# authors

name:
John McCrae| Guadalupe Aguado-de-Cea| Paul Buitelaar| Philipp Cimiano| Thierry Declerck| Asunción Gómez Pérez| Jorge Gracia| Laura Hollink| Elena Montiel-Ponsoda| Dennis Spohr

sort:
John McCrae, Guadalupe Aguado-de-Cea, Paul Buitelaar, Philipp Cimiano, Thierry Declerck, Asunción Gómez Pérez, Jorge Gracia, Laura Hollink, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Dennis Spohr


name:
Bulgakov| Mikhail Afanasevich; Pevear| Richard (TRN); Volokhonsky| Larissa (TRN); Fishman| Boris (FRW); Askew| Christopher Conn (ILT)

sort:
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasevich; Pevear, Richard (TRN); Volokhonsky, Larissa (TRN); Fishman, Boris (FRW); Askew, Christopher Conn (ILT)


# books

title: The Neo4j Manual v1.7-SNAPSHOT
sort: Neo4j Manual v1.7-SNAPSHOT, The
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:46:00.541726+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: The Neo4j Team neo4j.org <http://neo4j.org/> neotechnology.com <http://neotechnology.com/>
uuid: 7bd8cef0-96c7-424f-a2f2-102e248a3c1c
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:46:03.265479+00:00
path:
The Neo4j Team neo4j.org _http___neo4j.org__ neotechnology.com _http___neotechnology.com__/The Neo4j Manual v1.7-SNAPSHOT (41)


title: A Template for Understanding - How the Economic Machine Works and How it is Reflected Now
sort: Template for Understanding - How the Economic Machine Works and How it is Reflected Now, A
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:46:15.107105+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: LP, Bridgewater Associates
uuid: b4851f80-fbdb-472e-8428-9124bfa42547
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:46:19.813005+00:00
path:
Bridgewater Associates LP/A Template for Understanding - How the Economic Machine Works and How it is Reflected Now (45)


title: Annotating wikipedia articles with semantic tags for structured retrieval
sort: Annotating wikipedia articles with semantic tags for structured retrieval
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:50:16.119446+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Saravadee Sae Tan, Tang Enya Kong, Gian Chand Sodhy
uuid: 5215b154-df48-4b4c-879f-fd061bdfa513
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:50:20.874574+00:00
path:
Saravadee Sae Tan, Tang Enya Kong, Gian Chand Sodhy/Annotating wikipedia articles with semantic tags for structured retrieval (113)


title: Rails 2.2 - Documentation
sort: Rails 2.2 - Documentation
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:52:01.988633+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
path: By default, Rails will try to use_Mongrel/Rails 2.2 - Documentation (137)
uuid: 866c3bd3-fdc1-4b4d-8271-e4d4ea23e964
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:52:02.582926+00:00
author_sort:
By default, Rails will try to use
Mongrel & lighttpd if they are installed, otherwise Rails will use WEBrick, the webserver that
ships & Ruby. When you run script/server, Rails will check if Mongrel exists, then
lighttpd & up, finally fall back to WEBrick. This ensures that you can always get & quickly., running


title: The Ruby Way - Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition
sort: Ruby Way - Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition, The
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:52:48.285766+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Fulton, By Hal
uuid: dbab4b03-ad85-41a5-b87c-cb3993a579de
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:52:49.199594+00:00
path:
By ____________Hal Fulton/The Ruby Way - Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition (153)


title: Rails 2.3.2 - Documentation
sort: Rails 2.3.2 - Documentation
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:52:49.595043+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
uuid: febbf88a-69bd-4ff7-9a74-c9c5bbe699c2
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:52:50.155815+00:00
author_sort:
By default, Rails will try to use
Mongrel if it‘s are installed when started & script/server,
otherwise Rails will use WEBrick, the
webserver that ships & Rails, Ruby. But you can also use & servers., a variety of other web

path:
By default, Rails will try to use_Mongrel if it's are installed when started/Rails 2.3.2 - Documentation (154)


title: Rails CHM Documentation - 2.0.2
sort: Rails CHM Documentation - 2.0.2
timestamp: 2013-05-15 12:52:50.458653+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
path: By default, Rails will try to_use Mongrel/Rails CHM Documentation - 2.0.2 (155)
uuid: 1838f39d-8305-46d2-8519-6c64ff295607
last_modified: 2013-05-15 12:52:50.990476+00:00
author_sort:
By default, Rails will try to
use Mongrel & lighttpd if they are installed, otherwise Rails will use WEBrick, the
webserver that ships & Ruby. When you run script/server, Rails will check if Mongrel
exists, then lighttpd & up, finally fall back to WEBrick. This ensures that you can always get & quickly., running


title: Collected Works
sort: Collected Works
timestamp: 2017-02-28 02:34:22.947164+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
path: Ayn Rand/Collected Works (467)
uuid: ad44a6d5-0593-4a66-8b53-bb1dd6fc791f
last_modified: 2017-02-28 02:44:18.468600+00:00
author_sort:
Rand, Ayn & Peikoff, Leonard & Peikoff, Leonard & Branden, Nathaniel & Greenspan, Alan & Hessen, Robert & Binswanger, Harry & Schwartz, Peter & Harriman, David & Hull, Gary & Mayhew, Robert


timestamp: 2017-11-12 21:07:52.950434+00:00
pubdate: 2013-12-31 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Unknown
uuid: 9d60ef0b-894e-4334-8844-0d59c46c3ade
last_modified: 2017-11-12 21:07:53.064622+00:00
title:
Klaus Theweleit - Male Fantasies Vol 2 - Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (1989).pdf (PDFy mirror)

sort:
Klaus Theweleit - Male Fantasies Vol 2 - Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (1989).pdf (PDFy mirror)

path:
Unknown/Klaus Theweleit - Male Fantasies Vol 2 - Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (1989).p (575)


title: The lemon cookbook
sort: lemon cookbook, The
timestamp: 2018-01-18 02:52:26.468432+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
uuid: ac3ac80e-b920-4b8a-bcf0-6c3a9d4c7f74
last_modified: 2018-01-18 02:55:39.390463+00:00
author_sort:
John McCrae, Guadalupe Aguado-de-Cea, Paul Buitelaar, Philipp Cimiano, Thierry Declerck, Asunción Gómez Pérez, Jorge Gracia, Laura Hollink, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Dennis Spohr & Wunner, Tobias

path:
John McCrae, Guadalupe Aguado-de-Cea, Paul Buitelaar, Philipp Cimiano, Thierry Declerck, Asunci/The lemon cookbook (621)


title: La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada
sort: La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada
timestamp: 2018-03-01 17:25:17.300803+00:00
pubdate: 1977-12-31 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: García Márquez, Gabriel
uuid: 3d1af886-4a01-4016-bff7-5a5c16765fc4
last_modified: 2018-03-01 17:26:31.607343+00:00
path:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez/La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada (643)


title: Three Plays: The Young Lady from Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, La Chunga
sort: Three Plays: The Young Lady from Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, La Chunga
timestamp: 2018-03-21 23:00:35.687283+00:00
pubdate: 2010-03-31 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Llosa, Mario Vargas
uuid: e4ee56bc-307b-4f14-a19e-84fa452ab1f9
last_modified: 2018-03-21 23:00:35.817621+00:00
path:
Mario Vargas Llosa/Three Plays_ The Young Lady from Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, La Chunga (679)


timestamp: 2018-03-27 11:34:58.143542+00:00
pubdate: 2013-04-09 20:16:47+00:00
author_sort: Helen Smith, PhD
uuid: 77df453f-1d74-43fc-bbb7-22e025b53598
last_modified: 2018-03-27 11:34:58.281892+00:00
title:
Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream--And Why It Matters

sort:
Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream--And Why It Matters

path:
Helen Smith, PhD/Men on Strike_ Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream--And Why It (741)


title: Master and Margarita : 50th-anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (9781524704124)
sort: Master and Margarita : 50th-anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (9781524704124)
timestamp: 2018-06-25 20:35:50.215525+00:00
pubdate: 2016-06-09 12:04:24+00:00
uuid: a9c81a48-caa5-4195-91c4-d3b82efab841
last_modified: 2018-06-25 20:43:06.878531+00:00
author_sort:
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasevich; Pevear, Richard (TRN); Volokhonsky, Larissa (TRN); Fishman, Boris (FRW); Askew, Christopher Conn (ILT)

path:
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasevich; Pevear, Richard (TRN); Volokhonsky, Larissa (TRN); Fishman, Bori/Master and Margarita _ 50th-anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (978152470412 (804)


title: The Gulag Archipelago Three (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII)
sort: Gulag Archipelago Three (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII), The
timestamp: 2018-07-17 19:27:11.128276+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.
uuid: 874c71fa-c47a-4124-a19a-cbf1069d7edb
last_modified: 2018-07-17 19:29:58.356615+00:00
path:
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn/The Gulag Archipelago Three (1918-1956_ An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII) (847)


title: The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV)
sort: Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV), The
timestamp: 2018-07-17 19:27:11.359498+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.
uuid: 14de9400-99a5-48d8-a78a-f00516624bbb
last_modified: 2018-07-17 19:30:24.364902+00:00
path:
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn/The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956_ An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV) (848)


title: The GULAG Archipelago, Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
sort: GULAG Archipelago, Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, The
timestamp: 2018-07-17 19:27:13.706090+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.
uuid: 83c3bea9-acca-4941-8d54-a57ab7c38bb2
last_modified: 2018-07-17 19:30:54.354144+00:00
path:
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn/The GULAG Archipelago, Volume 1_ An Experiment in Literary Investigation (849)


title: Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated)
sort: Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated)
timestamp: 2018-12-14 13:21:56.254962+00:00
pubdate: 2011-05-08 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: BRONTE, CHARLOTTE
uuid: 699ca23c-0e96-4c47-9fe5-4e7188ceb4db
last_modified: 2018-12-14 13:21:56.603013+00:00
path:
CHARLOTTE BRONTE/Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Bronte (Illustrated) (905)


title: The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism--The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
sort: Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism--The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens, The
timestamp: 2018-12-21 21:45:42.164269+00:00
pubdate: 2011-05-15 11:37:48.617000+00:00
author_sort: Mann, Windsor
uuid: ec83cebc-e6fc-4820-b81b-135a56b4e83e
last_modified: 2018-12-21 21:46:55.095116+00:00
path:
Windsor Mann/The Quotable Hitchens_ From Alcohol to Zionism--The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens (917)


title: Triumvirate of Rationalism: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and George Orwell
sort: Triumvirate of Rationalism: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and George Orwell
timestamp: 2018-12-21 21:45:44.371360+00:00
pubdate: 2016-10-08 04:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Hitchens, Christopher
uuid: 882d8687-9592-45ee-8bdd-bc1c3fd96b21
last_modified: 2018-12-21 21:47:02.094285+00:00
path:
Christopher Hitchens/Triumvirate of Rationalism_ Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and George Orwell (928)


title: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
sort: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
timestamp: 2019-07-19 02:05:41.667078+00:00
pubdate: 2012-09-10 16:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Brown, Brene
uuid: 7ac761ae-75fa-4bb1-8e3b-914c55c22d1c
last_modified: 2019-07-19 02:06:47.727093+00:00
path:
Brown, Brene/Daring Greatly_ How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and (1020)


title: A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition
sort: Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition, A
timestamp: 2019-07-29 21:13:08.658288+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Author, Unknown
uuid: 7e764f86-fa89-4abc-aa29-eb3c5f8b4593
last_modified: 2019-07-29 21:13:08.857010+00:00
path:
Unknown Author/A Short History of Modern Philosophy_ From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (1028)


title: Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Mast Powerful Mafia Empires
sort: Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Mast Powerful Mafia Empires
timestamp: 2020-01-01 16:21:26.550827+00:00
pubdate: 2010-04-01 05:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Raab, Selwyn
uuid: dea7ac44-b8ce-4bf6-868f-c901fba2affb
last_modified: 2020-01-01 16:22:23.284954+00:00
path:
Selwyn Raab/Five Families_ The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Mast Powerful Mafia Empires (1138)


timestamp: 2020-03-04 08:54:05.666353+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Greger, Michael; Stone, Gene
uuid: ea405f41-53e0-47ce-b62a-2051b1dd721c
last_modified: 2020-03-04 10:22:29.325288+00:00
title:
How Not to Die : Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (9781250066121)

sort:
How Not to Die : Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (9781250066121)

path:
Greger, Michael; Stone, Gene/How Not to Die _ Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (97812 (1197)


timestamp: 2020-03-04 10:22:06.341742+00:00
pubdate: 2017-02-13 22:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Mitnick, Kevin
uuid: 582d5f37-440f-41c4-bf9e-e1b04e2d60c7
last_modified: 2020-03-04 10:22:28.306520+00:00
title:
The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data

sort:
Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data, The

path:
Kevin Mitnick/The Art of Invisibility_ The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age o (1201)


timestamp: 2020-03-11 17:58:55.727060+00:00
pubdate: 1866-03-14 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Ward, Mary, 1827-1869
uuid: 4268f947-8bc9-44ff-b735-67c95e88f9f6
last_modified: 2020-03-11 17:58:55.929751+00:00
title:
Microscope teachings : descriptions of various objects of especial interest and beauty : adapted for microscopic observation ...

sort:
Microscope teachings : descriptions of various objects of especial interest and beauty : adapted for microscopic observation ...

path:
Ward, Mary, 1827-1869/Microscope teachings _ descriptions of various objects of especial interest and beauty _ adapte (1209)


timestamp: 2021-01-16 18:48:23.301847+00:00
pubdate: 2011-12-29 08:00:00+00:00
author_sort: McGonigal, Kelly
uuid: c70aea61-deba-4da4-a42b-d3517c569b69
last_modified: 2021-01-16 18:48:37.764383+00:00
title:
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

sort:
Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It, The

path:
McGonigal, Kelly/The Willpower Instinct_ How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More (1468)


title: Urtiere oder Protozoa I: Wimpertiere oder Ciliata -- Volume I General Section And Prostomata
sort: Urtiere oder Protozoa I: Wimpertiere oder Ciliata -- Volume I General Section And Prostomata
timestamp: 2021-01-31 12:32:31.097971+00:00
pubdate: 1930-01-14 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Kahl, Alfred
uuid: 49fc06d4-3b0c-438c-b5e2-ecccc09d250c
last_modified: 2021-01-31 12:32:31.254543+00:00
path:
Alfred Kahl/Urtiere oder Protozoa I_ Wimpertiere oder Ciliata -- Volume I General Section And Prostomata (1483)


title: Urtiere oder Protozoa I: Wimpertiere oder Ciliata -- Volume IV Peritricha And Chonotricha
sort: Urtiere oder Protozoa I: Wimpertiere oder Ciliata -- Volume IV Peritricha And Chonotricha
timestamp: 2021-01-31 12:32:31.288805+00:00
pubdate: 1935-01-14 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Kahl, Alfred
uuid: b4979e64-b83b-4b0f-bc03-d4da322dca79
last_modified: 2021-01-31 12:32:31.410938+00:00
path:
Alfred Kahl/Urtiere oder Protozoa I_ Wimpertiere oder Ciliata -- Volume IV Peritricha And Chonotricha (1484)


title: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
sort: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
timestamp: 2021-03-04 15:21:45.392791+00:00
pubdate: 2015-02-03 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Browder, Bill
uuid: b7a30656-94ea-4e59-b1ed-8941ddd1b1e8
last_modified: 2021-03-04 15:21:57.326772+00:00
path:
Bill Browder/Red Notice_ A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (1510)


title: The Complete Trailer Sailor. How to Buy, Equip, and Handle Small Cruising Sailboats
sort: Complete Trailer Sailor. How to Buy, Equip, and Handle Small Cruising Sailboats, The
timestamp: 2021-05-29 20:31:27.110317+00:00
pubdate: 2010-05-12 11:47:06+00:00
author_sort: B.Gilbert
uuid: b60412e4-cb4a-4598-bc08-663bf0289f72
last_modified: 2021-05-29 20:31:27.257265+00:00
path:
B.Gilbert/The Complete Trailer Sailor. How to Buy, Equip, and Handle Small Cruising Sailboats (1746)


title: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
sort: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
timestamp: 2021-12-30 18:02:57.890513+00:00
pubdate: 2009-09-15 07:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Dubner, Steven D. Levitt; Stephen J.
uuid: 16170ab5-67cc-4749-84d3-262a38a8cf72
last_modified: 2021-12-30 18:04:26.551530+00:00
path:
Steven D. Levitt; Stephen J. Dubner/Freakonomics_ A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2012)


title: DEEP LEARNING WITH PYTHON: Simple and Effective Tips and Tricks to Learn Deep Learning with Python
sort: DEEP LEARNING WITH PYTHON: Simple and Effective Tips and Tricks to Learn Deep Learning with Python
timestamp: 2022-03-05 08:50:51.241080+00:00
pubdate: 2020-08-23 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Smith, Benjamin
uuid: 80a11178-d4f0-45d2-960d-c45bc50024ef
last_modified: 2022-03-05 08:51:43.626888+00:00
path:
Smith, Benjamin/DEEP LEARNING WITH PYTHON_ Simple and Effective Tips and Tricks to Learn Deep Learning with Pyt (2079)


timestamp: 2022-03-09 07:52:46.275926+00:00
pubdate: 2018-11-16 23:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Eddison, Leonard
uuid: 9fd594d8-9ab3-491b-9c18-d6ca93410cef
last_modified: 2022-03-09 08:03:56.767002+00:00
title:
Python Machine Learning: A Deep Dive Into Python Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Using Tensor Flow And Keras: From Beginner To Advance

sort:
Python Machine Learning: A Deep Dive Into Python Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Using Tensor Flow And Keras: From Beginner To Advance

path:
Leonard Eddison/Python Machine Learning_ A Deep Dive Into Python Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Using Tens (2088)


timestamp: 2022-03-09 07:53:20.805160+00:00
pubdate: 2020-07-19 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Scratch, Jason
uuid: 04578c41-96c2-47e7-9b68-622fee62b525
last_modified: 2022-03-09 08:03:52.920746+00:00
title:
Python Crash Course: Python Machine Learning. Find out how you can use it for faster coding. Discover algorithms and strategy analysis for finance.

sort:
Python Crash Course: Python Machine Learning. Find out how you can use it for faster coding. Discover algorithms and strategy analysis for finance.

path:
Scratch, Jason/Python Crash Course_ Python Machine Learning. Find out how you can use it for faster coding. Di (2089)


timestamp: 2022-03-09 08:01:31.650459+00:00
pubdate: 2021-01-29 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Park, Andrew
uuid: db2b5b47-eb49-4096-a28b-4e8ac2a8e675
last_modified: 2022-03-09 08:04:21.506167+00:00
title:
Python Machine Learning: A Complete Guide for Beginners on Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python (Data Science Mastery Book 4)

sort:
Python Machine Learning: A Complete Guide for Beginners on Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python (Data Science Mastery Book 4)

path:
Park, Andrew/Python Machine Learning_ A Complete Guide for Beginners on Machine Learning and Deep Learning w (2091)


title: The Platform Delusion Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans (English Edition) B08VSB5P9Y
timestamp: 2022-09-29 14:40:29.078533+00:00
pubdate: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Unknown
uuid: 58419e05-4ea7-45ad-b00e-3829da3e82b9
last_modified: 2022-09-29 14:40:29.297623+00:00
sort:
Platform Delusion Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans (English Edition) B08VSB5P9Y, The

path:
Unknown/The Platform Delusion Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans (English Edition) B08VSB (2412)


timestamp: 2023-07-15 20:01:06.122632+00:00
pubdate: 2020-05-01 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Barrett, Tyler
uuid: cde0d50a-8d25-4abe-8306-ffc659d9ef83
last_modified: 2023-07-15 20:03:14.084327+00:00
title:
Psilocybin Growing Bible: The Complete Psilocybin Mushroom Cultivation Guide Step by Step to Grow Indoor and Outdoor Your Magic Psychedelic Mushrooms with Safety Measure.

sort:
Psilocybin Growing Bible: The Complete Psilocybin Mushroom Cultivation Guide Step by Step to Grow Indoor and Outdoor Your Magic Psychedelic Mushrooms with Safety Measure.

path:
Tyler Barrett/Psilocybin Growing Bible_ The Complete Psilocybin Mushroom Cultivation Guide Step by Step to Gr (2862)


timestamp: 2023-07-15 20:01:33.257846+00:00
pubdate: 2022-03-06 23:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Alpert, Alan
uuid: 86347d59-e5c4-4b63-8392-8cbf05f96187
last_modified: 2023-07-15 20:03:13.084359+00:00
title:
How to Grow Psilocybin Mushrooms at Home The FOOLPROOF Way: An All-Inclusive Beginner's Guide to Easily Grow Psychedelic Magic Mushrooms in Your Own Home (The Complete Guide to Psilocybin Mushrooms)

sort:
How to Grow Psilocybin Mushrooms at Home The FOOLPROOF Way: An All-Inclusive Beginner's Guide to Easily Grow Psychedelic Magic Mushrooms in Your Own Home (The Complete Guide to Psilocybin Mushrooms)

path:
Alan Alpert/How to Grow Psilocybin Mushrooms at Home The FOOLPROOF Way_ An All-Inclusive Beginner's Guide t (2863)


title: Psilocybin Mushrooms: The Perfect Guidebook to Cultivation, Growing and Knowing the Magic Effects
sort: Psilocybin Mushrooms: The Perfect Guidebook to Cultivation, Growing and Knowing the Magic Effects
timestamp: 2023-07-15 20:03:04.559600+00:00
pubdate: 2020-02-27 17:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Nature, David
uuid: 4b912d82-d55a-44ce-8677-c37a83ac41d5
last_modified: 2023-07-15 20:03:15.393794+00:00
path:
David Nature/Psilocybin Mushrooms_ The Perfect Guidebook to Cultivation, Growing and Knowing the Magic Effec (2864)


timestamp: 2023-09-30 10:14:56.506939+00:00
pubdate: 2023-07-18 00:00:00+00:00
author_sort: Howe, Neil
uuid: a9366699-4f99-4175-b424-6d30e3162409
last_modified: 2023-09-30 19:45:03.371699+00:00
title:
The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

sort:
Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End, The

path:
Neil Howe/The Fourth Turning Is Here_ What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis (3027)


# comments

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Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. The Joy of Clojure goes beyond the syntax, and shows how to write fluent, idiomatic Clojure code. Readers will learn to approach programming challenges from a Functional perspective and master the Lisp techniques that make Clojure so elegant and efficient. According to the authors, there's a right


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<p class="description">Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. The Joy of Clojure goes beyond the syntax, and shows how to write fluent, idiomatic Clojure code. Readers will learn to approach programming challenges from a Functional perspective and master the Lisp techniques that make Clojure so elegant and efficient. According to the authors, there's a right</p>


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<p>With this book, the promise of the semantic web -- in which machines can find, share, and combine data on the Web -- is not just a technical possibility, but a practical reality. <em>Programming the Semantic Web</em> demonstrates several ways to implement semantic web applications, using existing standards and patterns as well as technologies recently introduced. Each chapter walks you through a single piece of semantic technology, and explains how to use it to solve real problems.</p>


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<p>Clojure is a practical, general-purpose language that offers expressivity rivaling other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, while seamlessly taking advantage of Java libraries, services, and all of the resources of the JVM ecosystem. This book helps you learn the fundamentals of Clojure with examples relating it to the languages you know already, in the domains and topics you work with every day. See how this JVM language can help eliminate unnecessary complexity from your programming practice and open up new options for solving the most challenging problems.</p>


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Summary Clojure in Action is a hands-on tutorial for the working programmer who has written code in a language like Java or Ruby, but has no prior experience with Lisp. It teaches Clojure from the basics to advanced topics using practical, real-world application examples. Blow through the theory and dive into practical matters like unit-testing and environment set-up, all the way through building a scalable web-application using domain-specific languages, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ.About the Technology Clojure is a modern Lisp for the JVM, and it has the strengths you'd expect: first-class functions, macros, support for functional programming, and a Lisp-like, clean programming style. About this Book Clojure in Action is a practical guide focused on applying Clojure to practical programming challenges. You'll start with a language tutorial written for readers who already know OOP. Then, you'll dive into the use cases where Clojure really shines: state management, safe concurrency and multicore programming, first-class code generation, and Java interop. In each chapter, you'll first explore the unique characteristics of a problem area and then discover how to tackle them using Clojure. Along the way, you'll explore practical matters like architecture, unit testing, and set-up as you build a scalable web application that includes custom DSLs, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ. What's Inside A fast-paced Clojure tutorial Creating web services with Clojure Scaling through messaging Creating DSLs with Clojure's macro system Test-driven development with Clojure Distributed programming with Clojure, and more This book assumes you're familiar with an OO language like Java, C#, or C++ but requires no background in Lisp or Clojure itself. ================================== Table of Contents PART 1 GETTING STARTED Introduction to Clojure A whirlwind tour Building blocks of Clojure Polymorphism with multimethods Clojure and Java interop State and the concurrent world Evolving Clojure through macros PART 2 GETTING REAL Test-driven development and more Data storage with Clojure Clojure and the web Scaling through messaging Data processing with Clojure More on functional programming Protocols, records, and type More macros and DSLs


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<p>Mohawk hair-cuts in Bali, yuppies in Hong Kong and Rambo rip-offs in the movie houses of Bombay are just a few of the jarring images that Iyer brings back from the Far East.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i></p>


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<p>We all carry people inside our heads--actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know. <br><br> In <i>The Man Within My Head</i>, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene's obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene's trail from his first novel, <i>The Man Within</i>, to such later classics as <i>The Quiet American</i> and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself. <br><br> Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan,...</p>


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<p>When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.<br><br>All this he did. And then he met Sachiko.<br><br>Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese "salaryman" who seldom left the office before 10 P.M., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet...</p>


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<p>Pico Iyer has for many years described with keen perception and exacting wit the shifting textures of faraway lands anchored on a spinning globe that mixes and matches East and West. Now  he casts a philosophical eye upon this curious state of floatingness.<br><br>In the transnational village that our world has become, travel and technology fuel each other and us. As Iyer points out, "everywhere is so made up of everywhere else," and our very souls have been put into circulation. Yet even global beings need a home.<br><br>Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of departure, Iyer sets out on a quest, both physical and psychological, to find what remains constant in a world gone mobile. He begins in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life -- shops, services, sociability -- is available without a town, and in Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels. He moves on to Toronto, which has been given new life and a...</p>


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<p>The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i></p>


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<div><p>As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there--longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley  and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart--half tavern, half temple--stands Brokeland.</p><p>When ex--NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces  plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and  Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the...</p></div>


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<p><b>A Vintage Contemporaries Original<br><br>Includes:</b><br>Jim Shepard's "Tedford and the Megalodon"<br><br>Glen David Gold's "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter"<br><br>Dan Chaon's "The Bees"<br><br>Kelly Link's "Catskin"<br><br>Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman"<br><br>Carol Emshwiller's "The General"<br><br>Neil Gaiman's "Closing Time"<br><br>Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium"<br><br>Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick"<br><br>Michael Crichton's "Blood Doesn't Come Out"<br><br>Laurie King's "Weaving the Dark"<br><br>Chris Offutt's "Chuck's Bucket"<br><br>Dave Eggers's "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"<br><br>Michael Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary"<br><br>Aimee Bender's "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers"<br><br>Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That"<br><br>Karen Joy Fowler's "Private Grave 9"<br><br>Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes"<br><br>Michael Chabon's "The Martian...</p>


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SUMMARY:
1. Reading group guide for THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY by Michael Chabon Escape, literally and figuratively, is everywhere in this novel. Why do you think Michael Chabon and the characters in the novel place so much importance on it? From what and to what are the different characters in the novels escaping? When is escape good in the novel and when is it bad? Can the character of Joe Kavalier ever quit trying to escape, whether it is from place, like Prague and New York, or from relationships, like Rosa and Sammy? When Sammy leaves for LA, is this an escape, and if so, is it good or bad? Why do characters in this novel seem to be trying to escape relationships, and what are the different types of relationships that can be binding? Does the escaping end at the conclusion of the novel? 2. Compare the theme of escape in the novel to escapist nature of art. In what ways does Chabon explore this in his novel through the art of magic, and painting, and comics? How is the novel THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY an escape itself and the creation of a world unto itself for the reader? Although the novel is clearly fiction, why do you think Michael Chabon goes to such lengths to make it feel real, by adding real historical facts and fictitious footnotes? Why do you think Chabon chose to write about the medium of comics, as opposed to something else like television or the movies? 3. How are love and family portrayed in the novel? What constitutes a family at different points in the novel? What are the different types of love in the novel? How are the families of Joe, Sammy, and Rosa different, and how are these three people able to make a family themselves? What role does family play in Joe's life? Does it unnecessarily bind him to the past? Why or why not? Is there something special about America that allows for unorthodox types of families? Why do you think Sammy married Rosa? Why did she marry him? Are Sammy and Joe both fathers to Tommy? 4. Joe and Sammy create alter egos for themselves and others in their comic books. What is the significance of this? Do the comic book character give us any insight into the real characters in the book which they resemble. Does the character of Luna Moth help us to understand Rosa or Joe more? What does the character of The Escapist tell us about Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay? Why does Joe dress up as The Escapist before reuniting with Rosa and Sammy? 5. A golem, according to Webster's New World Dictionary, is 'a man artificially created by cabalistic rites: a robot.' Knowing this, what do you think the significance of the golem is in this novel. Why is it so important to preserve the golem, and what is the realization one comes to when the golem is only dirt? Where does the transforming power lie, in the dirt or some other, inexplicable, magic quality? Does the power of the creator die with the creation? Compare the creation of the golem to the creation of The Escapist and other characters by Sammy and Joe and the creation of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY by Michael Chabon. 6. Is this a happy ending? Is Sammy escaping to LA?


