Download or read book Vernon Subutex Two written by Virginie Despentes and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Sunday Times Best Books of 2018** "Funny, irreverent and scathing" Guardian "Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk rock George Eliot" ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN, author of You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine Rock star Alexandre Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench in the parc des Buttes Chaumont. Aïcha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Céleste thinks of her plan. Céleste wants Aïcha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex's gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Anaïs, her boss' assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him. Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT. THE SEQUEL TO VERNON SUBUTEX 1, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Download or read book Vernon Subutex Two written by Virginie Despentes and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rock star Alexandre Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench in the parc des Buttes Chaumont. Aïcha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Céleste thinks of her plan. Céleste wants Aïcha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex's gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Anaïs, her boss' assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him. Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT. THE SEQUEL TO VERNON SUBUTEX 1, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Download or read book Vernon Subutex 1 written by Virginie Despentes and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed trilogy of novels, Vernon Subutex—short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize and the basis for the TV series of the same name. But who is Vernon Subutex? Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Paris, where his name was legend throughout Paris. By the 2000s, however, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CD and vinyl sales, his shop is struggling, like so many others. When it closes, Subutex finds himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Before long, his savings are gone, and when the mysterious rock star who had been covering his rent suddenly drops dead of a drug overdose, Subutex finds himself launched on an epic saga of couch-surfing, boozing, and coke-snorting before finally winding up homeless. Just as he resigns himself to life as a panhandler, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook takes the internet by storm. The word is out: Subutex is lugging around a bunch of VHS tapes shot by that same dead rock musician—his last recordings on this earth. Soon a crowd of wild characters, from screen writers to social media groupies, from porn stars to failed musicians to random misfits, are hot on Vernon's trail . . . but Vernon is none the wiser. "Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read. Everything about it is contemporary, right down to the fearless woman author who doesn't think of herself as a feminist and gives an impression at least in interviews of habitually killing rapists." —Nell Zink, Bustle, "The Best Books Of The 2010s"

Download or read book Vernon Subutex Three written by Virginie Despentes and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A literary phenomenon" The Times "Despentes' writing is intelligent, outspoken, witty, shocking, propulsive and streetwise" Times Literary Supplement THE FINAL VOLUME IN THE EPIC ROCK AND ROLL TRILOGY BY CULT AUTHOR VIRGINIE DESPENTES Although it means leaving behind the community of disciples who have followed him on his travels and assembled at his raves and gatherings, Vernon Subutex is compelled to return to Paris to visit the dentist. Once back in the city, he learns that Charles, his old friend from his days on the Paris streets, has died and left him half of a lottery win. But when Vernon returns to his disciples with news of this windfall, it does not take long before his followers start to turn on each other, and his good fortune provokes ruptures in his once harmonious community. Meanwhile, storm clouds are gathering for Aïcha and Céleste: Laurent Dopalet is determined to make them pay for their attack on him, whatever it takes and whoever gets hurt. And before long, the whole of Paris will be reeling in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 2015 and 2016, and all the characters in this kaleidoscopic portrait of a city will be forced to a reckoning with each other. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Download or read book King Kong Theory written by Virginie Despentes and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can’t or won’t obey the rules.

