en-US Wed, 07 Aug 2024 18:45:14 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 7723 The Metamorphosis,� a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature.

Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. �The Judgment,� which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and �The Stoker,� which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with �The Metamorphosis,� form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,� and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.

Also included are �In the Penal Colony,� a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and �A Hunger Artist,� about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.]]> 224 Franz Kafka 1593080298 Richard 5 4.08 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: Richard
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1915
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 133539
He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.]]> 615 Marcel Proust 0375751548 Richard 4 4.28 1913
author: Marcel Proust
name: Richard
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1913
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/04/29
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]]> 49583709
With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralyzed as her husband Clifford is paralyzed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 400 D.H. Lawrence 014303961X Richard 5 all-time-favorites 3.48 1928
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Richard
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/10/18
shelves: all-time-favorites
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]]> 6706748 Here are eleven masterful stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all told with the evocative power that was Tolstoy's alone. They include "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," inspired by Tolstoy's own experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, "Hadji Murat," the novella Harold Bloom called "the best story in the world," "The Devil," a fascinating tale of sexual obsession, and the celebrated "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption.
Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation captures the richness, immediacy, and multiplicity of Tolstoy's language, and reveals the author as a passionate moral guide, an unflinching seeker of truth, and ultimately, a creator of enduring and universal art. "From the Trade Paperback edition."]]> 529 Leo Tolstoy 0307268810 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.21 1886
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Richard
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1886
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/03/23
shelves: all-time-favorites
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]]> 314972
At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella.Ěý Now in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.Ěý Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural.Ěý In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.

Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without YouthĚýilluminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery.Ěý It was adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in over ten years.

Ěý“A wonderful blend of realism, surrealism, and fantasy, [Eliade’s novellas] suggest the importance of the mythic and the supernatural to finding meaning in the everyday. Highly recommended.â€� â€�Library Journal
Ěý
�Youth Without Youth reads like a surreal collaboration by Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Carl Jung. Mircea Eliade left me with the rare sense that I had been entertained by a genius.”—William Allen, author of Starkweather and The Fire in the Birdbath and Other Disturbances]]> 140 Mircea Eliade 0226204154 Richard 5 summer-books 3.95 1976
author: Mircea Eliade
name: Richard
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/07/09
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 243598 The Sheltering Sky is at once merciless and heartbreaking in its compassion. It etches the limits of human reason and intelligence—perhaps even the limits of human life—when they touch the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.]]> 342 Paul Bowles 0141023422 Richard 5
Theyre all fucked, and yet they arent. Its life. Kits behaviour after Port dies is strange, I dont onow anyone who would act like this, close....but not that extreme. Dealng with, coming to terms with death is hard, if you think about it, remove the clutter, the mental toys, the supports, take it all awayand look it square in the face, then eat it. digest it. And , its not a one time job. Youve got to reaccept this death thing , ad nauseum...until it actually occurs. Accepting anothers death is not as hard as our own , but its not the accepting thats hard, its the end of a relationship that defined you, its gone now. The mind must change with this , if not it breaks down.

Kits lost her shit. I had forgotten her rapes, marriage to the Muslim, her fuckng the black, the catatonia at the end. She didnt care after Poet died,maybe she wantedto join him. She put herself in situations where she could die.
Bowles wanted a novel on two levels, the physical plane and the existential....the descriptions of the desert, of the people, the descriptions of Kit and Ports inner jungles, of Tunners shit mind, the Americans and their incessant yapping, the mom and son, Tunner, sick fuckers youd not want to meet in the States.

Kit and Port seem to not really live, to be in their lives, Bowles says exactly this....and its there, just moving , drinking, sex, sleep, the petty annoyances, the lusts, the fears, the whole shebang, life...
Death and loss, it is a dark book, but hard to put down. Beautiful language. ]]> 3.92 1949
author: Paul Bowles
name: Richard
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1949
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/19
date added: 2020/02/19
shelves: re-reading-for-the-umpteenth-time
review:
I read 25-30 years ago and didnt like it. I thought it rambled. This time I saw the artistry, the existential circus, its been said all the people are depressing, theyre all bad people. Selfsih, I think a friend called them. Who isnt?

Theyre all fucked, and yet they arent. Its life. Kits behaviour after Port dies is strange, I dont onow anyone who would act like this, close....but not that extreme. Dealng with, coming to terms with death is hard, if you think about it, remove the clutter, the mental toys, the supports, take it all awayand look it square in the face, then eat it. digest it. And , its not a one time job. Youve got to reaccept this death thing , ad nauseum...until it actually occurs. Accepting anothers death is not as hard as our own , but its not the accepting thats hard, its the end of a relationship that defined you, its gone now. The mind must change with this , if not it breaks down.

Kits lost her shit. I had forgotten her rapes, marriage to the Muslim, her fuckng the black, the catatonia at the end. She didnt care after Poet died,maybe she wantedto join him. She put herself in situations where she could die.
Bowles wanted a novel on two levels, the physical plane and the existential....the descriptions of the desert, of the people, the descriptions of Kit and Ports inner jungles, of Tunners shit mind, the Americans and their incessant yapping, the mom and son, Tunner, sick fuckers youd not want to meet in the States.

Kit and Port seem to not really live, to be in their lives, Bowles says exactly this....and its there, just moving , drinking, sex, sleep, the petty annoyances, the lusts, the fears, the whole shebang, life...
Death and loss, it is a dark book, but hard to put down. Beautiful language.
]]> 204185 300 Nikolai Leskov 0812966961 Richard 5
The story is unlike anything else in Russian literature. Its not moralistic like Tolstoyor Dostoyevsky, its not calm, cool, showing itself in glances like Chekhov, no humor like Bulgakov or Erofeev, there is some skazki elementa, tale elements, tall tales always are infused with magical realism, they wouldnt be tales to tell, this has magical realist elements but they dont stick, this is a tale, one expects an angel to fly and deflect bullets, one expects Tatars to sew chopped up horse hair into your soles , so you are hobbled to them, a slave, for ten years, choose a wife or two, good day, брат...

His mother died giving birth to him and swore the boy to God and n the end, he literally has nowhere else to go except a monastery, even there, the world, owned by its Prince, sends demons , large and small, to mess with him, even from the holy place he is exiled, in a sense, sento Solovki, in the far north, to pray at the relics of two saints.

]]> 3.96 1873
author: Nikolai Leskov
name: Richard
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1873
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/11
date added: 2020/02/10
shelves:
review:
Strictly for EW. An old man retells his life and we listen, young and reckless, he foolishly is responsible for a monks death. The monk returns as a ghostto tell him he will die every day of his life intil he becomes a monk because his mother promised him to God. and, the entire story, he kills , he becomes an alcoholic, hes a good man, he chucks his soul for instant pleasures, he suffers,

The story is unlike anything else in Russian literature. Its not moralistic like Tolstoyor Dostoyevsky, its not calm, cool, showing itself in glances like Chekhov, no humor like Bulgakov or Erofeev, there is some skazki elementa, tale elements, tall tales always are infused with magical realism, they wouldnt be tales to tell, this has magical realist elements but they dont stick, this is a tale, one expects an angel to fly and deflect bullets, one expects Tatars to sew chopped up horse hair into your soles , so you are hobbled to them, a slave, for ten years, choose a wife or two, good day, брат...

