Andrew's bookshelf: all

Andrew's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 20 Dec 2024 16:25:34 -0800 60 Andrew's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[2666, Part 4: The Part About The Crimes]]> 16481855 280 Roberto Bolaño Andrew 5 4.05

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.05
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rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[2666, Part 1: The Part About The Critics]]> 16481836 160 Roberto Bolaño Andrew 5 4.18

2666, Part 1: The Part About The Critics

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.18
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rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> <![CDATA[2666, Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano]]> 16481844 68 Roberto Bolaño Andrew 5 4.06

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.06
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rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> No Room at the Morgue 52656430 Inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett, No Room at the Morgue is Jean-Patrick Manchette's unparalleled take on the private eye novel -- fierce, politically inflected, and finely rendered by the haunting, pitch-black prose for which the author is famed.

No Room at the Morgue came out after Jean-Patrick Manchette had transformed French crime fiction with such brilliantly plotted, politically charged, unrelentingly violent tales as Nada and The Mad and the Bad. Here, inspired by his love of Dashiell Hammett, Manchette introduces Eugene Tarpon, private eye, a sometime cop who has set up shop after being kicked off the force for accidentally killing a political demonstrator. Months have passed, and Tarpon desultorily tries to keep in shape while drinking all the time. No one has shown up at the door of his office in the midst of the market district of Les Halles. Then the bell rings and a beautiful woman bursts in, her hands dripping blood. It's Memphis Charles, her roommate's throat has been cut, and Memphis can't go to the police because they'll only suspect her. Can Tarpon help?

Well, somehow he can't help trying. Soon bodies mount, and the craziness only grows.]]> 192 Jean-Patrick Manchette 1681374196 Andrew 0 to-read 3.77 1973 No Room at the Morgue

author: Jean-Patrick Manchette
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> <![CDATA[2666 - I - La parte dei critici. La parte di Amalfitano. La parte di Fate]]> 6971816 433 Roberto Bolaño 8845922081 Andrew 5 4.36

2666 - I - La parte dei critici. La parte di Amalfitano. La parte di Fate

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.36
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rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> <![CDATA[2666, Part 3: The Part About Fate]]> 16481853 118 Roberto Bolaño Andrew 5 4.23

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.23
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rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[2666, Part 5: The Part About Archimboldi]]> 16481875 256 Roberto Bolaño Andrew 5 4.42

2666, Part 5: The Part About Archimboldi

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.42
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rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)]]> 18801 In Search of Lost Time contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust’s narrator describes living in his mother’s Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. Rich with irony, The Captive and The Fugitive inspire meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 957 Marcel Proust 0375753117 Andrew 5 4.38 1923 The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)

The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)

author: Marcel Proust
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1923
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns]]> 7405551 Hugues Viane, a widower, has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife. There he find a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. The story itself centres on Hugue's obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife.]]> 165 Georges Rodenbach 1903517826 Andrew 0 to-read 3.74 1892 Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns

Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns

author: Georges Rodenbach
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1892
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> Go, Went, Gone 36217818
Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, his books remain in their packing boxes and he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin. Here, on Alexanderplatz, he discovers a new community -- a tent city, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly, getting to know the new arrivals, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us.

At once a passionate contribution to the debate on race, privilege and nationality and a beautifully written examination of an ageing man's quest to find meaning in his life, Go, Went, Gone showcases one of the great contemporary European writers at the height of her powers.]]> 339 Jenny Erpenbeck 1846276217 Andrew 4 3.95 2015

author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2015
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/11/14
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]]> Sleepwalk 57771216 A high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near future America with a big hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon

��ɲ��’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At fifty years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and an LSD microdosing problem, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady, often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has lots of connections, but no true ties. His longest relationships are with an old rescue dog with posttraumatic stress, and a childhood friend as deeply entrenched in the underworld as he is, who, lately, he’s less and less sure he can trust.

Out of the blue, one of his many burner phones heralds a call from a twenty-year-old woman claiming to be his biological daughter, Cammie. She says she’s the product of one of his long-ago sperm donations; he’s half certain she’s AI. She needs his help. She’s entrenched in a widespread and nefarious plot involving Will’s employers, and continuing to have any contact with her increasingly fuzzes the line between the people Will is working for and the people he’s running from.

With his signature blend of haunting emotional realism and fast-paced intrigue, Chaon populates his fractured America with characters who ring all too true. Gazing both back to the past and forward to an inevitable enough seeming future, Sleepwalk examines where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the curses and joys of being human that will never change, no matter how far we travel to dodge them, or how cleverly we hide.]]> 320 Dan Chaon 1250175216 Andrew 4 3.61 2022 Sleepwalk

author: Dan Chaon
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/15
date added: 2023/09/15
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]]> An Exaltation of Larks 764938 314 Megan Hart 1590889282 Andrew 0 to-read 3.60 2002

author: Megan Hart
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/15
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]]> Await Your Reply 6251222
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.
(jacket)]]> 324 Dan Chaon 0345476026 Andrew 0 to-read 3.54 2009 Await Your Reply

author: Dan Chaon
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/04
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]]> Oblomov 254308 586 Ivan Goncharov 1933480092 Andrew 5
How do we see Oblomov? Is he the wasteful man who squanders his existence, as his closest friends see him? Or is he a study in self-acceptance? Pascal once wrote that the problems of the world are caused by men who are unable to sit quietly in their room alone. And yet the novel puts forward two figures whose very fulfilling lives seem to be a living rebuke of Oblomov's indolence.

