Download or read book A Dance at the Slaughterhouse written by Lawrence Block and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2000-07-03 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no accolade or major mystery award that has not already been bestowed upon Lawrence Block. His acclaimed crime novels are asintelligent, provocative, and emotionally complex as they are nerve-tighteningly intense. And perhaps the most respected of his myriad works are the Matthew Scudder books -- masterworks of suspenseful invention featuring a remarkable protagonist rich in conscience and character, with all the flaws that his humanity entails. This is the detective novel as high art. A Dance At The Slaughterhouse In Matt Scudder's mind, money, power, and position elevate nobody above morality and the law. Now the ex-cop and unlicensed p.i. has been hired to prove that socialite Richard Thurman orchestrated the brutal murder of his beautiful, pregnant wife. During Scudder's hard drinking years, he left a piece of his soul on every seedy corner of the Big Apple. But this case is more depraved and more potentially devastating than anything he experienced while floundering in the urban depths. Because this investigation is leading Scudder on a frightening grand tour of New York's sex-for-sale underworld -- where an innocent young life is simply a commodity to be bought and perverted ... and then destroyed.
Download or read book Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 1999-01-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
Download or read book A Dance at the Slaughterhouse 10 Co written by Lawrence Block and published by . This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Dance at the Slaughterhouse written by Lawrence Block and published by Lawbook Company. This book was released on 1994 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slaughterhouse five written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present.
Download or read book Walk Among the Tombstones written by Lawrence Block and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book description to come.
Download or read book The Writer s Crusade written by Tom Roston and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, an enduring masterpiece on trauma and memory Kurt Vonnegut was twenty years old when he enlisted in the United States Army. Less than two years later, he was captured by the Germans in the single deadliest US engagement of the war, the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to a POW camp, then transferred to a work camp near Dresden, and held in a slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Fünf where he survived the horrific firebombing that killed thousands and destroyed the city. To the millions of fans of Vonnegut’s great novel Slaughterhouse-Five, these details are familiar. They’re told by the book’s author/narrator, and experienced by his enduring character Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who “has come unstuck in time.” Writing during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam conflict, with the novel, Vonnegut had, after more than two decades of struggle, taken trauma and created a work of art, one that still resonates today. In The Writer’s Crusade, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Vonnegut’s life and Slaughterhouse-Five. Did Vonnegut suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did Billy Pilgrim? Roston probes Vonnegut’s work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer’s family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists including Karl Marlantes, Kevin Powers, and Tim O’Brien. The Writer’s Crusade is a literary and biographical journey that asks fundamental questions about trauma, creativity, and the power of storytelling.
Download or read book A Dance at the Slaughterhouse written by Lawrence Block and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bearing an Hourglass written by Piers Anthony and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like On a Pale Horse, this second, complete-in-itself novel of the Incarnations of Immortality is a richly imagined and always fascinating story. And again, Piers Anthony adds to his gripping plot a serious, though-provoking study of good and evil. When life seemed pointless to Norton, he accepted the position as the Incarnation of Time, even though it meant living backward from present to past. The other seemily all-powerful Incarnates of Immortality—Death, Fate, War, and Nature—made him welcome. Even Satan greeted him with gifts. But he soon discovered that the gifts were cunning traps. While he had been distracted, he had become enmeshed in a complex scheme of the Evil One to destroy all that was good. In the end, armed with only the Hourglass, Norton was forced to confront the immense power of Satan directly. And though Satan banished him to Hell, he was resolved to fight on.
Download or read book Ten Cents a Dance written by Christine Fletcher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940s Chicago, fifteen-year-old Ruby hopes to escape poverty by becoming a taxi dancer in a nightclub, but the work has unforeseen dangers and hiding the truth from her family and friends becomes increasingly difficult.