His mother died giving birth to him and swore the boy to God and n the end, he literally has nowhere else to go except a monastery, even there, the world, owned by its Prince, sends demons , large and small, to mess with him, even from the holy place he is exiled, in a sense, sento Solovki, in the far north, to pray at the relics of two saints.


]]> 58043
*
Journalist and prose writer Nikolai Leskov is known for his powerful characterizations and the quintessentially Russian atmosphere of his stories.]]> 88 Nikolai Leskov 1843910683 Richard 4 3.95 1865
author: Nikolai Leskov
name: Richard
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1865
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/21
date added: 2020/01/21
shelves:
review:
I read Lefty/ Steel Flea back when I was the only CPUSA member with calluses n calluses, with a pedigree in lumpenproletarian angst, 1991-93, farcical, cute. This, however, begins with the narrator sitting you down to tell you " people round here get crazy, we remember them with chills, sometimes"...and Leskov outdoes Dostoyevsky on the gloom scale, if there was an award for most serotonin stolen from a work of art, this does it....Blood Meridian may be the ultimate, up with the Bible, but this novella, the same form and pace as Legends of the Fall, has the feeling of a tale told to you, an intimate telling, fireside, tipsy, dark. You know half the people mentioned and a father in law, a husband, and a child, a sensitive mollycoddled child is suffocated, all in the name of lov---lust. Everything changes, the light love affair becomes heavy with the sin of murder, three times over, they did it as a couple and once caught, he turns on her, the handsome, now branded with the three letters for kriminals sent to Siberia, n his pretty boy face that has got him droves of tail, he goes for the 19 year old coquette, his ex is bent , sad as all get out, the weather worsens, they wait by the river and cross with the ferry, and and the ending just swallows your mind.
]]> 23790
"Backgrounds" includes a rich selection of Chekhov's letters, in new translations by Professor Matlaw, and Gorky's celebrated essay on Chekhov, translated by Ivy Litvinov. The critical essays offer general views of Chekhov's art and achievement and detailed analyses of particular stories. The critics are D. S. Mirsky, A. B. Derman (whose essay has been translated from the Russian especially for this edition), Renato Poggioli, Gleb Struve, Donald Rayfield, Karl Kramer, Virginia Llewellyn Smith, and Nils Ake Nilsson.

A Selected Bibliography directs readers to resources for further study.


Chameleon (1884) --
Oysters (1884) --
A living chronology (1885) --
The huntsman (1885) --
Misery (1886) --
The requiem (1886) --
Anyuta (1886) --
Agatha (1886) --
Grisha (1886) --
A gentleman friend (1886) --
The chorus girl (1886)--
Dreams (1886) --
Vanka (1886)--
At home (1887) --
The siren's song (1887) --
Sleepy (1888) --
The grasshopper (1892) --
In exile --
Rothschild's fiddle (1894) --
The student (1894) --
The teacher of literature (1889-94) --
Whitebrow (1895) --
Anna on the neck (1895) --
The house with the mansard (1896) --
The pecheneg (1898)--
A journey by cart (1897) --
The man in a case (1898) --
Gooseberries (1898) --
About love (1898) --
A doctor's visit (1902) --
The darling (1899) --
The lady with the dog (1899) --
The bishop (1902) --
The betrothed (1903).]]> 384 Anton Chekhov 0393090027 Richard 5 4.36 1932
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Richard
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/04/18
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]]> 5947099
Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.
--back cover]]> 115 Gabriel García Márquez 1400095948 Richard 1 3.59 2004
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Richard
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2004
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2019/03/28
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]]> 28627
This new and expanded Everyman’s edition of his stories includes all the mature work. In addition to such novella-length masterpieces as The Captain’s Daughter and The Tales of Belkin the collection now contains many more short pieces and the masterly History of Pugachev, a powerful account of the man who rebelled against Catherine the Great.]]> 560 Paul Debreczeny 0804718008 Richard 5 4.36 1828
author: Paul Debreczeny
name: Richard
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1828
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/07/16
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review:

]]> 16182695 Karl Schlögel Richard 5 4.22 2006
author: Karl Schlögel
name: Richard
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2016/05/03
date added: 2016/05/03
shelves:
review:
So far? very good. From glancing forward Im in bliss, deep . Very deep. Not for the common man.
]]> 4999 776 Christopher Clark 0674023854 Richard 5 currently-reading 4.16 2006
author: Christopher Clark
name: Richard
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/05/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 75303
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 456 Anonymous 0140449205 Richard 1 3.52 632
author: Anonymous
name: Richard
average rating: 3.52
book published: 632
rating: 1
read at: 1994/09/01
date added: 2016/04/20
shelves:
review:
A companion piece to Mein Kampf. Awful.
]]> 37530 280 Georges Bataille 0872861902 Richard 4 4.11 1957
author: Georges Bataille
name: Richard
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/09/03
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]]> 7960968 528 Giacomo Leopardi 0374235031 Richard 4 4.43 1845
author: Giacomo Leopardi
name: Richard
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1845
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/09/03
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]]> 799939 extended essays on major tale cycles. An introductory essay explains who the Celts were, explores the history of the Celtic revival, and examines the meaning and role of mythology and tradition. An invaluable pronunciation guide for the major Celtic languages, a topic index of entries, thorough
cross-references within Celtic mythology and to other mythologies, such as Classical and Norse, enables the reader to see the relationship between Celtic mythology, later Irish literature, and other literary and mythological traditions.
The Dictionary of Celtic Mythology is the first place to turn for an authoritative guide to this colorful world of tragedy, revenge, honor, and heroism of Celtic myth.]]> 496 James MacKillop Richard 4 4.24 1998
author: James MacKillop
name: Richard
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/09/03
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]]> 249 Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."]]> 318 Henry Miller 0802131786 Richard 3 3.69 1934
author: Henry Miller
name: Richard
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1934
rating: 3
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]]> 24658 'What was the beginning, or how did things start? What was there before?'

The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source for Norse mythology. Written in Iceland a century after the close of the Viking Age, it tells ancient stories of the Norse creation epic and recounts the battles that follow as gods, giants, dwarves and elves struggle for survival. It also preserves the oral memory of heroes, warrior kings and queens. In clear prose interspersed with powerful verse, the Edda provides unparalleled insight into the gods' tragic realisation that the future holds one final cataclysmic battle, Ragnarok, when the world will be destroyed. These tales from the pagan era have proved to be among the most influential of all myths and legends, inspiring modern works as diverse as Wagner's Ring Cycle and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

This new translation by Jesse Byock captures the strength and subtlety of the original, while his introduction sets the tales fully in the context of Norse mythology. This edition also includes detailed notes and appendices.]]> 224 Snorri Sturluson 0140447555 Richard 5 4.17 1220
author: Snorri Sturluson
name: Richard
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1220
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/09/03
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review:

]]> 5478167 200 Ivan Bunin 1847491049 Richard 5 3.52 1910
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1910
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/09/03
shelves: re-reading-for-the-umpteenth-time, all-time-favorites, favorites, midway-thru
review:
green withers pink hooves yellow turkeys , lilac skies, this is a funny and black book by a master .... the Bunin " brocade" began here , I imagine Chagall being Russian Orthodox and a writer and voila! No magical realism but beautiful nonetheless
]]> 114873 St. Mawr is the story of a splendid stallion in whose vitality the heroine finds the quality that is lacking in the men she knows. It is also the first of Lawrence's writing to be partially set in America, on a ranch in Arizona. The Man Who Died, originally published in Paris as "The Escaped Cock" and later retitled and revised, has as its main character Christ, who does not die on the cross but escapes to wander through the country seeking the meaning of human existence, which he finally discovers in a temple of Isis by the waters of Lebanon.]]> 212 D.H. Lawrence 0394700716 Richard 5 3.77 1929
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Richard
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 25677643
Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet Russia, having been active in politics there since the 1980s. In addition to the many books he has authored on political, philosophical, and spiritual topics, he is the leader of the International Eurasia Movement, which he founded. For more than a decade, he has been an advisor to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin on geopolitical matters, and was head of the Department of Sociology at Moscow State University. Arktos has also published his books, The Fourth Political Theory (2012), Putin vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right (2014), and Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (2014).]]> 166 Alexander Dugin Richard 0 to-read 3.42 2010
author: Alexander Dugin
name: Richard
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 853509
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but—more importantly—as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Jünger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure. Published shortly after the war’s end, Storm of Steel was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann’s brilliant new translation.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 289 Ernst JĂĽnger 0142437905 Richard 5 4.13 1920
author: Ernst JĂĽnger
name: Richard
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1920
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
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review:

]]> 982532 315 W.H. Auden 0394725069 Richard 0 4.23 1972
author: W.H. Auden
name: Richard
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
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]]> 3140 The Bridge on the Drina earned Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.

A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric's stunning novel. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it: Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest - the bridge.]]> 314 Ivo Andrić 0226020452 Richard 0 4.34 1945
author: Ivo Andrić
name: Richard
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1945
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
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]]> 1889658 192 Abbas Kiarostami 9643721256 Richard 0 to-read 3.92 2005
author: Abbas Kiarostami
name: Richard
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12441373 300 Jay W. Baird 0521145635 Richard 0 to-read 3.50 2007
author: Jay W. Baird
name: Richard
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 82592 194 John Marsden 0312130805 Richard 0 to-read 3.49 1993
author: John Marsden
name: Richard
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 20493657 ad infinitum. In Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science, children must not be seen OR heard, and everyone has to be in bed by 8 p.m. because they are perpetually running a slight fever.

A massive cult hit online, Scarfolk re-creates with startling accuracy the darkest childhood memories of the 1970s, all in shiver-inducing visual form. It's surreal, clever and extremely funny.]]> 192 Richard Littler 0091958482 Richard 0 to-read 4.10 2014
author: Richard Littler
name: Richard
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1058625 248 Graham Harvey 023113701X Richard 0 to-read 4.07 2005
author: Graham Harvey
name: Richard
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1186953
In ways similar to Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Bunin's novel powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.]]> 254 Ivan Bunin 0810111721 Richard 5 3.95 1927
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2015/08/28
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]]> 34
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness bind them

In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.

In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.
--back cover]]> 398 J.R.R. Tolkien 0618346252 Richard 3 4.36 1954
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Richard
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1954
rating: 3
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2015/08/28
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review:

]]> 1268784
Em cada uma delas é-nos contado um episódio da vida de uma personagem completamente diferente e, em todas elas, os heróis de Búnin veem o seu amor testado pelo drama da separação, provocada pela loucura, a guerra, a morte ou, simplesmente, pela ambição pessoal e os acasos da vida.

Em Alamedas Escuras encontramos também a angústia pelo tempo perdido, a dor pelo destino da Rússia, o peso da memória, a beleza dos sentimentos e os recantos mais obscuros da alma humana, que colocam obstáculos à luta pelo que é bom e amado.]]> 272 Ivan Bunin 5352002373 Richard 5 4.17 1943
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves:
review:
He has edged out Chekhov for favorite writer. His color schemes!!! Its said his stories end sad. Psssssst.... they do, so do yours. Life is no medicine commercial. We all lose at love, the best of us do. Subtle? Precise language, exact but his words linger for days. Ghostly, diet surreal.... almost magical realism. Realism that wants to tell you theres a baba yaga in your living room, brown teeth and a smell of winter apples and must, shes smiling in a broken mirror. Ive read Sukhodol, many other stories, his sketches on Chekhov, study on Tolstoy---- his use of color does remind me of Chagall, he colors things odd colors: green hooves, pink manes, erotic blue lips, orange lips, iodine skin, red trees....Nabokov famously said a work could be written on his use of color..... also the emotions... his repetition reminds me of Lawrence, I think David H translated Ivan into English, both are sensitive authors, powerful full blooded authors.... to be continued
]]> 149413
Artos here comes alive: bold and forceful in battle, warm and generous in friendship, tough in politics, shrewd in the strategy of war - and tender and tragically tormented in love.