It's a question everyone who reads the book will have to answer for themselves. I turned fifty not too long ago, and while I have tilted at plenty of windmills in my time, I have been a bit of an Oblomov myself of late, and this book cut kind of close to the bone for me in some ways. Kafka said a book should be an axe to break up the frozen sea within, and this book was just such an implement for me.

Highly recommended.]]> 4.09 1859 Oblomov

author: Ivan Goncharov
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1859
rating: 5
read at: 2020/07/31
date added: 2023/08/01
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This is a beautiful novel. At its center is the eponymous figure who does his best never to get out of bed. He is challenged by those close to him to make more of himself and to seize control of his life, and he rises to their challenge at first, but old habits die hard....

How do we see Oblomov? Is he the wasteful man who squanders his existence, as his closest friends see him? Or is he a study in self-acceptance? Pascal once wrote that the problems of the world are caused by men who are unable to sit quietly in their room alone. And yet the novel puts forward two figures whose very fulfilling lives seem to be a living rebuke of Oblomov's indolence.

It's a question everyone who reads the book will have to answer for themselves. I turned fifty not too long ago, and while I have tilted at plenty of windmills in my time, I have been a bit of an Oblomov myself of late, and this book cut kind of close to the bone for me in some ways. Kafka said a book should be an axe to break up the frozen sea within, and this book was just such an implement for me.

Highly recommended.
]]> <![CDATA[Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)]]> 9484 Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.��

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 749 Marcel Proust 0375752196 Andrew 5 4.39 1919 Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)

Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)

author: Marcel Proust
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1919
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/05/29
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]]> The Hour of the Star 762390 The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.]]> 96 Clarice Lispector 0811211908 Andrew 0 to-read 4.11 1977 The Hour of the Star

author: Clarice Lispector
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/10/09
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]]> The Magician 56897459
The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile.]]> 498 Colm Tóibín 1476785082 Andrew 5 3.90 2021 The Magician

author: Colm Tóibín
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past]]> 782086 The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust] reduces the ungainly and intricately designed masterpiece to its shape, and with hardly a wasted word...The paragraphs on habit and memory are truly wonderful—wonderful as explication, as psychology, and as philosophy."—John Updike

"Almost everything Moss says seems to me right, illuminating, and new. This is the book of a mature and individual mind and sensibility, with a deep experience of moral, social, psychological, and aesthetic values which is rare among critics." —George D. Painter

"A moving and inspiring book. Moss clears away dark corners, clarifies motivations, and places the huge work within the reader's perspective. A book of great value to the scholar and the general reader." ��Publishers Weekly

"Remembrance of Things Past is more than a novel; it is a work in which a single person's life is transformed into a mythology, with its own pantheon of gods, its own religious rituals, and its own moral laws. A total vision, it does not rely on any system outside itself for support. It is as if Dante had set out to write the Paradiso and the Inferno utilizing only the facts of his own existence without any reference to Christianity...Other novelists describe or invent worlds. Remembrance of Things Past is an entire universe created and interpreted by Marcel Proust." �� from Chapter 1

Howard Moss was poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. He also wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, plays, criticism, and a book of arch parody-microbiographies of cultural figures, Instant Lives, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

]]> 124 Howard Moss 0879232803 Andrew 3 4.12 1962 Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past

Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past

author: Howard Moss
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/03
date added: 2022/09/03
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]]> The Good-Enough Life 60425958 How an acceptance of our limitations can lead to a more fulfilling life and a more harmonious societyWe live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all.Avram Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By competing less with each other, each of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around.Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid.]]> 327 Avram Alpert 0691204349 Andrew 4 3.39

author: Avram Alpert
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.39
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/24
date added: 2022/08/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Assassins (Assassins, #1)]]> 60310785 By the internationally bestselling author of Bullet Train, the high-octane new thriller, set in Tokyo’s criminal underworld, pits an ordinary man against a group of talented and very unusual assassins.

Three Assassins is the high-stakes, high-style, and utterly propulsive follow-up to Kotaro Isaka’s international bestseller, Bullet Train, a Crime Reads "Most Anticipated Book of 2021."

Suzuki is an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. To get answers and his revenge, Suzuki abandons his law-abiding lifestyle and takes a low-level job with a front company operated by the crime gang Maiden, who are responsible for his wife’s death. Before long, Suzuki finds himself caught up in a network of quirky and highly effective assassins:

The Cicada is a knife expert.
The Pusher nudges people into oncoming traffic.
The Whale whispers bleak aphorisms to his victims until they take their own lives.

Intense and electrifying, Three Assassins delivers a wild ride through the criminal underworld of Tokyo, populated by contract killers who are almost superhumanly good at their jobs.]]> 272 Kōtarō Isaka 1419763857 Andrew 0 to-read 3.68 2004 Three Assassins (Assassins, #1)

author: Kōtarō Isaka
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act]]> 57693266
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER , TIME MAGAZINE , SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE , VOX, SALON, LIT HUB, AND VANITY FAIR

“Entertaining and illuminating.��-- The New Yorker * “Compulsively readable.��-- New York Times * “Delicious, humane, probing.��-- Vulture * “The best and most important book about acting I’ve ever read.��--Nathan Lane

The critically acclaimed cultural history of Method acting―an ebullient account of creative discovery and the birth of classic Hollywood.

On stage and screen, we know a great performance when we see it. But how do actors draw from their bodies and minds to turn their selves into art? What is the craft of being an authentic fake? More than a century ago, amid tsarist Russia’s crushing repression, one of the most talented actors ever, Konstantin Stanislavski, asked these very questions, reached deep into himself, and emerged with an answer. How his “system�� remade itself into the Method and forever transformed American theater and film is an unlikely saga that has never before been fully told.

