Download or read book One Fat Englishman written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.
Download or read book One Fat Englishman written by Kingsley Amis and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book One Fat Englishman written by Kingsley Amis and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Alteration written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick) In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
Download or read book The Old Devils written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
Download or read book Lucky Jim written by Kingsley Amis and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Girl 20 written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonard Bernstein, is a pillar of the establishment whohas fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and the electric guitar. And since vain Sir Vandervane is a great success, he is also free to pursue his greatest failing: a taste for younger and younger women. Highborn hippie Sylvia (not, in fact, twenty) is his latest infatuation and a threat to his whole family, from his drama-queen wife, Kitty, to Penny, his long-suffering daughter. All this is recounted by Douglas Yandell, a music critic with his own love problems, who finds that he too has a part in this story of botched artistry, bumbling celebrity, and scheming family, in a time that for all its high-minded talk is as low and dishonest as any other.
Download or read book Cheers America written by Justin Webb and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An editor at BBC-TV takes a witty and honest look at the “special” relationship between the US and the UK. IMAGINE INVITING A BRIT TO A BARBECUE - THAT’S THIS BOOK. Justin Webb was the BBC’s man in America. He covered politics and interviewed presidents, but more importantly he reported, as Alistair Cooke once did, on the rich tapestry of American life. This is his toast to a country he called home for the best part of a decade. Webb’s America is a place of possibility and promise. He is scornful of those who think the nation is in decline, and posits an exciting new diplomatic era in which America diversifies its international relationships. Cheers, America will make you smile. Its wry and heartfelt observations provide a redeeming vision of our country at a time when it is redefining its identity.
Download or read book Take a Girl Like You written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer squalor—emotional, material, sexual, you name it—of modern life. It also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis’s rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a girl from the (English) north country come south to teach school in a small smug town where she hopes to find love and fortune. Jenny is a beauty and men and women are crazy about her, most of all handsome Patrick Standish, who Jenny also likes. But Jenny and Patrick live in a world where it’s becoming ridiculously difficult—disastrously difficult—to sort out the claims of sex and the claims of love.
Download or read book Passage of Arms written by Eric Ambler and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2004-07-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic thriller, two American tourists find more adventure than they bargained for when they get involved with Chinese gun smugglers and Muslim revolutionaries, learning first hand about the intrigue of the post-colonial world. Greg and Dorothy Nilsen had wanted to go on an adventurous trip, see some of the more out-of-the-way places. But the cruise they were on was turning out to be a bore. So when the gracious Mr. Tan requests that Greg take a side trip to Singapore to resolve a bureaucratic detail involving a consignment of small arms, Greg is surprisingly receptive. All he has to do is sign some papers, he’s told, and he’ll be paid a handsome fee. And everything does go smoothly, until it comes to getting a check co-signed by the rebel leader…
Download or read book Awake written by Harald Voetmann and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies. In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.
Download or read book One Fat Englishman written by Stevan Dedijer and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Unfortunate Englishman written by John Lawton and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A British agent is drawn to Berlin’s bridge of spies in this “superlative Cold War espionage story” from the author of the acclaimed Inspector Troy Novels (The Seattle Times). It’s the summer of 1961, and the inscrutable Khrushchev is developing plans for something that could change the course of the Cold War. As he and Kennedy gamble with the fate of millions of lives, Cockney East-Ender-turned-spy Joe Wilderness is thrust into the conflict. Enlisted by MI6 to set up shop in Berlin, Wilderness returns to the city where he spent his postwar years, where a former paramour is under threat, and where the dividing line between the West and the Soviets will soon be crossed. As the Russians start building the wall, two agents find themselves trapped on opposing sides: an unfortunate Englishman in the Lubyanka in Moscow, and a KGB operative in London’s Wormwood Scrubs. Now, Wilderness has a new mission: Swap the prisoners on Berlin’s bridge of spies. But, as a former black marketer, Wilderness is also working a personal angle—just to make it interesting, just to make it profitable, just to make it a little more dangerous. What can possibly go wrong? Named by the Daily Telegraph as one of “50 Crime Writers to Read before You Die,” John Lawton is “quite possibly the best historical novelist we have” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “[The Joe Wilderness novels] are meticulously researched, tautly plotted, historical thrillers in the mold of . . . Alan Furst, Phillip Kerr, Eric Ambler, David Downing and Joseph Kanon.” —The Wall Street Journal “Rich, inventive, surprising, informed, bawdy, cynical, heartbreaking and hilarious. However much you know about postwar Berlin, Lawton will take you deeper into its people, conflicts and courage. . . . Spy fiction at its best.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book One Fat Englishman written by Robert Markham and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Death of an Englishman written by Magdalen Nabb and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is just before Christmas and the marshal wants to go South to spend the holiday with his wife and family, but first he must recover from the flu (which has left the Florentine caribinieri short-handed) and also solve a murder. A seemingly respectable retired Englishman, living in a flat on the Via Maggio near the Santa Trinita bridge, was shot in the back during the night. He was well-connected and Scotland Yard has despatched two officers to "assist" the Italians in solving the crime. But it is the marshal, a quiet observer, not an intellectual, who manages to figure out what happened, and why.
Download or read book Anything Considered written by Peter Mayle and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-04-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Mayle’s delicious new fictional confection is set, bien entendu, in Provence, where a suave if slightly threadbare English expat named Bennett is reaching the end of his credit. In desperation he places an ad in The International Herald Tribune: “Unattached Englishman … seeks interesting and unusual work. Anything considered except marriage.” In no time at all Bennett is being paid handsomely to impersonate the mysterious and very wealthy Julian Poe. This entails occupying Poe’s palatial flat in Monte Carlo, whizzing around in his Mercedes, and charging meals at the Côte d'Azur’s better restaurants. Unfortunately, there are certain complications … involving Sicilian and Corsican Mafiosi, the loveliest woman ever to drive a tank, and a formula for domesticating the notoriously unpredictable black truffle. As orchestrated by Mayle, these elements make Anything Considered a novel of nail-biting suspense and champagne-dry wit, whose evocations of the good life are so convincing that you’ll come away with a suntan.
Download or read book World Without Fish written by Mark Kurlansky and published by Workman Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A KID’S GUIDE TO THE OCEAN "Can you imagine a world without fish? It's not as crazy as it sounds. But if we keep doing things the way we've been doing things, fish could become extinct within fifty years. So let's change the way we do things!" World Without Fish is the uniquely illustrated narrative nonfiction account—for kids—of what is happening to the world’s oceans and what they can do about it. Written by Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, Salt, The Big Oyster, and many other books, World Without Fish has been praised as “urgent” (Publishers Weekly) and “a wonderfully fast-paced and engaging primer on the key questions surrounding fish and the sea” (Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish). It has also been included in the New York State Expeditionary Learning English Language Arts Curriculum. Written by a master storyteller, World Without Fish connects all the dots—biology, economics, evolution, politics, climate, history, culture, food, and nutrition—in a way that kids can really understand. It describes how the fish we most commonly eat, including tuna, salmon, cod, swordfish—even anchovies— could disappear within fifty years, and the domino effect it would have: the oceans teeming with jellyfish and turning pinkish orange from algal blooms, the seabirds disappearing, then reptiles, then mammals. It describes the back-and-forth dynamic of fishermen, who are the original environmentalists, and scientists, who not that long ago considered fish an endless resource. It explains why fish farming is not the answer—and why sustainable fishing is, and how to help return the oceans to their natural ecological balance. Interwoven with the book is a twelve-page graphic novel. Each beautifully illustrated chapter opener links to the next to form a larger fictional story that perfectly complements the text.