Out of the braiding of ancient legend, fresh research, soaring imagination and hypnotic narrative skill comes a novel that has richly earned its reputation as a classic.]]> 512 Rosemary Sutcliff 0812588525 Richard 5 4.07 1963
author: Rosemary Sutcliff
name: Richard
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 797374 332 Joseph Roth 1585673269 Richard 5 4.08 1932
author: Joseph Roth
name: Richard
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2015/08/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 115982 242 Lawrence Millman 0618082484 Richard 5 I'd recommend all of his books, Kayak Full of Ghosts, Northern Latitudes, Innu Tales. In fact , I use them to teach English as a Second Language in Russia. ]]> 4.10 1990
author: Lawrence Millman
name: Richard
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/08/28
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review:
I have read and reread this book a dozen times. I came early totravel writing, especially of northern regions. Rasmussen and George Kennan, not to mention theclassics from the warmer parts of this flying mudball: Rebecca West, Robert Byron and many more. Yet, Icame late to Millman. His journey from Norway to the Shetlands, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador brought the smell of sweet Arctic air to my nostrils, I felt deliciouslycold while reading this book. His journey is adventure, pure poetry, lived poetry. Think of this as Snorri reborn, delirious from sleep deprivation and last nights fun. While not merely whimsical or irreverent, the tone of the book shows Millmans love for his subject matter. And what exactly is his subject matter? Always the human at the edge , the beautiful last edge, far far away from the comfort of our warm bed.
I'd recommend all of his books, Kayak Full of Ghosts, Northern Latitudes, Innu Tales. In fact , I use them to teach English as a Second Language in Russia.
]]> 23384090 320 Alexander Dugin 1910524115 Richard 0 to-read 3.54 2012
author: Alexander Dugin
name: Richard
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 499184 304 Ivan Bunin 1566635160 Richard 5 This book is best read by the other Thomas G Marullo edited books Russian Requiem and Notes From a Distant Shore....also his study of Bunin's work, also Bunin himself, also some in depth works on the Russian Revolution, not just the White lit, but the pro-Bolshevik stuff: John Reed, Gorky, Red Victory by W Bruce Lincoln, a few histories on the Revolution, my personal favorite , desoite his controversy is Orlando Figes , he looks at the Rev. from 1891, time of Famine to death of Lenin. Bunin, although he did come from the gentry was a social democrat, it was illogical to be for Tsarism at this time. I say this as a Russian Orthodox conservative(not Tea Party, think Euro Right, far right, mixed with socialism)--the Tsar was negligent to say the least and culpable to say the worst. Its no wonder Bolshevism became popular. Bunin was great friends with many Russian literery giants, from Tolstoy to Chekhov, Gorky was a good friend, he and his wife visited Capri, I think a few times, they wrote letters, they loved each other...then the Revolution happened. Gorkys own life was textbook communist---how could the young Maxim Peshkov , homeless and destitute at 12, NOT be a communist? Or, angry...ergo, his nom deplume(guerre?) Gorky...literally "bitter". The friendship died. This is another tragedy of war, friendships. Truth dies first, then friendships. The White movement consisted of Tsarists, monarchists, radical conservatives, social democrats yearning for a dead Russia(Bunin), madmen, aristocrats, businessmen,Russian Orthodox, Muslims and Buddhists---a hodge podge united in hate. The Civil War in the cities, indeed all over Russia, were times of immense suffering: famine, slaughter, incessant pain. Zamyatins short story "The Cave" is one of the best "bullets to the heart", that depicts this period. Cursed Days is another. Do yourself a favor and , if you arent acquianted with the Revolution, the times that birthed it, or the culture, read up, then read this....then it makes sense. This man, genteel, with total control over his art, his writing is so intense, so rich, so magical...Sukhodal(Dry Valley) and Mityas Love....then the Revolution comes, destroying his country, friendships, his entire world. In the other books edited by Marullo, there are snippets of conversations with Gorky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, memories by others of Bunin, mixed in with sketches by Vanya....these are some of my favorite books to read and reread, ad nauseum. ]]> 4.17 1935
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1935
rating: 5
read at: 2013/10/02
date added: 2014/09/21
shelves:
review:
Anyone who says this is depressing hasnt read Shalomov. Its witty, erudite, learned, depressing, angry, sexy, sad, dreamy, detailed, cogent, arrogant, ignorant and scared. What do you expect?
This book is best read by the other Thomas G Marullo edited books Russian Requiem and Notes From a Distant Shore....also his study of Bunin's work, also Bunin himself, also some in depth works on the Russian Revolution, not just the White lit, but the pro-Bolshevik stuff: John Reed, Gorky, Red Victory by W Bruce Lincoln, a few histories on the Revolution, my personal favorite , desoite his controversy is Orlando Figes , he looks at the Rev. from 1891, time of Famine to death of Lenin. Bunin, although he did come from the gentry was a social democrat, it was illogical to be for Tsarism at this time. I say this as a Russian Orthodox conservative(not Tea Party, think Euro Right, far right, mixed with socialism)--the Tsar was negligent to say the least and culpable to say the worst. Its no wonder Bolshevism became popular. Bunin was great friends with many Russian literery giants, from Tolstoy to Chekhov, Gorky was a good friend, he and his wife visited Capri, I think a few times, they wrote letters, they loved each other...then the Revolution happened. Gorkys own life was textbook communist---how could the young Maxim Peshkov , homeless and destitute at 12, NOT be a communist? Or, angry...ergo, his nom deplume(guerre?) Gorky...literally "bitter". The friendship died. This is another tragedy of war, friendships. Truth dies first, then friendships. The White movement consisted of Tsarists, monarchists, radical conservatives, social democrats yearning for a dead Russia(Bunin), madmen, aristocrats, businessmen,Russian Orthodox, Muslims and Buddhists---a hodge podge united in hate. The Civil War in the cities, indeed all over Russia, were times of immense suffering: famine, slaughter, incessant pain. Zamyatins short story "The Cave" is one of the best "bullets to the heart", that depicts this period. Cursed Days is another. Do yourself a favor and , if you arent acquianted with the Revolution, the times that birthed it, or the culture, read up, then read this....then it makes sense. This man, genteel, with total control over his art, his writing is so intense, so rich, so magical...Sukhodal(Dry Valley) and Mityas Love....then the Revolution comes, destroying his country, friendships, his entire world. In the other books edited by Marullo, there are snippets of conversations with Gorky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, memories by others of Bunin, mixed in with sketches by Vanya....these are some of my favorite books to read and reread, ad nauseum.
]]> 31491 The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization - the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of existence symbolized by the persistent, unifying motif of the "rainbow". Lawrence's fourth novel, a prequel to Women in Love, is an invigorating, absorbing tale about the undying determination of the human soul.]]> 544 D.H. Lawrence 0451530306 Richard 5 Huxley:To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness. For, being himself of a different order, he inhabited a different universe from that of common men � a brighter and intenser world, of which, while he spoke, he would make you free. He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of a man who had been at the brink of death and to whom, as he emerges from the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and mysterious. For Lawrence, existence was one continuous convalescence; it was as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life. What these convalescent eyes saw, his most casual speech would reveal. A walk with him in the country was a walk through that marvelously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels. He seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and tell you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought. Of Black-Eyed Susan, for example, the cow at his New Mexican ranch, he was never tired of speaking, nor was I ever tired of listening to his account of her character and her bovine philosophy.

“He sees,� Vernon Lee once said to me, “more than a human being ought to see. Perhaps,� she added, “that’s why he hates humanity so much.� Why also he loved it so much. And not only humanity: nature too, and even the supernatural. For wherever he looked, he saw more than a human being ought to see; saw more and therefore loved and hated more. To be with him was to find oneself transported to one of the frontiers of human consciousness. For an inhabitant of the safe metropolis of thought and feeling it was a most exciting experience.�
Oh, the novel??? Lawrences mind talking to mine for months, every night. ]]> 3.71 1915
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Richard
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2014/06/24
date added: 2014/06/24
shelves:
review:
Really good. Descriptions are amazing, Huxley was right, Lawrence really is the most intense human Ive ever met.....through his works at least. Huxley said that simply walking with Lawrence was an education, Lawrence would ask "Did you see that dead birds eyes, the sunset, the hue on the left side of the iris..."Huxley felt dead in comparison
Huxley:To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness. For, being himself of a different order, he inhabited a different universe from that of common men � a brighter and intenser world, of which, while he spoke, he would make you free. He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of a man who had been at the brink of death and to whom, as he emerges from the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and mysterious. For Lawrence, existence was one continuous convalescence; it was as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life. What these convalescent eyes saw, his most casual speech would reveal. A walk with him in the country was a walk through that marvelously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels. He seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and tell you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought. Of Black-Eyed Susan, for example, the cow at his New Mexican ranch, he was never tired of speaking, nor was I ever tired of listening to his account of her character and her bovine philosophy.