Now, critic and theater director Isaac Butler chronicles the history of the Method in a narrative that transports readers from Moscow to New York to Los Angeles, from The Seagull to A Streetcar Named Desire to Raging Bull . He traces how a cohort of American mavericks--including Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and the storied Group Theatre--refashioned Stanislavski’s ideas for a Depression-plagued nation that had yet to find its place as an artistic powerhouse. The Group’s feuds and rivalries would, in turn, shape generations of actors who enabled Hollywood to become the global dream-factory it is today. Some of these performers the Method would uplift; others, it would destroy. Long after its midcentury heyday, the Method lives on as one of the most influential--and misunderstood--ideas in American culture.

Studded with marquee names--from Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elia Kazan, to James Baldwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Dustin Hoffman-- The Method is a spirited history of ideas and a must-read for any fan of Broadway or American film.]]> 512 Isaac Butler 1635574773 Andrew 4 4.25 2022 The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

author: Isaac Butler
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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]]> Submission 25322084
Meanwhile, it’s election season. And although Francois feels “about as political as a bath towel,�� things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and Francois is offered an irresistible academic advancement—on condition that he convert to Islam.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of Submission that Michael Houellebecq is “not merely a satirist but—more unusually—a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind.�� Houellebecq’s new book may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious, a comic masterpiece by one of France’s great novelists.]]> 246 Michel Houellebecq 0374271577 Andrew 4 3.68 2015 Submission

author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2015
rating: 4
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]]> Invisible Man 50176777
As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying "battle royal" where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century.]]> 610 Ralph Ellison Andrew 3 4.09 1952

author: Ralph Ellison
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1952
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/20
date added: 2021/12/22
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]]> The White Devil 568901 The White Devil, originally performed in 1612, centres on the beautiful Vittoria Corombona and her lover, Duke Brachiano, whose passionate, adulterous affair unleashes the powerful revenge of their enemies. While clearly guilty of lust and murder, these unsavoury characters become startlingly heroic under pressure, challenging both conventional moral judgements and oppressive social forces."

This revised student edition contains a lengthy new introduction with background on the author, date and sources, theme, critical interpretation and stage history. The introduction discusses Webster's radical experimentation with tragic modes, his interest in the heroic potential of women, and evaluates the handling of both in recent stage productions.]]> 126 John Webster 1426465246 Andrew 4 3.62 1612 The White Devil

author: John Webster
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1612
rating: 4
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]]> Kafka on the Shore 4929 Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.]]> 467 Haruki Murakami 1400079276 Andrew 4 4.14 2002 Kafka on the Shore

author: Haruki Murakami
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> Le Portrait De Dorian Gray 303505 319 Oscar Wilde 2080707647 Andrew 5 3.86 1890

author: Oscar Wilde
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1890
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/12/11
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]]> Springtime in a Broken Mirror 36325706 An extraordinary story of love and exile, from one of the great masters of the Latin American novel, translated into English for the first time

Santiago is trapped. Taken political prisoner in Montevideo after a brutal military coup, he can do nothing but write letters to his family, and try to stay sane.

Far away, his nine-year-old daughter Beatrice wonders at the marvels of 1970s Buenos Aires, but her grandpa and mother - Santiago's beautiful, careworn wife, Graciela - struggle to adjust to a life in exile. Graciela fights to retain the fiery passion that suffused her marriage, her politics, her whole life, as day by day Santiago edges closer to freedom. But Santiago's rakish, reckless best friend is a constant, brooding presence in the exiles' lives, and Graciela finds herself drawn irresistibly towards him.

A lucid, heart-wrenching saga of a family torn apart by the forces of history, Spring with a Broken Corner tells with tenderness and fury of the indelible imprint politics leaves on individual lives. Generous and unflinching, it asks whether the broken bonds of family and history can ever truly be mended.]]> 192 Mario Benedetti 0241327202 Andrew 0 to-read 3.93 1982 Springtime in a Broken Mirror

author: Mario Benedetti
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe]]> 19145002
Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including "2666," "The Savage Detectives," and "By Night in Chile" while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto's Bolaño's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.]]> 304 Chris Andrews 0231168063 Andrew 0 to-read 3.91 2014 Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe

author: Chris Andrews
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Missing Person (Verba Mundi International Literature Series)]]> 53732542 An amnesiac searches for his identity, from Polynesia to Rome, in this novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Dora Bruder.

Guy Roland is in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation. For ten years, he has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files--directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century--but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attach��? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.

Published in France as Rue des Boutiques obscures, this is both a detective mystery and a haunting meditation on the nature of the self, Patrick Modiano's spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

Praise for Missing Persons

"[An] elliptical, engrossing rumination on the essence of identity and the search for self." --Frank Sennet, Booklist

"A fine introduction to his work. . . . Beautifully written and perfectly noirish, as though the world were being seen through a haze of Gauloise smoke. Be warned, after reading this, a sensitive soul may well seize up the next time a stranger waves." --Kirkus Reviews]]> 194 Patrick Modiano 156792543X Andrew 0 to-read 3.66 1978 Missing Person (Verba Mundi International Literature Series)

Missing Person (Verba Mundi International Literature Series)

author: Patrick Modiano
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/07/24
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]]> To the Lighthouse 59716
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.]]> 209 Virginia Woolf Andrew 2 3.81 1927 To the Lighthouse

author: Virginia Woolf
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1927
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/06/27
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review:
I had high hopes for this one, because I'm a big fan of Mrs. Dalloway. But for me, this book simply failed to fascinate. I didn't find any of the characters especially interesting, and the prose was frustrating.
]]> To the Lighthouse 11023918 Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is one of her greatest literary achievements and among the most influential novels of the twentieth century.

