Download or read book The Russian Interpreter Valancourt 20th Century Classics written by Michael Frayn and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Manning's old friend Proctor-Gould was in Moscow and anxious to get in touch with him. Or so Manning was informed. He looked forward to the meeting. He had few friends in Moscow, none of them old friends, and no friends at all, old or new, in Moscow or anywhere else, called Proctor-Gould . . .' Paul Manning, a young Englishman working on his thesis in Soviet-era Moscow, takes on a part-time job as interpreter for the enigmatic Gordon Proctor-Gould, ostensibly an honest businessman, but possibly involved in more clandestine activities. When Proctor-Gould falls for the mercurial blonde Raya, Manning finds himself in the awkward position of acting as interpreter in their love affair, a situation made even more awkward by Manning's own feelings for her. And when it begins to appear Raya may be a police spy, Manning realizes he may have gotten himself into more than he bargained for ... Featuring an unusual blend of humor and suspense, Michael Frayn's second novel, "The Russian Interpreter" (1966), was inspired in part by the author's own experiences in Communist Russia and won the Hawthornden Prize as the best work of imaginative fiction published that year. This edition includes a new introduction by the author. 'Altogether a notable book ... Frayn is now our best equipped younger prose-writer as well as being a very sane and very funny one.' - "Times Literary Supplement" 'Imaginative and delightful - zany characters who stick in the memory and have a genuine life of their own. Frayn juxtaposes the humorous and the frankly sinister into a satisfying and witty picture.' - "Sunday Telegraph" 'Full of quirky, quixotic surprises ... will catch your curiosity and convert it into admiration.' - "Kirkus Reviews" (starred review)
Download or read book Narrow Rooms written by James Purdy and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic work of surreal fiction, originally published in 1978, is a passionate and violent love story about adolescent obsession and revenge. By the author of The House of the Solitary Maggot. Original.
Download or read book The Expendable Man written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.
Download or read book Reassessing John Buchan written by Kate Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of edited essays on the novelist John Buchan (1875-1940), author of, among many other works, "The Thirty-Nine Steps" (1915), "Witch Wood" (1927) and "Sick Heart River" (1940). It considers Buchan's writing and reputation from the perspective of the twenty-first century and examines Buchan's major fiction and non-fictional writing.
Download or read book Sphinx written by Anne Garreta and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark literary event: the first novel by a female member of Oulipo in English, a sexy genderless love story.
Download or read book No Presents Please written by Jayant Kaikini and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.
Download or read book Good Behaviour written by Molly Keane and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover this wickedly funny classic about the very bad behaviour of an aristocratic family - A BBC2 Between the Covers pick! *** 'Molly Keane is a mistress of wicked comedy' VOGUE 'Dark, complex, engaging . . . a wonderful tour de force' MARIAN KEYES I do know how to behave - believe me, because I know. I have always known . . . Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. . . 'I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian and dissector of human behaviour. I love all her books, but Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are the ones I return to most' MAGGIE O'FARRELL
Download or read book Essential Voices Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora written by Christopher Nelson and published by Green Linden Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Essential Voices series intends to bridge English-language readers to cultures misunderstood and under- or misrepresented. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. The anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others. Praise Between arm-flexing states, the U.S. and Iran, the past burns and the future is held hostage. In a twilight present tense, the poets emerge, sure-footed and graceful, imagining another way, another vision of being. The range of these Iranian poets is prodigious and dizzying. Sometimes they "consider the saga of a bee / humming over minefields / in pursuit of a flower," sometimes they "bring your lips near / and pour your voice / into my mouth." Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora is a place where heartbreak and hope gather. At the shores of language, drink this bracing, slaking music. —Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora takes the extraordinary position that poetic arts from the homeland and diaspora should be read alongside each other. This vital book invites English-language readers to step into a lineage and tradition where poems—from playful to elegiac, prosaic to ornate—are fundamental to everyday living. It is the kind of book that requires two copies: one to give to a beloved, and one to keep for oneself. —Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora offers a profoundly satisfying journey into the poetic canon of my homeland—an anthology with an ambition, expanse, depth, and diversity that truly earns its essential tag. So many poets I was hoping would be in here are here, from contemporary icons to new luminaries, plus I got to explore several poets I had never before read. Everyone from students of poetry to masters of the form should take this ride through the soul and psyche of Iran, which endures no matter where the border, beyond whatever the boundary! —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity Iranians rely on poetry to give comfort, elevate the ordinary, and illuminate the darkness. Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora layers the work of the masters with fresh voices, using sensual imagery to piece together a society fractured by revolution, war, and exile. Let the poets lead you into an Iran beyond the news reports—a place where tenderness and humor and bitterness and melancholia balance together like birds on a wire, intricately connected and poised to take flight. —Tara Bahrampour, author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America
Download or read book The Female Thermometer written by Terry Castle and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.