“He sees,� Vernon Lee once said to me, “more than a human being ought to see. Perhaps,� she added, “that’s why he hates humanity so much.� Why also he loved it so much. And not only humanity: nature too, and even the supernatural. For wherever he looked, he saw more than a human being ought to see; saw more and therefore loved and hated more. To be with him was to find oneself transported to one of the frontiers of human consciousness. For an inhabitant of the safe metropolis of thought and feeling it was a most exciting experience.�
Oh, the novel??? Lawrences mind talking to mine for months, every night.
]]> 33690 The New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

This new edition includes six opinion pieces written by Robert Kaplan about the Balkans between l996 and 2000 beginning just after the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords and ending after the conclusion of the Kosovo war, with the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power.]]> 352 Robert D. Kaplan 0312424930 Richard 1 3.89 1993
author: Robert D. Kaplan
name: Richard
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1993
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2014/06/09
shelves:
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]]> 12880 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans, and the uneasy relationships amongst its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life.]]> 1181 Rebecca West 014310490X Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.21 1941
author: Rebecca West
name: Richard
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1941
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/06/09
shelves: all-time-favorites
review:

]]> 166990 144 Gretel Ehrlich 0140081135 Richard 4 4.11 1984
author: Gretel Ehrlich
name: Richard
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/06/09
shelves:
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]]> 12427
The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.]]> 380 Boris Pasternak 0940322714 Richard 5 4.23 1926
author: Boris Pasternak
name: Richard
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1926
rating: 5
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]]> 65947 Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings. Anticipating the expanded edition, Feral House placed Voluptuous Panic out of print, and for the past year buyers paid as much as $460 to online sellers for a used copy.

This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree� has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring hip clubgoers, filmmakers, gay historians, graphic designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson.

Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter, “Sex Magic and the Occult,� documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.� The deluxe hardcover edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin Fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit�), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!�), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO Secret Society, and sex crime (“the Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich�).]]> 305 Mel Gordon 1932595112 Richard 5 4.20 2006
author: Mel Gordon
name: Richard
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/06/09
shelves:
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]]> 486197 364 Ivan Bunin 0810117525 Richard 5 midway-thru 3.14 2001
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2014/05/26
date added: 2014/05/26
shelves: midway-thru
review:

]]> 15767111 For fans of fairy tales and the literary supernatural: a unique collection of Russian short stories from the last 200 years

In these folk tales, young women go on long and perilous quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese, and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Some of the stories here were collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four of the greatest writers in Russian literature: Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov, Andrey Platonov, and Alexander Pushkin, author of Eugene Onegin, the classic Russian novel in verse. Among the many classic stories included here are the tales of Baba Yaga, Vasilisa the Beautiful, Father Frost, and the Frog Princess.
]]> 466 Robert Chandler 0141442239 Richard 5 summer-books, to-read 4.19 2012
author: Robert Chandler
name: Richard
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/05/26
shelves: summer-books, to-read
review:

]]> 11455485 Satantango is proof that “the devil has all the good times.�

The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,� George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.�

“You know,� Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”]]> 274 László Krasznahorkai 0811217345 Richard 4 to-read 4.19 1985
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Richard
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/05/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 722859 316 Mati Unt 156478388X Richard 3 3.56 1990
author: Mati Unt
name: Richard
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/05/26
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]]> 462660 The Swan is a masterful work by one of Iceland's most accomplished novelists and one of its leading fictional innovators. A nine-year old girl is sent to live and work on a country farm to serve her probation for shiplifting, a common form of punishment in Iceland. There, in a powerful, unchanging landscape, she experiences a community torn between ancient tradition and new attitudes. She confronts new and painful feelings and has to face the unknown within herself and her alien surroundings. The contrasts that Bergsson carefully develops throughout the novel, between the grotesque and the beautiful, the comical and the dramatic, come to a powerful conclusion in an almost surreal confrontation by a lake between the girl, the swan, and a lamb.]]> 152 GuĂ°bergur Bergsson 1899197354 Richard 3 3.43 1991
author: GuĂ°bergur Bergsson
name: Richard
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/05/26
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]]> 267673 256 Andrei Platonov 1860465161 Richard 5 This collection, along with Soul and Kotlovan are enough. The River Potudan may be my favorite. As a lifelong prole, working hard labor, Ive dug hundreds of thousands of feet of holes, trenches, foundations, ponds and tunnels. To be inside the earth changes one. Not a day passed where I didnt think of death, and was buoyant from this fact. Id pull dead animals out and ponder their short life. Life above ground was more strange, the peace underground is a tonic that one never forgets. This peace perhaps crucified his spirit even more, was another nail added to all the others...]]> 4.19 1999
author: Andrei Platonov
name: Richard
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/05/19
shelves:
review:
. Rereading this again, always shocked by his ability to put beauty inside foulness, next to decay, beside mange and stinking death. I think you are half correct, I get the sense that he did want to un exist, but also to have his energy his life source reborn, to escape his trash heap life. Living under a stair well, virtually dead to his nation, his people, his hopes, the dream that sustained him as a youngman ate his son, which in turn diseased him, eventually killing him. And yet? His words are like nothing Ive ever read: a magical social realism of despair and never a trite saying, every word is chosen by this king of high literature and strung like a unique pearl onto a necklace of words that blinds you, takes you into the world of myth, of a heaviness of meaning next to death and in reading Platonov you realize we are his characters, dying in trash heaps. With our gadgets, accoutrements, pride we may be more pitiful than Platonov or his characters.
This collection, along with Soul and Kotlovan are enough. The River Potudan may be my favorite. As a lifelong prole, working hard labor, Ive dug hundreds of thousands of feet of holes, trenches, foundations, ponds and tunnels. To be inside the earth changes one. Not a day passed where I didnt think of death, and was buoyant from this fact. Id pull dead animals out and ponder their short life. Life above ground was more strange, the peace underground is a tonic that one never forgets. This peace perhaps crucified his spirit even more, was another nail added to all the others...
]]> 355439 420 Joachim Fest 030680915X Richard 5 4.01 1963
author: Joachim Fest
name: Richard
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2012/07/27
date added: 2014/05/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 252130
Praise for Sunstroke , Graham Hettlinger's first translations of Ivan

"Bunin is, unaccountably, the least translated of the great Russian writers (and his best work ranks with that of Turgenev and Chekhov). This splendid volume takes an important step toward righting a long-standing wrong."―Kirkus Reviews

"Graham Hettlinger's new translation...gives us a Bunin startling in his vividness, sensuality, and restraint."� Virginia Quarterly Review

