Download or read book Travelling to Absurdistan written by Anna Zoch and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When someone leaves on a trip, they have something to tell! That is all the more true for me, as I've been a tour guide for many years. I have experienced many, above all curious and sometimes quite absurd moments on my travels. At some point, I started to write everything down in order to be able to remember these special experiences and my many guests. Each story stands for itself. With some, I have added additional comments and general information about the respective countries at the end. Will you come with me on a trip to northwestern Europe, to my personal Absurdistan? I investigate missing suitcases in a Swedish thriller, meet Queen Silvia, the Queen and Nessie, survive various mishaps and human crises, become a Scottish Lady, I am on the road as a secret agent on the emerald Isle and in Cornwall and travel with a troll through a wintry Lapland!
Download or read book Absurdistan written by R. Lee Wright and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers can vicariously live for a year in Eastern Europe through the eyes of an American professor working in Absurdistan. With a rare blend of humor and insight, Professor Wright shares a year of teaching at universities in Absurdistan, the name given to former Czechoslovakia by its citizens. His job was to help universities overcome the last seventy years of communist propaganda. This true story is a tongue-in-cheek look at the people, history, and geography of Eastern Europe. Become acquainted with Dr. Wright's castle, village, university, and neighbors. Learn the true meaning of Eastern European Time, and the correct way to mime kitty litter. See if you can survive the alternately hilarious and tragic daily life. In turn funny and sad, Dr. Wright combines mordant insights into the human condition with truly touching stories of local citizens. His incisive wit takes on politics, religion, language, and history, with equal opportunity barbs. He lives in an ancient stone cottage just outside the ruins of a castle destroyed by Napoleon, in a genuine quaint little village with no telephone. He rides the same trolleys as the local people. He eats the same food, and shops in the same bazaars. Astoundingly, he survives a year without TV, the internet, or even a golf course. Twenty-four photos add a rare glimpse into the lives, people, and countries of Eastern Europe. The captions alone are worth the price of the book.
Download or read book Absurdistan written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.” –Aleksandar Hemon From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don’t even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost. Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. With the enormous success of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today’s literary world—“one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation,” according to The New York Observer. In Absurdistan, he delivers an even funnier and wiser literary performance. Misha Vainberg is a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of dashed hopes.
Download or read book Absurdistan written by Eric Campbell and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highs and lows of being a reporter in some of the strangest, most dysfunctional places on Earth. Award-winning foreign correspondent Eric Campbell has been stoned by fundamentalists, captured by US Special Forces, arrested in Serbia and threatened with expulsion from China. He's negotiated dating rituals in Moscow, shared a house with a charismatic mercenary in Kabul and taken up smoking at gunpoint in Kosovo. In 2003 in Iraq he was injured in a suicide bombing which killed his colleague, cameraman Paul Moran. By turns provocative and thoughtful, ABSURDISTAN is a memoir about juggling life, love and fatherhood while reporting from some of the most dysfunctional places on Earth.
Download or read book Postcards from Absurdistan written by Derek Sayer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Václav Havel’s greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.
Download or read book Absurdistan written by Eric James Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award winning foreign correspondent Eric Campbell has been stoned by fundamentalists, captured by US Special Forces, arrested in Serbia and threatened with expulsion from China. He has negotiated dating rituals in Moscow, shared a house with a charismatic mercenary in Kabul and taken up smoking at gunpoint in Kosovo. In 2003, in Iraq he was injured in a suicide bombing which killed his colleague, cameraman Paul Moran.
Download or read book Absurdistan written by Eric James Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2011-05-14 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning foreign correspondent Eric Campbell has been stoned by fundamentalists, captured by US Special Forces, arrested in Serbia and threatened with expulsion from China. Hes negotiated dating rituals in Moscow, shared a house with a charismatic mercenary in Kabul and taken up smoking at gunpoint in Kosovo. In 2003 in Iraq he was injured in a suicide bombing which killed his colleague, cameraman Paul Moran. By turns provocative and thoughtful, Absurdistan is a memoir about juggling life, love and fatherhood while reporting from some of the most dysfunctional places on Earth.