Download or read book Eastman Was Here written by Alex Gilvarry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Absorbing...Eastman is a riveting...presence who demands to be loved and remembered.” —The Boston Globe An ambitious new novel set in the literary world of 1970s New York, following a washed-up writer in an errant quest to pick up the pieces of his life. One of Esquire's Best books of 2017 (So Far), The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2017, and BuzzFeed’s Exciting New Books You Need To Read This Summer The year is 1973, and Alan Eastman, a public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, washed-up war journalist, husband, and philanderer; finds himself alone on the floor of his study in an existential crisis. His wife has taken their kids and left him to live with her mother in New Jersey, and his best work feels as though it is years behind him. In the depths of despair, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome phone call from his old rival dating back to his days on the Harvard literary journal, offering him the chance to go to Vietnam to write the definitive account of the end of America's longest war. Seeing his opportunity to regain his wife’s love and admiration while reclaiming his former literary glory, he sets out for Vietnam. But instead of the return to form as a pioneering war correspondent that he had hoped for, he finds himself in Saigon, grappling with the same problems he thought he'd left back in New York. Following his widely acclaimed debut, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, Alex Gilvarry employs the same thoughtful, yet dark sense of humor in Eastman Was Here to capture one irredeemable man's search for meaning in the face of advancing age, fading love, and a rapidly-changing world. “With his second book, Gilvarry establishes himself as a writer who defies expectation, convention and categorization. Eastman Was Here is a dark, riotously funny and audacious exploration of the sacred and the profane—and pretty much everything in between.” —Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife

Download or read book Bye Bye Blondie written by Virginie Despentes and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a wrecked modern version of a romance novel, acclaimed French writer Virginie Despentes pokes at the simultaneous ecstasy and banality of love in an age of psychiatry and punk. Gloria lives in seething rage, lashing out at everyone—particularly, a string of bewildered boyfriends—at the local bar. But when her latest explosion leaves her out on the street, she unexpectedly runs into famed television personality Eric Muir. Incidentally, he’s also her teenage boyfriend, and the one who started it all. Once upon a time, Gloria and Eric met while institutionalized, and then became a mascot couple for those homeless and high on a noisy mix of drugs, music, and counterculture. Now, twenty years later, Gloria is enamored by youthful love resurrected and determined to immortalize their story by writing a screenplay. Whisked away to Paris, she’s transformed from a provincial loose cannon into an urbane party guest. But navigating life and love isn’t any easier for the middle-aged. Cutting deep to unearth the marriage of institutional violence and heterosexual relationships, Bye Bye Blondie illustrates how young women are continuously dragged down and neglected, and then dangled false offers of fame in lieu of real, redemptive recognition.

Download or read book Vernon Subutex 2 written by Virginie Despentes and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part social epic, part punk-rock thriller, writer/filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy continues the Man Booker International Prize shortlisted sprawling tale of an ex-record shop clerk’s celebrity fortunes and misfortunes. The basis for the TV show of the same name available on streaming. Rock star Alex Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It’s a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench. He has tapes of Alex that will shake the world. The hunt is on, and the wolves are closing in. Meanwhile, the cast of lovers and killers in Vernon’s orbit is in violent disarray. Aïcha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, the porn star Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Céleste thinks of her plan. Céleste wants Aïcha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex’s gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Anaïs, her boss’s assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him. Big-shot producer Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT. "Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read." —Nell Zink, Bustle, "The Best Books of the 2010s"

Download or read book Listen Layla written by Yassmin Abdel-Magied and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the diaspora experience, race, politics and identity, Listen, Layla by Yassmin Abdel-Magied is an own voices novel for young readers, which bursts with passion, humour and truth. Layla has ended the school year on a high and can’t wait to spend the holidays hanging out with her friends and designing a prize-winning Grand Designs Tourismo invention. But Layla’s plans are interrupted when her grandmother in Sudan falls ill and the family rush to be with her. The last time Layla went to Sudan she was only a young child. Now she feels torn between her Sudanese and Australian identities. As political tensions in Sudan erupt, so too do tensions between Layla and her family. Layla is determined not to lose her place in the invention team, but will she go against her parents’ wishes? What would a Kandaka do?