The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.]]> 119 Virginia Woolf 0547707533 Andrew 0 3.83 1927 To the Lighthouse

author: Virginia Woolf
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/26
date added: 2021/06/26
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]]> The Satanic Verses 12781
From the back cover.]]> 561 Salman Rushdie 0312270828 Andrew 0 to-read 3.73 1988

author: Salman Rushdie
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/10/14
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review:

]]> Point Omega 10106590 148 Don DeLillo 0330512390 Andrew 0 to-read 3.39 2010

author: Don DeLillo
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> America 1051234 256 Franz Kafka 0749399511 Andrew 5 3.52 1927 America

author: Franz Kafka
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1927
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/10/13
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]]> The Golovlovs 19547829
The Vicious circle of greed, self-pity, and hypocritical repentance perpetuated by Arina Petrovna, her children, and her children's children in pursuit of money brings disaster to bear on Golovlovo, the gray, half-ruined estate where family and servants conspire against their mistress. Arina's venomous relationship with her sons casts early implications of the ruin to follow, in which every offender grows strangely sympathetic. One by one, and with curious reversals of character the Golovlovs fall prey to fantasy, drink, insanity, and moral disintegration, dispensing hatred, wit, and hideous flatteries. The Golovlovs is a "novel of the generations," which describes the fall of a house with all the scope and insight of artworks ranging from those that dealt with the House of Atreus to the novels of Thomas Mann and William Faulkner.]]> 316 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin Andrew 0 to-read 3.74 1880 The Golovlovs

author: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1880
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/12
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]]> Homeland Elegies 53031720 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and author of American Dervish, an American son and his immigrant father search for belonging -- in post-Trump America, and with each other.

"Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." - Salman Rushdie

A deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque adventure -- at its heart, it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a nation in which debt has ruined countless lives and our ideals have been sacrificed to the gods of finance, where a TV personality is president and immigrants live in fear, and where the unhealed wounds of 9/11 continue to wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process.]]> 368 Ayad Akhtar 031649643X Andrew 5 4.25 2020 Homeland Elegies

author: Ayad Akhtar
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/12
date added: 2020/10/12
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He calls this a novel, but it's very hard to believe it's not memoir. But whatever it is, it's sublime. He writes with such passion and penetration about America, about being Muslim, about being Muslim in America, about Trump, about everything he takes up. It's a searing testament to our dire straits as a nation, bracing in its truthfulness. An education.
]]> Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1) 28446947 Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Here comes Autumn.]]> 264 Ali Smith 0241207002 Andrew 0 to-read 3.67 2016 Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1)

author: Ali Smith
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins, #1)]]> 29401417
Mary Poppins is like no other nanny the Banks children have ever seen. It all starts when their new nanny is blown by the east wind onto the doorstep of the Banks house, carrying a parrot-headed umbrella and a magic carpetbag. She becomes a most unusual nanny to Jane, Michael, and the twins. Who else but Mary Poppins can slide up banisters, pull an entire armchair out of an empty carpetbag, and make a dose of medicine taste like delicious lime-juice cordial? A day with Mary Poppins is a day of magic and make-believe come to life!

Listening Length: 3 hours and 50 minutes.]]> P.L. Travers Andrew 0 3.61 1934 Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins, #1)

author: P.L. Travers
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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]]> Flee 18273054
Maybe the best novel to aesthetically and philosophically address the economic collapse of '08... Incredibly rewarding...a strong, strong book. --Biblioklept]]> 239 Evan Dara 0980226627 Andrew 3 4.02 2013 Flee

author: Evan Dara
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2020/10/11
date added: 2020/10/11
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie (Writings From An Unbound Europe)]]> 1101366
But the novel is more than an intellectual meditation. Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of an intellectual acting as a tool of repression. At the same time he questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the philosophical tradition he so admires-or if the line separating it from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.]]> 432 Borislav Pekić 0810117207 Andrew 3 4.44 1977 How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

author: Borislav Pekić
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2020/10/11
date added: 2020/10/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Justine (The Alexandria Quartet, #1)]]> 13037 253 Lawrence Durrell 0140153195 Andrew 0 to-read 3.86 1957

author: Lawrence Durrell
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Huis clos: suivi de Les Mouches]]> 822338 247 Jean-Paul Sartre 2070368076 Andrew 0 4.04 1946

author: Jean-Paul Sartre
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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]]> Death and the Dervish 358846 Death and the Dervish is an acclaimed novel by Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Ottoman authorities in his search to discover what happened to him. He narrates his story in the form of an elaborate suicide note, regularly misquoting the Koran. In time, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general.

Hugely successful when published in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish is an enduring classic that was made into a feature length film in 1974.]]> 473 Meša Selimović 0810112973 Andrew 0 to-read 4.55 1966

author: Meša Selimović
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace]]> 6916961 �Ჹ��’s magazine in the ��90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.��

�ճ��Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation��). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.

A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.

