Download or read book Public Enemies written by Bernard-Henri Lévy and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The international publishing sensation is now available in the United States—two brilliant, controversial authors confront each other and their enemies in an unforgettable exchange of letters. In one corner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, creator of the classic Barbarism with a Human Face, dismissed by the media as a wealthy, self-promoting, arrogant do-gooder. In the other, Michel Houellebecq, bestselling author of The Elementary Particles, widely derided as a sex-obsessed racist and misogynist. What began as a secret correspondence between bitter enemies evolved into a remarkable joint personal meditation by France’s premier literary and political live wires. An instant international bestseller, Public Enemies has now been translated into English for all lovers of superb insights, scandalous opinions, and iconoclastic ideas. In wicked, wide-ranging, and freewheeling letters, the two self-described “whipping boys” debate whether they crave disgrace or secretly have an insane desire to please. Lévy extols heroism in the face of tyranny; Houellebecq sees himself as one who would “fight little and badly.” Lévy says “life does not ‘live’” unless he can write; Houellebecq bemoans work as leaving him in such “a state of nervous exhaustion that it takes several bottles of alcohol to get out.” There are also touching and intimate exchanges on the existence of God and about their own families. Dazzling, delightful, and provocative, Public Enemies is a death match between literary lions, remarkable men who find common ground, confident that, in the end (as Lévy puts it), “it is we who will come out on top.”
Download or read book The Possibility of an Island written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus–a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished. Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, The Possibility of an Island is at once an indictment, an elegy, and a celebration of everything we have and are at risk of losing. It is a masterpiece from one of the world’s most innovative writers.
Download or read book The Elementary Particles written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-11-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence. Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.
Download or read book Island written by Aldous Huxley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While shipwrecked on the island of Pala, Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, discovers a utopian society that has flourished for the past 120 years. Although he at first disregards the possibility of an ideal society, as Farnaby spends time with the people of Pala his ideas about humanity change. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Download or read book Interventions 2020 written by Michel Houellebecq and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-03-02 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of God in the West was the prelude to a formidable metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity’s masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom doomed to follow advertising’s every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this skin-deep, superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread. However, we can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our iPhones, stop buying stuff, stop wanting to buy stuff, temporarily detach ourselves and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds. This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.
Download or read book H P Lovecraft written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning French novelist pays tribute to a literary hero in this critical biography of the master of horror—with a foreword by Stephen King. Best known for his acclaimed novels, such as the Prix Goncourt-winning The Map and the Territory, Michael Houellebecq devotes his single work of nonfiction to the pioneering author of horror and weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. In a volume that is part biographical sketch and part pronouncement on existence and literature, France's most famous contemporary author praises his prewar American alter ego, whose style couldn't be less like his own. With a foreword by Lovecraft admirer Stephen King, this eloquently translated edition is an insightful introduction to both Lovecraft’s dark mythology and Houellebecq’s deadpan prose.
Download or read book Without God written by Louis Betty and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Houellebecq is France’s most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq’s work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day that Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day that his most recent novel, Soumission—the story of France in 2022 under a Muslim president—appeared in bookstores. Without God uses religion as a lens to examine how Houellebecq gives voice to the underside of the progressive ethos that has animated French and Western social, political, and religious thought since the 1960s. Focusing on Houellebecq’s complicated relationship with religion, Louis Betty shows that the novelist, who is at best agnostic, “is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer.” In exploring the religious, theological, and philosophical aspects of Houellebecq’s work, Betty situates the author within the broader context of a French and Anglo-American history of ideas—ideas such as utopian socialism, the sociology of secularization, and quantum physics. Materialism, Betty contends, is the true destroyer of human intimacy and spirituality in Houellebecq’s work; the prevailing worldview it conveys is one of nihilism and hedonism in a postmodern, post-Christian Europe. In Betty’s analysis, “materialist horror” emerges as a philosophical and aesthetic concept that describes and amplifies contemporary moral and social decadence in Houellebecq’s fiction.
Download or read book An Island written by Karen Jennings and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “beautifully and sparingly constructed” (The New York Times) novel about a lighthouse keeper with a mysterious past, and the stranger who washes up on his shores—An Island is the American debut of a major voice in world literature. “An Island by Karen Jennings is quite simply a revelation—a ferocious, swift chess game of a novel.”—Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth Samuel has lived alone on an island off the coast of an unnamed African country for more than two decades. He tends to his garden, his lighthouse, and his chickens, content with a solitary life. Routinely, the nameless bodies of refugees wash ashore, but Samuel—who understands that the government only values certain lives, certain deaths—always buries them himself. One day, though, he finds that one of these bodies is still breathing. As he nurses the stranger back to life, Samuel—feeling strangely threatened—is soon swept up in memories of his former life as a political prisoner on the mainland. This was a life that saw his country exploited under colonial rule, followed by a period of revolution and a brief, hard-won independence—only for the cycle of suffering to continue under a cruel dictator. And he can’t help but recall his own shameful role in that history. In this stranger’s presence, he begins to consider, as he did in his youth: What does it mean to own land, or to belong to it? And what does it cost to have, and lose, a home? A timeless and gripping portrait of regret, terror, and the extraordinary stakes of companionship, An Island is a story as page-turning as it is profound.