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<div><p>The sheltered son of a Jewish mobster, Art Bechstein leaps into his first summer as a college graduate as cluelessly as he capered through his school years. But new friends and lovers are eager to guide him through these sultry days of last-ditch youthful alienation and sexual confusion—in a blue-collar city where the mundane can sometimes appear almost magical. </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>First-novelist Chabon, with "distinctive vision" and "an elegiac, graceful style," spins a story about alienated youth that, while serving up some familiar details of sex, alcohol and drugs, "fully engages the reader in the lives of an appealing cast of characters," said PW . <br>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>'A strikingly accomplished debut' -- Sunday Times 'His style has an enviable suppleness and fluency which offers the perfect vehicle for the moral feints and shifts of the cool crowd he portrays' -- TLS 'Hard as it is to write about youth when you're young, Chabon has done it brilliantly' -- Cosmopolitan 'Mingles wit, sex and fine writing' -- Sunday Telegraph 'His control over his story, the wonderful use he makes of each description, of Pittsburgh itself, are often astonishing...a young writer with a tremendous skill' -- New York Times Book Review </p></div>


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<p>Chabon's second story collection, about couples and families suffused with yearning but crippled by broken love Paralysis in the face of insight afflicts many characters in this stunning volume. In the title story, a boy named Paul does nothing to protect his feral friend Timothy from the scorn of teachers and classmates alike, even though he knows the reasons for Timothy's irritating games. In other stories, a young alpha couple sees a future together in the defects of a house up for sale, a heartbroken thief finds his ex-girlfriend's grandma to be an easy mark, and a man drifts away from a wife who has experienced a terrible misfortune.   At times darkly funny, and others achingly beautiful, Werewolves in Their Youth renders the sad compromises of adulthood and the vivid fantasies of childhood with clarity and warmth. This ebook features a biography of the author.</p>


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<p>In these lively critical and personal essays, Chabon asserts his literary manifesto: "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period." This collection of sixteen essays champions the cause of sci-fi and westerns, superheroes and horror shows, gumshoes and goblins—all the genre novels, comics, and pulp fiction that get pushed aside when literary discussion turns serious. For Chabon, the stories that give us great pleasure are in many ways our truest, best art—the building blocks of our shared imagination. Whether he's taking up Superman or Sherlock Holmes, Poe or Proust, Chabon's emphatic mission is to explore the reasons we tell each other tales, and to offer a glimpse of his own history as reader and writer.   This ebook features a biography of the author.</p>


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<div><p></p><blockquote>A Best Book Of The Year<p></p><li><i>Time</i></li><li><i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i></li><li><i>Kansas City Star San Francisco Chronicle</i></li><li><i>NPR</i></li><li><i>Seattle Times</i><p></p></li></blockquote><p>A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, <i>Manhood for Amateurs</i> is the first sustained work of personal writing from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers addresses with his characteristic warmth and lyric wit the all-important question: What does it mean to be a man today?</p></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>[Signature]<em>Reviewed by</em> Jess WalterThey are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel begins—the same way that Philip Roth launched <em>The Plot Against America</em>—with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize–winning <em>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay</em>.Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noir—or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, <em>The Final Solution</em>, was lovely, even if the <em>New York Times Book Review</em> sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. <em>(May)</em><em>Jess Walter was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for</em> The Zero <em>and the winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for</em> Citizen Vince<em>.</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From Bookmarks Magazine</h3><p>Does <em>The Yiddish Policemen's Union </em>live up to Michael Chabon's formidable reputation? There is no consensus: some critics called the novel the spiritual heir to the Pulitzer Prize?winning <em>Adventures of Kavalier &amp; Clay</em> (2000); others thought it a disappointing aberration. As in <em>Kavalier &amp; Clay</em>, Chabon explores issues of identity, assimilation, and mass culture, but he also pays homage to the noir detective novel—with mixed results. <em>The New York Times </em>called Landsman "one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe," while the <em>Pittsburgh Post-Gazette </em>felt that the work "came nowhere close to making the cut of a Raymond Chandler novel." Critics similarly disagreed about the writing, the convoluted plot, the symbolism of the Jewish-Native American conflict, and the controversial use of Yiddish slurs and caricatures. If not a glowing success, <em>The Yiddish Policemen's Union </em>nonetheless illustrates the rare talents and creativity of its author.</p><p><em>Copyright © 2004 Phillips &amp; Nelson Media, Inc.</em></p></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The odd bond between the young Frank Zelikman and the older, dark-skinned giant, Amram, serves as the basis for Chabon's short novel about life, war and religion in the 10th century. Wandering along the Silk Road, using both knowledge and trickery to earn their way, they stumble upon Filaq, the displaced heir to the Khazar throne. The two employ their many skills to return Filaq to the throne. Braugher delivers a strong and commanding performance with a lilting rhythm to his voice that is almost hypnotic. His resonating baritone voice proves appealing for the narration. His vocalization of the strong and solemn Amram is perfect, while his lightened tone for Zelikman is also a good match. His female vocalizations aren't nearly as powerful. Chabon reads the afterword, enlightening listeners to the reasons for writing a novel he originally intended to call <em>Jews with Swords</em>. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From Bookmarks Magazine</h3><p><em>Gentlemen of the Road</em>, compared by the <em>New York Times Book Review</em> to "the stories found in 19th-century dime novels and the fantastic escapades invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard," was first published in serial form in the <em>New York Times Sunday Magazine</em>. Critics quickly pointed out the telltale signs of the multiple-installment format: new characters, settings, and plot twists in every chapter, which result in a fast, sometimes confusing, pace. Chabon’s lush, memorable prose shines here despite the obscurity of some of his language. A few critics complained of uninteresting characters and outlandish scenarios, while most complimented the charming illustrations by Gary Gianni. This 21st-century spin on the old-fashioned adventure tale won’t be to everyone’s taste, but adventurous readers wishing to experience Chabon’s amazing literary range are in for a thrilling, outrageous joyride.</p><p><em>Copyright © 2004 Phillips &amp; Nelson Media, Inc.</em></p></div>


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<p>Chabon's extraordinary story of one turbulent weekend in the life of a struggling writer, a satire of the permanent adolescence of the creative class A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn't grown up. He's now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp must finally confront the wreckage made of his past decisions.   Mordant but humane, Wonder Boys features characters as loveably flawed as any in American fiction.   This ebook features a biography of the author.</p>


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<div><h3>Review</h3>
<p>“’The most talented stand-up comedian to emerge in Britain this decade.” (Daily Telegraph (London) )  
</p>
<p>“I laughed out loud at least a dozen times. . . . To my shame, I’ll admit I sort of liked My Booky Wook.” (New York Times )  
</p>
<p>“Hilarious. . . . A richly detailed memoir that’s peppered with both evocative descriptions of the author’s homeland and memorable lines... Brand promises here another tome ‘about how it feels to be famous.’ To my shame, I can’t wait.” (Entertainment Weekly )  
</p>
<p>“A scandalous, libidinous memoir. . . . There is nothing [Brand] won’t reveal in search of a laugh and nothing he hasn’t done in search of love or experience or oblivion. . . . . An exceptional combination of candor, ardor, and humor. (The Guardian )  
</p>
<p>A child’s garden of vices, <em>My Booky Wook</em> is also a relentless ride with a comic mind clearly at the wheel. . . . The bloke can write. He rhapsodizes about heroin better than anyone since Jim Carroll. . . . Compelling. (New York Times Book Review ) 
</p>

<h3>Product Description</h3>
<p>Russell Brand learned early on to make a joke of fear and failure. From a troubled childhood in industrial Essex, England, to his descent into addictions to alcohol, drugs, and sex in the seamy underbelly of London, Brand has seen his share of both and miraculously lived to tell the tale. In <em>My Booky Wook</em> he leads readers on a rollicking journey through his disastrous school career, his infamous antics on MTV, and his multifarious sexual adventures. But this irreverent memoir is a story not simply of struggle but also of redemption, a testament to the difficulty of discovering what you want from life and the remarkable power of a bloody-minded determination to get it. <em>My Booky Wook</em> is a giddy trip through the brilliant mind of one of Britain's most valuable exports. 
</p></div>


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<div><p>A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.</p><p>**</p></div>


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<p class="description">Is it possible to die a happy death? This is the central question of Camus' astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young Algerian, Mersault, who defies society's rules by committing a murder and escaping punishment, then experimenting with different ways of life and finally dying a happy man. In many ways, "A Happy Death" is a fascinating first sketch for "The Outsider", but it can also be seen as a candid self-portrait, drawing on Camus' memories of his youth, travels and early relationships. It is infused with lyrical descriptions of the sun-drenched Algiers of his childhood - the place where, eventually, Mersault is able to find peace and die 'without anger, without hatred, without regret'.</p>


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<div><p>Camus considers the meaning of existence and the rationale (which he rejects) for suicide. Not a cheery fellow, but interesting as a philosopher.</p><p>**</p></div>


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<p>By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he shows how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny. As old regimes throughout the world collapse, The Rebel resonates as an ardent, eloquent, and supremely rational voice of conscience for our tumultuous times.<br><br>Translated from the French by Anthony Bower.


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<p class="description">Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus, The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the life and work of one of the 20th century's greatest novelists. Translated from the French by David Hapgood."The First Man is perhaps the most honest book Camus ever wrote, and the most sensual...Camus is...writing at the depth of his powers...It is a work of genius."--The New Yorker"Fascinating...The First Man helps put all of Camus's work into a clearer perspective and brings into relief what separates him from the more militant literary personalities of his day...Camus's voice has never been more personal."--New York Times Book Review</p>


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SUMMARY: Four of these stories are set on the shimmering desert fringes of Albert Camus' native Algeria, and all of them first appeared in 1957, the year when he became the youngest French writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.


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<div><p>History / Characters: 18 males, 2 females</p><p>Scenery: Exterior</p><p>Caligula explores the absolutism of power and the catastrophe of tyranny. Caesar summons his council, whose first thought is of taxes. Very well, says Caesar, if taxes are more important than human hearts, he may safely kill without conscience. He pursues the logic to the bitter end. In the last scene, he is murdered, an ending he knew was inevitable. "Has given the theatre a red hot glow." N.Y. World Telegram &amp; Sun.</p><p>**</p></div>


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<font class="Apple-style-span" face="'MS Shell Dlg 2', sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.</span></font>


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<div><p>The Stranger is as beautiful as any work of art can hope to be. It is in the latter parts of the book, where Mersault's words have a lyrical power not seen previous, that the English translation achieves the haunting effect that must be even more prevalent in the French. The first thing readily obvious is that the character has no emotional connection to what he experiences; he simply experiences. Thus, Camus utilizes an American style, terse and detached. Some reviewers were off put by this. "How could he not care that his mother died? " Attaching immorality to Mersault merely shows a total misunderstanding of the book. Camus believed in "absurd freedom," life has no inner value and is futilely cut short, but it is up to us to determine our life in such uncertainty. If one doesn't interpret life, emotion doesn't exist. But the values that society has incriminate you if you don't conform. They make you strange. They take no account of individuality. That is the peril of the main character after a bizarre series of events on a sun drenched beach. The power of Camus is that even though he creates such a bleak, hopeless human situation the characters still go on as best they can, perhaps even attaining happiness. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," to quote The Myth of Sisyphus. That is also the power and beauty of mankind. /BEST VALUE /FAST SERVICE/OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SERVICE/</p><p>**</p></div>


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<p class="description">Do your students enjoy a good laugh? Do they like to be scared? Or do they just like a book with a happy ending? No matter what their taste, our Creative Short Stories series has the answer.We've taken some of the world's best stories from dark, musty anthologies and brought them into the light, giving them the individual attention they deserve. Each book in the series has been designed with today's young reader in mind. As the words come to life, students will develop a lasting appreciation for great literature.The humor of Mark Twain...the suspense of Edgar Allan Poe...the danger of Jack London...the sensitivity of Katherine Mansfield. Creative Short Stories has it all and will prove to be a welcome addition to any library.</p>


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<div><p> </p><p>What makes a story a story? What is style? What's the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in <i>How Fiction Works</i>, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from <i>What Maisie Knew </i>to <i>Make Way for Ducklings</i>—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. </p><p></p>The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster's <i>Aspects of the Novel </i>and Strunk and White's <i>The Elements of Style</i>. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.</div>


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<p>A <i>New York Times </i>Notable Book of the Year, a <i>Washington Post</i> Best Book of the Year<br><br>Spanning the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), <i>Against the Day</i> unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.</p>


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<div><p>Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, <em>Gravity's Rainbow</em> is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's <em>Ulysses</em> was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.</p><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, <em>Gravity's Rainbow</em>, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky. </p><p>Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. </p><p>That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.</p><p>Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. <em>Gravity's Rainbow</em> uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>Novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 1973. The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is an American working for Allied Intelligence in London. Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop's erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist. Slothrop's quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader's interpretation. The novel won the National Book Award for fiction in 1974. -- <em>The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature</em></p></div>


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<p><b><i>New York Times Book Review</i></b><br> <b>"Exemplary... dazzling and ludicrous. "</b><br> <br> It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left.<br> <br> Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any...</p>


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<p>A Best Book of the Year for the <i>Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle</i>, and <i>Los Angeles Times</i><br><br>Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era.<br><br>It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another one of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except this one usually leads to trouble.<br><br>In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .</p>


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<p>"Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . ." On California's fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the "Nixonian Reaction," still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. . . . <br><br>Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture—spy thrillers, ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies—<i>Vineland</i> emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in <i>The New York Times Book Review</i> "that rarest of birds: a major political...</p>


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<p>The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men—one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose—and "V.," the unknown woman of the title.</p>


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<div><p>A <i>Time </i>magazine and <i>New York Times</i> Best Book of the Year</p><p>Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. <br><br>Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason and Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.<br><br>Along the way they encounter a plentiful...</p></div>


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<p>Compiling five short stories originally written between 1959 and 1964, <i>Slow Learner </i>showcases Thomas Pynchon's writing before the publication of his first novel <i>V. </i>The stories compiled here are "The Small Rain," "Low-lands," "Entropy," "Under the Rose," and "The Secret Integration," along with an introduction by Pynchon himself.</p>


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<p>The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.</p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>Cult novel about French Generation X. Book sold 40000 copies in France and won may prizes for the author who is a poet and father figure of new school of writing and literary magazine Perpendiculare.</p>


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<div><h3>From Booklist</h3><p>The controversial French author of <em>The Elementary Particles</em> (2000) turns in another unremittingly bleak novel. In addition to amplifying his views on the decadence of Western civilization, Houellebecq displays an absolutely chilling prescience in his depiction of a violent Muslim sect. Misanthropic, sexually frustrated bureaucrat Michel embarks on a "Thai Tropic" package tour, amusing himself with snide commentary on his fellow vacationers and frequent visits to sex clubs. Although he is attracted to business executive Valerie, he has trouble engaging her in small talk. However, when they return to Paris, their relationship quickly turns passionate as they explore sadomasochism and public sex. Michel talks Valerie and her business partner into marketing sex tours to the Third World, selling them on his theory that Westerners have lost touch with their own sexuality. But when they decide to sample one of their own tours, their resort becomes a flashpoint for Islamic hatred. Houellebecq is unrelenting as he meticulously constructs a world that mirrors his own cold vision and that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. <em>Joanne Wilkinson</em><br><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>“A terrific writer, funny and prophetic . . . feverishly alive to the world around him.” *– The New York Times Book Review<br></p><p><em>“Calculated to poke, prod, engorge, enrage and amuse. . . . It’s dangerous in the way that literature is meant to be dangerous—that is, it awakens neglected sensibilities.”—</em>The New York Observer*<br></p><p>“Houellebecq’s writing has a raw, disquieting brilliance. . . .It’s ‘genius.’”—*The Washington Post<br></p><p><em>“Brilliant, charming, puzzling, annoying and sometimes downright repulsive.” —</em>The Denver Post<br></p><p><em>“Full, acidic, self-flagellating . . . [</em>Platform<em> has] earned Mr. Houellebecq the status of conversation piece, agent provocateur and savage messiah.” —</em>The New York Times *<br></p><p>“Remarkable . . . hilarious. . . . [Houellebecq] writes from the soul of a despairing, acutely lucid bureaucrat on Viagra.” —<em>Los Angeles Times Book Review<br></em> <br>“Scaldingly honest . . . [<strong>Platform</strong>] takes no prisoners as to prevailing terms of politically correct or any-other-way-correct discourse. . . . It frequently uses jarring juxtaposition to dislocate us from complacencies, received wisdoms or even moderate comfort. . . . The analysis is broad and extremely knowledgeable . . . [with] quirky and sometimes horrific observations on everything from ecology to airport gift shops to incest. . . . Bracing.” —<em>St. Louis Post-Dispatch<br></em><br>“The most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier. . . . The trajectory of Houellebecq’s world view will be worth following.” —<em>The New Yorker</em><br></p><p>“An outstandingly powerful and relevant novel about sex, death, and Islam.” —Hanif Kureishi<br></p><p>“Astute, graceful, sexually preoccupied, occasionally alarming. . . . Eviscerat[es] the cultural moment.” —<em>The Baltimore Sun<br></em> <br>“The characters in <strong>Platform</strong><em> </em>are detestable. . . . And the hatred [Michel] expresses . . . is loathsome. . . . But what is wrong with this? Why should literature not be as cruel as life itself? . . . This book offers us an ‘I’ we can relate to–hate, love, fear–without being pointedly obstructed by the author’s tormented cosmology. . . . Moving.” —<em>San Francisco Chronicle<br></em><br>“Brilliant. . . . Reads like a shot. . . . The excitement of <em>Platform </em>is the force with which Houellebecq says the unsayable, his determination to cut through moral equivocation.” —<em>Salon</em> <br></p><p>“[A] dirty novel of ideas. . . . Houellebecq’s sex scenes are hot and bountiful.” —<em>Entertainment Weekly<br></em><br>“An extraordinary blend of pornography, satire and diatribe . . . Houellebecq is an undeniably gifted writer–I found myself reading on, even when the impulse to throw the book across the room grew strong.” —Charles Matthews, <em>San Jose Mercury News<br></em><br>“Odd, subversive entertainment.” —<em>The Boston Globe</em><br><em><br></em>“What’s at stake is the desacralizing of sex, its final leap into the realm of pure commodity, the role of implacable consumption in cultural imperialism. . . . It’s not the kind of book you only read once.” —*The Village Voice<br></p><p><em>“Cynical and anomic . . . literary and complex.” –</em>The Atlantic Monthly<br><em><br>“Shockingly vile and shockingly banal, written with an ear toward pissing off just about everyone. . . . Houellebecq’s novel is tough to put down no matter how much you’d like to. . . . Like good porn it’s increasingly difficult to draw your eyes away as it oozes toward climax.” —</em>Austin Chronicle<br><em> <br>“A work of considerable imagination and wit. Even when the reader is most repelled, he may want to view the writer with grudging admiration. . . . [Michel Renault’s rants] are very funny, and . . . very true.” —</em>The Sunday Star-Ledger* (Newark, NJ)<br></p><p>“<strong>Platform</strong> cuts precisely to the core of every imaginable big-picture problem facing the world. . . . Houellebecq knows how to get a rise out of his readers. . . . His prejudices are serious, and current.” —<em>American Book Review<br></em><br>“Houellebecq writes with an honesty and an anomic conviction that raises his novels, beyond any single troubling moment, toward genius.” —<em>Toronto Globe and Mail<br></em><br>“The most important book of the year–and perhaps of the century thus far. . . . Dazzling and prescient. . .Houellebecq [is] one of the finest novelists of ideas alive.” <em>—Evening Standard</em> (London)<br></p><p>“Brilliant. . .A thrilling read, close to Swift’s <strong>A Modest Proposal</strong> in its impact.” —<em>Daily Telegraph</em> (London)<br></p><p>“Extraordinarily good. . . Houellebecq is one of the few novelists working in any language who properly understands the tensions of the present age. He is also utterly fearless in articulating this.” <em>—New Statesman</em><br></p><p>“Houellebecq writes with humor as sharp as a razor’s edge. There is bravery and even bravado in [his] prose. He alone among contemporary writers is prepared to do what the likes of Orwell and Huxley did and put up a mirror to our past and project its reflection on the future.” —<em>Financial Times</em> (London)<br><em><br></em></p></div>


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<div class="ff"><div class="blurb">The scene is England 50 years after its conquest by the Soviets. The plot is to turn the occupying government upside down.<br><br>A
 handsome and highly sexed young Russian cavalry officer, Alexander 
Petrovsky, joins the plot and learns to his regret that politics and 
playmates don't mix.<br><br>"Funny, cynical, captivating--Amis makes an 
implausible situation almost believable, then lets his characters worry 
their way out." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)<br><br></div><div class="spacer"> </div></div>


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<div><p>"Contains all the best and familiar Amis qualities -- including superb sexual comedy." <br>—<em>Sunday Times</em><br><strong><em> </em></strong><br>Like all good medieval coaching inns, the Green Man in Fareham, Hertfordshire, boasts a resident, if retired, ghost: Dr Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy, rumoured to have killed his wife. The landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole witness to the renaissance of the malign Underhill. Led by curiosity and an anxious desire to vindicate his sanity, Allington uncovers the key to Underhill's satanic secrets. And the skeletons in the cupboard of Allington's own domestic affairs are just rattling to get out, too.</p><h3>From the Publisher</h3><p>7 1-hour cassettes </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>KINGSLEY AMIS was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. After the publication of <strong>Lucky Jim<strong><em> <em>in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including <strong>The Alteration</strong>, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, </em>*The Old Devils</em></strong>, *winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and </strong>The Biographer's Moustache<em>, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in October 1995. </em></p></div>


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<div><p>In this hilarious, outrageous and wickedly funny story of Jake and his lost libido, Kingsley Amis does not pull any punches, but takes some well-aimed swipes at the crankier fringes of psychotherapy and at sex--1970s style. </p><p>"Vintage Amis...he has probably given as much pleasure as any novelist of his generation." (Scotsman)</p><h3>From the Publisher</h3><p>7 1.5-hour cassettes </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Kingsley Amis was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. After the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils, winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and The Biographer's Moustache, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in October 1995. </p></div>


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Winner of the 1986 Booker Prize. Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon.


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<div><p>Set in North London, a retired librarian is surrounded by his widowed sister, a hopeless son, a failed poet brother and a lesbian niece. From the author of "Lucky Jim" and "I Like it Here". The author won the Booker Prize in 1986 for "The Old Devils".</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Another example of the new, mellower Amis, who wrote the bestselling (in Britain) The Old Devils , this is a pleasant, rambling, sometimes touching tale of Harry Caldecote, a retired library executive, and the assorted people in his life. These include Fiona, a self-destructive alcoholic related to one of his former wives; Bunty, the daughter of another, who is in an unhappy lesbian relationship; his ineffectual brother Freddie, married to a termagant; Clare, his capable but unambitious sister; and Piers, his son, a witty, elusive cadger. In his bemused way Harry worries about all of them, does his best for them and only very occasionally succeeds in bettering their lot. The character sketches are sharp, Amis's habitual misogyny is very muted, and there are even a couple of sympathetic and sophisticated Asian shopkeepers. A much kinder book than most of his work, then, but with the same sense of muddle and pitifully limited horizons we have come to associate with the Amis world. And the oddities of his style increasingly are coming to seem as carefully stylized, and classic in their way, as those of P. G. Wodehouse. <br>Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>"We're a dime breed," laments a pub keeper in Amis's new novel. "Dine out like the dinosaurs." Amis's ear for the delightful shortcuts of spoken English has never been keener, nor his sense of social comedy more perceptive. What prevents Folks from being one of his best works is the colorlessness of its protagonist, Harry Caldecote. A retired librarian described as (get this!) "soft, self-indulgent, languid, but alert against any threat of exertion," Harry is a bore. The eccentric doings of his extended family (scapegrace son, relentlessly henpecked brother, ill-assorted hangers-on by marriage) propel the novel, but Harry and his sense of guilt over his kin slow it down. For collections where Amis is popular. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/90.<br><em>- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.</em><br>Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<p class="description">Douglas Yandell, a young-ish music critic, is enlisted by Kitty Vandervane to keep an eye on her roving husband - the eminent conductor and would-be radical Sir Roy - as he embarks on yet another affair. Roy, meanwhile, wants Douglas as an alibi for his growing involvement with Sylvia, an unsuitably young woman who loves nothing more than to shock and provoke. Life soon becomes extremely complicated as Douglas finds himself caught up in a frantic, farcical tangle of relationships, rivalry and scandal.  Girl, 20 is a merciless send-up of 1970s London's permissive society from a master of uproarious comedy.  With a new introduction by Howard Jacobson.</p>


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<div><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer, at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. </p><p>Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a widowed beauty who practices "conspicuous polyandry," an unfocused psychiatrist, an unbelieving chaplain, and a charming alcoholic. </p><p>"Amis delights in combining espionage, violence, love and religious skepticism. Such disparate elements, like dishpans and fire rings, challenge his juggler's dexterity. Who wins? The reader!" (Publisher's Source) </p><h3>From the Publisher</h3><p>8 1.5-hour cassettes </p>

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<p class="description">SUMMARY: Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling.Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim was published in 1954, and is a hilarious satire of British university life. Jim Dixon is bored by his job as a medieval history lecturer. His days are only improved by pulling faces behind the backs of his superiors as he tries desperately to survive provincial bourgeois society, an unbearable 'girlfriend' and petty humiliation at the hands of Professor Welch.Lucky Jim is one of the most famous and influential of all British post-War novels.</p>


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<p>A remarkable series of lectures on the art of creating effective nonfiction by one of the 20th century's most profound writers and thinkers--now available for the first time in print. </p><p>Culled from sixteen informal lectures <strong>Ayn Rand</strong> delivered to a select audience in the late 1960s, this remarkable work offers indispensable guidance to the aspiring writer of nonfiction while providing readers with a fascinating discourse on art and creation. Based on the concept that the ability to create quality nonfiction is a skill that can be learned like any other, <strong>The Art of Nonfiction</strong> takes readers through the writing process, step-by-step, providing insightful observations and invaluable techniques along the way. </p><p>In these edited transcripts, Rand discusses the psychological aspects of writing, and the different roles played by the conscious and unconscious minds. From choosing a subject to polishing a draft to mastering an individual writing style--for authors of theoretical works or those leaning toward journalistic reporting--this crucial resource introduces the words and ideas of one of our most enduring authors to a new generation. </p><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>In <em>The Art of Nonfiction</em>, Ayn Rand spends six pages explaining why something she wrote about the launching of <em>Apollo II</em> is far superior to something Loudon Wainwright wrote about it; throughout the book, she uses her own work as examples of exemplary writing. Somehow, though, Rand's robust ego is less unbearable here than it is in, say, her <em>Art of Fiction</em>. </p><p>This book is a frank demystification of the writing process that originated as a series of lectures given in 1969 to friends and other potential contributors to Rand's magazine, <em>The Objectivist</em>. "Any person who can speak English grammatically can learn to write nonfiction," Rand declares. All you need "is what you need for life in general: an orderly method of thinking." Rand values clarity above all else in nonfiction writing, and it is her own clearheadedness that makes this book appealing. Within these pages, Rand discusses subject and theme, audience, philosophy, outlines, writing, and editing. She takes swipes at <em>The New Yorker</em> for its "'brilliant' essays that say nothing," and at William Buckley, whose "trademark is to use words he probably spends half his time looking up in the dictionary." She rails against disruptions ("When I was writing <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>, I accepted neither day nor evening appointments, with rare exceptions, for roughly thirteen years"). And she is an exacting taskmaster who demands that you not choose a lesser aspect of a subject than "the deepest one that interests you and that you can do." Finally, says Rand, you must write from a position of complete confidence and omnipotence. "While you are writing," she says, "you must be God's perfect creature (if there were a God)." <em>--Jane Steinberg</em></p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>In 1969, Rand gave a series of lectures to followers who wished to write for her Objectivist magazine. Best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand later wrote extensively on the philosophy that underlay her fiction. This is a transcript of her lectures on writing nonfiction, edited by Rand scholar Mayhew, who previously edited Rand's Marginalia. Though frequently sound, Rand's advice is obscured by philosophical jargon and has little to offer to the general reader seeking guidance on how to write. Moreover, readers may be put off by Rand's dogmatic style, her use of examples from her own writing, and her assumption that readers share her political beliefs. One of Rand's more helpful hints is to avoid misleading titles; given her view of writing as a technical process that anyone can learn, the editors clearly ignored her advice. Recommended for libraries where there is strong interest in Rand's life and work. Susan M. Colowick, North Olympic Lib. Syst., Port Angeles, WA <br />Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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Anthology containing:

         We the Living by Ayn Rand

         Anthem by Ayn Rand

         The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

         Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

         Night of January 16th by Ayn Rand

         The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection From Her Unpublished Fiction by Ayn Rand

         For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Ayn Rand

         The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism by Ayn Rand

         Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand

         The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand

         Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand

         The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism From a to Z by Ayn Rand

         The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand

         Journals of Ayn Rand by Ayn Rand

         Ayn Rand Reader by Ayn Rand

         Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Ayn Rand

         The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand

         The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand


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<b>Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest, most ultra-Dickensian places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement--and a great gift for its publisher.</b> <br><br>     In its simplest terms, this is a novel about the long-term friendship of four classmates from a Massachusetts liberal arts college who come to New York to make their way; unlike most such college friendships the four never lose touch over the years and decades. There is Willem, an actor from the West who becomes a Ryan Gosling-type indie film star and heartthrob; Malcolm, an Upper East Side buppie who becomes a noted architect; JB, a painter of Haitian/Brooklyn middle class descent whose Basquiat-type portraits of his friends earn him art world fame and fortune; and Jude St. Francis, a...