��ձ�> 320 David Lipsky 030759243X Andrew 0 to-read 3.93 2010 Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

author: David Lipsky
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> Madame Bovary 31626704

«De todos modos no era feliz, ni tampoco lo había sido nunca. Cada sonrisa ocultaba un bostezo de hastío, cada alegría una maldición, todo placer su saciedad, y los mejores besos no dejaban en los labios más que el irrealizable anhelo de una más sofisticada voluptuosidad.»]]> 448 Gustave Flaubert 8467048522 Andrew 0 3.89 1877 Madame Bovary

author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1877
rating: 0
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]]> The Cemetery in Barnes 36135775 The Cemetery in Barnes is a short, intense novel that opens in elegiac mode, advances quietly towards something dark and disturbing, before ending with an eerie calm. Its three plots, relationships and time-scales are tightly woven into a single story; three voices—as in an opera by Monteverdi—provide the soundtrack, enhanced by a chorus of friends and acquaintances. The main voice is that of a translator who moves from London to Paris and then to Wales, the setting for an unexpected conflagration. The ending at once confirms and suspends the reader’s darkest intuitions.
��ձ�> 104 Gabriel Josipovici 1784105465 Andrew 0 to-read 3.94 2018 The Cemetery in Barnes

author: Gabriel Josipovici
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/09
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]]> Silas Marner 25191210 163 George Eliot Andrew 0 to-read 3.79 1861

author: George Eliot
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1861
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories]]> 251688 Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's.

In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape—her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's... And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveler, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

Also included are three of Capote's best-known stories:
�� House of Flowers - Ottilie is entranced by a beautiful young man, and leaves her life and friends to live with him and his old grandmother, who seems to hate her.
�� A Diamond Guitar - Hear the story of the prized possession of a younger prison inmate, a rhinestone-studded guitar.
�� A Christmas Memory - A poignant tale of two innocents—a small boy and the old woman who is his best friend—whose sweetness contains a hard, sharp kernel of truth.]]> 142 Truman Capote Andrew 0 to-read 3.87 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

author: Truman Capote
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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]]> The Shape of the Ruins 38256287 A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions -- the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings.

This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.]]> 509 Juan Gabriel Vásquez 0735211140 Andrew 0 to-read 3.76 2015

author: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> Oliver Twist 18254
The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.

This Penguin Classics edition of Oliver Twist is the first critical edition to faithfully reproduce the text as its earliest readers would have encountered it from its serialisation in Bentley's Miscellany, and includes an introduction by Philip Horne, a glossary of Victorian thieves' slang, a chronology of Dickens's life, a map of contemporary London and all of George Cruikshank's original illustrations.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 608 Charles Dickens Andrew 0 3.88 1838 Oliver Twist

author: Charles Dickens
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1838
rating: 0
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]]> The Inspector General 17996772 82 Nikolai Gogol Andrew 0 to-read 3.81 1835

author: Nikolai Gogol
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1835
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/07
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]]> Long Day’s Journey into Night 12083
The play is autobiographical, and O'Neill draws his drug-addicted mother, his close-fisted father, his drunken and degenerate elder brother, and his tormented self, with terrifying veracity.]]> 179 Eugene O'Neill 0300093055 Andrew 0 4.05 1956 Long Day’s Journey into Night

author: Eugene O'Neill
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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]]> In the Penal Colony 581552 52 Franz Kafka Andrew 0 4.02 1918

author: Franz Kafka
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/06
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]]> Ramifications 50937475 176 Daniel Saldaña París 1566895960 Andrew 0 to-read 4.14 2018

author: Daniel Saldaña París
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/06
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]]> Kruso 22594449 Inselabenteuer und Geschichte einer außergewöhnlichen Freundschaft: Kruso, der erste, lang erwartete Roman von Lutz Seiler, schlägt einen Bogen vom Sommer 89 bis in die Gegenwart. Die einzigartige Recherche, die diesem Buch zugrunde liegt, folgt den Spuren jener Menschen, die bei ihrer Flucht über die Ostsee verschollen sind, und führt uns dabei bis nach Kopenhagen, in die Katakomben der dänischen Staatspolizei.

Als das Unglück geschieht, flieht Edgar Bendler aus seinem Leben. Er wird Abwäscher auf Hiddensee, jener legendenumwogten Insel, die, wie es heißt, schon außerhalb der Zeit und »jenseits der Nachrichten« liegt. Im Abwasch des Klausners, einer Kneipe hoch über dem Meer, lernt Ed Alexander Krusowitsch kennen �� Kruso. Eine schwierige, zärtliche Freundschaft beginnt. Von Kruso, dem Meister und Inselpaten, wird Ed eingeweiht in die Rituale der Saisonarbeiter auf Hiddensee und die Gesetze ihrer Nächte, in denen Ed seine sexuelle Initiation erlebt. Geheimer Motor dieser Gemeinschaft ist Krusos Utopie, die verspricht, jeden Schiffbrüchigen des Landes (und des Lebens) in drei Nächten zu den Wurzeln der Freiheit zu führen. Doch der Herbst 1989 erschüttert die Insel Hiddensee. Am Ende steht ein Kampf auf Leben und Tod �� und ein Versprechen.]]> 484 Lutz Seiler 3518424475 Andrew 0 to-read 3.30 2014 Kruso

author: Lutz Seiler
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/05
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]]> Frost 12203
A writer of world stature, Thomas Bernhard combined a searing wit and an unwavering gaze into the human condition. Frost follows an unnamed young Austrian who accepts an unusual assignment. Rather than continue with his medical studies, he travels to a bleak mining town in the back of beyond, in order to clinically observe the aged painter, Strauch, who happens to be the brother of this young man’s surgical mentor. The catch is Strauch must not know the young man’s true occupation or the reason for his arrival. Posing as a promising law student with a love of Henry James, the young man befriends the mad artist and is caught up among an equally extraordinary cast of local characters, from his resentful landlady to the town’s mining engineers.

