Уильям Бойд4.0 Winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award
A turn-of-the-century love story, set in Manila, between an American woman and Filipino-Spanish mestizo by the popular storyteller William Boyd. It's a memorable tale, richly detailed.
Los Angeles 1936. Kay Fischer, a young, ambitious architect, is shadowed by Salvador Carriscant, an enigmatic stranger claiming to be her father. Within weeks of their first meeting, Kay will join him for an extraordinary journey into the old man's past, initially in search of a murderer, but finally in celebration of a glorious, undying love.
Кейт Гренвилл0.0 Albion Gidley Singer appears an entirely proper man: husband, father, pillar of the community. But he is a hollow man, and within him are frightened and frightening dark places from which spring loathing and fear of female flesh. And the kind of violence that might call itself love.
Dark Places tells the story of this man - two parts monster to one part buffoon - and of his growing obsession. As the horror mounts, we gain a terrifying glimpse of the male ego's dark side, and of the destruction it can wreak upon itself and others. Yet at the same time Kate Grenville keeps alive the reader's sympathy for this doomed figure. This is a novel that fearlessly confronts the aspects of ourselves from which we normally recoil.
Dark Places is a companion novel to Lilian's Story.
William Trevor4.5 Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But the strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell even as it resonates with William Trevor's own "impeccable strength and piercing profundity" (The Washington Post Book World).
Alice Munro4.0 In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.
Bradford Morrow0.0
Best friends, Kip Calder and Brice McCarthy are born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who work on the Manhattan Project, they play macabre games, tempting the fate that looms over their closed community. One night, runaways, they make a crazy pilgrimage to the desert chapel of Chimayo to eat the holy dirt and atone for the legacy that haunts their families and themselves. Their two lives spiral apart after this joyous, terrifying moment: in the sixties, as Brice becomes an antiwar activist, Kip disappears into Vietnam and ultimately into the covert war in Laos, leaving Brice to marry Jessica Rankin, the woman they both love. Then, twenty-five years later, Kip returns, a ghost soldier perhaps come to reclaim what was lost, and so threatens to shatter everything his old friend has built.
Джексон Лирс0.0 Fables of Abundance ranges from the traveling peddlers of early modern Europe to the twentieth-century American corporation, exploring the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce the dominant aspirations and anxieties in the modern United States.
Doris Lessing0.0 "I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by . . . robust and efficient hands."
This, the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, in her suitcase.
The book is distinctive, as challenging and as wholly original as anything Doris Lessing has ever written. It recalls her own mind as a child, and the life of a child, with almost overwhelming immediacy, mapping the growth first of her consciousness, then, in adolescence, of her sexuality, and later, as a young woman, of her political beliefs. The African landscape (described with great lyricism), her often angry and combative relationship with her parents, her intense awareness of her own body, her passionate involvement with other people and indeed with everything around her are all here very, very powerfully present. The force of these memories, and the detail which which she is able to recall them, bear comparison only with Gosses Father and Son.
There can be few modern autobiographies so revealing of the mind of their creator. Under My Skin shows a woman uncompromising, from the beginning, in every aspect, who breaks all the rules, who battles at every turn against her upbringing and environment, who looks on the world clear and hard; and yet who also displays a softness, a wonderful sense of humor, a compassion for human failure.
Though she does not describe the process directly, it is abundantly evident to the reader how her childhood and adolescent experiences were absorbed through those "skins too few" and how they made the personality that has produced the novels and stories which began with The Grass is Singing and ended (for the moment) with The Fifth Child. Under My Skin shows - among many other things - how completely the life and work of one of the great writers of the twentieth century are of a single and indestructible piece.
"A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit."--Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here
As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents' marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black.
In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each.
Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph.
"Heartbreaking and uplifting... a searing book about race and prejudice in America... brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain."-- Cleveland Plain Dealer
Данте Алигьери0.0 Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem’s line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.
Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.
Edward O. Wilson0.0 In Naturalist, Wilson describes for the first time both his growth as a scientist and the evolution of the science he has helped define. He traces the trajectory of his life - from a childhood spent exploring the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida to life as a tenured professor at Harvard - detailing how his youthful fascination with nature blossomed into a lifelong calling. He recounts with drama and wit the adventures of his days as a student at the University of Alabama and his four decades at Harvard University, where he has achieved renown as both teacher and researcher. As the narrative of Wilson's life unfolds, the reader is treated to an inside look at the origin and development of ideas that guide today's biological research. Theories that are now widely accepted in the scientific world were once untested hypotheses emerging from one man's broad-gauged studies. Throughout Naturalist, we see Wilson's mind and energies constantly striving to help establish many of the central principles of the field of evolutionary biology. The story of Edward O. Wilson's life provides fascinating insights into the making of a scientist and a valuable look at some of the most thought-provoking ideas of our time.
Марк Мерлис0.0 An amazing first novel, a beautifully written work of historical fiction ( Lambda Book Review), American Studies tells the story of 62-year-old Reeve who, as he recovers from a brutal beating, recalls the troubled and closeted world of his former mentor, a once-famous professor who was driven to suicide during the McCarthy era.