Download or read book Carmilla written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and published by Aegitas. This book was released on 2024-05-23 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carmilla is a gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1872. It is often considered a seminal work in the vampire literature genre, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years. The story revolves around a young woman named Laura and her encounter with a female vampire named Carmilla. The novella is narrated from Laura's perspective, who recounts her strange and eerie experiences with Carmilla. The two young women form a close bond, but Laura begins to experience disturbing dreams and declining health. It is eventually revealed that Carmilla is a vampire, and she is destroyed by a group of vampire hunters. Carmilla is notable for its exploration of lesbian themes, which were considered taboo at the time of its publication. The relationship between Laura and Carmilla is portrayed as intimate and sensual, although it is also fraught with danger and fear. The novella can be interpreted as a commentary on the societal attitudes towards same-sex desire in the Victorian era. The novella is also significant for its contribution to the vampire literature genre. Carmilla is depicted as a seductive and predatory figure, a trope that would become common in later vampire fiction. The novella also introduces the idea of a vampire hunter, a character type that would become a staple of the genre. Carmilla has been adapted into various forms of media, including film, television, and stage productions. It has also inspired a number of derivative works, including the web series Carmilla (2014-2016) and the novel The Gilda Stories (1991) by Jewelle Gomez. In terms of critical reception, Carmilla has been praised for its atmospheric writing and its exploration of taboo themes. However, it has also been criticized for its slow pacing and its lack of character development. Overall, Carmilla is a significant work in the gothic and vampire literature genres, and it continues to be studied and analyzed by scholars and fans alike.
Download or read book The Boat of a Million Years written by Poul Anderson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book and Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist: This epic chronicle of ten immortals over the course of history “succeeds admirably” (The New York Times). The immortals are ten individuals born in antiquity from various cultures. Immune to disease, able to heal themselves from injuries, they will never die of old age—although they can fall victim to catastrophic wounds. They have walked among mortals for millennia, traveling across the world, trying to understand their special gifts while searching for one another in the hope of finding some meaning in a life that may go on forever. Following their individual stories over the course of human history and beyond into a richly imagined future, “one of science fiction’s most revered writers” (USA Today) weaves a broad tapestry that is “ambitious in scope, meticulous in detail, polished in style” (Library Journal).
Download or read book Dependency written by Tove Ditlevsen and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" —The Guardian). Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth century writers Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet, and the wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead—love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure, and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly—as an artist on her own terms. The final volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.
Download or read book Gothic Hauntings written by Christine Berthin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is buried in the crypts of the Gothic? Building on psychoanalytic research on haunting, cryptonymy and melancholy, as well as on French philosophies of language, this book explores how haunting is not just a Gothic narrative device but the symptom of an impossibility of representation and of an irreparable loss at the heart of language.
Download or read book Copenhagen written by Michael Frayn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2000 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb.
Download or read book Happening written by Annie Ernaux and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "Happening recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. . . . It feels urgently of the moment." --The New York Times In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience. Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival
Download or read book Eve s Hollywood written by Eve Babitz and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie. Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.
Download or read book A Rebel in Time written by Harry Harrison and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1983 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic time-travel adventure about altering the outcome of the War Between the States. On the fields where Civil War battles have yet to be fought, a black sergeant takes on a mad colonel with a machine gun and $25 million in gold--with the winner to determine the course of history.