"Vibrant...a fine introduction to Bunin's work and a reminder of its importance."� New York Sun]]> 270 Ivan Bunin 1566636418 Richard 5 4.13
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2014/05/10
date added: 2014/05/10
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]]> 8234155 Dacha Idylls is a lively account of dacha life and how Russians experience this deeply rooted tradition of the summer cottage amid the changing cultural, economic, and political landscape of postsocialist Russia. Simultaneously beloved and reviled, dachas wield a power that makes owning and caring for them an essential part of life. In this book, Melissa L. Caldwell captures the dacha’s abiding traditions and demonstrates why Russians insist that these dwellings are key to understanding Russian life. She draws on literary texts as well as observations from dacha dwellers to highlight this enduring fact of Russian culture at a time when so much has changed. Caldwell presents the dacha world in all its richness and complexity—a “good life� that draws inspiration from the natural environment in which it is situated.]]> 224 Melissa L. Caldwell 0520262840 Richard 3 2.67 2010
author: Melissa L. Caldwell
name: Richard
average rating: 2.67
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2014/05/10
date added: 2014/05/10
shelves:
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]]> 860183
In addition to its entertainment value, The Road to Oxiana also serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travellers. When Paul Fussell "rediscovered" The Road to Oxiana in his recent book Abroad, he whetted the appetite of a whole new generation of readers. In his new introduction, written especially for this volume, Fussell writes: "Reading the book is like stumbling into a modern museum of literary kinds presided over by a benign if eccentric curator. Here armchair travellers will find newspaper clippings, public signs and notices, official forms, letters, diary entries, essays on current politics, lyric passages, historical and archaeological dissertations, brief travel narratives (usually of comic-awful delays and disasters), and--the triumph of the book--at least twenty superb comic dialogues, some of them virtually playlets, complete with stage directions and musical scoring."]]> 292 Robert Byron 0195030672 Richard 5 3.91 1937
author: Robert Byron
name: Richard
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/05/10
shelves:
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]]> 18452 The Painted Bird is a dark novel that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love.]]> 234 Jerzy Kosiński 080213422X Richard 5 3.91 1965
author: Jerzy Kosiński
name: Richard
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 12491347
Lenin said of him: “in Italy, comrades, in Italy there is only a Socialist capable of guiding the people towards the revolution, Benito Mussolini�, soon after the Duce would lead a revolution, but a Fascist one�

So, why did he become a Fascist after wall? Has he really betrayed Socialism as his critics accused him of doing? Or was Fascism the genial and natural outcome of a Socialist’s evolution, of a charismatic mass leader, towards the real revolution?

In “Revolutionary Fascism� Erik Norling, author of “Blood in the Snow: The Russo-Finnish War� (Shelf Books, 2001), acquaints us not only with the Revolutionary and Socialist roots of primeval Fascism but also describes the Italian Social Republic period, at the end of the war, when these values reemerged in its utmost purity.

Authored by Erik Norling
Prologue by Francisco Calderon
Supplement by Jaime Nogueira Pinto]]> 144 Erik Norling 9898336269 Richard 0 to-read 4.05 2011
author: Erik Norling
name: Richard
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18363935 156 Lawrence Millman 098282193X Richard 5 4.35
author: Lawrence Millman
name: Richard
average rating: 4.35
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/12/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 138110 176 Tarjei Vesaas 0720611229 Richard 5 currently-reading 3.89 1963
author: Tarjei Vesaas
name: Richard
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/10/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:
A forgotten masterpiece; the descriptions of snow are worth reading the book.
]]> 252133 Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger has selected the "Gentleman" and twenty-four other stories and translated them afresh—several for the first time in English. The result is a collection that is remarkable in its crystalline prose, surprising in its vibrancy. It includes, among others, "Raven," "Cold Fall," "Muza," "Styopa," "Antigone," "In Paris," and "Late Hour." Never has the last of the great "gentry" writers and the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature received a more caring and passionate translation.

The lyric impulse that motivated so much of Bunin's writing is evident throughout the stories in Sunstroke. In the prose miniatures, such as "Summer Day" and "Sky Above a Wall," he seeks only to capture a momentary impression or a passing scene rather than to write a traditional narrative. And even in his longer works, Bunin displays little interest in exploring the psychology of his characters or creating detailed plots. Instead these stories are primarily shaped by an urge to express both the intense, sensual pleasure of existence and the tragic fleetingness of life. Thus, even as they depict a wide range of affairs, seductions, betrayals, and deaths, they tend to read more like poetry than potboilers, delivering their most powerful effects through the rhythms and pacing of their sentences, their highly detailed, sensuous imagery, and the connotative richness of their language.

Sunstroke confirms Bunin's stature as one of the greatest—and most neglected—Russian writers of the twentieth century.]]> 190 Ivan Bunin 1566634261 Richard 5 4.23 1925
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/10/02
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review:

]]> 116265 275 Anonymous 0520027086 Richard 5 3.83 1270
author: Anonymous
name: Richard
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1270
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/09/18
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]]> 252136 416 Thomas Gaiton Marullo 1566634334 Richard 5 3.75 2002
author: Thomas Gaiton Marullo
name: Richard
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/07/17
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]]> 252128 Dark Avenues, was published in the 1940s. Among his longer works were a fictional autobiography, The Life of Arseniev (1930), and its sequel, Youth (1939), which were later collected into one volume, and two memoirs, The Accursed Days (1926), and Memories and Portraits (1950). He also wrote books on Tolstoy and Chekhov, both of whom he knew personally. Bunin, in fact, serves as a link-both personal and literary-between Tolstoy, whom he met as a young man, Chekhov, a close friend, and Vladimir Nabokov, who was influenced by Bunin early in his career and who moved in the same émigré literary circles in the twenties and thirties.

Bunin achieved his greatest mastery in the short story, and much of his finest work appears in this volume-the largest collection of his prose works ever published in English. In Robert Bowie's fine translation, with extensive annotations and a lengthy critical afterword, this work affords readers of English their first opportunity for a sustained encounter with a Russian classic, and one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
]]> 718 Ivan Bunin 0810114038 Richard 5 4.16 2006
author: Ivan Bunin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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]]> 589257 A New York Review Books Original

The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called “alternative realism.� Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka.

This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are “The Return,� about an officer’s difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium�; “The River Potudan,� a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech.