Download or read book Unreconciled written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Submission and The Elementary Particles A shimmering selection of poems chosen from four collections of one of France’s most exciting authors, Unreconciled shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and reveals the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on themes that are similar to the ones in his novels, these poems are a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions. Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe, dedication, and—ultimately—redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transportation, indifferent landscapes and lonely nights, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos. Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Unreconciled stands in the tradition of Baudelaire while making a bold new claim on contemporary verse. It reveals that in addition to his work as an incisive novelist, Houellebecq is one of our most perceptive poets with a vision of our era that brims with tensions that cannot—and will not—be reconciled.
Download or read book The People in the Trees written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide—from the bestselling author of National Book Award–nominated modern classic, A Little Life “Provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth.” —Chicago Tribune It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.
Download or read book Anti Matter written by Ben Jeffery and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Houellebecq, author of five novels including Atomised and Platform, has become possibly the world’s most famous literary pessimist. His work declares that life is painful and disappointing, death is terrifying, and the human condition is a nasty sort of joke. He has been wildly successful – translated into over 25 different languages and hailed as the voice of a generation. Beginning with Houellebecq’s novels, this book explores the concept of ‘Depressive Realism’ in literature and philosophy – the proposition that the facts of life are bleak and unkind. Ranging over work by David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Fredric Jameson and Margaret Atwood, Anti-Matter surveys the case for pessimism, asks how a mass culture rooted in sentimentality and trivialisation manages to produce so much cynicism and apathy, and hunts for the space that remains for serious, life-affirming art.
Download or read book The Global Novel written by Adam Kirsch and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Illuminating." - The New York Times Book Review Named one of "Ten Books to Read this April" by the BBC What is the future of fiction in an age of globalization? In The Global Novel, acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century's best-known writers--including Orhan Pamuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolano, Elena Ferrante, and Michel Houellebecq. They are employing a way of imagining the world that sees different places and peoples as intimately connected. From climate change and sex trafficking to religious fundamentalism and genetic engineering, today's novelists use 21st-century subjects to address the perennial concerns of fiction, like morality, society, and love. The global novel is not the bland, deracinated, commercial product that many critics of world literature have accused it of being, but rather finds a way to renew the writer's ancient privilege of examining what it means to be human.
Download or read book Lanzarote written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Random House. This book was released on 2004 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sector of the holiday market that caters for sun, sangria and house music, not to mention sex, Lanzarote rivals Corfu and Ibiza. Tourism in Lanzarote remains resolutely ungreen and certainly wholly uncultural, 21st century hedonism, set in a bizarre lunar landscape - Martian, according to the travel agent. On Lanzarote, one can meet some fascinating human specimens - notably Pam and Barbara, 'non-exclusive' German lesbians - who can give rise to some interesting combinations. Will they succeed in seducing Rudi, the police inspector from Luxembourg, currently living in exile in Brussels. Or will he join the 'azraelian' sect, as they prepare for humanity to be regenerated by extra-terrestrials? As for our narrator, will he consider his week's holiday on the island a success?
Download or read book On the Island written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief, simplified retelling of the episode in "Treasure Island" during which the ship arrives at the island and Jim Hawkins follows the pirates, but discovers Ben Gunn who has been stranded there for three years.
Download or read book The Fourth Island written by Sarah Tolmie and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark, mournful, and beautiful, Sarah Tolmie's The Fourth Island is a moving and unforgettable story of life and death on the hidden Irish island of Inis Caillte. Huddled in the sea off the coast of Ireland is a fourth Aran Island, a secret island peopled by the lost, findable only in moments of despair. Whether drowned at sea, trampled by Cromwell's soldiers, or exiled for clinging to the dead, no outsiders reach the island without giving in to dark emotion. Time and again, The Fourth Island weaves a hypnotic pattern with its prose, presaging doom before walking back through the sweet and sour moments of lives not yet lost. It beautifully melds the certainty of loss with the joys of living, drawing readers under like the tide. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Lost Continent written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.
Download or read book Orphan Island written by Laurel Snyder and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Award Longlist title! "A wondrous book, wise and wild and deeply true." —Kelly Barnhill, Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon "This is one of those books that haunts you long after you read it. Thought-provoking and magical." —Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson series In the tradition of modern-day classics like Sara Pennypacker's Pax and Lois Lowry's The Giver comes a deep, compelling, heartbreaking, and completely one-of-a-kind novel about nine children who live on a mysterious island. On the island, everything is perfect. The sun rises in a sky filled with dancing shapes; the wind, water, and trees shelter and protect those who live there; when the nine children go to sleep in their cabins, it is with full stomachs and joy in their hearts. And only one thing ever changes: on that day, each year, when a boat appears from the mist upon the ocean carrying one young child to join them—and taking the eldest one away, never to be seen again. Today’s Changing is no different. The boat arrives, taking away Jinny’s best friend, Deen, replacing him with a new little girl named Ess, and leaving Jinny as the new Elder. Jinny knows her responsibility now—to teach Ess everything she needs to know about the island, to keep things as they’ve always been. But will she be ready for the inevitable day when the boat will come back—and take her away forever from the only home she’s known? "A unique and compelling story about nine children who live with no adults on a mysterious island. Anyone who has ever been scared of leaving their family will love this book" (from the Brightly.com review, which named Orphan Island a best book of 2017).