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>As the author of twenty bestselling books, John Grisham has set the standard for legal thrillers since the debut of <em>The Firm</em> in 1991. Enjoy this Q&amp;A--as well as a personal note to Amazon readers--from John Grisham. </p><p><strong>1. Your new novel starts off where most courtroom dramas end--with the verdict. Where did you get the idea to reverse the usual order of events this time around?</strong><br>The actual trial is not a terribly significant part of the story. Most all of the action and intrigue begins after the trial is over, with the verdict and the subsequent appeal.   </p><p><strong>2. <em>The Appeal</em> overtly suggests that elected judges can be bought. If the novel is meant as a cautionary tale, what's next--the Presidential primaries?</strong><br>Why not? Over one billion dollars will be spent next year in the Presidential primaries and general election. With that kind of money floating around, anything can be bought.   </p><p><strong>3. Speaking of electoral politics, you've been more vocal recently about your political views ... first supporting Jim Webb for Senate and now endorsing Hillary Clinton for the White House. Have you given any thought to running for office yourself?</strong><br>No. I made that mistake 25 years ago, and promised myself I would never do it again. I enjoy watching and participating in politics from the sidelines, but it's best to keep some distance.   </p><p><strong>4. This is your first legal thriller in three years. How did it feel to get back to the genre that started it all, and can fans expect another thriller from you next year?</strong><br>I still enjoy writing the legal thrillers, and don't plan to get too far away from them. Obviously, they have been very good to me, and they remain popular. I plan to write one a year for the next several years.   </p><p><strong>5. Your nonfiction book <em>The Innocent Man</em> continues to be a bestseller in paperback. In your ongoing work with The Innocence Project, have you come across another story of the wrongfully convicted that begs to be written as nonfiction?</strong><br>There are literally hundreds of great stories out there about wrongfully convicted defendants. I am continually astounded by these stories, and I resist the temptation to take the plunge again into non-fiction.   </p><p><strong>6. What's on your bedside reading list at the moment?</strong><br>1. <em>The Nine</em> by Jeffrey Toobin<br>2.  Eric Clapton's autobiography<br>3.  <em>East of Eden</em> by John Steinbeck.   </p><hr><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>A Mississippi jury returns a $41-million verdict against a chemical company accused of dumping carcinogenic waste into a small town's water supply. The company's ruthless billionaire CEO is thwarted and the good guys (a courageous young woman who lost her husband and child and her two lawyers who've gone half a million dollars in debt preparing her case) receives its just reward. This sounds like the end of a Grisham legal thriller, but instead it's the beginning of a book-length lesson in how greed and big business have corrupted our electoral and judicial systems. Grisham's characters are over-the-top. The CEO and the other equally overdone villains—his venal trophy wife, a self-serving senator and a pair of smarmy political fixers—as well as the unbelievably good-hearted, self-sacrificing lawyers and an honorable state judge, are one dimensional. Michael Beck, with his natural Southern drawl, does a fine job of adding credibility and nuance to the large cast. But his efforts are for naught. In fact, the more he makes us feel for these characters, the less apt we are to be satisfied with the sourball moral of Grisham's downbeat discourse. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>This addictive tale of a young lawyer defending a black Vietnam war hero who kills the white druggies who raped his child in tiny Clanton, Mississippi, is John Grisham's first novel, and his favorite of his first six. He polished it for three years and every detail shines like pebbles at the bottom of a swift, sunlit stream. Grisham is a born legal storyteller and his dialogue is pitch perfect.</p><p>The plot turns with jeweled precision. Carl Lee Hailey gets an M-16 from the Chicago hoodlum he'd saved at Da Nang, wastes the rapists on the courthouse steps, then turns to attorney Jake Brigance, who needs a conspicuous win to boost his career. Folks want to give Carl Lee a second medal, but how can they ignore premeditated execution? The town is split, revealing its social structure. Blacks note that a white man shooting a black rapist would be acquitted; the KKK starts a new Clanton chapter; the NAACP, the ambitious local reverend, a snobby, Harvard-infested big local firm, and others try to outmaneuver Jake and his brilliant, disbarred drunk of an ex-law partner. Jake hits the books and the bottle himself. Crosses burn, people die, crowds chant "Free Carl Lee!" and "Fry Carl Lee!" in the antiphony of America's classical tragedy. Because he's lived in Oxford, Mississippi, Grisham gets compared to Faulkner, but he's really got the lean style and fierce folk moralism of John Steinbeck. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>In this lively novel, Grisham explores the uneasy relationship of blacks and whites in the rural South. His treatment is balanced and humane, if not particularly profound, slighting neither blacks nor whites. Life becomes complicated in the backwoods town of Clanton, Mississippi, when a black worker is brought to trial for the murder of the two whites who raped and tortured his young daughter. Everyone gets involved, from Klan to NAACP. Grisham's pleasure in relating the byzantine complexities of Clanton politics is contagious, and he tells a good story. There are touches of humor in the dialogue; the characters are salty and down-to-earth. An enjoyable book, which displays a respect for Mississippi ways and for the contrary people who live there. Recommended.<br><em>- David Keymer, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Utica</em><br>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<p class="description">If you thought Mitch McDeere was in trouble in The Firm, waituntil you meet Kyle McAvoy, The AssociateKyle McAvoy grew up in his father’s small-town law office in York, Pennsylvania. He excelled in college, was elected editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal, and his future has limitless potential. But Kyle has a secret, a dark one, an episode from college that he has tried to forget. The secret, though, falls into the hands of the wrong people, and Kyle is forced to take a job he doesn’t want—even though it’s a job most law students can only dream about.Three months after leaving Yale, Kyle becomes an associate at the largest law firm in the world, where, in addition to practicing law, he is expected to lie, steal, and take part in a scheme that could send him to prison, if not get him killed.With an unforgettable cast of characters and villains—from Baxter Tate, a drug-addled trust fund kid and possible rapist, to Dale, a pretty but seemingly quiet former math teacher who shares Kyle’s “cubicle” at the law firm, to two of the most powerful and fiercely competitive defense contractors in the country—and featuring all the twists and turns that have made John Grisham the most popular storyteller in the world, The Associate is vintage Grisham.From the Hardcover edition.</p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Troy Phelan, a 78-year-old eccentric and the 10th-richest man in America, is about to read his last will and testament, divvying up an estate worth $11 billion. Phelan's three ex-wives, their grasping spawn, a legion of lawyers, several psychiatrists, and a plethora of sound technicians wait breathlessly, all eyes glued to digital monitors as they watch the old man read his verdict. But Phelan shocks everyone with a bizarre, last-gasp attempt to redistribute the spoils, setting in motion a legal morality tale of a contested will, sin, and redemption.</p><p>Our hero, Nate O'Riley--a washed-up, alcoholic litigator with two ruined marriages in his wake and the IRS on his tail--is dispatched to the Brazilian wetlands in search of a mysterious heir named in the will. After a harrowing trip upriver to a remote settlement in the Pantanal, he encounters Rachel Lane, a pure-hearted missionary living with an indigenous tribe and carrying out "God's work." Rachel's grave dedication and kindness impress the jaded lawyer, so much that a nasty bout of dengue fever leads him to a vision that could change his life.</p><p>Back in the States, the legal proceedings drag on and Grisham has a high time with Phelan's money-hungry descendents, a regrettable bunch who squandered millions, married strippers, got druggy, and befriended the Mob. The youngest son, Ramble, is a multi-pierced, tattoo-covered malcontent with big dreams for his rock band, the Demon Monkeys. Will Nate get straight with Rachel's aid? Do the greedy heirs get theirs? What's the real legacy of a lifetime's work? <em>The Testament</em> is classic Grisham: a down-and-out lawyer, a lot of money, an action-packed pursuit, and the highest issues at stake. It's not just about great characters; it's about the question of what character is. <em>--Rebekah Warren</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>A traditional gangbuster Grisham opening?in which an aged billionaire outfoxes his greedy heirs by signing a bombshell will, then jumps to his death?gives little clue how this seductive tale will develop. The novel also features the usual attorney hero and legal action, but Grisham confounds expectations by sweeping readers into adventure in the Brazilian wetlands and, more urgently, into a man's search for spiritual renewal. Nate O'Riley, 48, is a drunk. He's also a top D.C. attorney who, winding up his fourth rehab stint in 10 years, is asked by his firm to find one Rachel Lane. The illegitimate daughter to whom the firm's client, tycoon Troy Phelan, has left his entire $11 billion fortune, Rachel is a missionary-physician tending Indians somewhere in Brazil's Pantanal region. Nate's experiences there prove nightmarish, including fierce storms, a plane crash, dangerous animals, hunger and, finally, dengue fever, which nearly kills him. But as Grisham crosscuts from Brazil to D.C. and the sleazy machinations of Phelan's other children and their lawyers to negate Phelan's will, readers will wonder which is the real jungle; never has Grisham revealed so nakedly his contempt for the legal profession. What Grisham holds dear is made clear in his unforgettable portrait of Rachel, whose serenity and integrity stun Nate, while inspiring him to forsake forever his lust for booze, power and money and to turn toward God. The message (which isn't entirely new to Grisham; see The Street Lawyer) and the storytelling that conveys it aren't subtle, but Grisham's smart use of the suspense novel to explore questions of being and faith puts him squarely in the footsteps of Dickens and Graham Greene. Sincere, exciting and tinged with wonder, this novel is going to sell like an angel, and deservedly so. Agent, David Gernert. 2.8 million first printing. (On-sale date: Feb. 1)<br>Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Law professor Ray Atlee and his prodigal brother, Forrest, are summoned home to Clanton, Mississippi, by their ailing father to discuss his will. But when Ray arrives the judge is already dead, and the one-page document dividing his meager estate between the two sons seems crystal clear. What it doesn't mention, however, is the small fortune in cash Ray discovers hidden in the old man's house--$3 million he can't account for and doesn't mention to brother Forrest, either.</p><p>Ray's efforts to keep his find a secret, figure out where it came from, and hide it from a nameless extortioner, who seems to know more about it than he does, culminate in a denouement with an almost biblical twist. It's a slender plot to hang a thriller on, and in truth it's not John Grisham's best in terms of pacing, dramatic tension, and interesting characters (except for Harry Rex, a country lawyer who was the judge's closest friend and in many ways is the father Ray wishes he'd had. He's so vivid he jumps off the page). But Grisham's legions of fans are likely to enjoy <em>The Summons</em> even if it lacks the power of some of his classic earlier books, like <em>The Firm</em>, <em>The Brethren</em>, and <em>The Testament</em>. <em>--Jane Adams</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Last year's historical family drama A Painted House and the Christmas satire Skipping Christmas demonstrated that Grisham is willing to take risks. But fans of his legal thrillers already knew that, with his last three, particularly The Testament, making Play-Doh of the rules of the genre. Sometimes Grisham's friskiness works, and sometimes it doesn't. There's much to admire in his newest thriller, particularly his colorful evocation of a Deep South legal setting, his first use of this milieu since his debut novel, A Time to Kill, and some finely drawn characters. Even so, this isn't one of his most satisfying books, for while the narrative engages, it never catches fire. The setup is prime Grisham: Ray Atlee, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, is summoned home to Clanton, Miss., to the deathbed of his father, legendary judge Reuben V. Atlee; also summoned is Ray's younger brother, Forrest, a chronic drug abuser. Ray arrives home first, to find the judge dead and more than $3 million stored in boxes in a cabinet cash not mentioned in the judge's will and whose source baffles Ray. Grisham does a wonderful job of digging into Ray's increasingly frazzled head as, stunned, the professor decides to keep the money a secret, even from Forrest, and to safeguard it until he figures out what to do. Greed, frayed nerves and fear plague Ray during the coming weeks, as he investigates, scrambling from one hideout to the next, becoming ever more aware that someone dangerous is following him and wants the money. Several scenarios Ray's indulging his passion for flying small planes; his playing some of the cash at casinos to test it for counterfeiting; his dealings with screwed-up Forrest and his father's cronies, notably an ex-mistress and a wily old attorney propel the story, and Ray, forward to the source of the money, a revelation that allows Grisham to take his usual swipes at big lawyerism but which will register for many as anticlimactic though there's a final twist that as nifty and unexpected as anything Grisham has wrought. Grisham's writing is silky smooth here, his storytelling captivating; but the novel's lack of action a stone thrown through a window is as violent as it gets and the dissipation of all tension too far from the end make this, while a clever tale, one that's just too quiet. Grisham's fans might as well trim their nails while reading this, because they sure won't be biting them. <br>Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>John Grisham is back with his latest courtroom conundrum, <em>The Street Lawyer</em>. This time the lord of legal thrillers dives deep into the world of the homeless, particularly their barely audible legal voice in a world dominated by large, all-powerful law firms. Our hero, Michael Brock, is on the fast track to partnership at D.C.'s premier law firm, Sweeny &amp; Drake. His dream of someday raking in a million-plus a year is finally within reach. Nothing can stop him, not even 90-hour workweeks and a failing marriage--until he meets DeVon Hardy, a.k.a. "Mister," a Vietnam vet with a grudge against his landlord--and a few lawyers to fry. Hardy, with no clear motive, takes Brock and eight of his colleagues hostage in a boardroom, demanding their tax returns and interrogating them with a conviction that would have put perpetrators of the Spanish Inquisition to shame. Hardy, a man of few words and a lot of ammunition, mumbles cryptically, "Who are the evictors?" as he points a .44 automatic within inches of Brock's face. The violent outcome of the hostage situation triggers an abrupt soul-searching for the young lawyer, and Hardy's mysterious question continues to haunt him. Brock learns that Hardy had been in and out of homeless shelters most of his life, but he had recently begun paying rent in a rundown building; that means he has legal recourse when a big money-making outfit such as Sweeny &amp; Drake boots him with no warning. When Brock realizes that his profession caters to the morally challenged, he sets out on an aimless search through the dicier side of D.C., ending up at the 14th Street Legal Clinic. The clinic's director, a gargantuan man named Mordecai Green, woos Brock to the clinic with a $90,000 cut in pay and the chance to redeem his soul. Brock takes it--and some of the story's credibility along with it; it's hard to believe that a Yale graduate who sacrificed everything--including his marriage--to succeed in the legal profession would quickly jump at the opportunity for low-paying, charitable work. However, Brock's search for corruption in the swanky upper echelons of Sweeny &amp; Drake (via the toughest streets of D.C.) is filled with colorful characters and realistic, gritty descriptions. In the <em>The Street Lawyer</em>, Grisham once again defends the voiceless and powerless. In the words of Mordecai Green, "That's justice, Michael. That's what street law is all about. Dignity." </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>America's most popular author is arguably its most popular crusader as well, tilting his pen against myriad targets, including big law (The Firm, etc.), big tobacco (The Runaway Jury), big insurance (The Rainmaker) and now, in perhaps his sweetest, shortest novel, against anyone, big or little, who treats the homeless as less than human. The expected powerhouse opening involves the hostage-taking?by an armed, homeless man who calls himself Mister?of nine attorneys of a huge law firm headquartered in D.C. Among the nine is narrator Michael Brock, an antitrust lawyer who receives a faceful of blood when a police sniper blows away Mister's head. "I'm alive! I'm alive," Michael cries like Ebenezer Scrooge, but, like Scrooge, this greedy hotshot is ripe for a moral awakening. The next day, Michael visits the shabby offices of Mister's attorney, Mordecai Green, who explains that Mister and others had been illegally evicted from makeshift housing on orders from a real-estate development company represented by Michael's firm. Inspired by Green and shaken by his firm's complicity, Michael volunteers at a homeless shelter. When a family he meets there dies on the street, and turns out to have been among the evictees, Michael quits his job, goes to work for Green and, using as evidence a file he steals from the firm, aims to sue his former employer on behalf of the evictees. In turn, the firm places Michael in its crosshairs, pressuring him to give up the file through legal maneuvers, having him arrested and hints of darker means. The cat-and-mouse between Michael and the firm is vintage Grisham, intricately plotted, but the emphasis in this smoothly told, baldly manipulative tale is less on action and suspense, which are moderate, than on Michael's change of heart and moving exploration of the world of the homeless. Dickens would be well pleased, and so will Grisham's fans. 2.8 million first printing. <br>Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Millions of dollars are at stake in a huge tobacco-company case in Biloxi, and the jury's packed with people who have dirty little secrets. A mysterious young man takes subtle control of the jury as the defense watches helplessly, but they soon realize that he in turn is controlled by an even more mysterious young woman. Lives careen off course as they bend everyone in the case to their will. </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Grisham is either remarkably prescient or just plain lucky; because with public concerns about the tobacco companies heating up, and two major nonfiction books currently garnering a lot of attention, he has come up with a tobacco-suit novel that lights up the courtroom. In a Mississippi Gulf Coast town, the widow of a lifelong smoker who died prematurely of lung cancer is suing Big Tobacco. Enter Rankin Fitch, a dark genius of jury fixing, who has won many such trials for the tobacco companies and who foresees no special problems here. Enter also a mysterious juror, Nicholas Easter, whom Fitch's army of jury investigators and manipulators can't quite seem to track-and his equally mysterious girlfriend Marlee, who soon shows Fitch she knows even more about what's happening in the jury room than he does. The details of jury selection are fascinating and the armies of lawyerly hangers-on and overpaid consultants that surround such potentially profitable (to either side) cases are horribly convincing. The cat-and-mouse game played between Nicholas, Marlee and Fitch over the direction of the jury quickly becomes hair-raising as the stakes inch ever higher. As usual with Grisham, the writing is no more than workmanlike, the characterizations are alternatively thin and too broad, but all is redeemed by his patented combination of expertise and narrative drive. What makes The Runaway Jury his most rewarding novel to date is that it is fully enlisted in an issue of substance, in which arguments of genuine pith are hammered out and resolved in a manner that is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. It's a thriller for people who think, and Jesse Helms won't like it one bit. First printing of 2.8 million; major ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection. (May) ~ Mystery<br>Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>John Grisham turns a satirical eye on the overblown ritual of the festive holiday season, and the result is <em>Skipping Christmas</em>, a modest but funny novel about the tyranny of December 25. Grisham's story revolves around a typical middle-aged American couple, Luther and Nora Krank. On the first Sunday after Thanksgiving they wave their daughter Blair off to Peru to work for the Peace Corps, and they suddenly realize that "for the first time in her young and sheltered life Blair would spend Christmas away from home."</p><p>Luther Krank sees his daughter's Christmas absence as an opportunity. He estimates that "a year earlier, the Luther Krank family had spent $6,100 on Christmas," and have "precious little to show for it." So he makes an executive decision, telling his wife, friends, and neighbors that "we won't do Christmas." Instead, Luther books a 10-day Caribbean cruise. But things start to turn nasty when horrified neighbors get wind of the Krank's subversive scheme and besiege the couple with questions about their decision.</p><p>Grisham builds up a funny but increasingly terrifying picture of how this tight-knit community turns on the Kranks, who find themselves under increasing pressure to conform. As the tension mounts, readers may wonder whether they will manage to board their plane on Christmas day. <em>Skipping Christmas</em> is Grisham-lite, with none of the serious action or drama of his legal thrillers, but a funny poke at the craziness of Christmas. <em>--Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>For all its clever curmudgeonly edge and minor charms, no way does this Christmas yarn from Grisham rank with A Christmas Carol, as the publisher claims. Nor does it rank with Grisham's own best work. The premise is terrific, as you'd expect from Grisham. Fed up with the commercial aspects of Christmas, particularly all the money spent, and alone for the holiday for the first time in decades (their daughter has just joined the Peace Corps), grumpy Luther Krank and his sweeter wife, Nora, decide to skip Christmas this year to forgo the gifts, the tree, the decorations, the cards, the parties and to spend the dollars saved on a 10-day Caribbean cruise. But as clever as this setup is, its elaboration is ho-hum. There's a good reason why nearly all classic Christmas tales rely on an element of fantasy, for, literarily at least, Christmas is a time of miracles. Grisham sticks to the mundane, however, and his story lacks magic for that. He does a smartly entertaining job of satirizing the usual Christmas frenzy, as Luther and Nora resist entreaties from various charities as well as increasing pressure from their neighbors (all sharply drawn, recognizable members of the generic all-American burb, the book's setting) to do up their house in the traditional way, including installing the giant Frosty that this year adorns the roof of every home on the block except theirs. And when something happens that prompts the Kranks to jump back into Christmas at the last minute, Grisham does slip in a celebration of the real spirit of Christmas, to the point of perhaps squeezing a tear or two from his most sentimental readers (even if he comes uncomfortably close to It's a Wonderful Life to do so). But it's too little, too late. The misanthropy in this short novel makes a good antidote to the more cloying Christmas tales, and the book is fun to read. To compare it to Dickens, however, is...humbug. 1.5-million first printing. </p><p>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><strong><em>Playing for Pizza: </em> A Q&amp;A with John Grisham</strong></p><p><strong>Q: </strong>American football in Italy seems like an unlikely subject for a John Grisham novel. What was the inspiration for <em>Playing for Pizza</em>? </p><p><strong>A: </strong>Three years ago when I was in Bologna researching "The Broker", I discovered American football. One of my guides in the area played football for the Bologna Warriors for 10 years. I couldn't believe that American football actually existed there, but the more I heard about it the more intrigued I became. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>There is some great football writing in this novel. What kind of research was involved in capturing how this American institution is played in small town Italy? </p><p><strong>A: </strong>The only way to research the book was to go to Parma and watch a game. The coach is an American who played at Illinois State, and he proved to be extremely valuable. I met many of the Italian players and the story simply unfolded. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>Speaking of research, you write lovingly of Italian food and wine in this book. What's your idea of the perfect Italian meal? </p><p><strong>A: </strong>First course: prosicutto and melon; second course: stuffed tortellini; third course: roasted stuffed capon, all served with a great Barolo wine. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>Without giving away too much of the plot, your protagonist falls in love by the novel's end. Did you know when you started writing that Rick would get the girl? </p><p><strong>A: </strong>Of course. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>You have a new legal thriller coming in January 2008. Can you give us any hints about what to expect? </p><p><strong>A: </strong>I really don't like to talk about a book until it's finished. Sorry. But it will not be another work of non-fiction, nor will it be about football. Lots of lawyers in the next one.   </p><hr><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Third-string Cleveland Browns quarterback Rick Dockery becomes the greatest goat ever by throwing three interceptions in the closing minutes of the AFC championship game. Fleeing vengeful fans, he finds refuge in the grungiest corner of professional football, the Italian National Football League as quarterback of the inept but full-of-heart Parma Panthers. What ensues is a winsome football fable, replete with team bonding and character-building as the underdog Panthers challenge the powerhouse Bergamo Lions for a shot at the Italian Superbowl. The book is also the author's love letter to Italy. Rick is first baffled and then enchanted by all things Italian-tiny cars! opera! benign corruption!-and through him Grisham (The Firm) instructs his readership in the art of gracious living, featuring sumptuous four-hour, umpteen-course meals. The writing sometimes lapses into travel-guide ("most Italian cities are sort of configured around a central square, called a piazza") and food porn ("[the veal cutlets are beaten with a small bat, then dipped in eggs, fried in a skillet, and then baked in the oven with a mix of parmigiano cheese and stock until the cheese melts"), but it's invigorated by appealing characters and lively play-by-play. The result is a charming fish-out-of-water story. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p></div>