Download or read book Kurt Vonnegut written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Huffington Post • Kansas City Star • Time Out New York • Kirkus Reviews This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels—from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. • On a job he had as a young man: “Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.” • To a relative who calls him a “great literary figure”: “I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.” • To his daughter Nanny: “Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.” • To Norman Mailer: “I am cuter than you are.” Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote. Praise for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters “Splendidly assembled . . . familiar, funny, cranky . . . chronicling [Vonnegut’s] life in real time.”—Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review “[This collection is] by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane. . . . Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.”—NPR “Congenial, whimsical and often insightful missives . . . one of [Vonnegut’s] very best.”—Newsday “These letters display all the hallmarks of Vonnegut’s fiction—smart, hilarious and heartbreaking.”—The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book A Line of Blood written by Ben McPherson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the most entertaining and twisty thrillers of the year a London family, a mother, father and young son, must deal with the murder of their secretive next door neighbor and the intrusive police investigation that follows. Readers will be faced with ever shifting and increasingly frightening suspicions that one or all of them had something to do with it. Alex Mercer loves his family more than anything. His wife Millicent and their precocious eleven-year-old son Max are everything to him, his little tribe. When he is with them all is right with the world. But when he and Max find their next door neighbour dead in his bathtub, their lives are suddenly and irrevocably changed. Max is surprisingly fascinated by the dead body, and Alex is understandably anxious about how Max will react later, once he takes it all in. And Alex is increasingly impatient for the police to conclude their investigation and call this the suicide that it so clearly was. But as new information surfaces, it becomes clear that there is more to this than anyone is saying... Why was the neighbour charging his home improvements to the Mercers’ address? How did Millicent’s bracelet end up in his apartment? And why, in fact, did Max lead his father into the house on the quiet summer night that they found the corpse? As suspicion grows between the three, the once close-knit family starts to disintegrate. Is Alex really the loving husband we believe him to be? And where is Millicent really going when she disappears for hours, walking the parks of London, stewing over something that she can’t forget? Each of them is suffering. Each has something to hide. And as each questions how well they really know each other, they must decide how far they’ll go to protect themselves-and each other-from investigators who are watching every move they make. Just waiting for someone to make a mistake.
Download or read book A Long Line Of Dead Men written by Lawrence Block and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From NEW YORK TIMES bestseller Lawrence Block. In Manhattan thirty-one men have been meeting annually for years. Their private club meets only to record the passage of time and give toast to the joys of life. But suddenly they are dying at an alarming rate and one of their number begins to suspect that something more than bad luck is at work. For private eye Matt Scudder, the case is one of the most baffling he's faced. Can the deaths really be a bizarre series of suicides and violent accidents? Or is there is a pattern behind the random play of tragedy? Is there a murderer at work and can he be stopped before the victims run out?
Download or read book Letters of Note written by Shaun Usher and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with fourteen riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher. From Virginia Woolf's heart-breaking suicide letter to Queen Elizabeth II's recipe for drop scones sent to President Eisenhower; from the first recorded use of the expression 'OMG' in a letter to Winston Churchill, to Gandhi's appeal for calm to Hitler; and from Iggy Pop's beautiful letter of advice to a troubled young fan, to Leonardo da Vinci's remarkable job application letter, Letters of Note is a celebration of the power of written correspondence which captures the humour, seriousness, sadness and brilliance that make up all of our lives.
Download or read book A Dance at the Slaughterhouse written by Lawrence Block and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1992 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, private investigator Matthew Scudder is on the hunt for the rapist and killer of rich, beautiful Amanda Thurman. But when a snuff film involving a young homeless boy is discovered, the case becomes terrifyingly twisted. Somehow Scudder and his girlfriend Elaine must find the connection between the the two crimes and set a trap for the killer. From the Edgar Award-winning author of A Ticket to the Boneyard.
Download or read book When the Sacred Ginmill Closes written by Lawrence Block and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dark days, in a sad and lonely place, ex-cop Matt Scudder is drinking his life away -- and doing "favors" for pay for his ginmill cronies. But when three such assignments flow together in dangerous and disturbing ways, he'll need to change his priorities from boozing to surviving.
Download or read book The Devil Knows You re Dead written by Lawrence Block and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deranged derelict, a crazed Vietnam vet, has been arrested for gunning down successful young lawyer Glenn Holtzmann at a corner phone booth on Eleventh Avenue -- and the suspect's brother wants p.i. Matthew Scudder to prove the madman innocent. But Scudder's curiosity and dedication are leading him to dark, unexplored places in his own heart...and to passions and secrets that could destroy everything be loves.
