Download or read book Inside the Red Mansion written by Oliver August and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008-06-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist meets fascinating characters while seeking out a fugitive gangster in the Chinese underworld. The notorious gangster Lai Changxing started out as an illiterate farmer, but in the tumult of China’s burgeoning economy, he seized the opportunity to remake himself as a bandit king. A newly minted billionaire of outsized personality and even greater appetites, he was a living legend who eventually ran afoul of authorities. The journalist Oliver August set out to find the fugitive Lai. On his quest he encountered a highly entertaining series of criminals and oddball entrepreneurs—and acquired unique insight into the paradoxes of modern China. Part crime caper, part travelogue, part trenchant cultural analysis, August’s page-turning account captures China’s giddy vibe and its darker vulnerabilities. Praise for Inside the Red Mansion “A year before “Inside the Red Mansion” was due to be published, a handler from the Chinese Foreign Ministry told August that he had enjoyed the book. You needn’t be a spy to agree.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times “A harrowing, super-detailed story of a China exploding with runaway growth yet still trapped in the past and ruled by the ethos of tufei—the classical Mandarin word for bandit . . . . This must-read, can’t-put-it down tale shows the China only hinted at on the evening news—a place of outsized egos, over-the-top commercial development and shadowy, tradition-bound authoritarian rule.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book The Red Chamber written by Pauline A. Chen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century China, the beautiful orphan Daiyu leaves her home in the provinces to seek shelter with her mother's family in Beijing. At Rongguo Mansion, she is drawn into a world of sumptuous feasts, silken robes, and sparkling jewels—as well as a complex web of secret rivalries and intrigues that threatens to trap her at every turn. When she falls in love with Baoyu, the family's brilliant, unpredictable heir, she finds the forces of the family and convention arrayed against her, and must risk everything to follow her heart. Based on the epic Dream of the Red Chamber—one of the most famous love stories in Chinese literature—this novel recasts a timeless tale for Western audiences to discover.

Download or read book The Red House written by Mark Haddon and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Mark Haddon, the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, comes a dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family life. Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister and her family to join his family for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Against the backdrop of a strange family gathering, Haddon skillfully weaves together the stories of eight very different people forced into close quarters. The Red House is a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, painting a portrait of contemporary family life that is at once bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.

Download or read book A Dream of Red Mansions written by Zhou Kexi and published by Shanghai Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exquisite edition of A Dream of Red Mansions features a rare set of Qing Dynasty paintings by Sun Wen. This collector's edition features a complete set of Sun Wen's 230 paintings in splendid color, printed on fine paper. Condensed text from the original novel accompanies each of the paintings and offers a wonderful insight and a brief summary of each of the 120 chapters. This rare edition will be a keepsake for many generations, and is perfect for gift-giving and presentations. The original paintings are presently preserved in Lvshun Museum, Dalian, China.

Download or read book A Dream of Red Mansions written by Xueqin Cao and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This celebrated Chinese classical novel is a masterpiece of realism written in the middle of the eighteen century during the Qianlong era of the Qing Dynasty. It takes as its background the decline of four great noble families and deals with the tragic love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu. the novel provides a comprehensive and faithful picture of the social reality of the time, exposes the corrupt and iniquitous nature of feudal society and wrathfully denounces the crimes of the feudal autocratic system.

Download or read book The Red House Mystery written by A. A. Milne and published by Memorable Classics Books. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne - is a whodunnit by A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was Milne's only mystery novel (except for Four Days Wonder). Plot introduction: The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound. Literary significance and criticism: The Red House Mystery was immediately popular; Alexander Woollcott called it "one of the three best mystery stories of all time", though Raymond Chandler, in his essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944), criticised Woollcott for that claim, referring to him as, "rather a fast man with a superlative". Chandler wrote of Milne's novel, "It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks [...] Yet, however light in texture the story may be, it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to be. If the situation is false, you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about." In his introduction to the 1926 UK edition, A. A. Milne said he had "a passion" for detective stories, having "all sorts of curious preferences" about them: though in real life the best detectives and criminals are professionals, Milne demanded that the detective be an unscientific amateur, accompanied by a likable Watson, rubbing shoulders with an amateur villain against whom dossiers and fingerprints are of no avail.

Download or read book Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dream of the Red Chamber written by Cao Xueqin and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 2120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dream of the Red Chamber is one of the four Chinese classics. The novel is semi-autobiographical and it gives an incredibly detailed insight into 18th-century life in China, particularly that of the aristocracy. The plot is grand in scale, peopled with a complex array of characters.