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<p class="description">John Grisham's five novels -- A Time To Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, and The Chamber -- have been number one best-sellers, and have a combined total of 47 million copies in print. Now, inThe Rainmaker, Grisham returns to the courtroom for the first time since A Time To Kill, and weaves a riveting tale of legal intrigue and corporate greed. Combining suspense, narrative momentum, and humor as only John Grisham can, this is another spellbinding read from the most popular author of our time.Grisham's sixth spellbinding novel of legal intrigue and corporate greed displays all of the intricate plotting, fast-paced action, humor, and suspense that have made him the most popular author of our time. In his first courtroom thriller since A Time To Kill, John Grisham tells the story of a young man barely out of law school who finds himself taking on one of the most powerful, corrupt, and ruthless companies in America -- and exposing a complex, multibillion-dollar insurance scam. In hs final semester of law school Rudy Baylor is required to provide free legal advice to a group of senior citizens, and it is there that he meets his first "clients," Dot and Buddy Black. Their son, Donny Ray, is dying of leukemia, and their insurance company has flatly refused to pay for his medical treatments. While Rudy is at first skeptical, he soon realizes that the Blacks really have been shockingly mistreated by the huge company, and that he just may have stumbled upon one of the largest insurance frauds anyone's ever seen -- and one of the most lucrative and important cases in the history of civil litigation. The problem is, Rudy's flat broke, has no job, hasn't even passed the bar, and is about to go head-to-head with one of the best defense attorneys -- and powerful industries -- in America.From the Hardcover edition.</p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>John Grisham's head was full of movies when he wrote <em>The Pelican Brief</em>, which is such a brisk page-turner you could use it to dry your hair. He had Julia Roberts in mind for the heroine, Darby Shaw, a brilliant Tulane law student who comes up with an ingenious theory to explain the baffling assassinations of two Supreme Court justices in one day. They were shot and strangled by ace international terrorist Khamel, who loves the film <em>Three Days of the Condor</em>, but government gumshoes don't get what connects the deaths. Silly government guys! They died so the conservative president, who just wants to be left alone to play golf, will appoint new, conservative justices who will help out a case involving an industrialist who is the enemy of pelicans and other living things. It's all spelled out for them in Darby's brief. She likes to do legal feats to impress her boyfriend, her boyish law prof Thomas (who, like Grisham, prefers to shave at most once a week, and is cool, smart, and antiauthoritarian). The prof likes to paint her toes red, in homage to Susan Sarandon in <em>Bull Durham</em>. (Sarandon also starred in the film version of Grisham's <em>The Client</em>.)</p><p>But when Thomas gets splattered by a car bomb meant for Darby, she escapes the hospital and hooks up with a <em>Washington Post</em> reporter, Gray Grantham, who sleuths like the guys in <em>All the President's Men</em>. </p><p>Grisham wishes he hadn't written <em>The Pelican Brief</em> quite so quickly (his first novel, <em>A Time to Kill</em>, went through dozens of drafts), but <em>Pelican</em>'s very breathlessness contributes to its dreamy, cinematic chase-o-rama atmosphere. </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In this tale of the aftermath of the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices, Grisham delivers a suspenseful plot at a breakneck pace, although his characters are stereotypes. The hardcover was on the PW bestseller list 48 weeks and the mass market was No. 1 last week. <br>Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<p class="description">They watched Danilo Silva for days before they finally grabbed him. He was living alone, a quiet life on a shady street in Brazil; a simple life in a modest home, certainly not one of luxury. Certainly no evidence of the fortune they thought he had stolen. He was much thinner and his face had been altered. He spoke a different language, and spoke it very well.But Danilo had a past with many chapters. Four years earlier he had been Patrick Lanigan, a young partner in a prominent Biloxi law firm. He had a pretty wife, a new daughter, and a bright future. Then one cold winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car and died a horrible death. When he was buried his casket held nothing more than his ashes.From a short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial. Then he fled. Six weeks later, a fortune was stolen from his ex-law firm's offshore account. And Patrick fled some more.But they found him.From the Hardcover edition.</p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Ever since he published <em>The Firm</em> in 1991, John Grisham has remained the undisputed champ of the legal thriller. With <em>A Painted House</em>, however, he strikes out in a new direction. As the author is quick to note, this novel includes "not a single lawyer, dead or alive," and readers will search in vain for the kind of lowlife machinations that have been his stock-in-trade. Instead, Grisham has delivered a quieter, more contemplative story, set in rural Arkansas in 1952. It's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and "hill people" to pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But it's backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator, Luke: "I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice."</p><p>What's more, tensions begin to simmer between the Mexicans and the hill people, one of whom has a penchant for bare-knuckles brawling. This leads to a brutal murder, which young Luke has the bad luck to witness. At this point--with secrets, lies, and at least one knife fight in the offing--the plot begins to take on that familiar, Grisham-style momentum. Still, such matters ultimately take a back seat in <em>A Painted House</em> to the author's evocation of time and place. This is, after all, the scene of his boyhood, and Grisham waxes nostalgic without ever succumbing to deep-fried sentimentality. Meanwhile, his account of Luke's Baptist upbringing occasions some sly (and telling) humor: </p><blockquote><p>I'd been taught in Sunday school from the day I could walk that lying would send you straight to hell. No detours. No second chances. Straight into the fiery pit, where Satan was waiting with the likes of Hitler and Judas Iscariot and General Grant. Thou shalt not bear false witness, which, of course, didn't sound exactly like a strict prohibition against lying, but that was the way the Baptists interpreted it. </p></blockquote><p>Whether Grisham will continue along these lines, or revert to the judicial shark tank for his next book, is anybody's guess. But <em>A Painted House</em> suggests that he's perfectly capable of telling an involving story with nary a subpoena in sight. <em>--James Marcus</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Who needs lawyers? Not Grisham, in his captivating new novel, now between hardcovers after serialization in the Oxford American. Here there are hardscrabble farmers instead, and dirt-poor itinerant workers and a seven-year-old boy who grows up fast in a story as rich in conflict and incident as any previous Grisham and as nuanced as his very best. It's September 1952 in rural Arkansas when young narrator Luke Chandler notes that "the hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day." These folk are in Black Oak for the annual harvest of the cotton grown on the 80 acres that the Chandlers rent. The three generations of the Chandler family treat their workers more kindly than most farmers do, including engaging in the local obsession--playing baseball--with them, but serious trouble arises among the harvesters nonetheless. Most of it centers around Hank Spruill, a giant hillbilly with an equally massive temper, who one night in town beats a man dead and who throughout the book rubs up against a knife-wielding Mexican who is dating Hank's 17-year-old sister on the sly, leading to another murder. In fact, there's a mess of trouble in Luke's life, from worries about his uncle Ricky fighting in Korea to concerns about the nearby Latcher family and its illegitimate newborn baby, who may be Ricky's son. And then there are the constant fears about the weather, as much a character in this novel as any human, from the tornado that storms past the farm to the downpours that eventually flood the fields, ruining the crop and washing Luke and his family into a new life.Grisham admirers know that this author's writing has evolved with nearly every book, from the simple mechanics that made The Firm click to the manifestations of grace that made The Testament such a fine novel of spiritual reckoning. The mechanics are still visible here--as a nosy, spying boy, Luke serves as a nearly omnipresent eye to spur the novel along its course--but so, too, are characters that no reader will forget, prose as clean and strong as any Grisham has yet laid down and a drop-dead evocation of a time and place that mark this novel as a classic slice of Americana. Agent, David Gernert. (One-day laydown, Feb. 6)FORECAST: Will Grisham's fans miss the lawyers? Not hardly. This is a Grisham novel all the way, despite its surface departures from the legal thrillers, and it will be received as such, justifying the 2.8-million first printing. (For more on Grisham, see Book News, p. 178)</p><p>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>In 1970, small town newspaper <em>The Clanton Times</em> went belly up. With financial assistance from a rich relative, it's purchased by 23-year-old Willie Traynor, formerly the paper's cub reporter. Soon afterward, his new business receives the readership boost it needs thanks to his editorial efforts and coverage of a particularly brutal rape and murder committed by the scion of the town's reclusive bootlegger family. Rather than shy from reporting on the subsequent open-and-shut trial (those who oppose the Padgitt family tend to turn up dead in the area's swampland), Traynor launches a crusade to ensure the unrepentant murderer is brought to justice. When a guilty verdict is returned, the town is relieved to find the Padgitt family's grip on the town did not sway the jury, though Danny Padgitt is sentenced to life in prison rather than death. But, when Padgitt is released after serving less than a decade in jail and members of the jury are murdered, Clanton once again finds itself at the mercy of its renegade family.</p><p>When it comes, the dénouement is no surprise; <em>The Last Juror</em> is less a story of suspense than a study of the often idyllic southern town of Clanton, Mississippi (the setting for Grisham's first novel, <em>A Time to Kill</em>). Throughout the nine years between Padgitt's trial and release, Traynor finds acceptance in Clanton, where the people "don't really trust you unless they trusted your grandfather." He grows from a long-haired idealist into another of the town's colorful characters--renovating an old house, sporting a bowtie, beloved on both sides of the color line, and the only person to have attended each of the town's 88 churches at least once. <em>The Last Juror</em> returns Grisham to the courtroom where he made his name, but those who enjoyed the warm sentiment of his recent novels (_Bleachers_, <em>A Painted House</em>) will still find much to love here. <em>--Benjamin Reese</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Grisham has spent the last few years stretching his creative muscles through a number of genres: his usual legal thrillers (The Summons, The King of Torts, etc.), a literary novel (The Painted House), a Christmas book (Skipping Christmas) and a high school football elegy (Bleachers). This experimentation seems to have imbued his writing with a new strength, giving exuberant life to this compassionate, compulsively readable story of a young man's growth from callowness to something approaching wisdom. Willie Traynor, 23 and a college dropout, is working as a reporter on a small-town newspaper, the Ford County Times, in Clanton, Miss. When the paper goes bankrupt, Willie turns to his wealthy grandmother, who loans him $50,000 to buy it. Backed by a stalwart staff, Willie labors to bring the newspaper back to health. A month after his first issue, he gets the story of a lifetime, the murder of beautiful young widow Rhoda Kasselaw. After being raped and knifed, the nude Rhoda staggered next door and whispered to her neighbor as she was dying, "Danny Padgitt. It was Danny Padgitt." The killer belongs to an infamous clan of crooked highway contractors, killers and drug smugglers who live on impregnable Padgitt Island. Willie splashes the murder all over the Times, making him both an instant success and a marked man. The town is up in arms, demanding Danny's head. After a near miss (the Padgitts are known for buying themselves out of trouble), Danny is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. As he's dragged out of the courtroom, he vows revenge on the jurors. Willie finds, to his consternation, that in Mississippi life doesn't necessarily mean life, so in nine years Danny is back outâ€"and jurors begin to die. Around and through this plot Grisham tells the sad, heroic, moving stories of the eccentric inhabitants of Clanton, a small town balanced between the pleasures and perils of the old and the new South. The novel is heartfelt, wise, suspenseful and funny, one of the best Grishams ever. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Grisham continues to impress with his daring, venturing out of legal thrillers entirely for A Painted House and Skipping Christmas (the re-release of which this past fall was itself a bold move) and, within the genre, working major variations. Here's his most unusual legal thriller yet--a story whose hero and villain are the same, a young man with the tragic flaw of greed; a story whose suspense arises not from physical threat but moral turmoil, and one that launches a devastating assault on a group of the author's colleagues within the law. Mass tort lawyers are Grisham's target, the men (they're all men here, at least) who win billion-dollar class-action settlements from corporations selling bad products, then rake fantastic fees off the top, with far smaller payouts going to the people harmed by the products. Clay Carter is a burning-out lawyer at the Office of the Public Defender (OPD) in Washington, D.C., when he catches the case of a teen who, for no apparent reason, has gunned down an acquaintance. Clay is approached by a mysterious stranger, the enigmatic Max Pace, who says he represents a megacorporation whose bad drug caused the teen--and others--to kill. The corporation will pay Clay $10 million to settle with all the murder victims at $5 million per, if all is accomplished on the hush-hush; that way, the corporation avoids trial and possibly much higher jury awards. After briefly examining his conscience, Clay bites. He quits the OPD, sets up his own firm and settles the cases. In reward, Pace gives him a present--a mass tort case based on stolen evidence but worth tens of millions in fees. Clay lunges again, eventually winning over a hundred million in fees. He is crowned by the press the new King of Torts, with enough money to hobnob with the other, venal-hearted tort royalty, to buy a Porsche, a Georgetown townhouse and a private jet, but not enough to forget his heartache over the woman he loves, who dumped him as a loser right before his career took off. Clay's financial/legal hubris knows few bounds, and soon he's overextended, his future hanging on the results of one product liability trial. The tension is considerable throughout, and readers will like the gentle ending, but Grisham's aim here clearly is to educate as he entertains. He can be didactic (" <code>Nobody earns ten million dollars in six months, Clay,' " a friend warns. "</code>You might win it, steal it, or have it drop out of the sky, but nobody earns money like that. It's ridiculous and obscene' "), but readers will applaud Grisham's fierce moral stance (while perhaps wondering what sort of advance he got for this book) as they cling to his words every step along the way of this powerful and gripping morality tale.<br>Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Rousing . . . Another pedal-to-the-metal crowd-pleaser.”—_People_  </p><p>“Offers everything one expects from Grisham . . . delivers with a vengeance.”_—The Seattle Times_  </p><p>“Satisfying . . . a lot of fun . . . When you finish it, you’re ready to dash on to the next Grisham.”_—Entertainment Weekly_<br><em> </em><br>“A thrill ride of twists and turns.”_—The Philadelphia Inquirer_  </p><p><em>From the Paperback edition.</em></p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><strong>Amazon Exclusive: Pat Conroy Reviews <em>Ford County</em></strong>   </p><p><strong>Pat Conroy is most recently the author of the #1 <em>New York Times</em> bestseller <em>South of Broad</em>, as well as eight previous books: <em>The Boo</em>, <em>The Water Is Wide</em>, <em>The Great Santini</em>, <em>The Lords of Discipline</em>, <em>The Prince of Tides</em>, <em>Beach Music</em>, <em>My Losing Season</em>, and <em>The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life</em>. He lives on Fripp Island, South Carolina. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of <em>Ford County</em>:</strong>   </p><p>In the mail last week, I received a copy of John Grisham’s latest fiction. It surprised me that the book was comprised of seven short stories. From the time I first began publishing at Doubleday, they have always made sure that I received a copy of a Grisham book long before it went on sale in the bookstores. He has written 22 books, and I’ve read them all as soon as they were available in crisp review copies.</p><p>I have loved the Grisham books for the same reason that I love the works of John Irving, Richard Russo, or Anne Rivers Siddons: I get hooked by an early page, and pure habit forces me to read until I am issued my walking papers and can return to my normal life. These writers are all wish-bringers who cast spells with the bright enchantment of their stories, and the power of story has retained its glamour and necessity for me. I’ve always liked it when Grisham took a sabbatical from his impressive fiction to romp in the field of sports or non-fiction.</p><p>John surprised me by entering the ring of danger that the short story represents for all writers. In the world of writing, the poets come first as they finger the language like worry beads and wonder where their next meal is coming from. The art of the short story writer is one of economy, concision, and the genius of trying to craft a whole world inside a mason jar. The modern world punishes the short story writer with inattention. The literary reviews keep the short story alive and finger-popping in America today, while the <em>New Yorker</em> tries to strangle the form with its bare hands. But a great short story is a source of joy, and the reading of Chekhov, de Maupassant, Flannery O’Connor and others offer pleasures unmatched by any other form. Since I’m incapable of writing the short story form, I wanted to see how Grisham fared, knowing the critics would sharpen their swords against him no matter how accomplished his stories might be.</p><p><em>Ford County</em> is the best writing that John Grisham has ever done. One of the many things I’ve admired about his books is his intimate chronicle of Mississippi life in the generations following William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Grisham writes equally well about the plantation south, the black south, and white-cracker south. Over the years he has used the legal system as an instrument to illuminate the world of mansions and sharecroppers and everything in between as he not only defined Mississippi but also staked it out as his home fictional territory. His short stories were a surprise to me. All of them are very good; three of them, I believe, are great. Grisham has always had a rare gift for breaking hearts when he invokes unforgettable images of the broken, hopeless South. Some of the stories are hilarious, and Grisham’s gift of humor has never found a showcase like this. One of these stories should find its way into the anthologies of the best short stories of 2009. It might not happen, but I for one think the stories in <em>Ford County</em> are that damned good._--Pat Conroy_</p><p>(Photo © David G. Spielman) </p><hr><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Returning to the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill, longtime bestseller Grisham presents seven short stories about the residents of Ford County, Miss. Each story explores different themes-mourning, revenge, justice, acceptance, evolution-but all flirt with the legal profession, the staple of (former attorney) Grisham's oeuvre. Fans will be excited to settle back into Grisham's world, and these easily digestible stories don't disappoint, despite their brevity. Full of strong characters, simple but resonant plotlines, and charming Southern accents, this collection is solid throughout; though his literary aspirations may seem quaint, Grisham succeeds admirably in his crowd-pleasing craft while avoiding pat endings or oversimplifying (perhaps best exemplified in "Michael's Room," which finds a lawyer facing the consequences of successfully defending a doctor against a malpractice suit). As always, Grisham balances his lawyerly preoccupations with a deep respect for his undereducated and overlooked characters. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Hard to believe, but there was a time when the word "lawyer" wasn't synonymous with "criminal," and the idea of a law firm controlled by the Mafia was an outlandish proposition. This intelligent, ensnaring story came out of nowhere--Oxford, Mississippi, where Grisham was a small-town lawyer--and quickly catapulted to the top of the bestseller list, with good reason. Mitch McDeere, the appealing hero, is a poor kid whose only assets are a first-class mind, a Harvard law degree, and a beautiful, loving wife. When a Memphis law firm makes him an offer he really can't refuse, he trades his old Nissan for a new BMW, his cramped apartment for a house in the best part of town, and puts in long hours finding tax shelters for Texans who'd rather pay a lawyer than the IRS. Nothing criminal about that. He'd be set for life, if only associates at the firm didn't have a funny habit of dying, and the FBI wasn't trying to get Mitch to turn his colleagues in. The tempo and pacing are brilliant, the thrills keep coming, and the finish has a wonderful ironic flourish. It's not hard to see why Grisham changed the genre permanently with this one, and few of his colleagues in a very crowded field come close to equaling him. <em>--Jane Adams</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Grisham's gripping fiction debut describes the inner workings of a law firm set up by the Mafia to launder money and concoct tax evasions. Mitchell McDeere, third in his class at Harvard Law, is wooed relentlessly by the prestigious Memphis tax firm of Bendini, Lambert and Locke. Succumbing to the firm's high-powered salesmanship, he rejects some of the country's best-known firms to join the group, where he is awed by the opulent lifestyle pressed upon him. But the company has ruthless, underhanded methods of gathering information (they wire the homes of all associates) and ensuring loyalty (social situations are severely monitored). The firm's mania for security and secrecy, combined with the fact that the only lawyers who have ever left did so in coffins--five in 15 years--arouse Mitch and wife Abby's curiosity, and they rapidly find themselves in a labyrinth of intrigue and danger. Grisham, a criminal defense attorney, lucidly describes law office procedures at the highest levels, smoothly meshing them with the criminal events of the narrative. Mitch and Abby are appealing characters, though a suspension of disbelief may be required to accept their super-cool behavior while they are on the run from both the FBI and the Mafia. Nonetheless, readers will be totally hooked by this unusual and absorbing story. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection; movie rights to Paramount. <br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Grisham's recent slump continues with another subpar effort whose plot and characters, none of whom are painted in shades of gray, aren't able to support an earnest protest against the death penalty. In 2007, almost on the eve of the execution of Donté Drumm, an African-American college football star, for the 1998 murder of a white cheerleader whose body was never found, Travis Boyette, a creepy multiple sex offender, confesses that he's guilty of the crime to Kansas minister Keith Schroeder. With Drumm's legal options dwindling fast and with the threat of civil unrest in his Texas hometown if the execution proceeds, Schroeder battles to convince Boyette to go public with the truth--and to persuade the condemned man's attorney that Boyette's story needs to be taken seriously. While the action progresses with a certain grim realism, Schroeder's superficial responses to the issues raised undercut the impact. As with The Appeal, the author's passionate views on serious flaws in the justice system don't translate well into fiction. (Oct.) <br>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p><em></em>"_The Confession_ is the kind of grab-a-reader-by-the-shoulders suspense story that demands to be inhaled as quickly as possible. But it's also a superb work of social criticism in the literary troublemaker tradition of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle....Brilliant"--_Washington Post<br>_  </p><p>"Grisham is the master of the legal thriller."--_USA Today_  </p><p>NO ONE KEEPS YOU IN SUSPENSE LIKE AMERICA’S FAVORITE STORYTELLER <em></em>  </p><p>“The secrets of Grisham’s success are no secret at all. There are two of them: his pacing, which ranges from fast to breakneck, and his Theme—little guy takes on big conspiracy with the little guy getting the win in the end.” <em>—Time</em> magazine  </p><p>“The law, by its nature, creates drama, and a new Grisham promises us an inside look at the dirty machineries of process and power, with plenty of entertainment” —_Los Angeles Times_  </p><p>“With every new book I appreciate John Grisham a little more, for his feisty critiques of the legal system, his compassion for the underdog, and his willingness to strike out in new directions.” —_Entertainment Weekly _  </p><p>“John Grisham is about as good a storyteller as we’ve got in the United States these days.” —_The New York Times Book Review_  </p><p>“Grisham is a marvelous storyteller who works readers the way a good trial lawyer works a jury.” —_Philadelphia Inquirer_  </p><p> “A mighty narrative talent and an unerring eye for hot-button issues.” —_Chicago Sun-Times_  </p><p>“A legal literary legend.” —_USA Today_  </p><p><em>From the Hardcover edition.</em></p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>With <em>Bleachers</em> John Grisham departs again from the legal thriller to experiment with a character-driven tale of reunion, broken high school dreams, and missed chances. While the book falls short of the compelling storytelling that has made Grisham a bestselling author, it is nonetheless a diverting novella that succeeds as light fiction. </p><p>The story centers on the impending death of the Messina Spartans' football coach Eddie Rake. One of the most victorious coaches in high school football history, Rake is a man both loved and feared by his players and by a town that relishes his 13 state titles. The hero of the novel is Neely Crenshaw, a former Rake All-American whose NFL prospects ended abruptly after a cheap shot to the knees. Neely has returned home for the first time in years to join a nightly vigil for Rake at the Messina stadium. Having wandered through life with little focus since his college days, he struggles to reconcile his conflicted feelings towards his former coach, and he assays to rekindle love in the ex-girlfriend he abandoned long ago. For Messina and for Neely, the homecoming offers the prospect of building a life after Rake. </p><p>Physically a narrow book, <em>Bleachers</em> is a modest fiction in many respects. The emotional scope is akin to that of a short story, with a single-minded focus on explorations of nostalgia and regret. The dialogue, especially that of Neely's friend Paul Curry, is sometimes wooden as characters recall Messina history in paragraphs that were perhaps better left to the narrator. But Grisham has otherwise written a well-made, entertaining--if a bit sentimental--story. <em>--Patrick O'Kelley</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Grisham demonstrated he could produce bestsellers without legal aid with The Painted House and Skipping Christmas, and he'll undoubtedly do so again with this slight but likable novel of high school football, a legendary coach and the perils of too early fame. Fifteen years after graduation, Neely Crenshaw, one-time star quarterback of the Messina Spartans, returns home on hearing news of the impending death of tough-as-nails coach Eddie Rake. Neely knows the score: "When you're famous at eighteen, you spend the rest of your life fading away." It's a lesson he's learned the hard way after destroying his knee playing college ball and drifting through life in an ever-downward spiral. He and his former teammates sit in the bleachers at the high school stadium waiting for Rake to die, drinking beer and reminiscing. There is a mystery involving the legendary '87 championship, and Neely has unfinished business with an old high school sweetheart, but neither story line comes to much. Readers will guess the solution to the mystery, as does the town police chief when it's divulged to him (" `We sorta figured it out,' said Mal") and Neely's former girlfriend doesn't want to have anything to do with his protestations of love ("You'll get over it. Takes about ten years"). The stirring funeral scene may elicit a few tears, but Neely's eulogy falls curiously flat. After living through four hard days in Messina, the lessons Neely learns are unremarkable ("Those days are gone now"). Many readers will come away having enjoyed the time spent, but wishing there had been a more sympathetic lead character, more originality, more pages, more story and more depth.<br>Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Mark Sway, age 11 but years wiser thanks to a drunken dad who abused his mom, is out in the woods behind his Memphis trailer park teaching his kid brother, Ricky, how to smoke Virginia Slims heisted from Mom's purse. He's a pretty upright kid--he's determined to protect his brother from drugs, and he once defended his mom with a baseball bat. </p><p>The dangers of smoking rapidly escalate when Mark glimpses a guy trying to commit suicide by carbon monoxide in his car nearby and tries to stop him. The guy is Jerome, a lawyer who tells Mark that his Mafia client has murdered Senator Boyd Boyette and buried him in the concrete under his garage in New Orleans. Then Jerome puts a bullet in his own head. Little Ricky flips out, and so does Barry the Blade Muldanno, who doesn't want blustery U.S. attorney Reverend Roy Foltrigg to find the corpse and bust him. Caught in a ruthless game between the Mob and the amoral authorities, Mark's family has no defense in the world except Reggie Love, a 50ish divorcée who has just turned her life around by becoming a lawyer. Does she have what it takes to help Mark beat the system? The life-or-death chase is on! </p><p>Mark has seen a lot of movies, and he sees life in cinematic terms. So does Grisham. Even if this novel had never been filmed, it would still be a really good, fast-paced movie. Its literary limitation is also its filmlike virtue: <em>The Client</em> is a rush. </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Fans of the bestselling Grisham will be pleased to note that he is once more on Firm ground: his latest legal thriller offers a clever, compelling plot coupled with two singular protagonists sure to elicit readers' empathy. Eleven-year-old Mark Sway, taking his kid brother for a smoke behind their Memphis trailer park, witnesses the suicide of a lawyer "driven crazy" by a lethal secret. Before he dies, the man confides to Mark where the body of a recently murdered U.S. senator lies buried, and the game's afoot. Trailed by the police, the FBI and assorted Mafia types (the deceased politico was the victim of "a successful New Orleans street thug"), Mark retains--for one dollar--the services of Reggie Love, a 50ish female lawyer. This uncommon attorney-client relationship adds an affecting, unusually humanistic layer to the novel's tension-filled events. Mark, raised by a divorced mother and wise beyond his years, thinks chiefly in terms of movies and TV; Reggie, a street-smart survivor of an acrimonious divorce, is often unsure whether to hug or slug her precocious client. True to form, Grisham employs just enough foreshadowing to keep the suspense rolling ("Neither of them could know that . . . "), and propels his action at the requisite breakneck pace. Occasional plot improbabilities and stylistic quibbles--a few fuzzy characterizations; overstatement of already obvious points; Mark's sporadic adult phraseology--will not deter readers from enjoying a rousing read. 950,000 first printing; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections; Reader's Digest Condensed Book selection. <br>Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>"The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease." So begins Grisham's legal leviathan <em>The Chamber</em>, a 676-page tome that scrutinizes the death penalty and all of its nuances--from racially motivated murder to the cruel and unusual effects of a malfunctioning gas chamber. </p><p>Adam Hall is a 26-year-old attorney, fresh out of law school and working at the best firm in Chicago. He might have been humming Timbuk 3's big hit, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades," if it wasn't for his psychotic Southern grandfather, Sam Cayhall. Cayhall, a card-carrying member of the KKK, is on death row for killing two men. Knowing his uncle will surely die without his legal expertise, Hall comes to the rescue and puts his dazzling career at stake, while digging up a barnyard of skeletons from his family's past. Grisham fans expecting the typical action-packed plot should ready themselves for a slower pace, well-fleshed-out characters, and heavy doses of sentimentalism. </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The chamber in question is the gas chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary--and for 69-year-old Sam Crayhall, the road thence has been many years long. Sam was twice tried and twice acquitted for murder after a 1967 Ku Klux Klan scare bombing accidentally killed the twin sons of the intended target; 14 years later he was tried a third time, convicted and sentenced to death. Now, in 1990, a young Chicago lawyer, employed by the firm that represented Sam but which he has just unceremoniously dumped, wants Sam as a client. Adam Hall, the 26-year-old rookie, is Sam Crayhall's grandson. Adam's efforts to save this splendid curmudgeon from death form the center of Grisham's quietly compelling novel, a hub from which the far-reaching spokes of personal dramas extend. The despair of prison life has rarely been so grippingly evoked--no riots or dazzling escapes here, just a drab, pervasive dailiness. And the gradually revealed dysfunctions of the Crayhalls prove both surprising and affecting. This ranks as top-notch Grisham and reveals new dimensions to his talent: the focus on character, the credible emotion and the simple moments of human connection bear comparison to Grisham's work in A Time to Kill . The prose, too, has more subtlety and texture than Grisham has previously exhibited. Though the countdown to an execution is a well-worn plot device, it has seldom been as effective, especially in the novel's last 100 pages. Readers can almost hear the cogs of justice turning ever faster--or is that the sound of Grisham's fans stampeding the bookstores for this riveting read? 2.5 million first printing; Literary Guild main selection; audio rights to BBD audio; major ad/promo. <br>Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Before he was sent to federal prison for treason (among other things), Joel Backman was an extremely powerful man. Known as "the broker," Backman was a high roller--a lawyer making $10 million a year who could "open any door in Washington." That is, until he tried to broker a deal selling access to the world's most powerful satellite surveillance system to the highest bidder. When caught, Backman accepted prison as the one option that would keep him safe and alive, since the interested parties (the Israelis, the Saudis, the Russians, and the Chinese) were all itching to get their hands on his secrets at any cost. Little does he know that his own government has designs on accessing that information--or at least letting it die with him. Now, six years after his incarceration, the director of the CIA convinces a lame duck president to pardon Backman, and the broker becomes a free man--and an open target.</p><p><em>The Broker</em> marries the best of John Grisham's many talents--his ability to immerse himself in the culture of small town life (in this case, Bologna, Italy), and his uncanny mastery of the chase. The first half of the book focuses on Backman's transformation from infamous power broker to helpless victim in his own game. Upon his release from prison, Backman is taken into "protective custody" and whisked off to Italy where he is assigned a new identity, and a tutor to help him blend in. Sure he is on the run, but some readers may feel that Backman's time spent in Bologna is a bit too leisurely--readers join him on an almost cinematic tour through the Italian town, complete with language and history lessons. Impatient readers will be happy to know that the final half of the novel is classic Grisham--a fast-paced, thrilling cat and mouse chase pitting Backman against the numerous agencies that want him dead--as the broker makes a move to take back his life. <em>--Daphne Durham</em></p><p><strong>Exclusive Video Interview with John Grisham</strong></p><ul><li>     <em>Watch the interview (high bandwith)</em> </li> <li>     <em>Watch the interview (low bandwith)</em> </li></ul><p><strong>Grisham: The Books</strong></p><ul><li><p><em>A Time to Kill</em>, 1989</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Firm</em>, 1991</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Pelican Brief</em>, 1992</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Client</em>, 1993</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Chamber</em>, 1994</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Rainmaker</em>, 1995</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Runaway Jury</em>, 1996</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Partner</em>, 1997</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Street Lawyer</em>, 1998</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Testament</em>, 1999</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Brethren</em>, 2000</p> </li> <li><p><em>A Painted House</em>, 2001</p> </li> <li><p><em>Skipping Christmas</em>, 2001</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Summons</em>, 2002</p> </li> <li><p><em>The King of Torts</em>, 2003</p> </li> <li><p><em>Bleachers</em>, 2003</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Last Juror</em>, 2004</p> </li> <li><p><em>The Broker</em>, 2005</p> </li></ul><p><strong>Essential Grisham</strong> <br><em>Amazon Editor Favorites</em></p><p><em>A Time to Kill</em></p><p><em>The Firm</em></p><p><em>A Painted House</em></p><p><em>The Client</em></p><p><em>The Rainmaker</em></p><p><em>The Pelican Brief</em></p><p><strong>Bestselling Grisham</strong> <br><em>Amazon Customer Favorites</em></p><p><em>The Last Juror</em></p><p><em>Skipping Christmas</em></p><p><em>Bleachers</em></p><p><em>The Testament</em></p><p><em>The Partner</em></p><p><em>The King of Torts</em></p><p><strong>If You Like Grisham, You'll Love...</strong></p><ul><li><p>John Lescroart</p> </li> <li><p>Richard North Patterson</p> </li> <li><p>David Baldacci</p> </li> <li><p>Lisa Scottoline</p> </li> <li><p>Robert Crais</p> </li> <li><p>Michael Crichton</p> </li> <li><p>Harlan Coben</p> </li> <li><p>Dennis Lehane</p> </li> <li><p>Ken Follett</p> </li></ul><p><strong>Best Grisham Books on DVD</strong></p><p><em>A Time to Kill</em></p><p><em>The Pelican Brief</em></p><p><em>The Client</em></p><p><em>The Firm</em></p><p><em>The Rainmaker</em></p><p><em>The Chamber</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Readers will find an amiable travelogue to Italy and its charms in Grisham's latest. What they won't find are the suspense and inspired plotting that have made the author (The Last Juror, etc.) one of the world's bestselling writers. Yet Grisham remains a smooth storyteller, and few will fail to finish this oddball tale of what happens to ruined D.C. powerbroker Joel Blackman, 52, when he's suddenly released from federal prison after six years. Teddy Maynard, legendary CIA director, has engineered the release in order to put Joel into a variant of the witness protection program and then see who kills him. Many want him dead—the Saudis, the Israelis, especially the Chinese—because of his role in trying to sell a global satellite spy system that would alter the world's balance of power; that was what got Joel imprisoned, and the CIA hopes that whoever kills him will clue them in to who may have access to the satellites. Joel is relocated to Bologna, and much of the narrative consists of his touring that city, its historic sights and its many restaurants, and learning Italian ways from his male handler, Luigi, and his language tutor, Francesca—a middle-aged woman with whom he falls in love. A major subplot concerns Joel's secret dealings with his stateside son to prepare for escape from Bologna if necessary. Eventually, the CIA leaks Joel's whereabouts to his enemies, who dispatch killing teams. Can Joel broker his way to safety? There's some depth to the troubled relationship between Joel and his tutor, but otherwise the novel reads like a contented afterthought to a memorable Italian vacation, with little action or tension, plastic characters and plot turns that a tricycle could maneuver. Still, anyone wishing to learn how and why Bologna built its famed porticos, why to be wary of most Italian desserts and how to send an encrypted wireless message using a global cell phone will find that information cheerfully given here. (Jan. 11) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p></div>


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<p class="description">John Grisham's novels have all been so systematically successful that it is easy to forget he is just one man toiling away silently with a pen, experimenting and improving with each book. While not as gifted a prose stylist as Scott Turow, Grisham is among the best plotters in the thriller business, and he infuses his books with a moral valence and creative vision that set them apart from their peers. The Brethren is in many respects his most daring book yet. The novel grows from two separate subplots. In the first, three imprisoned ex-judges (the "brethren" in the title), frustrated by their loss of power and influence, concoct an elaborate blackmail scheme that preys on wealthy, closeted gay men. The second story traces the rise of presidential candidate Aaron Lake, a puppet essentially created by CIA director Teddy Maynard to fulfill Maynard's plans for restoring the power of his beleaguered agency. Grisham's tight control of the two meandering threads leaves the reader guessing through most of the opening chapters how and when these two worlds will collide. Also impressive is Grisham's careful portraiture. Justice Hatlee Beech in particular is a fascinating, tragic anti-hero: a millionaire judge with an appointment for life who was rendered divorced, bankrupt, and friendless after his conviction for a drunk-driving homicide. The book's cynical view of presidential politics and criminal justice casts a somewhat gloomy shadow over the tale. CIA director Teddy Maynard is an all-powerful demon with absolute knowledge and control of the public will and public funds. Even his candidate, Congressman Lake, is a pawn in Maynard's egomaniacal game of ad campaigns, illicit contributions, and international intrigue. In the end, The Brethren marks a transition in Grisham's career toward a more thoughtful narrative style with less interest in the big-payoff blockbuster ending. But that's not to say that the last 50 pages won't keep your reading light turned on late. --Patrick O'Kelley</p>


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<div>Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a delightfully cacophonous tale that spans 
25 years of two families' assimilation in North London. The Joneses and 
the Iqbals are an unlikely a pairing of families, but their intertwined 
destinies distill the British Empire's history and hopes into a dazzling
 multiethnic melange that is a pure joy to read. Smith proves herself to
 be a master at drawing fully-realized, vibrant characters, and she 
demonstrates an extraordinary ear for dialogue. It is a novel full of 
humor and empathy that is as inspiring as it is enjoyable. <br><br>White
 Teeth is ambitious in scope and artfully rendered with a confidence 
that is extremely rare in a writer so young. It boggles the mind that 
Zadie Smith is only 24 years old, and this novel is a clarion call 
announcing the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction. It
 is a raucous yet poignant look at modern life in London and is clearly 
the book to read this summer. <br></div>


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<p>Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. He hunts for names on paper in a huge network of desire, collecting them, selling them and occasionally faking them; offering people a little piece of fame. To him, enlightenment is some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated or sold. </p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. "The instruction was simple: make somebody up," explains novelist Smith in her introduction to this marvelous compendium of 23 distinct, pungent stories that attack the question of "character" from all angles. From David Mitchell's hilarious rendering of one menopausal woman's fantasy internet love-affair to ZZ Packer's heart-wrenching Jewish guy-black girl romance, each story is, as Smith puts it, "its own thing entirely." There are moments of prosaic precision (Andrew O'Hagan's eerily incisive "Gordon" is introduced "in the talcum-powdered air of the bathroom muttering calculations and strange moral sums about the cause of Hamlet's unhappiness"), but this volume is more than a showcase for deft prose and quirky souls. Toby Litt's lovely, lyrical "Monster," for example, playfully upends notions of personhood, as does Dave Eggers' surprising "Theo," a moving tale of a mountain who falls in love. Also on hand are a number of wonderful graphic shorts: Daniel Clowe shrewdly explores an insufferable critic's solipsistic lapses, Nick Hornby's "A Writing Life" gives a knowing wink with a series of writer bios and mock headshots, and "Jordan Wellington Lint" by Chris Ware cleverly chronicles the first 13 years of its hero's life. With so much to savor-the sensuality of Adam Thirlwell's "Nigora," the knowingness of George Saunder's "Puppy"-this anthology will sate even the most famished short story fan. Sales benefit Eggers's nonprofit literary organization 826 NYC. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"...But just when you're ready to howl in frustration at the anthologification of the book world-_I've seen the best minds of my generation, live blogging about recipes that inspire them_-along comes <em>The Book of Other People...Other People</em> collects 23 pieces by a who's who of 21st-century geniuses and wunderkinds, from Dave Eggers to Edwidge Dandicat...Smith sent her contributors just one instruction: Make somebody up."<br>-_USA Today_ </p><p>"Truly hip."<br>-_The Boston Globe_ </p><p>"Whether they are old-fashioned narratives, playful improvisations or comic- strip-like tales told in pictures, these stories force us to re-evaluate that old chestnut "Character is destiny." They remind us that an individual's life is itself a narrative with a beginning, a middle and at least the intimations of an end. And they showcase the many time-honored techniques that writers use to limn their characters' predicaments, from straight-up ventriloquism to the use of unreliable narrators to a "Rashomon"-like splitting of perspectives."<br>-Michiko Kakutani, <em>The New York Times</em> </p><p>"From its strange, graphic-novelesque cover-an array of cartoonish sketches of odd-looking faces in profile, stacked like ladder rungs-to its uncommonly eye- catching lineup of contributors, "The Book of Other People," a 2008 paperback from Penguin Books, is extraordinary."<br>-_Charlotte Observer_ </p><p>"If you only read one book, make it this dazzling selection of short stories..."<br>-Eve Magazine UK </p><p>"...Some of the wittiest and wisest stories you'll read all year..."<br>-Elle UK </p><p>"Character provides the thematic key to these stories, all new to this collection, from some of our finest younger contemporary fiction writers. </p><p>Editor and contributor Smith (On Beauty, 2005, etc.) invited 22 other authors, many of them (like her) better known for novels than short fiction, to write a story inspired by the creation of a character. "The instruction was simple," she writes in her introduction, "make somebody up." Yet the stories correspond to no consensus about the role of character in fiction, or a return to realism, or the responsibility of fiction to mirror society. To the contrary, what Smith believes the stories show is that "there are as many ways to create 'character' (or deny the possibility of 'character') as there are writers." The title of each story comes from the name of a character or type ("The Monster") with the selections sequenced alphabetically. Many of the writers, including Smith, come from the McSweeney's and/or Believer literary circle (Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida, Heidi Julavits, Chris Ware, Nick Hornby et al.) and most of the contributions range from the short to the very short (Toby Litt's "The Monster" is a four-page paragraph). With proceeds benefiting 826 New York (a nonprofit organization for the inspiration and development of student writing), none of the writers were paid for their work, with the results sometimes more playful (and occasionally slighter) than one has come to expect from them. Jonathan Lethem's Dickensian titled "Perkus Tooth" offers a hilarious dismissal of rock critics. A.L. Kennedy's "Frank" provides an existential parable about a man who isn't who he thinks he is. Though many of the stories have a first-person perspective, the narrator is rarely the title character, and some of the challenge for the reader can be determining whom a story is really about. In Colm T~ib"n's "Donal Webster," the name of the title character is never even mentioned, leaving the reader to guess who is addressing whom. </p><p>While the quality inevitably varies, the spirit of the anthology is that reading should be fun rather than work. -_Kirkus Reviews_</p></div>


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<p class="description">A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade. Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary. Split into four sections-"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"-Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani. In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers-E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others-have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences-in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond-that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected. Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.</p>


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<div>Somewhere in Northwest London stands Caldwell housing estate, relic of 
70s urban planning. Five identical blocks, deliberately named: Hobbes, 
Smith, Bentham, Locke, and Russell. If you grew up here, the plan was to
 get out and get on, to something bigger, better. Thirty years later 
ex-Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan have all made it out, 
with varying degrees of succes - whatever that means. Living only 
streets apart, they occupy separate worlds and navigate an atomized city
 where few wish to be their neighbor's keeper. Then one April afternoon a
 stranger comes to Leah's door seeking help, disturbing the peace, and 
forcing Leah out of her isolation. . . .<br><br>From private houses to 
public parks, at work and at play, in this delicate, devastating novel 
of encounters, the main streets hide the back alleys, and taking the 
high road can sometimes lead to a dead end. Zadie Smith's <i>NW </i>brilliantly
 depicts the modern urban zone - familiar to city dwellers everywhere - 
in a tragicomic novel as mercurial as the city itself.</div>


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<div><p>Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction and from the celebrated author of White Teeth comes another bestselling masterwork</p><p>Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.</p><p>Named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and Publishers Weekly A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe,...</p></div>


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<div><p>Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled—a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth.</p><p>Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.</p><p>**</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>If a copy (often unread) of The Name of the Rose on the coffee table was a badge of intellectual superiority in 1983, Eco's second novel--also an intellectual blockbuster--should prove more accessible. This complex psychological thriller chronicles the development of a literary joke that plunges its perpetrators into deadly peril. The narrator, Casaubon, an expert on the medieval Knights Templars, and two editors working in a branch of a vanity press publishing house in Milan, are told about a purported coded message revealing a secret plan set in motion by the Knights Templars centuries ago when the society was forced underground. As a lark, the three decide to invent a history of the occult tying a variety of phenomena to the mysterious machinations of the Order. Feeding their inspirations into a computer, they become obsessed with their story, dreaming up links between the Templars and just about every occult manifestation throughout history, and predicting that culmination of the Templars' scheme to take over the world is close at hand. The plan becomes real to them--and eventually to the mysterious They, who want the information the trio has "discovered." Dense, packed with meaning, often startlingly provocative, the novel is a mixture of metaphysical meditation, detective story, computer handbook, introduction to physics and philosophy, historical survey, mathematical puzzle, compendium of religious and cultural mythology, guide to the Torah (Hebrew, rather than Latin contributes to the puzzle here, but is restricted mainly to chapter headings), reference manual to the occult, the hermetic mysteries, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons-- ad infinitum . The narrative eventually becomes heavy with the accumulated weight of data and supposition, and overwrought with implication, and its climax may leave readers underwhelmed. Until that point, however, this is an intriguing cerebral exercise in which Eco slyly suggests that intellectual arrogance can come to no good end. <br>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate heresy among the monks in an Italian abbey; a series of bizarre murders overshadows the mission. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The book became a hit despite some obscure passages and allusions. This deftly abridged version, ably performed by Theodore Bikel, retains the genius of the original but is far more accessible. Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel, is a bit irritating. The plot consists of three Milan editors who concoct a series on the occult for an unscrupulous publishing house that Eco ridicules mercilessly. The work details medieval phenomena including the Knights Templar, an ancient order with a scheme to dominate the world. Unfortunately, few listeners will make sense of this failed thriller. The Island of the Day Before is an ingenious tale that begins with a shipwreck in 1643. Roberta della Griva survives and boards another ship only to find himself trapped. Flashbacks give us Renaissance battles, the French court, spies, intriguing love affairs, and the attempt to solve the problem of longitude. It's a world of metaphors and paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar. Tim Curry, who also narrates Foucault's Pendulum, provides a spirited narration. Ultimately, libraries should avoid Foucault's Pendulum, but educated patrons will form an eager audience for both The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before.?James Dudley, Copiague, N.Y.<br>Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>The most playful of historical novelists, Umberto Eco has absorbed the real lesson of history: that there is no such thing as the absolute truth. In <em>Baudolino</em>, he hands his narrative to an Italian peasant who has managed, through good luck and a clever tongue, to become the adopted son of the Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and a minister of his court in the closing years of the 12th century. Baudolino's other gift is for spontaneous but convincing lies, and so his unfolding tale--as recounted in 1204 to a nobleman of Constantinople, while the fires of the Fourth Crusade rage around them--exemplifies the Cretan Liar's Paradox: He can't be believed. Why not, then, make his story as outrageous as possible? In the course of his picaresque tale, Baudolino manages to touch on nearly every major theme, conflict, and boondoggle of the Middle Ages: the Crusades; the troubadours; the legend of the Holy Grail; the rise of the cathedral cities; the position of Jews; the market in relics; the local rivalries that made Italy so vulnerable to outside attack; and the perennial power struggles between the pope and the emperor. With the help of alcohol and a mysterious Moorish concoction called "green honey," Baudolino and his ragtag friends engage in typical scholastic debates of the period, trying to determine the dimensions of Solomon's Temple and the location of the Earthly Paradise. And when the Emperor needs support in his claims for saintly lineage, who but Baudolino can craft the perfect letter of homage from the legendary Prester John, Holy (and wholly fictitious) Christian King of the East? A giddy and exasperating romp, <em>Baudolino</em> will draw you into its labyrinthine inventions and half-truths, even if you know better. <em>--Regina Marler</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In another grand mythical epic, Eco transports readers to the medieval Italy of The Name of the Rose (though almost two centuries earlier), where Frederick Barbarossa seeks to establish himself as the Holy Roman emperor. The story begins in 1204, as the Byzantium capital of Constantinople is sacked and Baudolino, the adoptive son of Frederick, recounts his life to Byzantine historian Niketas, whom he has just saved from the barbaric Latins. Unfolding amid religious conspiracy theories and mysticism, the narrative, which builds slowly, follows the life of Baudolino, an Italian peasant boy who fabricates stories he realizes people want to believe in. While studying in Paris, Baudolino meets several friends from all over the world, who together divulge their intimate dreams and share their desire to discover distant places. Two decades later, Baudolino calls together his friends to embark on what will be a lifelong journey to find Prester John, the Christian priest of the East, whose fabled reputation Baudolino has helped create. Eco seems to loosen the reins when the friends set out across unknown territories, where they grope through an eternally dark forest; traverse a river of stones and boulders; and encounter such mythical creatures as the sled-footed skiapods, dog-headed cynocephali and the Hypatia, beautiful sirens with the legs of goats. While the pilgrims are aware, to a certain extent, of Baudolino's truth-stretching, they all come to believe in their search, as does Baudolino himself. Eco builds his story upon light theological and historical debates, though fiction and history are more evenly balanced than in his previous book, The Island of the Day Before, making for a more engaging read. While this book lacks the suspense of The Name of the Rose, it is nevertheless a spirited story that might offer those previously daunted by his writing a more accessible entrée. <br>Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<p>After a violent storm in the South Pacific in the year 1643, Roberto della Griva finds himself shipwrecked-on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing.<p>As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he remembers chapters from his youth: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy.<p>In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and of a most amazing old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood.


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<p><B>From the best-selling author of <I>The Name of the Rose</I> and <I>The Prague Cemetery,</I> a novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder</B><br> A newspaper committed to blackmail and mud slinging, rather than reporting the news.<BR> <BR> A paranoid editor, walking through the streets of Milan, reconstructing fifty years of history against the backdrop of a plot involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double.<BR> <BR> The murder of Pope John Paul I, the CIA, red terrorists handled by secret services, twenty years of bloodshed, and events that seem outlandish until the BBC proves them true.<BR> <BR> A fragile love story between two born losers, a failed ghost writer, and a vulnerable girl, who specializes in celebrity gossip yet cries over the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh. And then a dead body that suddenly appears in a back alley in Milan. <BR> <BR> Set in 1992 and foreshadowing the mysteries and follies of the following twenty years,...