This debut novel by Thomas Bernhard, which came out in German in 1963 and is now being published in English for the first time, marks the beginning of what was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful, provocative literary careers.]]> 342 Thomas Bernhard 1400040663 Andrew 0 to-read 3.87 1963 Frost

author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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]]> The Double 826799 304 José Saramago 009946165X Andrew 0 to-read 3.78 2002

author: José Saramago
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me]]> 60030 Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, "that they might one day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms...." Marta has just met Victor when she invites him to dinner at her Madrid apartment while her husband is away on business. When her two-year-old son finally falls asleep, Marta and Victor retreat to the bedroom. Undressing, she suddenly feels ill; and in his arms, inexplicably, she dies.

What should Victor do? Remove the compromising tape from the phone machine? Leave food for the child, for breakfast? These are just his first steps, but he soon takes matters further; unable to bear the shadows and the unknowing, Victor plunges into dark waters. And Javier Marías, Europe's master of secrets, of what lies reveal and truth may conceal, is on sure ground in this profound, quirky, and marvelous novel.]]> 320 Javier Marías 0811214826 Andrew 0 to-read 4.06 1994 Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

author: Javier Marías
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> Novel of Ferrara 40099428 Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.

Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classic books, fully revised as a single volume by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron and The Smell of Hay. These interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters, memorializing not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.

'Exquisite . . . from his boyhood Ferrara and the families he knew, Bassani has carved out a corner of Italy that rises above regionalism with fiction that can stand alongside the most lingering written in Europe to day' The New York Times ]]> 848 Giorgio Bassani 0141192186 Andrew 0 to-read 4.43 1974 Novel of Ferrara

author: Giorgio Bassani
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/04
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]]> Cartas a Theo 45787833 En este epistolario, un testimonio desgarrado frente a la vida, Vincent no sólo volcó sus ideas sobre la pintura sino también sobre al realidad que lo rodeaba. Aquí también se percibe la evolución pictórica del artista, enmarcada en la progresión dramática que va tomando la correspondencia. Se muestra que todo cuanto él pintaba, hacía o decía era producto de una misma sensibilidad. La escritura de Van Gogh, a menudo dura y poblada de errores de construcción y puntuación, no es, en apariencia, “literaria��, pero es absolutamente auténtica y de una extraordinaria fuerza.
El lenguaje de Vincent van Gogh es el de un hombre que escribe como habla, y que dice las cosas tal y como las siente, sin rodeos ni circunloquios. Las cartas que Vincent van Gogh le escribió a su hermano Theo desde 1872 en adelante, constituyen una fuente biográfica única e invalorable para conocer los objetivos, pasiones, esperanzas y desilusiones del pintor. Son un testimonio vívido, casi al modo de un diario, en el que el gran artista da cuenta de su cotidianeidad así como de su inestable salud física y mental. Después de haber inspirado biografías, películas, obras de teatro, documentales, estudios académicos y miniseries televisivas, estas cartas extraordinarias y conmovedoras se han transformado, a través de los años, en un grito desgarrado frente a la vida, en una utopía sobre la comunidad de artistas, en un gran documento humano que muestra al verdadero Van Gogh, por él mismo.]]> 398 Vincent van Gogh Andrew 0 to-read 4.17 1914 Cartas a Theo

author: Vincent van Gogh
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1914
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[All Quiet on the Western Front]]> 846136 This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780099532811

One by one the boys begin to fall...

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.]]> 208 Erich Maria Remarque Andrew 0 4.43 1928 All Quiet on the Western Front

author: Erich Maria Remarque
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/04
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]]> Falling Man 587922
"Falling Man" begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.

These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.

Brave and brilliant, "Falling Man" traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, cathartic.]]> 246 Don DeLillo 0330452231 Andrew 0 to-read 3.29 2007 Falling Man

author: Don DeLillo
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/04
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]]> The Demons 466712 1340 Heimito von Doderer 1557130302 Andrew 0 to-read 4.57 1956

author: Heimito von Doderer
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/04
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]]> Something Happened 2989927 559 Joseph Heller 0552102202 Andrew 0 to-read 3.22 1974

author: Joseph Heller
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/04
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]]> A Moment of True Feeling 1131697
Keuschnig's search takes him through all of Paris. At every step, his feelings are interwoven with acute observation of its streets, buildings, cafes, parks, sky. It is an intimate and evocative journey, in a city that is at once supportive and familiar, strange and provocative.]]> 133 Peter Handke 0374172919 Andrew 0 3.65 1975 A Moment of True Feeling

author: Peter Handke
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/10/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick]]> 1444718 The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that "portrays the breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's The Stranger" (Richard Locke, The New York Times). The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by his use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world" (Bill Marx, Boston Sunday Globe). ]]> 133 Peter Handke 0374531064 Andrew 0 3.31 1970 The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

author: Peter Handke
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.31
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/03
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]]> <![CDATA[I Have The Right To Destroy Myself]]> 797192 I don't encourage murder. I have no interest in one person killing another. I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious. This lust, once freed, starts growing. Their imaginations run free, and they soon discover their potential... They are waiting for someone like me.

A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the lost and wounded of big-city Seoul, suggesting solace in suicide. Wandering through the bright lights of their high-urban existence, C and K are brothers who fall in love with the same woman - Se-yeon. As their lives intersect, they tear at each other in a struggle to find connection in their fast-paced, atomized world.

