Download or read book Little Black Book of Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable collection of fairy tales for grownups—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession. • “A delight.... provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered.... [She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” —The New York Times Book Review Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for adults. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form. Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.

Download or read book Still Life written by A.S. Byatt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to 'The Virgin in the Garden, ' in the 1950s, Stephanie Potter, now married to a clergyman, is conflicted about her domestic life and her strivings for intellectual fulfillment; her brilliant sister Frederica eagerly embarks on her academic (and sexual) education at Cambridge University; and their troubled brother Marcus painfully tries to find friendship and love.

Download or read book The Matisse Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three delightful stories inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and “a writer of dazzling inventiveness" (Time). "[An] exquisite triptych.... Richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people." —People These stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling—about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority. "Full of delight and humor.... The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion." —San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Sugar and Other Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected in a single volume for the first time—an unforgettable book of short stories from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession that explores the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss, and the elaborate memories we construct against it. In this book of short fictions, A.S. Byatt compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder. "Byatt's stories display all her talents as a novelist, but spiced with an additional friskiness." —Evening Standard

Download or read book Babel Tower written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-18 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession presents an extraordinary story set against the backdrop of the 1960s—a turbulent decade of clashing politics, passionate ideals, and shifting sexual roles. At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure—the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time. We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the day seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. Peopled with weird and colorful characters, charted with brilliant, imaginative sympathy, Babel Tower is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

Download or read book Medusa s Ankles written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights" (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser's when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary—even beyond the gloss of the fantastical—to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

Download or read book Unruly Times written by A S Byatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that shaped it. With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A. S. Byatt brings alive this tumultuous period and shows a deep understanding of the effects upon the minds of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their contemporaries - de Quincey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Byron and Keats.

Download or read book A Bad Day for Voodoo written by Jeff Strand and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When your best friend is just a tiny bit psychotic, you should never actually believe him when he says, "Trust me. This is gonna be awesome." Of course, you probably wouldn't believe a voodoo doll could work either. Or that it could cause someone's leg to blow clean off with one quick prick. But I've seen it. It can happen. And when there's suddenly a doll of YOU floating around out there—a doll that could be snatched by a Rottweiler and torn to shreds, or a gang of thugs ready to torch it, or any random family of cannibals (really, do you need the danger here spelled out for you?)—well, you know that's just gonna be a really bad day ... "Jeff Strand is hilariously funny and truly deranged." —Christopher Golden, author of When Rose Wakes

Download or read book The Game written by Les Logan and published by Bantam Books. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bitter because of the accident that left her confined to a wheelchair, Julie spends hours playing with her ouija board, until she inadvertently contacts a demon.

Download or read book Sinister Entity written by Hunter Shea and published by Samhain Publishing. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can you escape the ghost of yourself? The Leigh family is terrified. They’ve been haunted by the ghostly image of their young daughter, Selena. But how can that be, when Selena is alive and well, and as frightened as her parents? With no where else to turn, the Leighs place their hopes in Jessica Backman, who has dedicated her life to investigating paranormal activity. Accompanied by a new partner who claims to able to speak to the dead, Jessica will soon encounter an entity that scares even her. And a terror far worse than she imagined.

Download or read book The Retreat written by Pierre Wazem and published by Humanoids Inc. This book was released on 2017-09-06 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical and touching tale of friendship put to the test amid death, mourning, and nostalgia.

Download or read book Portraits In Fiction written by A S Byatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways to the art of Cézanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage.

Download or read book Degrees of Freedom written by A S Byatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1965, A.S. Byatt's Degrees of Freedom examined the first eight novels of Iris Murdoch, identifying freedom as a central theme in all of them, and looking at Murdoch's interest in the relations between art and goodness, master and slave, and the novel of character in the nineteenth century sense. Drawing on Iris Murdoch's own critical and philosphical writing, A.S. Byatt discussed her interest in the thought of Sartre, Plato, Freud and Simone Weil, and related this to the form of the novels themselves. This edition of Degrees of Freedom has an added dossier of later essays and reviews of Iris Murdoch's work by A.S Byatt, taking us up to the publication of The Book and the Brotherhood in 1987. It also includes a substantial pamplet written for the British Council which follows Murdoch's fiction as far as The Good Apprentice.

Download or read book Going Down in Flames written by Chris Cannon and published by Entangled: Teen. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If her love life is going down in flames, she might as well spark a revolution. Finding out on your sixteenth birthday you're a shape-shifting dragon is tough to swallow. Being hauled off to an elite boarding school is enough to choke on. Since Bryn is the only crossbreed at the Institute for Excellence, all eyes are on her, but it’s a particular black dragon, Zavien, who catches her attention. Zavien is tired of the Directorate’s rules. Segregated clans, being told who to love, and close-minded leaders make freedom of choice almost impossible. The new girl with the striped hair is a breath of fresh air, and with Bryn’s help, they might be able to change the rules. At the Institute, old grudges, new crushes, and death threats are all part of a normal day for Bryn. She'll need to learn to control her dragon powers if she wants to make it through her first year at school. But even focusing on staying alive is difficult when you’re falling for someone you can't have... The Going Down in Flames series is best enjoyed in order Reading Order: Book #1- Going Down in Flames Book #2- Bridges Burned Book #3- Trial by Fire Book #4- Fanning the Flames Book #5- Burning Bright

Download or read book The Witch with the Long Sharp Nose written by Nancy Faulkner and published by Dutton Adult. This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the witch's orders, a little girl looks into the chimney to see what is hidden there.

Download or read book Carrie s War written by Nina Bawden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Second World War air raids threaten their safety in the city, Carrie and her brother Nick are evacuated to a small Welsh village. But the countryside has dangers and adventures of its own - and a group of characters who will change Carrie's life for ever. There's mean Mr Evans, who won't let the children eat meat; but there’s also kind Auntie Lou. There's brilliant young Albert Sandwich, another evacuee, and Mr Johnny, who speaks a language all of his own. Then there's Hepzibah Green, the witch at Druid’s Grove who makes perfect mince pies, and the ancient skull with its terrifying curse... For adults and young people aged eight and over. Emma Reeves has created a stunning stage adaptation of Nina Bawden’s much loved classic account of life as an evacuee in the 1940s, which opened at the Lillian Bayliss Theatre in November 2006. This edition includes teachers' notes and activities for classes based on the play.

Download or read book The Last Roman in Britain Storycuts written by M C Scott and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-17 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Dumnonii defeat of the Second Legion the Celtic victory is complete. But Hywell, Cunomar and Valerius must still find the lost Eagle of the Second and prevent Rome from attempting another attack. To prevent further conflict the Emperor Nero must be overthrown and replaced by someone of their choosing. Part of the Storycuts series.