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<div><p>In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.</p><h3>Review</h3><p>Amis's vision of adolescence is an unvarnished, terrifying and hilarious one."-- New Yorker<br></p><p>"A truly sexy and funny book...a delight...the best teenage sex novel since Goodbye Columbus." -- New York<br></p><p>"Amis is a born comic novelist, in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh...He can find laughter in catastrophe and knows that morality shifts sneakily between absolutes and ambiguity...Amis's mercurial style...can rise to Joycean brilliance." </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p>In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her. </p></div>


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<p>Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With <i>Experience</i>, he discloses a <br>private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels. He explores his relationship with his beloved father, novelist Kingsley Amis, and examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers. <i>Experience</i> also dissects the literary scene, and includes Amis'portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Ian McEwan, among others. Not since Nabokov's <i>Speak, Memory</i> has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>In <b>Success</b> Amis pens a mismatched pair of foster brothers--one "a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude," the other a "bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response"--in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister to create a modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers.&nbsp;<br><br>Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious Anti-Social Behaviour Order), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine.&nbsp; He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality.&nbsp; Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love (and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him).&nbsp; But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle&mdash;once again in a London prison&mdash;wins &pound;140 million in the lottery and upon his release hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and &ldquo;poet.&rdquo;&nbsp;...


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<div><p>A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>"This collection of stories is prefaced with an essay on the nuclear threat so trenchant and irrefutable that the book is worth reading for that alone." The stories that follow are "all virtuoso exercises in dread," said PW. <br>Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p>A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Join Douglas Adams's hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You'll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue. <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide</em> is rich in comedic detail and thought-provoking situations and stands up to multiple reads. Required reading for science fiction fans, this book (and its follow-ups) is also sure to please fans of Monty Python, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and British sitcoms. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Don't panic! Here are words of praise for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!  </p><p>"It's science fiction and it's extremely funny...inspired lunacy that leaves hardly a science fiction cliche alive."  </p><p>Washington Post  </p><p>"The feckless protagonist, Arthur Dent, is reminiscent of Vonnegut heroes, and his travels afford a wild satire of present institutions."  </p><p>Chicago Tribune  </p><p>"Very simply, the book is one of the funniest SF spoofs ever written, with hyperbolic ideas folding in on themselves."  </p><p>School Library Journal  </p><p>"As parody, it's marvelous: It contains just about every science fiction cliche you can think of. As humor, it's, well, hysterical."  </p><p><em>From the Hardcover edition.</em></p></div>


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<div><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Warning! This second volume in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series is definitely not a standalone book. Enjoying, or even understanding, the continuing adventures of Earthling Arthur Dent, his strange pal Ford Prefect, and the very, very odd Zaphod Beeblebrox requires previous study and preparation. Confusion and possible insanity awaits the poor soul who tries to figure out the second title without having read the first. Arthur and Ford, having survived the destruction of Earth by surreptitiously hitching a ride on a Vogon constructor ship, have been kicked off that ship by its commander. Now they find themselves aboard a stolen Improbability Drive ship commanded by Beeblebrox, ex-president of the Imperial Galactic Government and full-time thief. Narrated by Adams, this production is a treat for fans of the late author and others who enjoy British comedy. Be sure to buy all five parts of the "Hitchhiker" series or your patrons will storm your office. One caveat: this audiobook will need to be repackaged for library circulation.<br><em>Barbara Rhodes, Northeast Texas Lib. Syst., Garland </em><br>Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Douglas Adams is a terrific satirist.”—_Washington Post Book World  </p><p><em>“What’s such fun is how amusing the galaxy looks through Adams’s sardonically silly eyes.”—</em>Detroit Free Press<br>_  </p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Edited by Peter Guzzardi and with an introduction by Christopher Cerf, this bittersweet collection comprises letters, fragments of ideas for books, films and TV, ruminations on a diverse array of subjects and a good bit of a final unfinished novel by the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, who died in May of last year. Included are a letter to the editor of a U.K. boy's magazine (written in 1965, when Adams was 12); a reminiscence about his lifelong love for the Beatles, written when he was in his 40s; a 1991 piece from Esquire entitled "My Nose"; and an undated article for the Independent espousing his preference for whiskey. Also on hand are a q&amp;a in which he identifies the most interesting natural structure as being a "2,000-mile-long fish in orbit around Jupiter, according to a reliable report in the Weekly World News"; a spiritual encounter with a giant manta ray while testing a mechanical diving device at Australia's Great Barrier Reef; an affecting introduction to P.G. Wodehouse's unfinished novel, Sunset at Blandings; an account of a Save the Rhino pilgrimage across Africa; ruminations on computerization; and a philosophical address about the authorship of the universe entitled "Is There an Artificial God?" Two sketches "The Private Life of Genghis Khan" and "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" from the Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, 1986, are also here, as are 10 chapters from various versions of the title novel-in-progress. National advertising. <br>Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>It's hard to classify this cornucopia, selected by Christopher Cerf from Adams's papers after his untimely death, but Hitchhiker fans will want it. </p><p>Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</p></div>


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<p class="description">"HYSTERICAL!"--The Philadelphia InquirerThe unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads--so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the white killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation.They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler, who tries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane to see if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vicepresident of the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered by irrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-head honcho of the Universe; and Trillian, the sexy space cadet who is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressed Beeblebrox.How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows as they try to avert "universal" Armageddon and save life as we know it--and don't know it!"ADAMS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE TREASURES: an author who, one senses, has as much fun writing as one has reading."--The Arizona Daily Star</p>


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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>"The looniest of the lot."<br>--Time  </p><p>"A MADCAP ADVENTURE . . . ADAMS'S WRITING TEETERS ON THE FRINGE OF INSPIRED LUNACY."<br>--United Press International  </p><p>"The most ridiculously exaggerated situation comedy known to created beings . . . Adams is irresistible."<br>--The Boston Globe </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange trip through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription, the mysterious disappearance of Earth's dolphins, and the discovery of his battered copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy all conspire to give Arthur the sneaking suspicion that something otherworldly is indeed going on. . . .  </p><p>God only knows what it all means. And fortunately, He left behind a Final Message of explanation. But since it's light-years away from Earth, on a star surrounded by souvenir booths, finding out what it is will mean hitching a ride to the far reaches of space aboard a UFO with a giant robot. But what else is new? </p></div>


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<p class="description">Starship Titanic is a science-fiction adventure set aboard a colossal spaceship (which is named after a fairly well-known cruise ship from the planet Earth). It seems that something has gone horribly wrong aboard the Starship Titanic--a fact that becomes evident as the vessel slams into the cozy confines of your living room. Now, at the request of the ship's robotic crew, you must go aboard, figure out what went wrong, and fix it. The game uses impressively rendered graphics to depict Starship Titanic's opulent interior. For the most part, you can make your way through the ship and the game using the mouse as you would in Myst. For conversations with the robot attendants, you use the keyboard and the game's text parser. This combination of contemporary adventure-game graphics and classic-style text conversations works well. As with any adventure game, this one has a lot of puzzles for you to solve. And like everything else Douglas Adams comes up with, the puzzles in this game are complex, challenging, and often downright silly. You'll have to disarm a bomb, for example, that has a 20-digit "combination" and that constantly taunts you. (Monty Python's John Cleese plays the voice of the bomb.) You'll also have to deal with an annoying, chicken-eating parrot (played by Terry Jones, another Python veteran and author of the Starship Titanic novel).One thing to keep in mind as you play Starship Titanic is that the puzzles will leave you frustrated at times. That's OK--in fact, that's probably what Adams had in mind from the start--because most of the solutions to these puzzles are incredibly bizarre and unusual. If you get really stuck, the DoorBot and BellBot can usually be of some assistance. Even with a little help from these automated assistants, however, Starship Titanic will have you puzzling for hours and hours. --Michael Ryan</p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>"The British author of the Hitchhiker trilogy and other immensely popular lunacies, Adams permits no whiff of common sense to spoil his new novel, which combines fantasy, hilarity and creeping horrors," remarked PW . Here, sleuth Dirk Gently investigates a lawyer and an advertiser who possess the soul of the god Odin. "The plot's ramifications are marvelous, bloody and irresistible." <br>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A passenger check-in desk at London's Heathrow Airport goes up in a ball of flame and Dirk Gently becomes very inquisitive. </p></div>


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<div><h3>Product Description</h3><p>There is a long tradition of Great Detectives, and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. But his search for a missing cat uncovers a ghost, a time traveler, AND the devastating secret of humankind! Detective Gently's bill for saving the human race from extinction: NO CHARGE. </p><h3>From the Publisher</h3><p>There is a long tradition of Great Detectives, and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. But his search for a missing cat uncovers a ghost, a time traveler, AND the devastating secret of humankind! Detective Gently's bill for saving the human race from extinction: NO CHARGE. </p></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In this installment of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga, Ford Prefect of the planet Betelgeuse relies on serendipity and his own quick wits to protect a new edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide from the loathsome Vogons. A 12-week PW bestseller in cloth. <br>Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Hitchhiker fans rejoice! . . . [Here’s] more of the same zany nonsensical mayhem.”—_New York Times Book Review  </p><p><em>“It is Mr. Adams’s genius to hurl readers into a plot that seems to go everywhere and nowhere, then suddenly drop the pieces into place, click, click, click, like tumblers in a lock. . . . Delightful.”—</em>Baltimore Sun<br>_</p></div>


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<div><p class="description">With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels **A Wild Sheep Chase** and **Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World**, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.  </p>
<p class="description"><br>By turns haunting and hilarious, **The Elephant Vanishes** is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.</p></div>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3> <p>On March 20, 1995, followers of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo unleashed lethal sarin gas into cars of the Tokyo subway system. Many died, many more were injured. This is acclaimed Japanese novelist Murakami's (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, etc.) nonfiction account of this episode. It is riveting. What he mostly does here, however, is listen to and record, in separate sections, the words of both victims, people who "just happened to be gassed on the way to work," and attackers. The victims are ordinary people bankers, businessmen, office workers, subway workers who reflect upon what happened to them, how they reacted at the time and how they have lived since. Some continue to suffer great physical disabilities, nearly all still suffer great psychic trauma. There is a Rashomon-like quality to some of the tales, as victims recount the same episodes in slightly different variations. Cumulatively, their tales fascinate, as small details weave together to create a complex narrative. The attackers are of less interest, for what they say is often similar, and most remain, or at least do not regret having been, members of Aum. As with the work of Studs Terkel, which Murakami acknowledges is a model for this present work, the author's voice, outside of a few prefatory comments, is seldom heard. He offers no grand explanation, no existential answer to what happened, and the book is better for it. This is, then, a compelling tale of how capriciously and easily tragedy can destroy the ordinary, and how we try to make sense of it all. (May 1)Forecast: Publication coincides with the release of a new novel by Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart, Forecasts, Mar. 19), and several national magazines, including Newsweek and GQ, will be featuring this fine writer. This attention should help Murakami's growing literary reputation. </p> <p>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p> <h3>From Library Journal</h3> <p>The deadly Tokyo subway poison gas attack, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on March 20, 1995, was the fulfillment of every urban straphanger's nightmare. Through interviews with several dozen survivors and former members of Aum, novelist Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) presents an utterly compelling work of reportage that lays bare the soul of contemporary Japan in all its contradictions. The sarin attack exposed Tokyo authorities' total lack of preparation to cope with such fiendish urban terrorism. More interesting, however, is the variety of reactions among the survivors, a cross-section of Japanese citizens. Their individual voices remind us of the great diversity within what is too often viewed from afar as a homogeneous society. What binds most of them is their curious lack of anger at Aum. Chilling, too, is the realization that so many Aum members were intelligent, well-educated persons who tried to fill voids in their lives by following Shoko Asahara, a mad guru who promised salvation through total subordination to his will. For all public and academic libraries. Steven I. Levine, Univ. of Montana, Missoula <br /> Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.


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<p class="description">Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami's characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be the closest of all.</p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in <em>After the Quake</em> are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of __. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. <em>--Claire Dederer</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>These six stories, all loosely connected to the disastrous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, are Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Norwegian Wood) at his best. The writer, who returned to live in Japan after the Kobe earthquake, measures his country's suffering and finds reassurance in the inevitability that love will surmount tragedy, mustering his casually elegant prose and keen sense of the absurd in the service of healing. In "Honey Pie," Junpei, a gentle, caring man, loses his would-be sweetheart, Sayoko, when his aggressive best friend, Takatsuki, marries her. They have a child, Sala. He remains close friends with them and becomes even closer after they divorce, but still cannot bring himself to declare his love for Sayoko. Sala is traumatized by the quake and Junpei concocts a wonderful allegorical tale to ease her hurt and give himself the courage to reveal his love for Sayoko. In "UFO in Kushiro" the horrors of the quake inspire a woman to leave her perfectly respectable and loving husband, Komura, because "you have nothing inside you that you can give me." Komura then has a surreal experience that more or less confirms his wife's assessment. The theme of nothingness is revisited in the powerful "Thailand," in which a female doctor who is on vacation in Thailand and very bitter after a divorce, encounters a mysterious old woman who tells her "There is a stone inside your body.... You must get rid of the stone. Otherwise, after you die and are cremated, only the stone will remain." The remaining stories are of equal quality, the characters fully developed and memorable. Murakami has created a series of small masterpieces.<br />Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<p class="description">It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company’s advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself.</p>


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SUMMARY: In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets: When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound. Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat "King" Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Romance, accusingly bittersweet but still redemptive, is the theme of this novel written by award-winning novelist Murakami, one of Japan's most popular authors. Two only children who were schoolmates and best friends meet again after a 25-year separation. Hajime is now married, the father of two little girls and a successful owner of two jazz clubs. Shimamoto has also changed; she has become a very beautiful woman. She is always immaculately and expensively dressed, but she will not talk about her life or anything that has happened to her. Nevertheless, Hajime believes that he loves her more than life itself; he is convinced that he could leave his family and his business to be with her. After they spend a night together, a night filled with raw passion, she vanishes. Hajime is distraught. After much soul searching, he begins to put his life back together and discovers that he has become a stronger man, one who realizes that looking back is often necessary in order to move forward.?Janis Williams, Shaker Heights P.L., OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Murakami never fails to surprise, whether he's mixing genres and creating ambitious alternate worlds, as he did in the magisterial Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , or putting his own spin on a tale of obsessional love, as he does here. Like many of Murakami's heroes, Hajime is, at least on the surface, a thoroughly conventional man: married with children, the owner of an upscale jazz bar in suburban Tokyo. And yet, there is another Hajime, disconnected from his outer self, drifting in its wake, waiting quietly to be summoned to action. The summons comes in the form of Shimamoto, Hajime's childhood sweetheart, whom he hasn't seen for 20 years but who has never been out of his thoughts. She returns one rainy night, walking into Hajime's bar, and the effect is a little like what happens when Ilse walks into Rick's in Casablanca ("Of all the gin joints in all the world . . ."). But it is something more, too. As always, Murakami drenches his story in American pop culture, but here he uses those illusions to set us up. What happens with Hajime and Shimamoto lacks the tragic tonic chord that melodramatic love stories give us at the end; instead, there is only mystery and confusion. In Murakami's world, secret selves and other realities are forever lurking beneath the shifting sands of the everyday. If this examination of one of those selves is less grand than we've come to expect from one of the masters of the contemporary novel, it is also more intimate and every bit as unsettling. Bill Ott --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. This latest from the internationally celebrated Japanese author of A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle eschews Murakami's trademark comic extravagance, offering instead a muted portrayal of dream-driven midlife crisis. Narrator Hajim e, an only child (a condition that obsesses him) whose very conventional upbringing includes a sexless (if emotionally intense) friendship with a crippled girl named Shimamoto, discovers in his mid-30s that his settled bourgeois existence masks an urgent desire to resume and consummate the relationship that dominated his youth. Having endured a frustrating teenage romance (which was ended by his own unfaithfulness) and an unrewarding job as a textbook editor, Hajime later married happily, fathered childre n, andthanks to his wealthy father-in-lawbecame the proprietor of two popular ``jazz bars.'' One night Shimamoto walks into Hajime's popular Robin's Nest, they talk for hours, and the fantasies of adventurous lives and exotic faraway places that had absor bed their earlier years gradually resurface. Persuading himself that ``I was living someone else's life, not my own,'' Hajime surrenders to Shimamoto's spell, accompanying her on an enigmatic ``pilgrimage,'' then tumbling into an affair terminated only wh en she inexplicably departs again, abandoning Hajime to the workaday world and domestic routine he had imagined escaping. In a slowly moving narrative made even more attenuated by shapeless lengthy conversations, Murakami presents Hajime as a hopeful drea mer chastened, though not changed, by his realization that ``I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover.'' It seems scant material for a novel, though there are fine moments, including a hilarious anecdotal account of adolescent sexual panic a nd an eerie climactic encounter with Izumi, the girl Hajime had wronged many years earlier. Brief Encounter meets Blue Velvet? Or a book written to exorcize personal demons? Whichever, it's only middling Murakamiwhat well have to make do with until the ne xt wild sheep or wind-up bird comes along. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. "A wise and beautiful book." --The New York Times Book Review "A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other."&#160;&#160;--The New York Times "Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction." --The Baltimore Sun "Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance."&#160;&#160;--San Francisco Chronicle "His most deeply moving novel." --The Boston Globe -- Review &#8220;A wise and beautiful book.&#8221; &#8211;The New York Times Book Review &#8220;A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.&#8221; &#8211;The New York Times &#8220;Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami&#8217;s deeply original fiction.&#8221; &#8211;The Baltimore Sun &#8220;Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.&#8221; &#8211;San Francisco Chronicle &#8220;His most deeply moving novel.&#8221; &#8211;The Boston Globe &#8220;Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.&#8221; &#8211;The Baltimore Sun &#8220;A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.&#8221; &#8211;The Philadelphia Inquirer &#8220;Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.&#8221; &#8211;San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle &#8220;Haunting and natural. . . . so smoothly shifts the reader from mundane concerns into latent madness as to challenge one&#8217;s faith in the material world . . . contains passages that are among his finest.&#8221; &#8211;The New York Observer &#8220;Haruki Murakami applies his patented Japanese magic realism&#8211;minimalist, smooth and transcendently odd&#8211;to a charming tale of childhood love lost.&#8221; &#8211;New York


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>In 1987, when <em>Norwegian Wood</em> was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production <em>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</em>. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man. </p><p><em>Norwegian Wood</em> is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles: </p><blockquote><p>I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it. </p></blockquote><p>This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's <em>The Bell Jar</em> and Stephen Vizinczey's <em>In Praise of Older Women</em>. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, <em>Norwegian Wood</em> captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy. <em>--Mark Thwaite</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In a complete stylistic departure from his mysterious and surreal novels (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; A Wild Sheep Chase) that show the influences of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Tom Robbins, Murakami tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story, reminiscent of J.R. Salamanca's classic 1964 novel, LilithAthe tale of a young man's involvement with a schizophrenic girl. A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki, inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered. She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young love bound for tragedy. Published in Japan in 1987, this novel proved a wild success there, selling four million copies. (Sept.) <br>Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<p>"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves." --<i>The New York Times Book Review</i><br> <i> </i><br> The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.<br><br>A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 --"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. <br><br> As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the...


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<div><p>Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn’t that be great?<br><br>But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs, where no one knew your face (no book jackets, no TV) and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you then?<br><br>What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you anymore? When you saw a look-alike acting your roles for you, what would you do? <br><br>And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything else you’d ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense? What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing it?<br><br>Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through all nine episodes of this captivating, wickedly funny, and perpetually surprising novel as paths cross and plots thicken, as characters become real people and real people morph into characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of Europe’s finest young writers.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. In this brilliant study of the fragility and interconnectedness of life, Kehlmann (Measuring the World) probes issues of identity in nine overlapping narratives, with each pivoting on a moment where a commonplace event becomes a crack and then a flood gate for existential horror. It begins as computer technician Ebling buys a cellphone, only to discover the number he is assigned belongs to movie star Ralf Tanner; at first resistant, Ebling is soon making decisions that alter Ralf's life. Later, after his phone has abruptly stopped ringing, Ralf finds his life taken over by an impersonator. Meanwhile, the telecommunications executive whose negligence led to the phone number switch cracks from the pressures of having an affair. In a parallel plot, Elisabeth, a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, keeps her work secret from her famous boyfriend, the writer Leo Richter, out of fear he will steal her experiences for future adventures of his most popular character. Layers of connection, irony, despair, and humor distinguish this masterful work and announce Kehlman as a worthy heir to Bowles and Camus. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Daniel Kehlmann's <em>Fame</em> is a darkly comic masterpiece, a rare and thrilling example of a philosophical novel as pleasurable as it is thought-provoking." <em>—San Francisco Chronicle</em><br></p><p>“In Kehlmann’s wickedly clever novel of nine interconnected stories, fame is something his cast of widely disparate characters seek, avoid, flirt with, and succumb to. . . [They are] luminous creations, and the coincidental devices that link them are brilliant gambits. Kehlmann showcases a flair for devious satire.” <br><em>—Booklist</em> (starred) <br><strong> </strong> <br>“[A] darkly comic tour de force…A brazen take on the modern yearning for recognition. Kehlmann is a writer worth reading.” <br><strong>—<em>Kirkus Reviews</em> (starred)<br><br>“[A] brilliant study of the fragility and interconnectedness of life. . . Layers of connection, irony, despair, and humor distinguish this masterful work.”<br></strong>—<em>Publishers Weekly</em> (starred)<br><br>"Who would have thought contemporary Central European literature could be so fun and so funny?  Daniel Kehlmann is who. The young Austrian prodigy, famous everywhere but in the United States, has given us a real beauty of a book, farcical, satiric, melancholic, and humane. Modern fame may have been invented in America, but nobody has dramatized its paradoxes and heartbreaks more entertainingly than the European Kehlmann does here."<br><em>—</em>Jonathan Franzen<br><br></p></div>


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<p>From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels <b>Lolita, Pale Fire,</b><br> and <b>Ada, or Ardor</b>, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, <b>The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov</b> offers and intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>King is the wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a male clothing emporium. Ruddy with health and self-satisfaction, he is repugnant to his cold queen, his wife Martha. She is warmed by his fortune, but hungers for their nephew, the knave of hearts. <br></p>


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<p>Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, <b>Ada, or Ardor</b> is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.  It tells a love story troubled by incest.  But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.   <b>Ada, or Ardor</b> is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.<br><br>This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously  sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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The screenplay for Kubrik's 1962 film tells the story of an older man's obsession with a young girl.


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<div><p>A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian emigre who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness.</p><h3>Review</h3><p>'He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language' </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. </p></div>


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<div><p>Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--<strong>Despair</strong> is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.<br></p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p><h3>Language Notes</h3><p>Text: English, Russian (translation) </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p>Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--<strong>Despair</strong> is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder. </p></div>


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<p>Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike<br><br>The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguished novelist, but probably fewer than a dozen knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career, the second one in such a disastrous way. After Knight's death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with a few scanty clues in the novelist's private papers. His search proves to be a story as intriguing as any of his subject's own novels, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<div><p><strong>Mary</strong> is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel. In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.<br></p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p><h3>Language Notes</h3><p>Text: English, Russian (translation) </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p><strong>Mary</strong> is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel. In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia. </p></div>


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<p>'The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations.I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-coloured snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe...'These three stories of menace, magic and melancholy display Vladimir Nabokov's astonishing range and inventiveness. Whether describing an escape across a surreal tropical landscape, a fateful meeting or an unexpected -- and threatening -- return, each tale shows his dazzling sleight of hand, intellectual playfulness and fantastical imagination.This book includes Terra Incognita, Spring in Fialta and The Doorbell.


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<p>The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov's classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p><b>The Gift</b> is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career.  It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative:  the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished &#233;migr&#233; poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--a book very much like <b>The Gift</b> itself.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>A fastidiously shaped series of lectures based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the Spanish classic. Rejecting the common interpretation of <I>Don Quixote</I> as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a Preface by Fredson Bowers.


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<p>In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects.  Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<div><p>For the first time in English, Vladimir Nabokov’s earliest major work, written when he was only twenty-four: his only full-length play, introduced by Thomas Karshan and beautifully translated by Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy.<br></p><p><em>The Tragedy of Mister Morn</em> was written in the winter of 1923­­–1924, when Nabokov was completely unknown. The five-act play—the story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent—was never published in Nabokov’s lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer’s major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The play is Nabokov’s major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 above all through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.<br></p><h3>Review</h3><p>The variety, force and richness of Nabokov's perceptions have not even the palest rival in modern fiction. To read him in full flight is to experience stimulation that is at once intellectual, imaginative and aesthetic, the nearest thing to pure sensual pleasure that prose can offer -- Martin Amis He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language -- Anthony Burgess The power of the imagination is not apt soon to find another champion of such vigour -- John Updike </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for the United States, where he wrote some of his greatest works––<em>Bend Sinister</em> (1947),<em> Lolita</em> (1955), <em>Pnin </em>(1957), and <em>Pale Fire</em> (1962)––and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.<br></p><p>Thomas Karshan is the author of <em>Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play</em> and editor of Nabokov’s <em>Selected Poems</em>.  Previously a research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and Queen Mary, University of London, he is now a lecturer in literature at the University of East Anglia. <br></p><p>Anastasia Tolstoy is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, where she is writing a thesis on Nabokov. She is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy.<br></p></div>


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<p>Nabokov's fourth novel, <b>The Eye</b> is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian &#233;migr&#233; living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>A satirical fantasy on the rise of a tyrant state. Adam Krug stands alone in opposition to the new regime. His antagonist is the leader of the new party, Paduk. Grieving over his wife's recent death, Krug is at first dismissive of Paduk's activities. Then his son David is seized. </p>


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<p>When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, <i>The Original of Laura</i>. But Nabokov's wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband's last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five--the Russian novelist's only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books--has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father's wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative--dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality--affords us one last experience of Nabokov's magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.<br><br><i>Photos of the handwritten index cards accompany the text. They are perforated and can be...


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<p>Nabokov's third novel, <b>The Defense</b>, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i></p>


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<p>Four plays and two essays on drama, written during Nabokov's &eacute;migr&eacute; years before his writings in English earned him worldwide fame. Translated and with Introductions by Dmitri Nabokov.


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<p>Nikolai Gogol was one of the great geniuses of nineteenth century Russian literature, with a command of the irrational unmatched by any writer before or since. His strange tales, though often read as forceful demands for social change, were displays of the fantasies of the human spirit. In this ideal marriage of subject and critic, Nabokov analyses his endlessly inventive compatriot, focusing on the masterpieces <i>Dead Souls</i>, 'The Overcoat' and 'The Government Inspector'.</p><p></p><p>Misunderstood by his contemporaries, mishandled by theatre directors and ending his life mistreated by doctors - with medicinal leeches hanging from his exceptional nose - it took Nabokov to give Gogol, 'the oddest Russian in Russia', the critical biography he and his singular, brilliant work deserve.


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<div><p><strong>Glory</strong> is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him.  Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a "perilous, daredevil project"--an illegal attempt to re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919.  He succeeds--but at a terrible cost.</p><h3>Language Notes</h3><p>Text: English (translation)<br>Original Language: Russian </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p><strong>Glory</strong> is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twnety-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him.  Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a "perilous, daredevil project"--an illegal attempt to re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919.  He succeeds--but at a terrible cost. </p></div>


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<div><p>For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations. </p><p>**</p></div>


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<p>Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as <b>Conclusive Evidence</b> and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including <b>Lolita</b>, <b>Pnin</b>, <b>Despair</b>, <b>The Gift</b>, <b>The Real Life of Sebastian Knigh</b>t, and <b>The Defense</b>.  <br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>THE BESTSELLING BOOK FOR THOSE WHO WANT POWER, WATCH POWER, OR WANT TO ARM THEMSELVES AGAINST POWER . . .A moral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power into forty-eight well-explicated laws. As attention-grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws require prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), some stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and some the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally") but like it or not, all have applications in real-life situations. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded -- or been victimized by -- power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.</p>


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The final work from the Pulitzer Prize&#8211;winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days<br> <br> In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard's extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator's memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment&#8212;for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book's core, and his, is family&#8212;his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, <i>Spy of the First Person </i>takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to...


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"Los funerales de la mamá Grande", el primer libro de cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez, continúa la historia de Macondo iniciada en "La Hojarasca" y que alcanza su culminación y fin en "Cien años de soledad". En estos relatos el paisaje psíquico de Macondo se confunde con el humor d elos habitantes y con la sucesión de malestares, penas y prodigios. Rebeca Buendía, la viuda de José Arcadio, vive en una casa inmensa de dos corredores y nueve alcobas, padeciendo de delirios y visiones; el padre Ángel duerme desde hace años en el confesionario; el dentista tortura a los opositores; el telegrafista transmite poemas de amor a una colega desconocida; Trinidad, un adolescente, colecciona ratones muertos en cajas de zapatos. En Macondo sólo prosperan las pestes, los adivinos, los saltimbanquis y los encantadores de serpientes.


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Gabriel García Márquez ha declarado una y otra vez que El otoño del patriarca es la novela en la que más trabajo y esfuerzo invirtió. En efecto, García Márquez ha construido una maquinaria narrativa perfecta que desgrana una historia universal -la agonía y muerte de un dictador- en forma cíclica, experimental y real al mismo tiempo, en seis bloques narrativos sin diálogos, sin puntos y aparte, repitiendo una anécdota siempre igual y siempre distinta, acumulando hechos y descripciones deslumbrantes.


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El general Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios se iba para siempre. Había arrebatado al dominio español un imperio cinco veces más vasto que las Europas, había dirigido veinte años de guerras para mantenerlo libre y unido, y lo había gobernado con pulso firme hasta la semana anterior, pero a la hora de irse no se llevaba ni siquiera el consuelo de que se lo creyeran. Fascinado por la figura histórica del Libertador Simón Bolívar, García Márquez narra los últimos días, los menos documentados, de su vida. Lo muestra en todos sus aspectos: devorado por la fiebre, consumido por la tuberculosis, entregado a prácticas medicinales personales y fantásticas, evocando en rachas de lucidez o de fiebre sus lealtades y conquistas, sus infidelidades y fracasos. Pero ese deslumbramiento del narrador por la lenta agonía del personaje histórico demuestra ser también un deslumbramiento por la vida, por el curso de una vida que entrelaza fragmentos mediante los cuales no sólo puede reconstruirse el pasado de nuestra América sino también el laberinto que, implacable en su rigor moral, el héroe ha trazado.


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«Antes de entrar en el automóvil miró por encima del hombro para estar segura de que nadie la acechaba. Eran las siete y cinco de la noche en Bogotá. Había oscurecido una hora antes, el Parque Nacional estaba mal iluminado y los árboles sin hojas tenían un perfil fantasmal contra el cielo turbio y triste, pero no había a la vista nada que temer.»


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En "La Hojarasca" nació Macondo, ese poblachón cercano a la costa atlántica colombiana que ya se ha convertido en uno de los grandes mitos de la literatura universal. En él transcurre la historia de un entierro imposible. Ha muerto un personaje extraño, un antiguo médico odiado por el pueblo, y un viejo coronel retirado, para cumplir una promesa, se ha empeñado en enterrarle frente a la oposición de todo el poblado y sus autoridades.


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Gabriel García Márquez se descubrió a sí mismo como un narrador. Sin embargo, la intención primera era la de escribir un reportaje sobre un hombre, Luis Alejandro Velasco, que estuvo diez días a la deriva en una balsa mecida por el mar Caribe. El futuro Premio Nobel de Literatura y entonces joven reportero que era García Márquez escuchó el relato de los hechos de boca de su protagonista, y lo transformó, tal vez sin pretenderlo, en un prodigioso ejercicio literario, una narración escueta y vigorosa donde late el pulso de un gran escritor. La publicación por entregas del reportaje en El Espectador de Bogotá supuso un alboroto político considerable —se revelaba la existencia de contrabando ilegal en un buque de la Armada colombiana, lo que costó la vida de siete marineros y el naufragio, más afortunado, de Velasco— y el exilio para su autor, que se vio abocado a una nueva vida.


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Esta novela se basa en un hecho histórico acontecido en la tierra natal del autor. Sin embargo, en García Márquez la dialéctica entre realidad y mito es tan fecunda que eleva el hecho a categoría de metáfora universal sobre la condición humana. Cuando empieza el relato, Santiago Nasar ya está muerto, pues sabe que los hermanos Vicario lo van a matar —de hecho ya lo han matado— para vengar el honor ultrajado de su hermana Ángela, pero la novela concluye en el momento en que Santiago Nasar muere… Fascinante análisis de la fatalidad y el tiempo cíclico, en esta obra la realidad se metamorfosea en rito, el amor desemboca en tragedia, y los hombres y mujeres se sitúan en las fronteras de la leyenda.


