New and Experimental Approaches to Writing Lives written by Jo Parnell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With recent advances in digital technology, a number of exciting and innovative approaches to writing lives have emerged, from graphic memoirs to blogs and other visual-verbal-virtual texts. This edited collection is a timely study of new approaches to writing lives, including literary docu-memoir, autobiographical cartography, social media life writing and autobiographical writing for children. Combining literary theory with insightful critical approaches, each essay offers a serious study of innovative forms of life writing, with a view to reflecting on best practice and offering the reader practical guidance on methods and techniques. Offering a range of practical exercises and an insight into cutting-edge literary methodologies, this is an inspiring and thought-provoking companion for students of literature and creative writing studying courses on life writing, memoir or creative non-fiction.
Download or read book The Bookshop written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by HarperCollins publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop.
Download or read book Nabokov s Cinematic Afterlife written by Ewa Mazierska and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers critical studies of films that adapted works by Vladimir Nabokov. One of the most screened twentieth century authors (with over ten books adapted for cinema), his works are full of quirky and forbidden romance, and his writing is renowned for its cinematic qualities (e.g., frames, stage directions, and descriptions suggesting specific camera positions and movements). Films discussed include Lolita (both Kubrick's 1962 and Lyne's 1997 versions), Richardson's Laughter in the Dark (1969), Skolimowski's King, Queen, Knave (1972), Fassbinder's Despair (1978), Foulon's Mademoiselle O (1994), Kuik's An Affair of Honor (1999), Gorris' The Luzhin Defence (2000), and Rohmer's The Triple Agent (2004). A final chapter discusses similarities between Nabokov and Jean-Luc Godard.
Download or read book The Bookstore written by Deborah Meyler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Featuring a Gallery Readers group guide"--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Vladimir written by Julia May Jonas and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR, Washington Post, Time, People, Vulture, Guardian, Vox, Kirkus Reviews, Newsweek, LitHub, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year * “Delightful…cathartic, devious, and terrifically entertaining.” —The New York Times * “Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny.” —People (Book of the Week) A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own... “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.” And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding. With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.
Download or read book In Her Absence written by Antonio Munoz Molina and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous." —Francine Prose in O, The Oprah Magazine During working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits. Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage. How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.
Download or read book Nabokov s Pale Fire written by Brian Boyd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pale Fire is regarded by many as Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece. The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever. In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery. This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Britannica Book of the Year 2012 written by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Britannica Book of the Year 2012 provides a valuable viewpoint of the people and events that shaped the year and serves as a great reference source for the latest news on the ever changing populations, governments, and economies throughout the world. It is an accurate and comprehensive reference that you will reach for again and again.
Download or read book The Pale King written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions -- questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society -- through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. "The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." --Laura Miller, Salon
Download or read book Former People written by Douglas Smith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries'-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called "former people" and "class enemies"—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia's most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.