Download or read book Two Murders in My Double Life written by Josef Skvorecký and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliantly stylish tour de force in which the bright, sarcastic comedy of one tale sharply contrasts with the dark, elegiac bitterness of the other, Two Murders in My Double Life confirms Josef Skvorecký's reputation as one of our most versatile, engaging, and compassionate writers. In Skvorecký's first novel written in English, the narrator lives in two worlds: the exile world of post-Communist Czechoslovakia, where old feuds, treacherous betrayals, and friendships that have lasted through wars, occupations, and revolutions survive; and the fatuously self-congratulatory comfortable world of a Canadian university, in which grave attention is given to matters such as whether a certain male professor has left his office door open wide enough while interviewing a female student. Murder suddenly intrudes upon both of these worlds. One features a young female sleuth, a college beauty queen, professional jealousies, and a neat conclusion. The other is a tragedy caused by evil social forces, in which a web of lies works insidiously to entangle Sidonia, who is a publisher of suppressed books, and the narrator's wife.
Download or read book Absurdistan written by Gary Shteyngart and published by . This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The World s Weirdest Web Pages and the People who Create Them written by Hank Duderstadt and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers and Web browsers who are tired of the same old thing will find The World's Weirdest Web Pages a refreshing change of pace. Author Hank Duderstadt leads readers beyond the computer mainstream and into the entertaining, the humorous, and the mad, focusing on outlandish Web pages and the oddballs who created them. The book concludes with helpful instructions on building one's own ""Xanadu in cyberspace.""
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work written by Geoff Hamilton and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 1386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with the English-language fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Welcome to Absurdistan written by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and published by Kingston, Ont. : Kashtan Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Super Sad True Love Story written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus Reviews In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?
Download or read book Lake Success written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Spectacular.”—NPR • “Uproariously funny.”—The Boston Globe • “An artistic triumph.”—San Francisco Chronicle • “A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.”—The Washington Post • “Shteyngart’s best book.”—The Seattle Times The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR’S FRESH AIR AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • Mother Jones • Glamour • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Newsday • Pamela Paul, KQED • Financial Times • The Globe and Mail Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema—a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth—has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to America. LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION “The fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature—movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation—are what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel. . . . [It is] a novel so pungent, so frisky and so intent on probing the dissonances and delusions—both individual and collective—that grip this strange land getting stranger.”—The New York Times Book Review “Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. He is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy. . . . The wit and the immigrant’s sense of heartbreak—he was born in Russia—just seem to pour from him. The idea of riding along behind Shteyngart as he glides across America in the early age of Trump is a propitious one. He doesn’t disappoint.”—The New York Times
Download or read book The Russian Debutante s Handbook written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-04-29 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS A visionary novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure. The Russian Debutante's Handbook introduces Vladimir Girshkin, one of the most original and unlikely heroes of recent times. The twenty-five-year-old unhappy lover to a fat dungeon mistress, affectionately nicknamed "Little Failure" by his high-achieving mother, Vladimir toils his days away as a lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. When a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears, Vladimir embarks on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy that takes us from New York's Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava--the Eastern European Paris of the nineties. With the help of a murderous but fun-loving Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the Prava expat community and launches a scheme as ridiculous as it is brilliant. Bursting with wit, humor, and rare insight, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is both a highly imaginative romp and a serious exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in America.
Download or read book Annual Report written by Human Rights Watch (Organization) and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Little Failure written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Newsday • Salon • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • Esquire (UK) • GQ (UK) After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor wrote his first novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page. In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly. As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being. Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world. Praise for Little Failure “Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times Book Review “A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary Karr “Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “Literary gold . . . bruisingly funny.”—Vogue “A giant success.”—Entertainment Weekly