This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov’s short fiction.]]> 335 Andrei Platonov 159017254X Richard 5 The stories in this small collection are written by a man who saw his generation not self destruct by be destroyed by the ideals he once had, by a system he once supported. Once. Many authors were shot or worked to death in gulags.Platonov himself died in a closet. Yet, for all this his stories have a purity unmatched in any other writer I have read, in any language. There is something alien and jarring. My favorite story is River Potudan. The story of a man returning from WW2 is not unusual in Russia, millions did. They came back to villages that were empty of men. The small towns often had women running the show. A young man returns to look for his love, a girl who once played piano and lived perhaps slightly better than others, they had a composure , a gentility that made them stick out from others. He comes back to find them thin and wrecked, the war has destroyed them, poverty has pummeled them. How Platonov describes the young man, the village, the mindsets,nature can only be called strange, very strange. I see how some would throw it away. Russians tell me Platonov really is the hardest author to translate. Even in Russian he startles with his style. His is the prose of an angel who has come to the world in its whirlwind of violence and sadnesses we cannot comprehend. He keeps his composure, but barely. One gets the sense that his lower lip is trembling. At the same time, he describes commonplace emotions and scenes as if they had never been described before. Language was invented by him, he seems to be telling us. The world has never been described ...until now.The stories are sad, beautiful, dark. A pearl necklace with blood on it in the hand of a poor child. Or, something like that.]]> 4.15 1935
author: Andrei Platonov
name: Richard
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1935
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/07/06
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review:
I have read thousands of books mostly Russian. Platonov is in the top 5. Anyone who says he is " pro Soviet/ Stalin" must be shot, they are too idiotic to understand dark sarcasm. Irony. A man who had his 15 yr old son die from TB(and he in turn would contract it from his son, dying from it later) he contracted in a gulag did not love Stalin. A man who could not publish his work while Stalin was alive did not love Stalin. Are readers even educated anymore? Are they so uneducated from their hald educated Tea Party duraki that they cannot notice irony, sarcasm, very dark humor when they come across it? Yes, apparently so.
The stories in this small collection are written by a man who saw his generation not self destruct by be destroyed by the ideals he once had, by a system he once supported. Once. Many authors were shot or worked to death in gulags.Platonov himself died in a closet. Yet, for all this his stories have a purity unmatched in any other writer I have read, in any language. There is something alien and jarring. My favorite story is River Potudan. The story of a man returning from WW2 is not unusual in Russia, millions did. They came back to villages that were empty of men. The small towns often had women running the show. A young man returns to look for his love, a girl who once played piano and lived perhaps slightly better than others, they had a composure , a gentility that made them stick out from others. He comes back to find them thin and wrecked, the war has destroyed them, poverty has pummeled them. How Platonov describes the young man, the village, the mindsets,nature can only be called strange, very strange. I see how some would throw it away. Russians tell me Platonov really is the hardest author to translate. Even in Russian he startles with his style. His is the prose of an angel who has come to the world in its whirlwind of violence and sadnesses we cannot comprehend. He keeps his composure, but barely. One gets the sense that his lower lip is trembling. At the same time, he describes commonplace emotions and scenes as if they had never been described before. Language was invented by him, he seems to be telling us. The world has never been described ...until now.The stories are sad, beautiful, dark. A pearl necklace with blood on it in the hand of a poor child. Or, something like that.
]]> 2625495 - Tamengo
- La partie de trictrac
- Le vase Ă©trusque]]> 98 Prosper Merimee Prosper 2277300985 Richard 5 3.72 1850
author: Prosper Merimee Prosper
name: Richard
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1850
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/19
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]]> 53639
The classic novel Zorba the Greek is the story of two men, their incredible friendship, and the importance of living life to the fullest. Zorba, a Greek working man, is a larger-than-life character, energetic and unpredictable. He accompanies the unnamed narrator to Crete to work in the narrator’s lignite mine, and the pair develops a singular relationship. The two men couldn’t be further apart: The narrator is cerebral, modest, and reserved; Zorba is unfettered, spirited, and beyond the reins of civility. Over the course of their journey, he becomes the narrator’s greatest friend and inspiration and helps him to appreciate the joy of living.

Zorba has been acclaimed as one of the most remarkable figures in literature; he is a character in the great tradition of Sinbad the Sailor, Falstaff, and Sancho Panza. He responds to all that life offers him with passion, whether he’s supervising laborers at a mine, confronting mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the tales of his past adventures, or making love. Zorba the Greek explores the beauty and pain of existence, inviting readers to reevaluate the most important aspects of their lives and live to the fullest.]]> 335 Nikos Kazantzakis 0571203132 Richard 5 summer-books 4.08 1946
author: Nikos Kazantzakis
name: Richard
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1946
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/07
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 805632
Stories contained in this volume:
- Moloch
- Olesya
- Night Duty
- The White Poodle
- I Was An Actor
- The Gambrinus
- Emerald
- The Garnet Bracelet.]]> 388 Aleksandr Kuprin 1410102351 Richard 5 summer-books 4.13
author: Aleksandr Kuprin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/06
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 602948 209 Ernst JĂĽnger 0940322552 Richard 5 summer-books 3.75 1957
author: Ernst JĂĽnger
name: Richard
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/06
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 15704 496 Albert Camus 1569246661 Richard 5 summer-books 4.28 1972
author: Albert Camus
name: Richard
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/06
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 135060 100 Leo Tolstoy 1602060134 Richard 5 summer-books 3.90 1912
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Richard
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1912
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/06
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 12527 288 Annie Dillard 0072434171 Richard 5 summer-books 4.08 1974
author: Annie Dillard
name: Richard
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/06
shelves: summer-books
review:

]]> 197308
Andrei Sinyavsky (1925�1997) was also known as Abram Tertz.]]> 416 Andrei Sinyavsky 5717200773 Richard 5 4.16 2007
author: Andrei Sinyavsky
name: Richard
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/06/04
shelves: re-reading-for-the-umpteenth-time
review:

]]> 780988
Boule de suif --
The Tellier establishment --
Mademoiselle Fifi --
Miss Harriet --
The piece of string --
The necklace --
The Horla.]]> 245 Guy de Maupassant 0486289184 Richard 5 4.06 1884
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Richard
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1884
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/05/23
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review:

]]> 1144016 32 Natalia Romanova 0140546774 Richard 5 3.84 1983
author: Natalia Romanova
name: Richard
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1983
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/05/17
shelves:
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]]> 57785 220 Joseph Roth 1585673749 Richard 5 4.04 1930
author: Joseph Roth
name: Richard
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/04/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 728765 D.H. Lawrence 0521285755 Richard 5 3.55 1921
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Richard
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1921
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/04/02
shelves:
review:
I feel drugged Lawrence is the English Bunin and conversely Bunin is the Russian Lawrence: both write from nature not of it they are not sappy worshippers but profound detailed shamen; they see what we never will
]]> 321935 This Nordic Prize winner for 1988 is a story of incest and infanticide set in the remote hinterlands of 19th-century Iceland. ""Vilhjálmsson's hallucinatory imagination creates an eerily beautiful vision of things, Icelandic in far-seeing clarity, precision, strangeness. Unique and unforgettable."" - Ted Hughes. Based on a true story, Justice Undone is a compelling novel of obsession and aversion. An idealistic young magistrate (a figure inspired by the Whitmanesque Icelandic writer Einar Benediktsson) undertakes his first case. His geographical and emotional journey into bleak, unknown territory, where dream mingles sensuously with the world of the Sagas, tests him to the limit. ""A complex, poetic, psychological novel that becomes more rewarding as the reader progresses through it."" Booklist]]> 222 Thor Vilhjálmsson 1899197109 Richard 4 3.53 1986
author: Thor Vilhjálmsson
name: Richard
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/03/27
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]]> 381112 The Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times.

Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf."]]> 343 Anonymous Richard 5 4.28 1270
author: Anonymous
name: Richard
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1270
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/03/21
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]]> 13538977 339 James Wood 0374159564 Richard 4 3.83 2012
author: James Wood
name: Richard
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2012
rating: 4
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date added: 2013/03/08
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]]> 46957
Comic, edgy, lyrical, and indignant Bunting gives the term unreliable narrator a new twist with his irrepressible incapacity to tell the truth.]]> 272 James Wood 0312422512 Richard 1 3.10 2003
author: James Wood
name: Richard
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2013/03/08
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]]> 46958
Following the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels.

In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.

This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane. The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.]]> 336 James Wood 0312424604 Richard 4 4.11 2004
author: James Wood
name: Richard
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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]]> 46956 ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.]]> 304 James Wood 0375752633 Richard 4 4.10 1999
author: James Wood
name: Richard
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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date added: 2013/03/08
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]]> 32068
The selection comprises fourteen short stories, including "Love Among the Haystacks," "The Prussian Officer," "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "The Border Line, and "The Woman Who Rode Away."]]> 512 D.H. Lawrence 0679603271 Richard 5 3.94 1971
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Richard
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1971
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/03/08
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]]> 1355465 Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes a telling detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is Realism realistic? Why do some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh?