Dreamlike and cinematic, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself brilliantly affirms Young-ha Kim as Korea's leading young literary master.]]> 119 Young-ha Kim 0156030802 Andrew 0 to-read 3.22 1995

author: Young-ha Kim
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/03
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]]> Resuscitation of a Hanged Man 9906 272 Denis Johnson 0413772322 Andrew 0 to-read 3.70 1990

author: Denis Johnson
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Before Night Falls 33833 398 Reinaldo Arenas 1852428082 Andrew 0 to-read 4.17 1992

author: Reinaldo Arenas
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/10/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Billard um halb zehn: Roman (German Edition)]]> 35585585 330 Heinrich Böll 3462039105 Andrew 4 3.50 1959

Billard um halb zehn: Roman (German Edition)

author: Heinrich Böll
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2020/10/03
date added: 2020/10/03
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]]> The Slaves of Solitude 176964
Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That’s when Miss Roach’s troubles really start to begin.

Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, with a delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart.]]> 242 Patrick Hamilton 1590172205 Andrew 0 to-read 4.08 1947

author: Patrick Hamilton
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/01
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]]> The Shipyard 2250881 192 Juan Carlos Onetti 1852421916 Andrew 0 to-read 3.67 1961

author: Juan Carlos Onetti
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Boyfriend Material (London Calling, #1)]]> 48994908 WANTED:

One (fake) boyfriend

Practically perfect in every way

Luc O'Donnell is tangentially—and reluctantly—famous. His rock star parents split when he was young, and the father he's never met spent the next twenty years cruising in and out of rehab. Now that his dad's making a comeback, Luc's back in the public eye, and one compromising photo is enough to ruin everything.

To clean up his image, Luc has to find a nice, normal relationship...and Oliver Blackwood is as nice and normal as they come. He's a barrister, an ethical vegetarian, and he's never inspired a moment of scandal in his life. In other words: perfect boyfriend material. Unfortunately, apart from being gay, single, and really, really in need of a date for a big event, Luc and Oliver have nothing in common. So they strike a deal to be publicity-friendly (fake) boyfriends until the dust has settled. Then they can go their separate ways and pretend it never happened.

But the thing about fake-dating is that it can feel a lot like real-dating. And that's when you get used to someone. Start falling for them. Don't ever want to let them go.

]]> 431 Alexis Hall 1728206154 Andrew 0 to-read 4.14 2020 Boyfriend Material (London Calling, #1)

author: Alexis Hall
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/01
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]]> Moscow to the End of the Line 117896 ]]> 164 Venedikt Erofeev 0810112000 Andrew 0 to-read 4.08 1969

author: Venedikt Erofeev
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ratner's Star 28701 438 Don DeLillo 009992840X Andrew 0 3.51 1976

author: Don DeLillo
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/27
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]]> The Europeans 877318
Feckless, charming Felix and his sister Eugenia, the Baroness Munster, descend on their well-to-do, God-fearing New England cousins, the Wentworths, and both parties are confronted by an attitude of life beyond their experience or faith.

"The Europeans, the visiting cousins, are there mainly to provide a foil for the American family, a study of the New England ethos being James's essential purpose... Nevertheless James's irony is far from being unkind; he sees too much he admires in the ethos he criticizes to condemn it... James is not condemning or endorsing either New England or Europe... This small book, written so early in James's career, is a masterpeice of major quality" - F.R. Leavis]]> 204 Henry James 0140432329 Andrew 5 3.45 1878 The Europeans

author: Henry James
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1878
rating: 5
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]]> Red Pill 53506853 From the widely acclaimed author of White Tears, a bold new novel about searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth.

After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches "Blue Lives"--a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life--and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.

Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: across the lake the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that "no happiness was possible here on earth." When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of "Blue Lives," the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers--turning them towards an ugly, alt-rightish worldview--ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.]]> 217 Hari Kunzru 0451493729 Andrew 5 3.74 2020 Red Pill

author: Hari Kunzru
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]]> 3892153 111 Walter Benjamin 0141036192 Andrew 0 4.02 1936

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

author: Walter Benjamin
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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]]> Dead Souls 28381 Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.

In his introduction to this new translation, Robert A. Maguire discusses Gogol's life and literary career, his depiction of Russian society, and the language and narrative techniques employed in Dead Souls. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading, appendices, a glossary, map and notes.]]> 464 Nikolai Gogol 0140448071 Andrew 5 4.00 1842

author: Nikolai Gogol
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1842
rating: 5
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]]> The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy 317764
The action of The Visit takes place in the small town of Guellen, "somewhere in Central Europe." An elderly millionairesse, Claire Zachanassian, returns to Guellen, her home town, after an absence of many years. Merely on the promise of her millions, she shortly turns what has been a depressed area into a boom town. But there is a condition attached to her largess, which the natives of Guellen realize only after they have become enmeshed in her vengeful plot: murder. Out of these elements, Durrenmatt has fashioned a many-leveled play which is at once a macabre parable, a deeply moving tragedy, and a scathing indictment of the power of greed.]]> 112 Friedrich Dürrenmatt 0802130666 Andrew 0 to-read 3.93 1956 The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy

author: Friedrich Dürrenmatt
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Nazi Literature in the Americas]]> 1178230 Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño’s books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers�� works, plus an epilogue (“for Monsters��), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).]]> 227 Roberto Bolaño 0811217051 Andrew 3 3.93 1996 Nazi Literature in the Americas