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En este relato infinitamente seductor, Gabriel García Márquez narra la obsesión del deseo con un arrebato que lo aparta de sus grandes novelas anteriores y a la vez lo acerca a ellas. A la circularidad del tiempo en Macondo, al enclaustramiento del tirano aislado en su poder demencial, sucede ahora la vigencia imbatible del deseo, ahincado en sí mismo. Un deseo que avanza hacia su origen en un movimiento que no cesa. Como el movimiento del barco <i>Nueva Fidelidad</i>, que seguirá yendo y viniendo "toda la vida". Son las palabras que cierran, reanudándola, esta historia de amor.


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<i>Vivir para contarla</i> es la novela de una vida y, a lo largo de sus páginas el lector de García Márquez descubrirá ecos de personajes e historias que han poblado sus inolvidables novelas como <i>Cien años de soledad</i> o <i>El amor en los tiempos del cólera</i>. Además, esta obra incluye muchas más sorpresas. Seguiremos los primeros pasos de García Márquez en el mundo de la creación artística, el trabajo incansable en el proceso de redacción y corrección de <i>La hojarasca</i>, los distintos escenarios de una juventud bohemia plagada de burdeles, bailes y hoteluchos de mala muerte en Barranquilla, Cartagena de Indias y Bogotá. Y todo aderezado con reflexiones sobre el oficio de escritor, en un entramado que avanza y retrocede en el tiempo con la seguridad que sólo pueden dar cincuenta años de oficio maestro.


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Novela corta o cuento largo escrito por Gabriel García Márquez en 1972, no fue publicado sino hasta 1978. La cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada personifican la inocencia y la maldad, el amor y su perversión, y el relato recuerda al mismo tiempo las gestas medievales y los cantos provenzales o trovadorescos, aunque, como siempre, inmersos en ese mundo denso y frutal del Caribe americano. Otra obra maestra de este premio Nobel de literatura.


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Los textos que Gabriel García Márquez ha reunido en este libro fueron escritos con la intención de ser leídos por él mismo en público, ante una audiencia, y recorren prácticamente toda su vida, desde el primero, que escribe a los diecisiete años para despedir a sus compañeros del curso superior en Zipaquirá, hasta el que lee ante las Academias de la Lengua y los reyes de España al cumplir ochenta años. Estos discursos del premio Nobel nos ayudan a comprender más profundamente su vida y nos desvelan sus obsesiones fundamentales como escritor y ciudadano: su fervorosa vocación por la literatura, la pasión por el periodismo, su inquietud ante el desastre ecológico que se avecina, su propuesta de simplificar la gramática, los problemas de su tierra colombiana o el recuerdo emocionado de amigos escritores como Julio Cortázar o Álvaro Mutis, entre otros muchos. El lector tiene entre sus manos el complemento indispensable a una obra narrativa que nos seguirá hablando en un largo porvenir.


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<p>El 26 de octubre de 1949 el reportero Gabriel García Márquez fue enviado al antiguo convento de Santa Clara, que iba a ser demolido para edificar sobre él un hotel de cinco estrellas, a presenciar el vaciado de las criptas funerarias y a cubrir la noticia.</p> <p>Se exhumaron los restos de un virrey del Perú y su amante secreta, un obispo, varias abadesas, un bachiller de artes y una marquesa. Pero la sorpresa saltó al destapar la tercera hornacina del altar mayor: se desparramó una cabellera de color cobre, de veintidós metros y once centímetros de largo, perteneciente a una niña. En la lápida apenas se leía el nombre: Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles.</p> <p>Cuenta el propio García Márquez: «Mi abuela me contaba de niño la leyenda de una marquesita de doce años cuya cabellera le arrastraba como una cola de novia, que había muerto del mal de rabia por el mordisco de un perro, y era venerada en los pueblos del Caribe por sus muchos milagros. La idea de que esa tumba pudiera ser la suya fue mi noticia de aquel día, y el origen de este libro.»</p> <p>En esta novela histórica, el escritor colombiano nos ofrece nuevamente una obra cautivadora y fascinante que atrapa al lector a lo largo de cada una de sus páginas; el estilo de su escritura, muy semejante al mítico-histórico utilizado en <em>Cien años de soledad</em>, la hace parecer «como un capítulo perdido» de esta última obra.</p>


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Para festejar su nonagésimo cumpleaños un hombre solicita a la madame de un burdel una joven virgen. Mientras se prepara para esa noche recuerda su relación con las mujeres y el amor, a sus padres… Cuando conoce a la niña se encapricha, hasta el punto de quedarse con ella en su casa.


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A principios de 1985, el director de cine chileno Miguel Littín, sobre quien pesaba prohibición absoluta de volver a su tierra, entró clandestinamente en Chile. Durante seis semanas filmó más de siete mil metros de película sobre la realidad de su país después de doce años de dictadura militar. Para ello afrontó situaciones de extremo riesgo y tuvo que servirse de disfraces y tretas para mantenerse de incógnito. El resultado de su peripecia fue una película de cuatro horas para la televisión y de dos horas para el cine. Con el testimonio directo del protagonista, el premio Nobel colombiano escribió este libro en el más puro estilo del reportaje periodístico.


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«Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo». Macondo, en ese entonces, era una pequeña aldea a la que llegaban todos los años, por el mes de marzo, los gitanos dirigidos por Melquíades, llevando los últimos inventos de la ciencia. El patriarca y fundador de Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, se obsesiona con los inventos de los gitanos al extremo de descuidar a su familia. Descubre que la tierra es redonda y planea un viaje para encontrar la tierra de los inventos, pero luego de un peligroso viaje, sólo llega al mar. Ante su decisión de abandonar Macondo, Úrsula, su mujer, lo detiene y le dice que se ocupe de sus hijos. José Arcadio se entretiene en darles leccciones poco verídicas a sus hijos, José Arcadio y Aureliano. Cuando vuelven los gitanos, José Arcadio se entera de la muerte de Melquíades. Además, junto con sus dos hijos, conoce el hielo, que el cree es el más grande invento de su tiempo.


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El coronel no tiene quien le escriba fue escrita por Gabriel García Márquez durante su estancia en París, adonde había llegado como corresponsal de prensa y con la secreta intención de estudiar cine, a mediados de los años cincuenta. El cierre del periódico para el que trabajaba le sumió en la pobreza, mientras redactaba en tres versiones distintas esta excepcional novela, que luego fue rechazada por varios editores antes de su publicación. Tras el barroquismo faulkneriano de La hojarasca, esta segunda novela supone un paso hacia la ascesis, hacia la economía expresiva, y el estilo del escritor se hace más puro y transparente. Se trata también de una historia de injusticia y violencia: un viejo coronel retirado va al puerto todos los viernes a esperar la llegada de la carta oficial que responda a la justa reclamación de sus derechos por los servicios prestados a la patria. Pero la patria permanece muda...


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«El esfuerzo de escribir un cuento corto es tan intenso como empezar una novela. Pues en el primer párrafo de una novela hay que definir todo: estructura, tono, estilo, ritmo, longitud, y a veces hasta el carácter de algún personaje. Lo demás es el placer de escribir, el más íntimo y solitario que pueda imaginarse, y si uno no se queda corrigiendo el libro por el resto de la vida, es porque el mismo rigor de fierro que hace falta para empezarlo se impone para terminarlo. El cuento, en cambio, no tiene principio ni fin: fragua o no fragua. Y si no fragua, la experiencia propia y la ajena enseñan que en la mayoría de las veces es más saludable empezarlo de nuevo por otro camino, o tirarlo a la basura». Este volumen recoge los cuentos que, afortunadamente para los lectores de García Márquez, no terminaron en la papelera, precedidos por un prólogo en el que se da razón de por qué son doce, por qué son cuentos y por qué son peregrinos.


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<div><p>Fathered, through circuitous circumstances, by an Englishman, Pran Nath Razdan, the boy who will become the Impressionist, was passed off by his Indian mother as the child of her husband, a wealthy man of high caste. Growing up spoiled in a life of luxury just downriver from the Taj Mahal, at fifteen the news of Pran's true parentage is revealed to his father and he is tossed out into the street -- a pariah and an outcast. Thus begins an extraordinary, near mythical journey of a young man who must re-invent himself to survive -- not once, but many times.Imprisoned by a brothel and dressed in women's clothes, his sensuous beauty is exploited as he is made to become Rukhsana, a pawn in a game between colony and empire. To a depraved British major he becomes Clive, an object of desire taught to be a model English schoolboy. Escaping to Bombay he begins a double life as Robert, dutiful foster child to a Scottish missionary couple, and as Pretty Bobby, errand boy and sometime pimp to the tawdry women of the city's most notorious district.<br></p><p>But as political unrest begins to stir, Pran finds himself in the company of a doomed young Englishman -- an orphan named Jonathan Bridgeman. Having learned quickly that perception is a ready replacement for reality, Pran soon finds himself on a boat bound for Southampton where, with Bridgeman's passport, he will begin again. First in London, then at Oxford, the Impressionist hones his chameleon-like skills, making himself whoever and whatever he needs to be to obtain what he desires.<br></p><p>From Victorian India to Edwardian London, from an expatriate community of black Americans in Paris to a hopeless expedition to study a lost tribe of Africa, HariKunzru's unforgettable novel dazzles with its artistry and wit while it challenges with its insights into what it means to be Indian or English, black or white, and every degree that lies between them.</p></div>


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<b>From one of the most talented fiction writers at work today: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into the dark underworld of blues record collecting, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past.</b> <br>Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. <i>White Tears</i> is a ghost...


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Death in the Afternoon is a non-fiction book by Ernest Hemingway about the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting. It was originally published in 1932. The book provides a look at the history and what Hemingway considers the magnificence of bullfighting, while also being a deeper contemplation on the nature of fear and courage.  Any discussion concerning bullfighting would be incomplete without some mention of the controversy surrounding it. Toward that end Hemingway commented, "anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it."


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<p><p>A <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book<br><br>Flora Trist&#225;n, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return in 1844, she makes her name as a champion of the downtrodden, touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union. <br>In 1891, Flora's grandson, struggling painter and stubborn visionary Paul Gauguin, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.<p><br>Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this double portrait, a rare study in passion and ambition, as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death.


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<p><p>At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man...that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both.<br>


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Deep within the remote backlands of nineteenth-century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise--and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost. In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa tells his own version of the real story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.  Mario Vargas Llosa is the author of eight novels, most recently The Way to Paradise (FSG, 2003), and was the recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2002. He lives in London. Deep within the remote backlands of nineteenth-century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise—and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost.In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa tells his own version of the real story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.  “A magnificent storyteller . . . [Vargas Llosa] gives us a cast of unforgettable characters swept up in the upheaval . . . This is the work of a master, coming into full realization of his powers.”—The Boston Sunday Globe “A powerful and haunting historical novel.”—Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review“A modern tragedy on the grand scale . . . As dark as spilled blood.”—Salman Rushdie, The New Republic“A vast, fantastic, thunderous novel.”—The Times (London)“A magnificent storyteller . . . [Vargas Llosa] gives us a cast of unforgettable characters swept up in the upheaval . . . This is the work of a master, coming into full realization of his powers.”—The Boston Sunday Globe“An extraordinary achievement. The author gives a wonderfully vivid and impartial picture of individuals and communities.”—The Guardian (London)“His masterpiece.”—Madison Smartt Bell


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This wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the scene of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the commanding officer of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth.Who Killed Palomino Molero, an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery, takes up one of Vargas Llosa’s characteristic themes: the despair at how hard it is to be an honest man in a corrupt society. This wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the scene of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the commanding officer of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth.Who Killed Palomino Molero, an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery, takes up one of Vargas Llosa’s characteristic themes: the despair at how hard it is to be an honest man in a corrupt society.


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<p><B>The latest masterpiece</B><B>—perceptive, funny, insightful, affecting</B><B>—from the Nobel Prize–winning author<BR></B><BR>Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's newest novel, <I>The Discreet Hero</I>, follows two fascinating characters whose lives are destined to intersect: neat, endearing Felícito Yanaqué, a small businessman in Piura, Peru, who finds himself the victim of blackmail; and Ismael Carrera, a successful owner of an insurance company in Lima, who cooks up a plan to avenge himself against the two lazy sons who want him dead.<BR> Felícito and Ismael are, each in his own way, quiet, discreet rebels: honorable men trying to seize control of their destinies in a social and political climate where all can seem set in stone, predetermined. They are hardly vigilantes, but each is determined to live according to his own personal ideals and desires—which means forcibly rising above the pettiness of their surroundings. <I>The Discreet...


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<p><p><i>The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta</i> is an astute psychological portrait of a modern revolutionary and a searching account of an old friend's struggle to understand him. First published in English in 1986, the novel probes the long and checkered history of radical politics in Latin America. <br>


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<p class="description">Mario Vargas Llosa's masterful, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.</p>


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<p><p><I>The Perpetual Orgy</I> is Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant analysis of Gustav Flaubert's masterpiece <I>Madame Bovary</I>. In this remarkable book, "we not only enjoy a dazzling explication, but experience a master discoursing at the top of his form on the craft of the novel" (Robert Taylor, <I>The Boston Globe</I>). It is a tribute to <I>The Perpetual Orgy</I> that it sends the reader back to Flaubert's work with renewed interest.


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<P>‘Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity. ‘</P> <P>In his Nobel lecture, Mario Vargas Llosa describes reading and fiction as a parallel life where we can take refuge against adversity. He claims that we invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.</P> <P>Giving praise to the writers who helped his younger self to be transported to worlds beyond his own and enrich his life, he describes how learning to read at the age of five in Cochabamba, Bolivia, was the most important thing that ever happened to him. Without fictions, he suggests, we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, and that reading is the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition and to transform the impossible into possibility.</P> <P>&nbsp;</P>


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<p>"Does anyone date anymore?" Today, the authorities tell us that courtship is in crisis. But when Moira Weigel dives into the history of sex and romance in modern America, she discovers that authorities have always said this. Ever since young men and women started to go out together, older generations have scolded them: That's not the way to find true love. The first women who made dates with strangers were often arrested for prostitution; long before "hookup culture," there were "petting parties"; before parents worried about cell phone apps, they fretted about joyrides and "parking." Dating is always dying. But this does not mean that love is dead. It simply changes with the economy. Dating is, and always has been, tied to work. </p><p>Lines like "I'll pick you up at six" made sense at a time when people had jobs that started and ended at fixed hours. But in an age of contract work and flextime, many of us have become sexual freelancers, more likely to text a partner "u still...


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<p class="description">Rigoberto, un maduro empleado de una compañía de seguros, combate su banal existencia con una rica imaginación que va plasmando en cuadernos. Todo lo que Rigoberto no se atreve a hacer, no se atreve a vivir por sí mismo, sus audacias y aventuras imaginadas, sus deseos ocultos, van quedando reflejados en estas anotaciones que lo distancian cada vez más de su vulgar existencia. Los cuadernos son como un baúl del que se van extrayendo inesperados relatos, atesorados por el personaje con mayor celo que si fueran reales, y constituyen un refinado compendio de la imaginación erótica. Pero la particularidad de estas fantasías es que parten siempre de pinturas, obras literarias y piezas musicales constituyendo un verdadero y exquisito índice de la pintura y la literatura eróticas de todos los tiempos. Como contrapunto al florido universo de don Rigoberto, está el inquietante y perturbador ambiente que se forja alrededor de su pequeño hijo, Fonchito. Obsesionado con la vida y la obra del pintor austríaco Egon Schiele, el muchacho se sueña como la encarnación del pintor maldito y su misterioso mundo de niñas perversas y autorretratos angustiosos. Entre ellos, la madrastra. Una mujer que es para ambos la figura principal de ese doble mundo de deseos y realidades. Una mujer a la medida de sus más exigentes fantasías. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto es, sin lugar a dudas, la obra definitiva de Mario Vargas Llosa sobre el erotismo. En ella se despliegan ante el lector las claves que nuestra memoria cultural ha dado, a través del arte, sobre los misterios del placer sensual.</p>


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¿Por qué regresa Urania Cabral a la isla que juró no volver a pisar? ¿Por qué sigue vacía y llena de miedo desde los catorce años? ¿Por qué no ha tenido un solo amor? En La Fiesta del Chivo asistimos a un doble retorno. Mientras Urania visita a su padre en Santo Domingo, volvemos a 1961, cuando la capital dominicana aún se llamaba Ciudad Trujillo. Allí un hombre que no suda tiraniza a tres millones de personas sin saber que se gesta una maquiavélica transición a la democracia. Vargas Llosa, un clásico contemporáneo, relata el fin de una era dando voz, entre otros personajes históricos, al impecable e implacable general Trujillo, apodado el Chivo, y al sosegado y hábil doctor Balaguer (sempiterno presidente de la República Dominicana). Con un ritmo y una precisión difícilmente superables, este peruano universal muestra que la política puede consistir en abrirse camino entre cadáveres, y que un ser inocente puede convertirse en un regalo truculento.


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«La banalización de las artes y la literatura, el triunfo del periodismo amarillista y la frivolidad de la política son síntomas de un mal mayor que aqueja a la sociedad contemporánea: la idea temeraria de convertir en bien supremo nuestra natural propensión a divertirnos. En el pasado, la cultura fue una especie de conciencia que impedía dar la espalda a la realidad. Ahora, actúa como mecanismo de distracción y entretenimiento. La figura del intelectual, que estructuró todo el siglo XX, hoy ha desaparecido del debate público. Aunque algunos firmen manifiestos o participen en polémicas, lo cierto es que su repercusión en la sociedad es mínima. Conscientes de la esta situación, muchos han optado por el discreto silencio. Como buen espíritu incómodo, Vargas Llosa nos entrega una durísima radiografía de nuestro tiempo y nuestra cultura. «Este pequeño ensayo no aspira a abultar el elevado número de interpretaciones sobre la cultura contemporánea, sólo a dejar constancia de la metamorfosis que ha experimentado lo que se entendía aún por cultura cuando mi generación entró a la escuela o a la universidad y la abigarrada materia que la ha sustituido, una impostura que parece haberse realizado con facilidad, en la aquiescencia general».


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¿Cuál es el secreto que encierra La casa verde? La casa verde ocurre en dos lugares muy alejados entre sí, Piura, en el desierto del litoral peruano, y Santa María de Nieva, una factoría y misión religiosa perdida en el corazón de la Amazonía. Símbolo de la historia es la mítica casa de placer que don Anselmo, el forastero, erige en las afueras de Piura. Novela ejemplar en la historia del boom latinoamericano, La casa verde es una experiencia ineludible para todo aquel que quiera conocer en profundidad la obra narrativa de Mario Vargas Llosa. La casa verde (1965) recibió al año siguiente de su publicación el Premio de la Crítica y, en 1967, el Premio Internacional de Literatura Rómulo Gallegos a la mejor novela en lengua española.


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Un libro básico para el estudio de la literatura hispanoamericana de la segunda mitad de este siglo. Con esta novela Vargas Llosa alcanzó el reconocimiento internacional. En ella demuestra una madurez literaria extraordinaria que en delante irá en aumento hasta alcanzar un estilo depuradísimo y un sitio de primera fila entre los escritores contemporáneos. Desde su publicación, La ciudad y los perros ha sido traducida a más de treinta idiomas. La ciudad y los perros no solamente es una diatriba contra la brutalidad ejercida en un grupo de jóvenes alumnos del Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, también es un ataque frontal al concepto erróneo de la virilidad, de sus funciones y de las consecuencias de una educación castrense malentendida. Aunada a la brutalidad propia de la vida militar, a lo largo de las páginas de esta extraordinaria novela, la vehemencia y la pasión de la juventud se desbocan hasta llegar a una furia, una rabia y un fanatismo que anulan toda su sensibilidad. El libro más violento de Mario Vargas Llosa.


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Dos voces se alternan para relatarnos el anverso y reverso de una historia singular. Por una parte, el narrador evoca sus recuerdos de un compañero de juventud, apodado Mascarita, que siente fascinación por la cultura amazónica. Por la otra, un anónimo contador ambulante de historias -un "hablador"-, viviente memoria colectiva de los indios machiguengas de la Amazonia peruana, nos narra, en un lenguaje de desusada poesía, su propia existencia y la historia y mitos de su pueblo. La confluencia final de los dos relatos que revelan una secreta unidad, muestra las misteriosas relaciones de la ficción con las sociedades y con los individuos, su razón de ser, sus mecanismos y sus efectos en la vida.


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<p class="description">Mario Vargas Llosa nos arrastra con su prosa hacia Mayta, protagonista de una intentona revolucionaria trotskista que en la novela acontece en 1958. La reconstrucción de la historia de este personaje se lleva a cabo mediante los testimonios de aquellos que lo conocieron y la posterior confrontación de este relato, cargado de subjetivismo, con la realidad. El resultado sólo podrá tener un claro regusto amargo y tragicómico. Así, aparte de conocer a un hombre, personificación de la marginalidad, hijo de un periodo de pasiones políticas y conflictos ideológicos, sabremos también de un momento clave en el devenir de América Latina, un tiempo sombrío, tiempo de reivindicación violenta de los deseos y los derechos, y, finalmente, comprenderemos las limitaciones de la verdad. Porque la historia procede de las ficciones personales. Y el lenguaje de la ficción traiciona inevitablemente la experiencia real. A menudo infravalorada, esta novela va mucho más allá de las lecturas políticas que en su momento la redujeron. Hoy, además, nos deleita con toda la altura literaria de Mario Vargas Llosa.</p>


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La aventura que narra esta novela empieza en el Congo en 1903 y termina en una cárcel de Londres, una mañana de 1916. Aquí se cuenta la peripecia vital de un hombre de leyenda: el irlandés Roger Casement. Héroe y villano, traidor y libertario, moral e inmoral, su figura múltiple se apaga y renace tras su muerte. Casement fue uno de los primeros europeos en denunciar los horrores del colonialismo. De sus viajes al Congo Belga y a la Amazonía sudamericana quedaron dos informes memorables que conmocionaron a la sociedad de su tiempo. Estos dos viajes y lo que allí vio cambiarían a Casement para siempre, haciéndole emprender otra travesía, en este caso intelectual y cívica, tanto o más devastadora. La que lo llevó a enfrentarse a una Inglaterra a la que admiraba y a militar activamente en la causa del nacionalismo irlandés. También en la intimidad, Roger Casement fue un personaje múltiple: la publicación de fragmentos de unos diarios, de veracidad dudosa, en los últimos días de su vida, airearon unas escabrosas aventuras sexuales que le valieron el desprecio de muchos compatriotas. El sueño del celta describe una aventura existencial, en la que la oscuridad del alma humana aparece en su estado más puro y, por tanto, más enfangado. Una novela mayor de Mario Vargas Llosa.


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«Se escribe para llenar vacíos, para tomarse desquites contra la realidad, contra las circunstancias.» La obra del escritor peruano se sustenta en numerosos acontecimientos personales que transcurrieron en su juventud. La difícil relación con un padre duro y violento, el nacimiento de la vocación de escritor como oposición a esa autoridad, los años del colegio militar Leoncio Prado, la precoz vida bohemia, la precipitada boda con «la tía Julia» o la existencia real de «La casa verde». Además, y a modo de contrapeso, conocemos la corta pero intensa carrera política del escritor. Esos tres años que transcurrieron desde la improvisada movilización popular de la Plaza de San Martín en oposición a la política de Alan García hasta la definitiva derrota ante Fujimori. Un libro cargado de experiencias que se nos muestran desnudas y sinceras, sin recurrir a la ficción, acompañadas tan sólo de la prosa hipnótica, reveladora y magistral de Mario Vargas Llosa.


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Dos vidas: la de Flora Tristán, que pone todos sus esfuerzos en la lucha por los derechos de la mujer y de los obreros, y la de Paul Gauguin, el hombre que descubre su pasión por la pintura y abandona su existencia burguesa para viajar a Tahití en busca de un mundo sin contaminar por las convenciones. Dos concepciones del sexo: la de Flora, que sólo ve en él un instrumento de dominio masculino y la de Gauguin, que lo considera una fuerza vital imprescindible puesta al servicio de su creatividad. ¿Qué tienen en común esas dos vidas desligadas y opuestas, aparte del vínculo familiar por ser Flora la abuela materna de Gauguin? Esto es lo que Vargas Llosa pone de relieve en esta novela: el mundo de utopías que fue el siglo XIX. Un nexo de unión entre dos personajes que optan por dos modelos vitales opuestos que desvelan un deseo común: el de alcanzar un paraíso donde sea posible la felicidad para los seres humanos.


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El loco de los balcones es un personaje de la estirpe del licenciado Vidriera, es decir, en último término un personaje de raigambre quijotesca. Fascinado por el paisaje virreinal de Lima, el anciano profesor Aldo Brunelli, en esta pieza inédita de Mario Vargas Llosa, emprende una singular apología y cruzada en favor de los balcones mudéjares o barrocos de madera de la antigua ciudad de los reyes. Entre lo visionario, lo patético y lo grotesco, la singular peripecia terminará momentáneamente en un fuego purificador, mas no por ello la gesta habrá concluido. El loco de los balcones es un apólogo moral y una reflexión sobre la dinámica entre presente y pasado, entre arte y vida: es también, por encima de todo, una muestra singularmente poética de la fecunda imaginación creadora de Mario Vargas Llosa.


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El héroe discreto narra la historia paralela de dos personajes: el ordenado y entrañable Felícito Yanaqué, un pequeño empresario de Piura, que es extorsionado; y de Ismael Carrera, un exitoso hombre de negocios, dueño de una aseguradora en Lima, quien urde una sorpresiva venganza contra sus dos hijos holgazanes que quisieron verlo muerto. Ambos personajes son, a su modo, discretos rebeldes que intentan hacerse cargo de sus propios destinos, pues tanto Ismael como Felícito le echan un pulso al curso de los acontecimientos. Mientras Ismael desafía todas las convenciones de su clase, Felícito se aferra a unas pocas máximas para sentar cara al chantaje. No son justicieros, pero están por encima de las mezquindades de su entorno para vivir según sus ideales y deseos. Viejos conocidos del mundo vargasllosiano aparecen en estas páginas: el sargento Lituma y los inconquistables, don Rigoberto, doña Lucrecia y Fonchito, todos moviéndose ahora en un Perú muy próspero. Un libro lleno de humor, con elementos propios del melodrama, donde Piura y Lima ya no son espacios físicos, sino reinos de la imaginación poblados por los personajes del gran escritor que es Mario Vargas Llosa.


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Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio conversan en La Catedral. Estamos en Perú, durante el «ochenio» dictatorial del general Manuel A. Odría. Unas cuantas cervezas y un río de palabras en libertad para responder a la palabra amordazada por la dictadura. Conversación en La Catedral no es, sin embargo, una novela histórica. Sus personajes, las historias que éstos cuentan, los fragmentos que van encajando, conforman la descripción minuciosa de un envilecimiento colectivo, el repaso de todos los caminos que hacen desembocar a un pueblo entero en la frustración. Conversación en La Catedral es algo más que un hito en el derrotero literario de Mario Vargas Llosa: es un punto de referencia insoslayable, un dato fijo en la historia de la literatura actual.


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A finales del siglo XIX, en las tierras paupérrimas del noreste del Brasil, el chispazo de las arengas del Consejero, personaje mesiánico y enigmático, prenderá la insurrección de los desheredados. En circunstancias extremas como aquéllas, la consecución de la dignidad vital sólo podrá venir de la exaltación religiosa -el convencimiento fanático de la elección divina de los marginados del mundo- y del quebranto radical de las reglas que rigen el mundo de los poderosos. Así, grupos de miserables acudirán a la llamada de la revolución de Canudos, la ciudad donde se asentará esta comunidad de personajes que difícilmente desaparecerán de la imaginación del lector: el Beatito, el León de Natuba, María Quadrado... Frente a todos ellos, una trama político-militar se articula para detener con toda su fuerza el movimiento que amenaza con expandirse. La primera novela que Mario Vargas Llosa situó fuera del Perú es un prodigio de expresión de mentalidades profundas, de pasiones irracionales y desbocadas fuerzas sociales. Un relato exhaustivamente documentado, tanto a través de lecturas como de viajes sobre el terreno en el que tuvo lugar este acontecimiento histórico. Un libro fundamental en la historia literaria del siglo XX.


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Pantaleón Pantoja, un capitán del Ejército recientemente ascendido, recibe la misión de establecer un servicio de prostitución para las Fuerzas Armadas del Perú en el más absoluto secreto militar. Estricto cumplidor del deber que le ha sido asignado, Pantaleón se traslada a Iquitos, en plena selva, para llevar a cabo su cometido, pero se entrega a esta misión con tal obcecación que termina por poner en peligro el engranaje que él mismo ha puesto en movimiento. Así arranca la novela de Mario Vargas Llosa Pantaleón y las visitadoras, publicada en 1973 y llevada posteriormente al cine. Mario Vargas Llosa utiliza esta anécdota para subrayar la hipocresía de las instituciones que se llaman ejemplares y del oficio más viejo del mundo. El eterno debate entre verdad y mentira, entre necesidad y virtud, y las perniciosas consecuencias que depara a veces la observancia rigurosa del deber son valores fundamentales de esta extraordinaria novela. Concebida y ensamblada con pericia de maestro, Pantaleón y las visitadoras supone un giro en la obra narrativa de Mario Vargas Llosa. El realismo social presente en sus primeras obras da paso a una precisa dosificación del sentido del humor, la sátira y la ironía que enriquecen sin mesura el desarrollo de su peculiar universo literario.


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«El género novelesco no ha nacido para contar verdades, éstas, al pasar a la ficción, se vuelven siempre mentiras.»Ya en el título de esta novela de Mario Vargas Llosa, publicada en 1977, se recoge la doble historia en que se vertebra su argumento: por un lado, la relación amorosa del joven escritor Varguitas con una mujer de su familia mayor que él, la tía Julia; y por otro, la desaforada presencia del folletinista Pedro Camacho en la misma emisora de radio donde Varguitas trabaja.La noble pasión amorosa entre la tía Julia y el aprendiz de novelista, que la sociedad limeña de los años cincuenta trata por todos los medios de impedir, se combina en esta novela de Vargas Llosa con las narraciones truculentas del folletinista de las ondas. El contrapunto de una encendida pasión con aires shakesperianos y su correlato melodramático y la inesperada confluencia del devoto de la alta literatura y el escribidor rastrero son algunas claves de esta narración mayor de Mario Vargas Llosa.La tía Julia y el escribidor reúne el interés de los relatos de aventuras, donde la atención del lector queda sujeta a un final feliz continuamente postergado, y el más desternillante y grotesco pasatiempo, gracias sin duda a las divertidas aportaciones del escribidor Camacho, uno de los grandes personajes del novelista peruano.


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En palabras del propio autor, la novela es "una exploración del amor desligado de toda la mitología romántica que lo acompaña siempre". En ella narra la relación tormentosa y enfermiza de dos amantes durante cuatro décadas, con el trasfondo de los tumultuosos cambios políticos y sociales que se vivieron en la segunda mitad del siglo XX en lugares como Lima, París, Londres, Tokio o Madrid.


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La vida es una y tiene límites. La lectura de novelas los revienta y lo que era una se convierte en mil, infinitas. Ése es el mayor poder de la literatura y este libro nos hace participar de él. Lolita, Muerte en Venecia, El extranjero, Manhattan Transfer, Trópico de Cáncer y El tambor de hojalata son sólo algunas de las obras del siglo XX de las que nos habla Mario Vargas Llosa en estas páginas. Revela con sus palabras la íntima relación de su lectura con las posibilidades de ampliar nuestra experiencia vital. A estos ensayos se añade un prólogo —con reflexiones lúcidas y apasionadas sobre el sentido de la ficción— y un epílogo. Este espléndido cierre resulta una incitación y una seducción hacia el placer de leer, además de una inmersión en las opiniones del autor, uno de los escritores más geniales de nuestro tiempo, sobre la función de la literatura y el presente y el futuro del libro.