James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.]]> 265 James Wood 0374173400 Richard 0 favorites 4.00 2008
author: James Wood
name: Richard
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/03/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> 342049 435 Knut Hamsun 0394717813 Richard 5 4.27 1917
author: Knut Hamsun
name: Richard
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1917
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: midway-thru, re-reading-for-the-umpteenth-time, currently-reading, all-time-favorites
review:

]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.18 1985
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Richard
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: all-time-favorites
review:

]]> 132543
One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.]]> 358 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin 0940322579 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.04 1880
author: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
name: Richard
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1880
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/02/22
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]]> 35206 ¸é˛ą˛őłóĹŤłľ´Ç˛Ô to his later, more autobiographical writings.

RyĹ«nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan’s foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. â€�¸é˛ą˛őłóĹŤłľ´Ç˛Ôâ€� and â€�In a Bamboo Groveâ€� inspired Kurosawa’s magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as â€�The Noseâ€�, â€�O-Ginâ€� and â€�Loyaltyâ€� paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as â€�Death Registerâ€�, â€�The Life of a Stupid Manâ€� and â€�Spinning Gearsâ€�, Akutagawa drew from his own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving impressionistic stories.

A WORLD IN DECAY
- ¸é˛ą˛őłóĹŤłľ´Ç˛Ô (Sep 1915)
- In a Bamboo Grove (Dec 1921)
- The Nose (Jan 1916)
- Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale (May 1919)
- The Spider Thread (Apr 1918)
- Hell Screen (1918)
UNDER THE SWORD
- Dr. Ogata RyĹŤsai: Memorandum (Dec 7th 1916)
- O-Gin (Aug 1922)
- Loyalty (Feb 1917)
MODERN TRAGICOMEDY
- The Story of a Head That Fell Off (Dec 1917)
- Green Onions (Dec 1919)
- Horse Legs (Jan 1925)
AKUTAGAWA'S OWN STORY
- DaidĹŤji Shinsuke: The Early Years (Dec 9th 1924)
- The Writer's Craft (Mar 1924)
- The Baby's Sickness (Jul 1923)
- Death Register (Sep 1926)
- The Life of a Stupid Man (Jun 1927 posthumous)
- Spinning Gears (Jun 1927 posthumous)

Cover illustration by Yoshihiro Tatsumi]]> 268 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa 0143039849 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.15 1927
author: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
name: Richard
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1927
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/02/22
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]]> 715995 The Foundation Pit portrays a group of workmen and local bureaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for what is to become a grand 'general' building where all the town's inhabitants will live happily and 'in silence.']]> 141 Andrei Platonov 0810111454 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 3.81 1930
author: Andrei Platonov
name: Richard
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1930
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: all-time-favorites
review:

]]> 621550 272 Giovanni Verga 0140447415 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 3.61 1896
author: Giovanni Verga
name: Richard
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1896
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/02/22
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]]> 17961 Alternate cover edition of ISBN-13: 978-0140286809, ISBN-10/ASIN: 0140286802

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century� collected in a single volume

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper

For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.

Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.]]> 565 Jorge Luis Borges Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.57 1998
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Richard
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/02/22
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]]> 9717 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.]]> 314 Milan Kundera 0571224385 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.12 1984
author: Milan Kundera
name: Richard
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1984
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: all-time-favorites
review:

]]> 117896 ]]> 164 Venedikt Erofeev 0810112000 Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.08 1969
author: Venedikt Erofeev
name: Richard
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: all-time-favorites
review:

]]> 43035 252 Jack London Richard 5 all-time-favorites 4.00 1906
author: Jack London
name: Richard
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1906
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: all-time-favorites
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]]> 158610
The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century.]]> 128 Hugo von Hofmannsthal 1590171209 Richard 0 currently-reading 4.00 1902
author: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
name: Richard
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1902
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/02/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 723438 272 Joseph Roth 0312244940 Richard 0 currently-reading 3.78 1938
author: Joseph Roth
name: Richard
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/02/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 4457039 361 Otto Strasser 0404169961 Richard 5 5.00
author: Otto Strasser
name: Richard
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/16
shelves:
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]]> 7624594
As he re-creates these extraordinary events, John Vaillant gives us an unforgettable portrait of this spectacularly beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the arrival of Russian settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soldiers and hunters who greatly diminished the tiger populations. And we come to know their descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region.

This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens may have fit seamlessly into the tiger’s ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to ten feet long, weigh more than six hundred pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and mountain.

Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.]]> 329 John Vaillant 0307268934 Richard 3
good not great. he gets many things wrong . glaring is why the area has no priest. he already blamed the isolation for no work no school no civilizing factors yet he casually says theres no priest because the soviets killed them. that is simply retarded. jaunty prose style not professional switches frm journalistic speech to jargon without warning. lazy.
His description of the Amur, the tiger, I think, are very good. He should have brushed up on Russian history before he went, maybe even learned Russian. He could have inserted himself into the culture easier if he didnt go with preconceived(wrong) ideas about Russia and her people. ]]> 4.04 2010
author: John Vaillant
name: Richard
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2012/12/13
date added: 2013/02/13
shelves:
review:


good not great. he gets many things wrong . glaring is why the area has no priest. he already blamed the isolation for no work no school no civilizing factors yet he casually says theres no priest because the soviets killed them. that is simply retarded. jaunty prose style not professional switches frm journalistic speech to jargon without warning. lazy.
His description of the Amur, the tiger, I think, are very good. He should have brushed up on Russian history before he went, maybe even learned Russian. He could have inserted himself into the culture easier if he didnt go with preconceived(wrong) ideas about Russia and her people.
]]> 10850 304 Edward Hoagland 0375759433 Richard 5 3.84 1969
author: Edward Hoagland
name: Richard
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2004/12/18
date added: 2013/02/13
shelves: re-reading-for-the-umpteenth-time, summer-books
review:
Hoagland writes like I want to write, he lived like I want to live. I think Roth or Updike, both writers whose styles I do not care for---but their opinions?Yes---one of them said something to the effect of "he shoulda won a Nobel"..others have called him "Americas greatest essayist alive". I'd say he's our best, hands down. Whatshe write about isnt the question---what does he NOT write about.This particular book is one long essay, the characters are fleshed, as in a novel, the descriptions of the natural world rival Annie Dillard, even Whitman.Every little drop of Hoagland makes me want to go ---even Africa. I dont like Africa, because I dont like bugs or diseases.But, his essays on South Sudan and other parts of sub Saharan Africa had me craving to go.
]]> 77287 Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.

Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is simply a masterpiece]]> 482 HalldĂłr Laxness 0679767924 Richard 5 Strange 4.13 1934
author: HalldĂłr Laxness
name: Richard
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1934
rating: 5
read at: 2013/01/08
date added: 2013/02/13
shelves: currently-reading, re-reading-for-the-umpteenth-time
review:
Strange
]]> 7045965 672 Dominic Lieven 0713996374 Richard 5 4.16 2009
author: Dominic Lieven
name: Richard
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/13
date added: 2013/02/13
shelves:
review:

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