Download or read book Diary of a Drag Queen written by Crystal Rasmussen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2020 Life's a drag... Why not be a queen? 'Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about.' Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her). Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience. (c) 2019, Crystal Rasmussen (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

Download or read book The German Mujahid written by Boualem Sansal and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] masterly investigation of evil, resistance and guilt, billed as the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust” from the Nobel Prize–nominated author (Publishers Weekly). Banned in the author’s native Algeria, this groundbreaking novel is based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi. The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, couldn’t be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But the similarities end there. Rachel is a model immigrant—hard working, upstanding, law-abiding. Malrich has drifted. Increasingly alienated and angry, a bleak future seems inevitable for him. But when Islamic fundamentalists murder the young men’s parents in Algeria the destinies of both brothers are transformed. Rachel discovers the shocking truth about his family and buckles under the weight of the sins of his father, a former SS officer. Now Malrich, the outcast, will have to face that same awful truth alone. “The German Mujahid deals with the fine line between the destructive power wielded by Islamic fundamentalism today and the power of another movement that left an indelible mark on history: Nazism.” —Haaretz (Israel) “With extraordinary eloquence, Sansal condemns both the [Algerian] military and the Islamic fundamentalists; he decries that Algeria crippled by trafficking, religion, bureaucracy, the culture of illegality, of coups, and of clans, career apologists, the glorification of tyrants, the love of flashy materialism, and the passion for rants.” —Lire (France) “The German Mujahid, winner of the RTL-Lire Prize for fiction, is a marvelous, devilishly well-constructed novel.” —L’Express (France)

Download or read book The Art of Patience written by Sylvain Tesson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey in search of one of the most elusive creatures on the planet Adventurer Sylvain Tesson has led a restless life, riding across Central Asia on horseback, freeclimbing the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, and traversing the Himalayas by foot. But while recovering from an accident that left him in a coma, and nursing his wounds from a lost love, he found himself domesticated, his lust for life draining with each moment spent staring at a screen. An expedition to the mountains of Tibet, in search of the famously elusive snow leopard, presented itself as a cure. For the chance to glimpse this near mythical beast, Tesson and his companions must wait for hours without making a sound or a movement, enduring the thin air and brutal cold. Their vigil becomes an act of faith--many have pursued the snow leopard for years without seeing it--and as they keep their watch, Tesson comes to embrace the virtues of patience and silence. His faith is rewarded when the snow leopard, the spirit of the mountain, reveals itself: an embodiment of what we have surrendered in our contemporary lives. And the simple act of waiting proves to be an antidote to the frenzy of our times. A celebration of the power and grace of the wild, and a requiem for the world's vanishing places, The Art of Patience is a revelatory account of the communion between nature and the human heart. Sylvain Tesson has written a new masterpiece on the relationship between man and beast in prose as sublime as the wilderness that inspired it.

Download or read book Get Well Soon written by Marie-Sabine Roger and published by Pushkin Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A joyful novel full of humanity from the author of Soft in the Head - a July 2016 Indie Next pick. Saved from drowning in Paris's River Seine, a sixty-something misanthrope finds himself stuck in a hospital bed for six weeks while he recovers. As he looks back on his life, the good and the bad, he makes some unexpected new acquaintances, and just when he thought life had no more suprises in store for him, he finds out he was wrong....

Download or read book Windows on the World written by Frédéric Beigbeder and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-07-08 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daring, moving fictional account of the last moments of a father and his two sons atop the World Trade Centre on September 11.

Download or read book On Hell written by Johanna Hedva and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Hell transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of "Sick Woman Theory," takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

Download or read book Ghost Image written by Hervé Guibert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.

Download or read book The Wind Traveler written by Alonso Cueto and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wind Traveler showcases the mesmerizing storytelling of Alonso Cueto at the top of his career. At the heart of his latest work is a seemingly ordinary man named Ángel, who sells kitchenware at a store in Lima. In the early 1990s, he had served as an army soldier, engaging in brutal acts whose aftermath still reverberates. He is forced to reckon with his past when a woman he was instructed to kill enters the store and buys a few items. How can she still be alive? What's more, how can she not recognize Ángel? Remarkably, she asks him to deliver her purchases to her house. From this moment, Ángel feels compelled to make amends through any means necessary, even if it requires sacrificing his life of quiet retirement. A stirring tribute to the wounded souls who yearn to make peace with the past, The Wind Traveler offers a new vision of the fragile human connections that sustain a deeply fractured world.