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<div><p><strong>Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, <em>Darkness At Noon,</em> is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.</strong>   </p><p>During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation.   </p><p>A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, <em>Darkness At Noon</em> is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.</p><p>**</p><h3>Review</h3><p>"One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it."<br>
-- <em>New Statesman</em> (UK)  </p><p>"It is the sort of novel that transcends ordinary limitations. Written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling, and with such persuasive simplicity that it is as absorbing as melodrama."<br>
-- <em>The New York Times Book Review</em>  </p><p>"A rare and beautifully executed novel."<br>
-- <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>  </p><p>"A remarkable book. A grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama."<br>
-- <em>The Times Literary Supplement</em> (London) </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>








</p><p>Born in Budapest in 1905, educated in Vienna, Arthur Koestler immersed himself in the major ideological and social conflicts of his time. A communist during the 1930s, and visitor for a time in the Soviet Union, he became disillusioned with the Party and left it in 1938.  Later that year in Spain, he was captured by the Fascist forces under Franco, and sentenced to death. Released through the last-minute intervention of the British government, he went to France where, the following year, he again was arrested for his political views.  Released in 1940, he went to England, where he made his home. His novels, reportage, autobiographical works, and political and cultural writings established him as an important commentator on the dilemmas of the 20th century. He died in 1983. </p></div>


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<div><p>This <em>The New York Times</em> bestseller will make the Bernie Gunther series the new gold standard in thrillers.</p><p>Bernie Gunther is one of the great protagonists in thriller literature. During his eleven years working homicide in Berlin's Kripo, Bernie learned a thing or two about evil. Then he set himself up as a private detective-until 1940 when Heydrich dragooned him into the SS's field gray uniform and the bloodbath that was the Eastern Front. Spanning twenty-five tumultuous years, <em>Field Gray</em> strides across the killing fields of Europe, landing Bernie in a divided Germany at the height of the Cold War. Bernie's latest outing will mesmerize both readers of the Berlin Noir trilogy and anyone who loves historical thrillers, catapulting this cult favorite to breakout stardom.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Bernie Gunther's past catches up with him in Kerr's outstanding seventh novel featuring the tough anti-Nazi Berlin PI who survived the Nazi regime (after If the Dead Rise Not). In 1954, Bernie is living quietly in Cuba, doing a little work for underworld boss Meyer Lansky, when he runs afoul of the U.S. Navy and lands in prison in Guantánamo. Later, at an army prison in New York City, FBI agents ask him about his service in WWII, in particular as a member of an SS police battalion on the Eastern Front. Another transfer sends him to Germany's Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was imprisoned in 1923. Officials from various governments question and torture him, but grimly amusing Bernie, who's smarter than any of his interrogators, successfully strings each one of them along. Vivid flashbacks chronicle Bernie's harrowing war experiences. Series aficionados and new readers alike will take comfort knowing that Kerr is hard at work on the next installment. Author tour. (Apr.) <br>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Philip Kerr is the author of many novels, but perhaps most important are the five featuring Bernie Gunther—<em>A Quiet Flame</em>, <em>The One from the Other</em>, and the Berlin Noir trilogy (<em>March Violets</em>, <em>The Pale Criminal</em>, and <em>A German Requiem</em>). He lives in London and Cornwall, England, with his family.</p></div>


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<div><p><strong>From <em>New York Times</em>–bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much anticipated return of Bernie Gunther in a series hailed by <em>The Daily Beast</em> as “the best crime novels around today.”</strong><br>
<em><br>
Once I’d been a good detective in Kripo, but that was a while ago, before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent.” Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.</em>  </p>
<p>The war is over. Bernie Gunther, our sardonic former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer, is now living on the French Riviera. It is 1956 and Bernie is the go-to guy at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, the man you turn to for touring tips or if you need a fourth for bridge. As it happens, a local writer needs just that, someone to fill the fourth seat in a regular game that is the usual evening diversion at the Villa Mauresque. Not just any writer. Perhaps the richest and most famous living writer in the world: W. Somerset Maugham. And it turns out it is not just a bridge partner that he needs; it’s some professional advice. Maugham is being blackmailed—perhaps because of his unorthodox lifestyle. Or perhaps because of something in his past, because once upon a time, Maugham worked for the British secret service, and the people now blackmailing him are spies.  </p>
<p>As Gunther fans know, all roads lead back to the viper’s nest that was Hitler’s Third Reich and to the killing fields that spread like a disease across Europe. Even in 1956, peace has not come to the continent: now the Soviets have the H-bomb and spies from every major power feel free to make all of Europe their personal playground.  </p>
<p><em>From the Hardcover edition.</em></p>
<p>**</p><h3>Review</h3>
<p>*<em>Praise for </em>The Other Side of Silence  </p>
<p><strong><em>“A marvelously intricate tale of betrayals and counterbetrayals—the scam involves Bernie’s past as much as it does Maugham’s—and in sorting it all out Bernie finds that he’s not quite as dried up as he thought he was. But as good as Bernie is, the real star here is Maugham, who emerges as a world-class cynic for all seasons and a great foil for Bernie. One of the best in a sterling series. —</em><em>Booklist </em> *(starred review)</strong><br>
<strong>Kerr carefully develops his plot, sense of place, and characterization, enabling readers to imagine what it must have been like to have lived in a postwar morass of political and moral ambiguity. This is more than a crime or espionage novel; it’s a marvelous, hard-boiled political read. — <em>Library Journal </em>(starred review)</strong>  </p>
<p>Praise for Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther novels:<br>
**<br>
“Philip Kerr is the only bona fide heir to Raymond Chandler.” —Jonathan Ames, Salon.com  </p>
<p>“On any continent, in any decade, no one does melancholy better than Bernie Gunther, and melancholy, after all, is the hard-boiled mystery fans’ emotion of choice.” —Bill Ott, <em>Booklist</em>  </p>
<p>“In terms of narrative, plot, pace and characterization, Kerr’s in a league with John le Carré.” <br>
—Patrick Anderson, <em>The Washington Post</em>  </p>
<p>“Bernie just tries to behave decently in a world where the serial killers run the governments and history itself may be the biggest crime of all. Bernie walks down streets so mean that nobody can stay alive and remain truly clean.” —John Powers, <em>Fresh Air</em> (NPR)  </p>
<p>“Kerr quantum leaps the limitations of genre fiction. Most thriller writers insult your intelligence; his thrillers assault your ignorance.” —<em>Esquire</em>  </p>
<p>“Bernie Gunther is the right kind of hero for his time—and ours.” —Marilyn Stasio, <em>The New York Times Book Review</em>  </p>
<p>“The Bernie Gunther novels are first-class, as stylish as Chandler and as emotionally resonant as the best of Ross Macdonald.” —George Pelecanos  </p>
<p>“A wily if unreliable narrator, Bernie may be forgiven for holding his cards so close to his chest as he tries to do the right thing in so many wrong places. Shades of the moral ambiguity of some of Graham Greene’s and John le Carré’s more memorable characters are here, as is the spirit of Raymond Chandler’s knight-errant, Philip Marlowe.” —Paula L. Woods, <em>Los Angeles Times</em></p>
<h3>About the Author</h3>
<p><strong>Philip Kerr </strong>is the author of ten previous Gunther novels. <em>Field Gray </em>and <em>Prague Fatale </em>made the <em>New York Times </em>extended list, while <em>A Man Without Breath</em> debuted at #13 last year. The Gunther books have garnered nominations for the Edgar and Shamus Awards, and Kerr has won the British Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. As P. B. Kerr, he is the author of the much-loved young-adult fantasy series Children of the Lamp. He lives in London and tours annually in America. </p></div>


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<div><p>Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliantly innovative thriller-writer," Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries that are nothing short of spellbinding. In this second book of the <strong>Berlin Noir</strong> trilogy, <strong>The Pale Criminal</strong> brings back Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who thought he’d seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin—until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. Hard-hitting, fast-paced, and richly detailed, <strong>The Pale Criminal</strong> is noir writing at its blackest and best.</p><h3>Review</h3><p>"...a superb tour of Berlin on the edge of an abyss and a cynical, dashing leading man. —<strong>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</strong> <br></p><p>"Echoes of Raymond Chandler but better on his vivid and well-researched detail than the master." —<strong>Evening Standard</strong></p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Philip Kerr is the author of many novels, but perhaps most important are the five featuring Bernie Gunther—<em>A Quiet Flame</em>, <em>The One from the Other</em>, and the Berlin Noir trilogy (<em>March Violets</em>, <em>The Pale Criminal</em>, and <em>A German Requiem</em>). He lives in London and Cornwall, England, with his family.</p></div>


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<div><p><strong> Bernie Gunther returns to trail a serial killer in 1950's Buenos Aires </strong><br></p><p>When he introduced Bernie Gunther in the original Berlin Noir trilogy, Philip Kerr immediately established himself as a thriller writer on par with Raymond Chandler. His new Bernie Gunther novels have won him comparisons with Alan Furst, John le Carré, and Graham Greene. <em>A Quiet Flame</em> finds Gunther in Argentina, circa 1950, where he- falsely accused of Nazi war crimes-has been offered a new life and a clean passport by the Perón government. But the tough, fast-talking detective doesn't have the luxury of laying low when a serial killer- whose crimes may reach back to Berlin before the war-is mutilating young girls. Taut, gritty, and loaded with evocative historical detail, <em>A Quiet Flame</em> is among Kerr's best work yet. <br></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. At the start of Kerr's stellar fifth Bernie Gunther novel (after <em>The One from the Other</em>), the former Berlin homicide detective seeks exile in Argentina in 1950, along with others connected to the Nazi past (one of his fellow ship passengers is Adolf Eichmann). A few weeks after Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires, a local policeman, Colonel Montalbán, asks his help in solving the savage murder of 15-year-old Grete Wohlauf. Montalbán has noticed similarities between this crime and two unsolved murders Gunther investigated in 1932 Germany. Another teenage girl's disappearance heightens the urgency of the inquiry. In exchange for free medical treatment for his just diagnosed thyroid cancer, Gunther agrees to subtly grill members of the large German community. A secret he stumbles on soon places his life in jeopardy. Kerr, who's demonstrated his versatility with high-quality entries in other genres, cleverly and plausibly grafts history onto a fast-paced thriller plot. <em>(Mar.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3></div>


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<div><p>Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a “brilliantly innovative thriller-writer,” Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries that are nothing short of spellbinding. The first book of the <strong>Berlin Noir</strong> trilogy, March Violets introduces readers to Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who thought he’d seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin—until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. Hard-hitting, fast-paced, and richly detailed, <strong>March Violets</strong> is noir writing at its blackest and best.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The brutality and corruption of Nazi Germany serve as the backdrop for this impressive debut mystery novel. Scottish-born Kerr re-creates the period accurately and with verve; the novel reeks of the sordid decade that saw Hitler's rise to power. Bernhard Gunther is a hard-boiled Berlin detective who specializes in tracking down missing persons--mostly Jews. He is summoned by a wealthy industrialist to find the murderer of his daughter and son-in-law, killed during the robbery of a priceless diamond necklace. Gunther quickly is catapulted into a major political scandal involving Hitler's two main henchmen, Goering and Himmler. The search for clues takes Gunther to morgues overflowing with Nazi victims; raucous nightclubs; the Olympic games where Jesse Owens tramples the theory of Aryan racial superiority; the boudoir of a famous actress; and finally to the Dachau concentration camp. Fights with Gestapo agents, shoot-outs with adulterers, run-ins with a variety of criminals, and dead bodies in unexpected places keep readers guessing to the very end. Narrator Gunther is a spirited guide through the chaos of 1930s Berlin and, more important, a detective cast in the classic mold. Kerr is at work on a sequel to this sparkling and witty tale. <br>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Echoes of Raymond Chandler but better on his vivid and well-researched detail than the master." —<strong>Evening Standard</strong><br></p><p>"Taut, brutal, coarse, believable and gripping stuff." —<strong>Sunday Telegraph</strong><br></p><p>"Kerr’s complex intrigue allows space for brilliantly provoking political asides." —<strong>Sunday Times</strong><br></p></div>


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<div><p>Philip Kerr 's <em>Berlin Noir</em> trilogy- featuring the tough, fast-talking detective Bernie Gunther-is a publishing phenomenon that continues to win new fans more than fifteen years after its initial publication. Kerr has brought Bernie back in this highly anticipated thriller that will delight fans of the original books and attract new attention to the backlist. It is 1949 and-after being forced to serve in the SS in the killing fields of Ukraine-Bernie has moved to Munich to reestablish himself as a private investigator. When the beautiful Frau Britta Warzok hires him for an apparently simple job, Bernie's suspicions flare, but the money is too good to turn down. Soon, Bernie is on the run, because in postwar Germany, it's hard to know friends from enemies, the one from the other.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Starred Review.</em> Set in 1949, Kerr's excellent fourth novel to feature Bernhard Gunther (after 1991's <em>German Requiem</em>) finds the erstwhile PI managing a failing hotel about a mile from the site of the Dachau concentration camp. After the death of his wife, Kirsten, in a mental hospital, he calls it quits and opens a private detective agency. A series of missing-Nazi cases sets Bernie on a course that becomes increasingly complicated until he's beaten to a near pulp, had his little finger chopped off and is sent to a mysterious private estate to recover. There he's drawn into a nightmare involving the American occupation and the CIA, and soon his life hangs in the balance. Kerr's stylish noir writing makes every page a joy to read ("The little mouth tightened into a smile that was all lips and no teeth, like a newly stitched scar"). Perfectly plotted, the book builds to a satisfying conclusion. <em>(Sept.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From Booklist</h3><p>After a 15-year hiatus during which he's taken readers from the Himalayan snows to Enlightenment England, Kerr returns to the war-torn Germany of his Berlin Noir trilogy with a fourth case for sardonic detective Bernhard Gunther. It is 1949, and fed up with trying to run a hotel next door to Dachau, Gunther hangs out his shingle and in walks a tall blond with marriage on her mind and a missing husband on her conscience. Gunther sets out to track down the renowned sadist, one of many SS spiders able to slip through the Allies' dragnet and find refuge in the Americas. Of course, nothing is quite as it seems, and our knight's detached weltschmerz gets a fresh coat of tarnish. As with his earlier Gunther books, Kerr follows Raymond Chandler's playbook closely, adapting his trademark metaphors with all the subtlety of a goose-step and the restraint of Hermann Goring at a knackwurst-eating contest, to say nothing of the relish. Still, the knockabout action should please most fans of classic hard-boiled mystery and historical espionage. <em>David Wright</em><br><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p></div>


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<div><p><strong>The disturbing climax to the Berlin Noir trilogy</strong> <br></p><p>Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels have won him an international reputation as a master of historical suspense. In <em>A German Requiem</em>, the private eye has survived the collapse of the Third Reich to find himself in Vienna. Amid decaying imperial splendor, he traces concentric circles of evil and uncovers a legacy that makes the wartime atrocities seem lily-white in comparison.<br></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In the wreckage of postwar Berlin, PI Bernie Gunther--in his third appearance--accepts coal for payment and reluctantly takes on a case for Russian Col. Palkovich Poroshin, one of the despised "Ivans." Asked to prove black marketeer Emil Becker innocent of the death of U.S. Counterintelligence Corps Capt. Edward Linden, Gunther leaves Berlin (and his unfaithful wife) for Vienna, where the incarcerated Becker insists he had been set up while delivering SS files to Linden at the behest of a stranger named Konig. Gunther's search for Konig attracts the attention of the CIC's John Belinksky, who also believes Becker was framed. After saving Gunther from some drunken Russians, Belinsky asks Gunther to infiltrate the ranks of a super-secret group of ex-Nazis whose leader may be former Gestapo head Heinrich Muller. Obviously, the Nazi-hunting CIC wants Muller badly, but Belinsky drops a bombshell that brings into question his own role in the investigation. Unleashing a series of stunning revelations, Kerr ( The Pale Criminal ) discloses the reasons for the Russians' interest in Linden and for the many deaths involved in Gunther's case. Rooted in historical details, driven by a powerful narrative, this atmospheric novel traces a frightening course amid a multiplicity of ironies. <br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>This is Kerr's third Bernie Gunther mystery in as many years. As in the others, Gunther must solve his case against a backdrop of war-ravaged Germany. Kerr's plot is formulaic, but his main character--with his SS background and rabid hate for the Soviet occupying forces--rises above stereotypical detectives. Kerr adds to his character with a light touch of subtle, wry humor; yet he relies on contrivances to piece together the puzzle. Still, Kerr has a good premise for a detective series and a lot of promise as a writer. Despite its faults, Requiem is worth a read. Bernie Gunther might be the next Doc Adams.<br><em>- Martin J. Hudacs, Solanco H.S., Quarryville, Pa.</em><br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<div><p><strong>"Every time we're afraid we've seen the last of Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr comes through." -<em>The New York Times Book Review</em> </strong><br></p><p>Hailed as "one of the greatest series of crime novels in the world" (<em>El Pais</em>, Spain), Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels continue to garner fantastic acclaim both here and abroad. This time, it's 1954 and Bernie has resurfaced in Havana. Life is relatively peaceful, but the world-weary ex-cop discovers that he cannot outrun his past when he collides with an old lover-and a vicious killer-from his life in Berlin. Alternating between the flamboyant corruption of Batista's Cuba and Nazi Germany during the buildup to the 1936 Olympiad, <em>If the Dead Rise Not</em> is another stunning example of Kerr's virtuoso talent.<br></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Both newcomers and established fans will appreciate Kerr's outstanding sixth Bernie Gunther novel (after <em>A Quiet Flame</em>), as it fills in much of the German PI's backstory. By 1934, as the Nazis tighten their grip on power, Gunther has left the Berlin police force for a job as a hotel detective. His routine inquiry into the theft of a Chinese box from a guest, a German-American from New York, becomes more complex after he learns that the identical objet d'art was reported stolen just the previous day by an official from the Asiatic Museum. The case proves to be connected with German efforts to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics, and provides ample opportunities for Gunther, whom Sam Spade would have found a kindred spirit, to make difficult moral choices. Once again the author smoothly integrates a noir crime plot with an authentic historical background. Note that the action precedes the events recounted in the series' debut, <em>March Violets</em> (1989). <em>(Mar.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From Bookmarks Magazine</h3><p>Favorably compared to the World War II espionage novels of Alan Furst (<em>The Foreign Correspondent</em>, <em>The Spies of Warsaw</em>) and the work of hard-boiled legends Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, Philip Kerr reprises the Bernie Gunther saga with true fidelity to his detective's noir roots. The Berlin Noir novels (<em>March Violets</em>, <em>The Pale Criminal</em>, <em>A German Requiem</em>), a trilogy published nearly 20 years ago, are known in crime circles but woefully neglected by mainstream readers. With <em>If the Dead Rise Not</em>--and despite the unevenness of the book's two parts, which critics felt slightly impaired the novel as a whole--Kerr continues to develop Gunther's character in one of the great historical crime series. </p></div>


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<b>From <i>New York Times</i>&#8211;bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much-anticipated return of Bernie Gunther in a series hailed by Malcolm Forbes as "the best crime novels around today."</b><br> <br>A beautiful actress, a rising star of the giant German film company UFA, now controlled by the Propaganda Ministry. The very clever, very dangerous Propaganda Minister&#8212;close confidant of Hitler, an ambitious schemer and flagrant libertine. And Bernie Gunther, former Berlin homicide bull, now forced to do favors for Joseph Goebbels at the Propaganda Minister's command.<br>This time, the favor is personal. And this time, nothing is what it seems.<br>Set down amid the killing fields of Ustashe-controlled Croatia, Bernie finds himself in a world of mindless brutality where everyone has a hidden agenda. Perfect territory for a true cynic whose instinct is to trust no one.


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<b>From<i> New York Times</i>&#8211;bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much-anticipated return of Bernie Gunther, our compromised former Berlin bull and unwilling SS officer. With his cover blown, he is waiting for the next move in the cat-and-mouse game that, even a decade after Germany's defeat, continues to shadow his life.</b><br> <b> </b><br> The French Riviera, 1956: The invitation to dinner was not unexpected, though neither was it welcome. Ernst Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, has turned up in Nice, and he's not on holiday. An old and dangerous adversary, Mielke is calling in a debt. He intends that Bernie go to London and, with the vial of Thallium he now pushes across the table, poison a female agent they both have had dealings with. <br> But chance intervenes in the form of Friedrich Korsch, an old Kripo comrade now working for Stasi and probably there to make sure Bernie gets the job done. Bernie bolts for the German border. Traveling by night, holed up...


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<p>Liar's Poker meets The Social Network in an irreverent expos&#233; of life inside the tech bubble, from industry provocateur Antonio Garc&#237;a Mart&#237;nez, a former Twitter advisor, Facebook product manager and startup founder/CEO.</p><p>The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple:</p><p>Investors are people with more money than time.Employees are people with more time than money.</p><p>Entrepreneurs are the seductive go-between.</p><p>Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. </p><p>Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this "chaos monkey" to test online services' robustness&#8212;their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society's chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix)...


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<p>This novel from the classic era of colonialist literature is sure to intrigue readers interested in nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction. Although some of the imperialist attitudes evinced by the protagonist are likely to clash with the sensibilities of modern audiences, the book accurately documents the spirit and foibles of the era.


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<p>This compilation contains three complete novels and eight major short stories from the canon of one of the twentieth century's most enduringly popular fiction writers.<BR>From London to Hong Kong, from Paris to Pago Pago, in Samoa or Malaya or on a Tahitian tropical isle, the men and women in this collection of masterfully crafted tales inhabit exotic, mysterious worlds&#8212;and at their own peril invade the dark territory of the human heart.<BR>Somerset Maugham, a noted English novelist, playwright, and author of masterly short stories, spent several months in the Pacific in 1916 and 1917 during an interlude in his service in British intelligence during World War I. Several of his works have been made into movies and plays, including <I>Razor's Edge</I>, <I>Of Human Bondage</I>, <I>Cakes and Ale</I>, <I>Rain</I>, and <I>The Moon and Sixpence</I>.


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<p>Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. Whilst his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications. Inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is at once a satiric caricature of Edwardian conventions and a vivid portrayal of the mentality of a genius.


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<p>W. Somerset Maugham was one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century, and his travel writing has long been considered among his finest work. Now, acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer maps out a masterful tour of these vivid, evocative pieces that are collected here for the first time.<br><br>Maugham worked as a secret agent in Russia, published novels in London, staged plays in New York, and traveled throughout Europe, Asia, India, and the United States, chronicling his travels, wherever he went, with exceptional insight. Beginning with "In the Land of the Blessed Virgin" and culminating in "A Partial View," Iyer selects vignettes of Maugham's razor-sharp prose that track his transformation from a boyish traveler in Spain to a worldly man of letters.<br><br>This is Maugham at his most keenly observant, direct, and powerful.<br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>


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<p><i>Far Eastern Tales</i> is a collection of short stories born of Maugham's experiences in Malaya, Singapore and other outposts of the former British Empire. Whether portraying a ship-borne flight from a lover's curse, murder in the jungle, or a marriage shattered by a past indiscretion, they all reveal Maugham at his best - sometimes caustic, sometimes gently comic, but always the shrewd and human judge of character and soul.


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<p>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX</p><p></p><p>Somerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own. <i>The Gentleman in the Parlour</i> is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life.</p>


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<p>W. Somerset Maugham led many lives, including that of a doctor in London's slums, a successful playwright and novelist, an agent for British Intelligence during World War I, and a world traveler. In 1917, he took the first of many voyages to the Pacific Islands and the Far East, where his keen sense of observation found inspiration for some of his finest writing.<p><I>Rain and Other South Sea Stories</I> features one of Maugham's most famous tales, concerning the clash between a missionary and a prostitute. "Rain" was adapted for the stage and filmed on three separate occasions, its leading character portrayed by Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. This collection also includes "Macintosh," a psychological study of the competition between two officials; "The Fall of Edward Barnard," a tale of social rebellion that foreshadows <I>The Razor's Edge;</I> "The Pool," a portrait of a marriage between people from different cultures; and other compelling stories of life...


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<p>Filled with keen observations, autobiographical notes, and the seeds of many of Maugham's greatest works, <i>A Writer's Notebook </i>is a unique and exhilarating look into a great writer's mind at work. From nearly five decades, Somerset Maugham recorded an intimate journal. In it we see the budding of his incomparable vision and his remarkable career as a writer. Covering the years from his time as a youthful medical student in London to a seasoned world traveler around the world, it is playful, sharp witted, and always revealing. Undoubtedly one of his most significant works, <i>A Writer's Notebook</i> is a must for Maugham fans and anyone interested in the creative process.


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<p>The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America and England, and include some of Maugham's most famous tales; 'Flotsam and Jetsam', the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; 'The Man with the Scar', and notably the opening story 'The Vessel of Wrath', a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse and a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories, Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place.


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<p>For Christmas, Charley Mason's father granted him a trip to Paris, all expenses paid. It should have been a lark, but on his first night Charley meets a woman whose story will forever change his life. <br><br>For Lydia has seen tragedy. The Russian Revolution displaced her family, left her homeless, fatherless. And for reasons that elude Charley, Lydia pines for a man half a world away--a dope dealer and murderer whose sins Lydia seeks to absolve through her own self- destruction. Haunting, erotic, deeply effecting, <b>Christmas Holiday</b> explores two souls capsized by compassion--and the confusion that engulfed a generation in the days between the Great Wars.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing his private self, The Summing Up, written when Maugham was sixty-four, is an inimitable expression of a personal credo. It is not only a classic avowal of a professional author's ideas about style, literarture, art, drama and philosophy, but also an illuminating insight into this great writer's craft.


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<p>Looking out upon the backstreets, the suburbs and the high society haunts of Edwardian London, the delightfully witty and independent spinster Miss Ley surveys a tangled web of lives; she sympathetically observes the struggle under the pressures of convention, and the complex interplay between love and reason. Through Miss Ley's eyes we witness the brief but happy marriage of a dying poet; a woman's adulterous passion for a young rascal, and finally, an honourable man's decision to take virtue to extremes.


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<p>This final classic collection of stories reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships. Brilliant tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice, the stories range from 'The Lotus Eater' in which a man has a vision of a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of 'The Outstation' and 'The Back of Beyond' in Malaya and South East Asia. Largely set in favourite Maugham country, this colourful collection brilliantly evokes the numbered days of the British Empire.


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<p>The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories, introduced by the author, contains the celebrated series about Ashenden, a secret service agent in World War I. Based on Maugham's own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland, the stories are vignettes in which he dramatises both the romance and absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness and brutality. Accountable only to 'R', Ashenden travels all over the Continent on assignments which entangle him with such characters as the traitor Grantley Caypor, the passionate Guilia Lazzari, and the sinister 'hairless Mexican'.


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<p>Set in the bohemian café society of Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maugham's exploration of hypnotism and the occult was inspired by the sinister black magician Aleister Crowley. At the start of this compulsive gothic horror story, Arthur and his beautiful, innocent fiancée Margaret look forward to an idyllic life together, until they encounter the mesmerising and repulsive Oliver Haddo...


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<p>This classic collection of stories moves from England, France and Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. It includes the famous story 'Rain', the tragedy of a narrow-minded and overzealous missionary and a prostitute, and 'The Three Fat Women of Antibes,' an extravagantly sardonic tale of abstention and greed, as well as a host of other brilliant tales.


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Maugham's first novel is about the gloomy, poverty-stricken world of South London in the 1890s and how it affects one young girl who tries to escape from it.


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<p>When war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the British Secret Service to Switzerland under the guise of completing a play. Multilingual, knowledgeable about many European countries and a celebrated writer, Maugham had the perfect cover, and the assignment appealed to his love of romance, and of the ridiculous. The stories collected in <i>Ashenden </i>are rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.


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<p>Somerset Maugham is the acknowledged master of the short story, and his full range is represented in this collection. In acclaimed stories such as 'Rain', 'The Letter', 'The Vessel of Wrath' and 'The Alien Corn', Maugham illustrates his wry perception of human weakness and his genius for evoking compelling drama and an acute sense of time and place.


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<p>Filled with adventure, passion, and intrigue, The Narrow Corner is a classic tale of the sea by one of the twentieth-century's finest writers. Island hoping across the South Pacific, the esteemed Dr. Saunders is offered passage by Captain Nichols and his companion Fred Blake, two men who appear unsavory, yet any means of transportation is hard to resist. The trip turns turbulent, however, when a vicious storm forces them to seek shelter on the remote island of Kanda. There these three men fall under the spell of the sultry and stunningly beautiful Louise, and their story spirals into a wicked tale of love, murder, jealousy, and suicide.


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<p>He was a brilliant teller of tales, one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century, and at one time the most famous writer in the world, yet W. Somerset Maugham's own true story has never been fully told. At last, the fascinating truth is revealed in a landmark biography by the award-winning writer Selina Hastings. Granted unprecedented access to Maugham's personal correspondence and to newly uncovered interviews with his only child, Hastings portrays the secret loves, betrayals, integrity, and passion that inspired Maugham to create such classics as <i>The Razor's Edge</i> and <i>Of Human Bondage</i>.<br><br>Hastings vividly presents Maugham's lonely childhood spent with unloving relatives after the death of his parents, a trauma that resulted in shyness, a stammer, and for the rest of his life an urgent need for physical tenderness. Here, too, are his adult triumphs on the stage and page, works that allowed him a glittering social life in which he befriended and...


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<p>'She did not know what to say. She was undecided whether indignantly to assert her innocence or to break out into angry reproaches. He seemed to read her thoughts. "I've got all the proof necessary" 'Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with Charles Townsend, a man whom she finds charming, attractive and exciting. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange but terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera epidemic rages.First published to a storm of protest, The Painted Veil is a classic story of a woman's spiritual awakening.</p>


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<p><b>Cakes and Ale</b> is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image.  Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, <b>Cakes and Ale</b> is Maugham at his best.


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<p><b>The Moon and Sixpence</b>, published in 1919, was one of the novels that galvanized W. Somerset Maugham's reputation as a literary master. It follows the life of one Charles Strickland, a bourgeois city gent whose dull exterior conceals the soul of a genius. Compulsive and impassioned, he abandons his home, wife, and children to devote himself slavishly to painting. In a tiny studio in Paris, he fills canvas after canvas, refusing to sell or even exhibit his work. Beset by poverty, sickness, and his own intransigent, unscrupulous nature, he drifts to Tahiti, where, even after being blinded by leprosy, he produces some of his most extraordinary works of art. Inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, <b>The Moon and Sixpence</b> is an unforgettable study of a man possessed by the need to create&#8212;regardless of the cost to himself and to others.<br> Includes a new introduction by distinguished Maugham scholar and biographer Robert Calder <br>


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<p>Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.


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Thilo Sarrazin beschreibt mit seiner profunden Erfahrung aus Politik und Verwaltung die Folgen, die sich für Deutschlands Zukunft aus der Kombination von Geburtenrückgang, problematischer Zuwanderung und wachsender Unterschicht ergeben. Er will sich nicht damit abfinden, dass Deutschland nicht nur älter und kleiner, sondern auch dümmer und abhängiger von staatlichen Zahlungen wird. Sarrazin sieht genau hin, seine Analyse schont niemanden. Er zeigt ganz konkret, wie wir die Grundlagen unseres Wohlstands untergraben und so den sozialen Frieden und eine stabile Gesellschaft aufs Spiel setzen. Deutschland läuft Gefahr, in einen Alptraum zu schlittern. Dass das so ist, weshalb das so ist und was man dagegen tun kann, davon handelt dieses Buch.


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<p><P>Ever since its first publication in 1992, <I>The End of History and the Last Man</i> has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, <I>The End of History and the Last Man</i> is a modern classic.


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<p><p>In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that our greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy.  <br><br>To re-orient contemporary debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends," to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution-intervention in the "germ-line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendents-will...


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<p>This selection from the diaries and letters of the Bulgakovs, mostly translated for the first time into English, provides an insightful glimpse into a fascinating period of Russian history and literature, telling the tragic tale of the fate of an artist under a totalitarian regime. The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of Master and Margarita&#8212;now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature&#8212;was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression did not only apply to his art: in 1926 his personal diary was seized by the authorities. From then on he confined his thoughts to letters to his friends and family, as well as to public figures such as Stalin and his fellow Soviet writer Gorky, while also encouraging his wife Yelena to keep a diary, with many entries influenced or even dictated by him.


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<p>This portrait of Moliere, by Mikhail Bulgakov, goes far beyond mere biography. The Russian master brings a kindred spirit vividly to life in this novelistic story of art and the struggle it demands.Mikhail Bulgakov's The Life of Monsieur de Moliere is a fascinating portrait of the great French seventeenth-century satirist by one of the great Russian satirists of our own century. For Bulgakov, Moliere was an alter ego whose destiny seemed to parallel his own. As Bulgakov's translator, Mirra Ginsburg, informs us: "There is much besides their craft that links these two men across the centuries. Both had a sharp satirical eye and an infinite capacity for capturing the absurd and the comic, the mean and the grotesque: both had to live and write under autocracies: both were fearless and uncompromising in speaking of what they saw, evoking storms with each new work: and shared what Bulgakov calls 'the incurable disease of passion for the theater.' The life of Moliere, born...


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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>'The exuberance of it - has to enliven the reader, and make us laugh.' Doris Lessing 'Bulgakov was not merely a brilliant observer of what was going on around him, but had an uncanny ability to pick out the particular manifestations of folly and discord which would set the tone of the era to follow.' The Guardian </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Russian novelist and dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891--1940) is one of the foremost satirists of the twentieth century and most famous for The Master and Margarita. </p></div>


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<div><p class="description"></p><h3>Review</h3><p>One of the greatest modern Russian writers, perhaps the greatest Independent A writer of fantastic genius Sunday Times Bulgakov is a wild, mobile, crafty devotee of ideas Guardian</p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>In Bulgakov's "Diaboliad", the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the First Central Depot for the Materials for Matches, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior Kalsoner, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This early satirical story, reminiscent of Gogol and Dostoevsky, was first published in 1924 and incurred the wrath of pro-Soviet critics. Along with the three other stories in this volume which also feature explorations of the absurd and bizarre, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the artistic development of the author of "Master and Margarita".</p></div>


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<p>WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ANDREY KURKOVA rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is now on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.