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/26
date added: 2020/09/26
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]]> The Green Man 15797778 Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death.
The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.]]> 222 Kingsley Amis 1590176162 Andrew 0 to-read 3.59 1969

author: Kingsley Amis
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?]]> 14940 272 Edward Albee 0451218590 Andrew 0 4.07 1962

author: Edward Albee
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> Letters to a Young Poet 46199
A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.]]> 80 Rainer Maria Rilke 0486422453 Andrew 0 4.31 1929 Letters to a Young Poet

author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1929
rating: 0
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]]> The Dark 18045619
In a voice that favors erudite distance, yet simultaneously demands intimate attention, The Dark is the most captivating example of Sergio Chejfec’s unique narrative approach, and a resonant novel that calls into question the necessity, risks, and fallout behind the desire and attempt to know another person.]]> 143 Sergio Chejfec 1934824437 Andrew 0 to-read 3.87 2000 The Dark

author: Sergio Chejfec
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/25
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]]> Moon Palace 138314
So begins the mesmerising narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the 1960s, a quester by nature. Moon Palace is his story - a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco's search - for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origins and his fate.

'Clever: very. Surprising: always - Auster is a master.' The Times]]> 298 Paul Auster 0571142206 Andrew 0 to-read 3.89 1989 Moon Palace

author: Paul Auster
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/25
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]]> The Translator's Bride 42513430
This edition was translated from Portuguese by the author.]]> 119 João Reis 1940953952 Andrew 0 to-read 4.03 2015

author: João Reis
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts]]> 904982
Already a bestseller in Italy, Mexico, and his native Brazil, Rubem Fonseca's newest novel is a rollicking adventure into the high camp world of carnival, the intricate history of precious gems, and the subtle craft of filmmaking. It is also a piercing account of a man whose life is resurrected by art just when tragedy threatens to paralyze him.]]> 312 Rubem Fonseca 0880015837 Andrew 4 3.84 1988 Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts

author: Rubem Fonseca
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/25
date added: 2020/09/25
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]]> Brave New World 5129 Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine�� (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune]]> 268 Aldous Huxley 0060929871 Andrew 0 3.99 1932 Brave New World

author: Aldous Huxley
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1932
rating: 0
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]]> Billy Budd 38094728 101 Herman Melville 1420956221 Andrew 5 3.55 1924

author: Herman Melville
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1924
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/09/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp]]> 38485762 In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Includes an 8-page color insert of Czapski’s lecture notes.]]> 128 Józef Czapski 1681372584 Andrew 0 to-read 4.02 1948 Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

author: Józef Czapski
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/24
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]]> The Sluts 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Andrew 1 3.79 2004

author: Dennis Cooper
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 1
read at: 2020/09/23
date added: 2020/09/23
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DNF. Got about halfway through. Too sensational. No literary value whatsoever.
]]> Light in August 55187752 Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.]]> William Faulkner Andrew 2 2.80 1932 Light in August

author: William Faulkner
name: Andrew
average rating: 2.80
book published: 1932
rating: 2
read at: 2020/09/23
date added: 2020/09/23
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]]> The American 834473 Christopher Newman, a ‘self-made�� American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes�� past, he confronts a moral dilemma: Should he expose them and thus gain his revenge? James’s masterly early work is at once a social comedy, a melodramatic romance and a realistic novel of manners.

Excerpt:
On a brilliant day in May, of the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carre, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts; but our visitor had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo's beautiful moon-borne Madonna in deep enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly, with vague weariness, passed his handkerchief over his forehead. And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested an intensity of unconscious resistance. His exertions on this particular day, however, had been of an unwonted sort, and he had often performed great physical feats that left him less jaded than his quiet stroll through the Louvre.]]> 471 Henry James 0140390820 Andrew 0 to-read 3.62 1877 The American

author: Henry James
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1877
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Unidentified man at left of photo]]> 55365398 Unidentified man at left of photo, a fill-in-the-blanks novel mercifully free from characters to warm to and without tiresome plot points to retain, features artistic foibles, domestic strife, questions galore, a catastrophic hurricane, and a narrative voice that veers from mean to genial as it explores whatever topics come to mind and spills into the open what’s been overheard in public conversations in Charlottetown, PEI.]]> 279 Jeff Bursey 9617036606 Andrew 0 to-read 4.39 Unidentified man at left of photo

author: Jeff Bursey
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/22
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]]> Macbeth 8852
This shocking tragedy - a violent caution to those seeking power for its own sake - is, to this day, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and influential masterpieces.]]> 249 William Shakespeare 0743477103 Andrew 0 3.90 1623 Macbeth

author: William Shakespeare
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1623
rating: 0
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]]> Never Let Me Go 10550335
Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Now a major movie starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield.]]> 275 Kazuo Ishiguro Andrew 0 to-read 3.99 2005

author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/22
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]]> An Enemy of the People 19009717 127 Henrik Ibsen 1625589387 Andrew 4 4.09 1882

author: Henrik Ibsen
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1882
rating: 4
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date added: 2020/09/22
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]]> Baal 148345 96 Bertolt Brecht 1559704195 Andrew 5 3.62 1922 Baal

author: Bertolt Brecht
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1922
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Danton's Death / Leonce and Lena / Woyzeck]]> 162324 176 Georg Büchner 0192836501 Andrew 5 3.73 1985

Danton's Death / Leonce and Lena / Woyzeck

author: Georg Büchner
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1985
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/09/21
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]]>