Download or read book The Seventh Mansion written by Maryse Meijer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for the 2020 Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of the Second-Half of 2020, one of Library Journal's 35 Standout Summer/Fall 2020 Debut Novels, and one of Shondaland's 11 New Books That Will Change How You Think About the Climate Crisis From the author of the story collections Heartbreaker and Rag comes a powerful and propulsive debut novel that examines activism, love, and purpose When fifteen-year-old Xie moves from California to a rural Southern town to live with his father he makes just two friends, Jo and Leni, both budding environmental and animal activists. One night, the three friends decide to free captive mink from a local farm. But when Xie is the only one caught his small world gets smaller: Kicked out of high school, he becomes increasingly connected with nature, spending his time in the birch woods behind his house, attending extremist activist meetings, and serving as a custodian for what others ignore, abuse, and discard. Exploring the woods alone one night, Xie discovers the relic of a Catholic saint—the martyred Pancratius—in a nearby church. Regal and dressed in ornate armor, the skeleton captivates him. After weeks of visits, Xie steals the skeleton, hides it in his attic bedroom, and develops a complex and passionate relationship with the bones and spirit of the saint, whom he calls P. As Xie’s relationship deepens with P., so too does his relationship with the woods—private property that will soon be overrun with loggers. As Xie enacts a plan to save his beloved woods, he must also find a way to balance his conflicting—and increasingly extreme—ideals of purity, sacrifice, and responsibility in order to live in this world. Maryse Meijer's The Seventh Mansion is a deeply moving and profoundly original debut novel—both an urgent literary call to arms and an unforgettable coming-of-age story about finding love and selfhood in the face of mass extinction and environmental destruction.

Download or read book Red Island House written by Andrea Lee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Packet War -- The Children -- Blondes -- Sirens -- Voice -- Noble Rot -- The Rivals -- Guess Who's Coming To Dinner -- Sister Shadow -- Elephants' Graveyard.

Download or read book House of Leaves written by Mark Z. Danielewski and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2000-03-07 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Download or read book The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Revised Edition written by Ruoxi Chen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation A classic of modern world literature, this collection of stories provides a vivid eyewitness view of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. For this edition, the text has been thoroughly revised and updated to Pinyin romanization. A new introduction reflects on the book's significance in the post-Tianamen era.

Download or read book The Mansion written by Ezekiel Boone and published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “classic haunted house tale meets Black Mirror” (Book Riot), a family moves into a home equipped with the world’s most intelligent, cutting-edge, and intuitive computer ever—but a buried secret leads to terrifying and catastrophic consequences. After two years of living on cheap beer and little else in a bitterly cold tiny cabin outside an abandoned, crumbling mansion, young programmers Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford have created something that could make them rich: a revolutionary computer they name Eagle Logic. But the hard work and escalating tension have not been kind to their once solid friendship—Shawn’s girlfriend Emily has left him for Billy, and a third partner has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. While Billy walks away with Emily, Shawn takes Eagle Logic, which he uses to build a multi-billion-dollar company that eventually outshines Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. Years later, Billy is a failure, beset by poverty and addiction, and Shawn is the most famous man in the world. Unable to let the past be forgotten, Shawn decides to resurrect his and Billy’s biggest failure: a next-generation computer program named Nellie that can control a house’s every function. He decides to set it up in the abandoned mansion they worked near all those years ago. But something about Nellie isn’t right—and the reconstruction of the mansion is plagued by accidental deaths. Shawn is forced to bring Billy back, despite their longstanding mutual hatred, to discover and destroy the evil that lurks in the source code. From the internationally bestselling author of the “apocalyptic extravaganza” (Publishers Weekly) The Hatching series, this white-knuckled thriller is perfect for fans of Stephen King and Iain Reid.

Download or read book The Dutch House written by Ann Patchett and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Finalist | New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

Download or read book A Dream of Red Mansion Complete and Unexpurgated written by Cao Xueqin and published by Disruptive Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic tale of the Ning and Rong families, Chinese aristocrats on the wrong side of the wheel of fate. Starring Baoyu, a character unique in literature, the young man who finds his own kind filthy, and seeks only the company of women. With characters high and low, corrupt and chaste, human and supernatural. Illustrated.

Download or read book Sometimes I Lie written by Alice Feeney and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

Download or read book A Companion to The Story of the Stone written by Kenneth Hsien-Yung Pai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature, beloved by readers ever since it was first published in 1791. The story revolves around the young scion of a mighty clan who, instead of studying for the civil service examinations, frolics with his maidservants and girl cousins. The narrative is cast within a mythic framework in which the protagonist’s rebellion against Confucian strictures is guided by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. This book is a straightforward guide to a complex classic that was written at a time when readers had plenty of leisure to sort through the hundreds of characters and half a dozen subplots that weave in and out of the book’s 120 chapters. Each chapter of the companion summarizes and comments on each chapter of the novel. The companion provides English-speaking readers—whether they are simply dipping into this novel or intent on a deep analysis of this masterpiece—with the cultural context to enjoy the story and understand its world. The book is keyed to David Hawkes and John Minford’s English translation of The Story of the Stone and includes an index that gives the original Chinese names and terms.