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<p>Part autobiography, part fiction, this early work by the author of <i>The Master and Margarita</i> shows a master at the dawn of his craft, and a nation divided by centuries of unequal progress.<br><br>In 1916 a 25-year-old, newly qualified doctor named Mikhail Bulgakov was posted to the remote Russian countryside. He brought to his position a diploma and a complete lack of field experience. And the challenges he faced didn't end there: he was assigned to cover a vast and sprawling territory that was as yet unvisited by modern conveniences such as the motor car, the telephone, and electric lights.<br><br>The stories in <i>A Country Doctor's Notebook</i> are based on this two-year window in the life of the great modernist. Bulgakov candidly speaks of his own feelings of inadequacy, and warmly and wittily conjures episodes such as peasants applying medicine to their outer clothing rather than their skin, and finding himself charged with delivering a baby--having only read about...


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<div><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>This book translates several of Bulgakov's early short stories and feuilletons for the first time. They effectively present Bulgakov's personal struggle with the idiocies of Moscow's bureaucracy, including the morning he went to work only to discover that his office had simply disappeared overnight! In diverse feature articles written for Russian emigres in Berlin, Bulgakov offers a personal look at post-revolutionary Russia. For instance, he writes both about a friend who shrewdly "remodels" his apartment to befuddle the new Soviet housing authorities and reports the trial of a mass murderer: a cab-driver who kills peasant horse traders for a living. His vivid and often humorous sketches of 1920s Moscow bring this era to life. Capably translated, these stories are recommended for most libraries.<br><em>- Ruth M. Ross, Olympic Coll. Lib., Bremerton, Wash.</em><br>Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Language Notes</h3><p>Text: English (translation)<br>Original Language: Russian </p></div>


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<p class="description">Translated from the Russian by MICHAEL GLENNY<br>    with an epilogue by Viktor Nekrasov<br>    Copyright © 1971 by McGraw-Hill Book Company. <br>    Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 70-140252 08844<br>    Printed in Great Britain</p>


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<p>I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one ever seemed to sleep, and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories of their culture and their ancestors and their ongoing lives. Bulgakov taught me to hear something in those stories that I had not yet clearly heard. One could call it, in terms that would soon thereafter gain wide currency, "magical realism". The deadpan mix of the fantastic and the realistic was at the heart of the Vietnamese mythos. It is at the heart of the present zeitgeist. And it was not invented by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as wonderful as...


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<p>The devil comes to Moscow wearing a fancy suit. With his disorderly band of accomplices - including a demonic, gun-toting tomcat - he immediately begins to create havoc.<p>Disappearances, destruction and death spread through the city like wildfire and Margarita discovers that her lover has vanished in the chaos. Making a bargain with the devil, she decides to try a little black magic of her own to save the man she loves ...


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<b><b>"My new favorite book of all time." &#8212;Bill Gates </b><br><b></b><br><b>"A terrific book...[Pinker] recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life." &#8212;</b><b><i>The New York Times</i></b><br>The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.</b><br>Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows...


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<div><p></p><p>David Kepesh wakes up one morning in the hospital, mysteriously altered. Through an endocrinopathic catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, he has been transformed into a 155-pound human female breast. Railing at the incomprehensible, he uses his intelligence to deny and resist the thing he has become. Ultimately, he must accept his fate. Philip Roths <i>The Breast</i> is a funny, fantastical story and a bizarre yet daring exploration of sex and subjectivity.</p></div>


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<p><i>Patrimony</i>, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly a anything Philip Roth has ever written. Philip Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father - famous for his vigour, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollection - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life


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<p>It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children,...


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<div><p>In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life.</p><p>Milan Kundera and Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi and Auschwitz, Edna O'Brien and Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld and Bukovina, Ivan Klíma and Prague, Isaac Singer and Warsaw, Bruno Schulz and Poland — what is the intricate transaction between the susceptible writer and the provocative time and place? Roth's questions go to the original conditions that stimulate the narrative impulse, and he puts them to writers who are as attuned to the subtleties of literature as to the influence of the surrounding society.</p><p>Also included here are appreciative portraits of two of Roth's late friends, each transfixed till the end by his artistic vocation — the writer Bernard Malamud and the...</p></div>


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<p>A famous writer, named Philip, and his mistress meet in a room without a bed. They talk, they play games with each other, they have sex, they tell lies. DECEPTION, Philip Roth's most poignant and provocative work since Portnoy's Complaint, explores adultery and the unmasking of illicit lovers in a novel that exposes the tenderness and uncertainty underlying all affairs of the heart.


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<p>In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. <br><br>When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<div><p>As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire. </p><p>A brilliant, lustful man is overloaded with fantasies. </p></div>


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<p><p>The sensationalizing sixties are coming to an end, and even writing a novel can make you a star. The writer Nathan Zuckerman publishes his fourth book, an aggressive, abrasive, and comically erotic novel entitled <I>Carnovsky</I>, and all at once he is on the cover of <I>Life</I>, one of the decade's most notorious celebrities.<p>This is the same Nathan Zuckerman who in Philip Roth's much praised <I>The Ghost Writer</I> was the dedicated young apprentice drawing sustenance from the great books and the integrity of their authors. Now in his mid-thirties, Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his fame, ventures out on the streets of Manhattan, and not only is he assumed to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?"), but he also finds himself the target of admirers, admonishers, advisers, and would-be literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Nathan Zuckerman to wonder...


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"I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five." Philip Roth's new novel is a fiercely intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong confrontation with mortality. Roth's everyman is a hero whose youthful sense of independence and confidence begins to be challenged when illness commences its attack in middle age. A successful commercial advertising artist, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him. He is the brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy. He is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he has made a mess of marriage. Inevitably, he discovers that he has become what he does not want to be. Roth has been hailed as "the most compelling of living writers . . . [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind."* In Everyman, Roth once again displays his hallmark incisiveness. From his first glimpse of death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through his vigorous, seemingly invincible prime, Roth's hero is a man bewildered not only by his own decline but by the unimaginable deaths of his contemporaries and those he has loved. The terrain of this haunting novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.


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<p>Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union, the relationship enlarges from private drama into national scandal. Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's political tribulations in the dark years of betrayal, the blacklist, and naming names. I Married a Communist is an American...


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<div><p>Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.</p><p>Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.</p><p>The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to...</p></div>


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A ferocious political satire in the great tradition, <b>Our Gang</b><i> </i>is Philip Roth's brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.<br><br>In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p class="description">National Book Award Winner Philip Roth's brilliant career was launched when the unknown twenty-five-year-old writer won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for a collection that was to be called Goodbye, Columbus, and which, in turn, captured the 1960 National Book Award. In the famous title story, perhaps the best college love story ever written, Radcliffe-bound Brenda Patimkin initiates Neil Klugman of Newark into a new and unsettling society of sex, leisure, and loss. Over the years, most of the other stories have become classics as well.</p>


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<p><b>Letting Go</b> is Roth's first full-length novel, published just after <b>Goodbye, Columbus</b>, when he was twenty-nine. Set in 1950s Chicago, New York, and Iowa city, <b>Letting Go</b> presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as we have of a mid-century America defined by social and ethical constraints and by moral compulsions conspicuously different from those of today.<br><br>Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to be connected to the ordered "world of feeling" that he finds in books is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes' struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager love affairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously, Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart,...


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<div><p></p><p><i>The Counterlife</i> is a novel unlike any that Philip Roth has written before, a book of astonishing 180-degree turns, a book of conflicting perspectives and points of view, and, by far, Roth's most radical work of fiction.</p><p><i>The Counterlife</i> is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Every major character (and most of the minor ones) is investigating, debating, and arguing the possibility of remaking the future.</p><p>Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through all the landscapes, familiar and foreign, where these people are seeking self-transformation, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and to reshape history.</p><p>Yet his is hardly the only voice. This is a novel in which speaking out with force and lucidity...</p></div>


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<p><p>The Prague Orgy takes the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman on a quixotic journey to search for the stories of an unknown Yiddish writer. The entries from Zuckermans notebooks are rich with comedy and dense with observation, detailing his relationship with the oppressed artists of communist Prague. In his bizarre adventures with the citys outcast writers, he discovers a perverse but appealing heroism.</P><I></P>The Prague Orgy</I> is a startling conclusion to Philip Roths intricately designed magnum opus, <I>Zuckerman Bound</I>.


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<p>David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.<p>Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an "emancipated manhood," beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years he has refined that exuberant decade of protest and license into an orderly life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of Consuela, "a masterpiece of volupt&#233;" undo him completely, and a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The carefree erotic adventure evolves, over eight years, into a story of grim loss.<p>What is astonishing is how much of America's...


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<div><p></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'MS Shell Dlg 2', sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, "are melted into air, into thin air." When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. "Something fundamental has vanished." His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can’t persuade him to make a comeback.</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'MS Shell Dlg 2', sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for a bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day’s journey into night, told with Roth’s inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, all the ways that we convince ourselves of our solidity, all our life’s performances—talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation—are stripped off.</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'MS Shell Dlg 2', sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The Humbling is Roth’s thirtieth book.</span></font></p></div>


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<p><p>Exactly twenty years ago, Philip Roth made his debut with <I>Goodbye, Columbus</I>, a book that immediately announced the presence of a major new talent.<p><I>The Ghost Writer</I>, his eleventh book, begins with a young writer's search, twenty years ago, for the spiritual father who will comprehend and validate his art, and whose support will justify his inevitable flight from a loving but conventionally constricting Jewish middle-class home. Nathan Zuckerman's quest brings him to E.I. Lonoff, whose work&#8212;exquisite parables of desire restrained&#8212;Nathan much admires. Recently discovered by the literary world after decades of obscurity, Lonoff continues to live as a semi-recluse in rural Massachusetts with his wife, Hope, scion of an old New England family, whom the young immigrant married thirty-five years before. At the Lonoffs' Nathan also meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background. He is instantly infatuated with the...


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<p>When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for sel&#64257;shly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking of&#64257;ce as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial &#147;understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without dif&#64257;culty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize&#8211;winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family &#8212; and for a million such families all over the country &#8212; during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect...


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<p>Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.<p>The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.<p>A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with...


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"ARCHIPELAGO THREE ... is a book about people. The writer's soliloquy links together the separate tales of individual nobility and depravity, of bravery and ingenuity, and of despair and helplessness in the face of a hostile environment. We meet real men and women. Some of them have been corrupted, but others have never given up the struggle ... [The stories] reach out beyond Soviet reality and into the realm of universal human experience."
—Saturday Review
"Solzhenitsyn can and must proclaim that the automatism of oppression can be arrested, because he has seen it arrested or, at least, ground to temporary impotence . . . This is the testimony of the final volume of the trilogy, with its enthralling record of camp uprisings, of escapes, of defiance by individuals and groups of victims. ... In poignant closing chapters, he recalls his own resurrection from the house of the dead, his own reentry, at once agonizing and joyous, into the habitual daylight of more or less normal, licensed existence."
—George Steiner, The New Yorker


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The Gulag Archipelago Two 
"...may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning achievement." —Time
In "The Destructive-Labor Camps," the first part of this volume, we experience the terrible plight of the working prisoners, the cruelty and caprice of camp authorities, and the tragic fate of the women prisoners and the luckless children born to them.
This chronicle of inhumanity is made bearable by the vitality and emotional range of Solzhenitsyn's writing that make his work on the "Archipelago" of Soviet repression one of the extraordinary literary events of our age.
"The Soul and Barbed Wire," the second part of this volume, is a magnificent statement on the possibilities of purification and redemption through suffering.
It was at the threshold of the camps that the first volume of GULAG left us. GULAG TWO takes us inside them.


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The GULAG Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately. The Author =================== The GULAG Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment in Literary Investigation By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn It is a question if any work of literature in our era other than 'the Divine Comedy is commensurate with The Gulag Archipelago in structure, scale, multiplicity of incident and characters, emotional range, variety of inflection and, above all, in the staggering magnitude of its underlying concept. In this masterpiece, the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle has orchestrated thousands of incidents and individual histories into one narrative of unflagging power and momentum. Written in a tone that encompasses Olympian wrath, bitter calm, savage irony and sheer comedy, it combines history, autobiography, documentary and political analysis as it examines in its totality the Soviet apparatus of repression from its inception following the October Revolution of 1917. The "Archipelago" of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's work is the network of secret police installations, camps, prisons, transit centers, communications facilities, transportation systems and espionage organizations which, in his view, honeycombs the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Drawing on his own experience, material from Soviet archives, cases collected during his eleven years of labor camps and exile, and the evidence of more than 200 fellow prisoners, Mr. Solzhenitsyn concludes that the secret police are the vital element of the Soviet regime, and have been ever since its founding by Lenin. Numerous studies of the Soviet system of control have been published in the West but until now nothing so complete, so carefully documented and assembled, and never before has a literary giant devoted his gifts of narrative and characterization to the enterprise. Solzhenitsyn has here created and peopled with brilliantly portrayed human beings a vast, overarching fresco of that state within a state which is the Gulag Archipelago. Thomas P. Whitney, the translator, has also translated both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, and is a leading authority on Russian culture and the Soviet Union.


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<p>Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition- Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, who has come here on a full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite - her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, privileged Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Gellin, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's 'independent' newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of...


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<p class="description">Sir Richard Branson is one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and his Virgin Group is one of the most recognised lifestyle brands, trusted and enjoyed by many millions of people. Now, in his trademark charismatic and honest style, Richard shares the inside track on some of his greatest achievements over forty years in business as well as the lessons he has learned from his setbacks. In Business Stripped Bare, he discusses why he took on one of the world’s biggest superbrands, how he built Virgin Mobile USA into the fastest growing company in history to reach a billion dollars in revenue, faster than Microsoft, Google or Amazon.com, and how Richard is the only person in the world to have built seven billion dollar companies from scratch in seven completely different sectors. Richard tells the story behind the launch of Virgin America, his new airline in the USA, how Virgin Galactic is set to initiate a new era of space tourism from a spaceport deep in the Mojave desert, and what he has learned about business from a diverse group of leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Jack Welch, Herb Kelleher, Steve Jobs and the founders of Google. He also shares his thoughts on the changing face of the global economy and how businesses worldwide need to work together to tackle environmental challenges and invest in the future of our world.Combining invaluable advice with remarkable and candid inside stories, Business Stripped Bare is a dynamic, inspirational and truly original guide to success in business and in life. Whether you are an executive, an entrepreneur or just starting out in the business world, Richard strips down business to show how you can succeed and make a difference.</p>


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<p class="description">An exhilarating and highly personal story of flight by the world-famous adventurer and businessman.  As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last two hundred years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They're inventors and toymakers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers and, yes, crackpots. Some have called them irresponsible, even dangerous. But I have met many of them. I have worked with them, and funded them, and flown with them. I admire them, and trust them, and I think they and their kind are our future.  In this book I look at the history of flight through the stories and people who have inspired me. These are tales of miraculous rescues; of records made and broken; of surprising feats of endurance and survival, including some of my own adventures, as well as developments in the future of air (and space) travel. This is a story of pioneers, and of course it includes the world famous Montgolfiers and the Wright brothers. But I also want to describe some of the lesser-known trailblazers — people like Tony Jannus, who in 1914 created the world's first scheduled commercial flight, flying his passengers over the waters of Tampa Bay at an altitude of just fifty feet; the 'bird man' Leo Valentin, who in the 1950s jumped from 9,000 feet with wooden wings attached to his shoulders; and my friend, Steve Fossett, who dedicated his life to breaking records and having adventures.  This is their story. It is also, in a small way, my own.   From the Hardcover edition.</p>


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<div><p class="description">EDITORIAL REVIEW:</p> <p class="description">The global icon shares his secrets of success and exciting plans for the future.Throughout my life I have achieved many remarkable things. In **Screw It, Let's Do It**, I will share with you my ideas and the secrets of my success, but not simply because I hope they'll help you achieve your individual goals.Today we are increasingly aware of the effects of our actions on the environment, and I strongly believe that we each have a responsibility, as individuals and organisations, to do no harm. I will draw on Gaia Capitalism to explain why we need to take stock of how we may be damaging the environment, and why it is up to big companies like Virgin to lead the way in a more holistic approach to business.In **Screw It, Let's Do It** I'll be looking forwards to the future. A lot has changed since I founded Virgin in 1968, and I'll explain how I intend to take my business and my ideas to the next level and the new and exciting areas - such as launching Virgin Fuels - into which Virgin is currently moving.But I have also brought together all the important lessons, good advice and inspirational adages that have helped me along the road to success.Ironically, I have never been one to do things by the book, but I have been inspired and influenced by many remarkable people. I hope that you too might find a little inspiration between these pages.</p> <p class="description"></p></div>


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<p class="description">Tom Wolfe, "America's most skillful satirist" (The Atlantic Monthly), examines the strange saga of American architecture in this sequel to The Painted Word. Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City. In his sequel to The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe, examines the strange saga of American architecture in the 20th century. "No wonder . . . this book is the hottest topic in Manhattan's architectural salons."—The New York Times Book Review  "No wonder . . . this book is the hottest topic in Manhattan's architectural salons."—The New York Times Book Review "Tom Wolfe has squeezed a funny tale out of glass and stone."—The Wall Street Journal "A search-and-destroy mission against architectural pretensions . . . a funny book."—New York magazine"America's most skillful satirist."—The Atlantic Montly "Full of Insight . . . marvelously right."—People "Sharp serpent's-tooth wit, useful cultural insight, and snazzy zip! pop! writing."—Playboy"Wolfe's delightfully witty, biting history of modern architecture is a scintillating high comedy of big money, manners, and massive manipulation of public taste."—Publishers Weekly</p>


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<div><p><strong>A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.</strong><br></p><p>As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay-with officer Nestor Camacho on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, BACK TO BLOOD is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.</p><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>A writer like Tom Wolfe probably shouldn’t have to stage a comeback, but there will doubtless be reviewers of his new novel, <em>Back to Blood</em>, who describe it that way. In Wolfe's career of great books, his last novel, published in 2004, was considered by many to be a stumble--but <em>Back to Blood</em> is a return to form, a work that solidifies Wolfe’s stature as one of the best. Using his incisive journalistic skills, his flair for the cinematic moment, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humor, Wolfe takes the disparate types in and around Miami to create a tapestry of memorable scenes and characters. The result is entertaining, revealing, and perhaps even bigger than the sum of its parts. This is a book that will do for Miami what Wolfe's mega-hit <em>The Bonfire of the Vanities * did for New York. --</em>Chris Schluep*</p><h3>From Booklist</h3><p><em>Starred Review</em> After skewering academia in I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), Wolfe, the impish, white-suited satirist, eviscerates a city-in-flux as he did with New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Atlanta in A Man in Full (1998). This time he takes on Miami, which, as one character declares, is not America. Wolfe’s pizzazz and obsessions are on peacock display, from slapstick action to ironic stereotypes to photorealist settings, including smugly trendy restaurants, a gated island, the bawdy Biscayne Bay regatta, and the prestigious annual exhibition, Art Basel Miami. The king and queen in his chess-set cast of characters are two young Cuban Americans determined to ascend above the modest homes and rigid mindsets of their “Little Havana” neighborhood. Freakishly muscular Nestor is a sweet-natured cop who earns combustible notoriety when he daringly rescues an illegal Cuban immigrant from atop a ship’s mast. Beautiful Magdalena is a nurse working for an Anglo psychiatrist who treats wealthy patients addicted to pornography. Also on the board are a sly, Waspy reporter; a suspect Russian art collector; and a lovely Haitian college student. Within a masterfully strategized plot, Wolfe works his sardonic mojo to mock both prejudice and decadence and demolish the art world, reality TV, tawdry fame, and journalism in the digital age. Though plagued with belabored sex scenes, this is a shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, divisive, sun-seared city where “everybody hates everybody.” HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anticipation has been high for several years now, so the publisher will crank up the publicity for what can legitimately be dubbed a cultural event. --Donna Seaman </p></div>


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<p class="description">Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.A decade ago, The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. This time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.</p>


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<div><p>In <em>Hooking Up</em>, Tom Wolfe ranges from coast to coast observing 'the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000.' From teenage sexual manners and mores to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience; from his legendary profile of William Shawn, editor of <em>The New Yorker </em>(first published in 1965), to a remarkable portrait of Bob Noyce, the man who invented Silicon Valley, Tom Wolfe the master of reportage and satire returns in vintage form.<br></p><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Tom Wolfe's name is now so well known that the cover of his new collection bears just that: Tom Wolfe's name. No title, no picture, just the name, with an elegant design twining through it. Flip the thing on its side and you'll find that its title, <em>Hooking Up</em>, gives little idea of its function. But investigation soon reveals an oleo of reportage, fiction, and acrimonious name-calling. The latter, of course, makes for the best reading. In "My Three Stooges," Wolfe reviles the three big men of American letters--Updike, Mailer, and Irving--who cast aspersions on his second novel. Apparently, "the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as <em>A Man in Full</em>, and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor." Wolfe gets in a lot of figures about what a big hit <em>his</em> book was with the reading public, and a few gentle reminders about other writers who were big hits of their times--little guys like Twain and Tolstoy. </p><p>Equally bitter fun are his two famous 1965 satires from the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>. As always, Wolfe's titles lead you a good way into the actual stories: "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: <em>The New Yorker</em>." Wolfe, clotheshorse of note, gets off some of his best cracks at the expense of <em>New Yorker</em> editor William Shawn's fashion sense: "He always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks." The rest of the reported pieces are unexceptional, and while the novella <em>Ambush at Fort Bragg</em> makes the most of its setting--a <em>Dateline</em>-like newsmagazine--it lacks the irresistible momentum required to drag most readers into a novella. Still, it's fun to watch the author reprise his lifelong role of unlikely underdog: between his sniping at the literary elite and his mocking of the precious <em>New Yorker</em> set, Tom Wolfe makes like a defender of the common man. <em>--Claire Dederer</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Arch, vengeful and incisive as ever, the standard bearer for the chattering classes is back, this time with a collection of nine previously published essays, one new one and a reprinted novella. Ranging from the spectacular innovations of neuroscience to the preposterous horrors of the contemporary art world to a bare-knuckled assessment of the critical reception to his novel A Man in Full (an essay that appears for the first time in this collection, and that will set tongues wagging), the pieces run the gamut of Wolfe's signature obsessions. Fans of his character sketches will relish "Two Young Men Who Went West," a revelatory profile of Robert Noyce, a key innovator of the microchip who founded Intel in 1968, where the midwestern Congregationalist values he shared with his former mentor, William Shockley (founder of the original Silicon Valley startup, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory), grew into a business philosophy that's now so pervasive it's practically in the ether. Also included are Wolfe's infamous, irreverent profiles of New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, originally published in 1968. Lopped off of Wolfe's most recent fiction opus, the novella "Ambush in Fort Bragg" concerns a "TV sting" run amok, and sits easily next to his journalism. However, Wolfe's meticulous eye for detail shows signs of jaundice in his hectoring anti-Communist tirades and in the title essay, which turns a snide backward glance on the turn of the millennium. Still, his fans will find plenty of evidence that Wolfe remains willing to plunge into "the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic typanum all around [him]" and thatDespecially in his nonfictionDhe can still grab the brass ring. Agent, Janklow &amp; Nesbitt Associates. (Oct..--" and thatDespecially in his nonfictionDhe can still grab the brass ring. Agent, Janklow &amp; Nesbitt Associates. (Oct.) <br>Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p></div>


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<p>Wolfe's brilliant first book -- a collection of essays that introduced us to the Sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.</p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking <em>was</em> his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment. </p><p>Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas. Everyone should send him money and other fine things. Hats off to Tom Wolfe!"--Terry Southern  </p><p>"_The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test <em>is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book . . . the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter . . . Vibrating dazzle!"--</em>The New York Times  </p><p><em>"Some consider Mailer our greatest journalist; my candidate is Wolfe."--Studs Terkel, </em>Book Week  </p><p><em>"A Day-Glo book, illuminating, merry, surreal!"--</em>The Washington Post  </p><p><em>"Electrifying."--</em>San Francisco Chronicle  </p><p><em>"An amazing book . . . A book that definitely gives Wolfe the edge on the nonfiction novel."--</em>The Village Voice  </p><p><em>"Among journalists, Wolfe is a genuine poet; what makes him so good is his ability to get inside, to not merely describe (although he is a superb reporter), but to get under the skin of a phenomenon and transmit its metabolic rhythm."--</em>Newsweek_</p>

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<p>In this book, the author of <i>Seven Gothic Tales</i> gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.<br><br>The Random House colophon made its debut in February 1927 on the cover of a little pamphlet called "Announcement Number One." Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the company's founders, had acquired the Modern Library from publishers Boni and Liveright two years earlier. One day, their friend the illustrator Rockwell Kent stopped by their office. Cerf later recalled, "Rockwell was sitting at my desk facing Donald, and we were...


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<p>Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<p>'And it happened when Martine or Philippa spoke to Babette that they would get no answers, and would wonder if she had even heard what they said ... Orshe would sit immovable on the three-legged kitchen chair, her strong hands in her lap and her dark eyes wide open, as enigmatical and fatal as a Pythia upon her tripod. At such moments, they realised that Babette was deep, and that in the soundings of her being there were passions, there were memories and longings of which they knew nothing at all.'Babette's Feast is a sublime celebration of eating, drinking and sensual pleasure. In Isak Dinesen's life-affirming short story, two elderly sisters living in a remote, god-fearing Norwegian community take in a mysterious refugee from Paris one night -- and are rewarded for their kindness with the most decadent, luxurious feast of a lifetime.


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<div><p>Last Tales is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from Albondocani, a projected novel that was never completed; "The Caryatids," an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter and a gypsy's spell; and three tales of winter, including "Converse at Night in Copenhagen," a drunken, all-night conversation between a boy-king, a prostitute, and a poor young poet.<br></p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p><p>Twelve tales, the last that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. </p></div>


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<p>With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>


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<div><p>In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant. <br></p><p>Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's <strong>Winter's Tales</strong> transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.<br></p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Dinesen's stories come toward one like the flashes...from a lighthouse on a strange and infrequently sighted coast--a coast beautiful and precarious, for it may be the last outreach of magic, but resting on bedrock."--Eudora Welty<br></p><p>"These tales belong to an old and great tradition and are worthy of it." --<em>The Nation</em><br></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; ">Language Notes</span></p><p>Text: English (translation)<br>Original Language: Danish </p></div>


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In Plotting Hitler’s Death  Joachim Fest, acclaimed biographer of Adolf Hitler, brings together the full story of those Germans who, from 1933 almost until the moment the Third Reich collapsed, plotted to kill the Führer. Fest recounts in vivid detail Count von Stauffenberg’s famous planting of a time-bomb at Hitler’s feet on 20 July 1944. But he also describes lesser-known plan by leading Wehrmacht generals who, reluctant to go to war, plotted in 1938 to have Hitler arrested, tried and shot—a plot they called off when Neville Chamberlain opted for appeasement at Munich. Included, too, are heroic attempts by isolated individuals and numerous conspiracies even among Germany’s highest-ranking officers. Time and again, small numbers of Germans, civilian and military, noble and ignoble, schemed to topple the Führer, and on several occasions they came within minutes – or inches—of succeeding. In this compelling, definitive work Fest explores why they tried, why they found so little support either in Germany or outside it, and why they failed. As he places the resistance in the larger political and social context, we come to understand the difficulties of opposition in an age of totalitarianism.


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<p><b>Book Source:</b> <a href="http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/77454" rel="nofollow">Digital Library of India Item 2015.77454</a></p><p>dc.contributor.author: Ruth Benedict<br />dc.date.accessioned: 2015-06-30T15:54:39Z<br />dc.date.available: 2015-06-30T15:54:39Z<br />dc.date.digitalpublicationdate: 0000-00-00<br />dc.date.citation: 1947<br />dc.identifier.barcode: 2020050084034<br />dc.identifier.origpath: /data7/upload/0184/851<br />dc.identifier.copyno: 1<br />dc.identifier.uri: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/77454<br />dc.description.scanningcentre: RMSC, IIIT-H<br />dc.description.slocation: IIIT, Hyderabad<br />dc.description.main: 1<br />dc.description.tagged: 0<br />dc.description.totalpages: 332<br />dc.description.vendor: par<br />dc.format.mimetype: application/pdf<br />dc.language.iso: English<br />dc.publisher: London Secker And Warburg<br />dc.rights: In_copyright<br />dc.source.library: Sjm<br />dc.subject.classification: Geography. Biography. History<br />dc.subject.classification: General History<br />dc.title: The Chrysanthemum And The Sword<br /></p>


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<p><i>Crazy Rich Asians</i> is the outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season.<br>When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn't know is that Nick's family home happens to look like a palace, that she'll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia's most eligible bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back. Initiated into a world of dynastic splendor beyond imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society; Eddie, whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines; and...


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<p>It beats me why a man of his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my clothes and what not,' says Bertie. 'If I had Jeeves's brain, I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something.' Luckily for us, Bertie Wooster manages to retain Jeeves's services through all the vicissitudes of purple socks and policemen's helmets, and here, gathered together for the first time, is an omnibus of Jeeves novels and stories: <I>Thank You, Jeeves</I>, <I>The Code of the Woosters </I>and <I>The Inimitable Jeeves</I>.


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<p>On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.</p><p><em>The Sleepwalkers</em> reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade. Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. </p><p>How did the Balkans--a peripheral region far from Europe's centers of power and wealth--come to be the center of a drama of such...


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged from the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansa. In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece.</p>


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<p>Hitchens boldly puts the pieces of the Clinton puzzle together &#8212; and isn't afraid to describe the result.<p>Clintonism' is not an idea, or a program; still less is it a principle. It represents what might be termed - were it not for its murk - the distilled essence of consensus politics. Unremarkable in its constituent elements, which are a mixture of opportunist statecraft, crony capitalism, 'divide and rule' identity politics, and populist manipulation, Clintonism has nonetheless raised these ordinary practices to the level of theory. It has succeeded, argues the author, because of a stealthy appeal to the waning and insecure forces of an American liberalism gone bad. Christopher Hitchens followed Governor Clinton through New Hampshire in 1992, and remained an assiduous student of his methods ever since.<p>In <i>No One Left to Lie To</i>, Hitchens profiles the rise and decline of some prominent Clintonoids, from George Stephanopoulos to the First Lady. He scrutinizes...


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<p><b>'Why, when the subject of royalty or monarchy is mentioned, do the British bid adieu to every vestige of proportion, modesty, humour and restraint? '</b></p><p> <b> </b></p><p>This is not a call for the monarchy's abolition by fiat; illusions cannot be abolished. This is an invitation to think. </p><p></p><p>In this scathing essay, Christopher Hitchens looks at the relationship of the press and the public to the royal family, unpacking the tautology and contradictory arguments that prop it up. In his inimitable style, Hitchens argues that our desire not to profane or disturb the monarchy is a failure of reason and a confusion of reality. Fealty to the magic of monarchy stops us looking objectively at our own history and hinders open-minded criticism of our present. It is time we outgrew it.</p><p></p><p>With the Queen's Diamond Jubilee upon us, during a time of recession, high unemployment and national debt, Hitchens' 10,000-word critique is even more relevant today...


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<b>"If someone says I'm doing this out of faith, I say, Why don't</b><br><b> you do it out of conviction?" &#8212;CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS</b><br> One of his generation's greatest public intellectuals, and perhaps its fiercest,<br> Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant interview subject. This collection&#8212;which<br> spans from his early prominence as a hero of the Left to his controversial<br> support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan toward the end of his life&#8212;<br> showcases Hitch's trademark wit on subjects as diverse as his mistrust of the<br> media, his love of literature, his dislike of the Clintons, and his condemnation of<br> all things religious. Beginning with an introduction and tribute from his longtime<br> friend Stephen Fry, this collection culminates in Hitchens's fearless final<br> interview with Richard Dawkins, which shows a man as unafraid of death as<br> he was of everything in life.


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<p class="description">Over the past few decades, the bestselling author ofHitch-22has crisscrossed the globe debating religious scholars, Catholic clergy, rabbis, and devout Christians on the existence of God--appearances that have attracted thousands of people on both sides of the issue. He has been invited to talk shows and events to discuss everything from the death of Jerry Falwell to the sainthood of Mother Teresa, from U.S. policy in the Middle East to the dangers of religious fundamentalism and beyond. And he is always armed with pithy discourse that is as intelligent as it is quotable. The Quotable Hitchensgathers for the first time the eminent journalist, public intellectual, and all-around provocateur Christopher Hitchen's most scathing, inflammatory, hilarious, and clear-cut commentary from the course of his storied career. Drawn from his many TV appearances, debates, lectures, interviews, articles, and books, the quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject--from atheism and alcoholism to George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, from Islamofascism and Iraq to smoking and sex.</p>


