Affichage de 3201–3225 sur 7284 résultatsTrié par popularité
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility: what could be so terribly wrong?This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.
THE STARLESS SEA
The Sunday Times Top 5 Bestseller Are You Lost Or Are You Exploring? When Zachary Rawlins Stumbles Across A Strange Book Hidden In His University Library It Leads Him On A Quest Unlike Any Other. Its Pages Entrance Him With Their Tales Of Lovelorn Prisoners, Lost Cities And Nameless Acolytes, But They Also Contain Something Impossible: A Recollection From His Own Childhood. Determined To Solve The Puzzle Of The Book, Zachary Follows The Clues He Finds On The Cover - A Bee, A Key And A Sword. They Guide Him To A Masquerade Ball, To A Dangerous Secret Club, And Finally Through A Magical Doorway Created By The Fierce And Mysterious Mirabel. This Door Leads To A Subterranean Labyrinth Filled With Stories, Hidden Far Beneath The Surface Of The Earth. When The Labyrinth Is Threatened, Zachary Must Race With Mirabel, And Dorian, A Handsome Barefoot Man With Shifting Alliances, Through Its Twisting Tunnels And Crowded Ballrooms, Searching For The End Of His Story. You Are Invited To Join Zachary On The Starless Sea: The Home Of Storytellers, Story-lovers And Those Who Will Protect Our Stories At All Costs.
And Finally
Magnificent.' Rachel Clarke'A book to treasure and reread: I'm very grateful for it.' Gavin FrancisAs a neurosurgeon, I lived in a world filled with fear and suffering, death and cancer. But rarely, if ever, did I think about what it would be like if what I witnessed at work every day happened to me. This book is the story of how I became a patient myself.As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence. As he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient, he is haunted by past failures and projects yet to be completed, and frustrated by the inconveniences of illness and old age. But he is also more entranced than ever by the mysteries of science and the brain, the beauty of the natural world and his love for his family. Elegiac, candid, luminous and poignant, And Finally is ultimately not so much a book about death, but a book about life and what matters in the end.
Penguin Random House Persepolis
CHOSEN BY EMMA WATSON FOR 'OUR SHARED SHELF' FEMINIST BOOK CLUBThe Story of a Childhood and The Story of a ReturnThe intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. This is a beautiful and intimate story full of tragedy and humour - raw, honest and incredibly illuminating.
Slaughterhouse 5:Children ‘s Crusade a Dirty-Dance With Death
Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of billy pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse slaughterhouse 5 is one of the worlds great anti-war books centring on the infamous fire-bombing of dresden in the second world war, billy pilgrims odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know
The Mantis
Good dad or good assassin? Can he be both?From the internationally bestselling author of Bullet Train: A seemingly ordinary family man tries to juggle his home life with his job as a hitman.Picture a mantis raising up its blades. It looks fearsome, but it's still just a tiny insect. The mantis actually thinks it can win. Even though it's tiny, it's still ready to fight to the death.Kabuto is an ordinary guy: stressed with work, hassled by his wife and disrespected by his son. No wonder he visits his doctor so often. Except 'the Doctor' is actually his handler, and Kabuto is a hired assassin. The 'prescriptions' the Doctor hands over are his unlucky targets. Because although Kabuto may seem like a small man at home, he's really good at killing people.But Kabuto is worn out with the business of murder. He is trying to break free from the Doctor's control. His wife wants more from him and his teenage son needs more attention. So he's trying to pay his way out of the Doctor's employment with a few last jobs. But the most lucrative jobs involve taking out other professional assassins and his final assignment puts both him and his family in danger.
When Breath Becomes Air
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.
METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHE (RE-ISSUE)
"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked..."
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.
Everything Under: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018'Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction' Lauren Groff‘Weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling… Dive in for just a moment and you’ll emerge gasping and haunted’ Celeste NgIt’s been sixteen years since Gretel last saw her mother, half a lifetime to forget her childhood on the canals. But a phone call will soon reunite them, and bring those wild years flooding back: the secret language that Gretel and her mother invented: the strange boy, Marcus, living on the boat that final winter: the creature said to be underwater, swimming ever closer.In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but to wade deeper into their past, where family secrets and aged prophesies will all come tragically alive again.‘As readable as it is dazzling, full of unsettling twists and dark revelations’ Observer
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
Calvino's masterpiece opens with a scene that's reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it's taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch-back ride to the heart of storytelling.
Three Elegies for Kosovo
It's 28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field: an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since. 28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo. In three short narratives, Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.
A Girl in Exile
When a girl is found dead with a signed copy of Rudian Stefa’s latest book in her possession, the author finds himself summoned for an interview by the Party Committee. Unable to guess what transgression he has committed Rudian goes fearfully to meet his interrogators. He has never met the girl in question but he remembers signing the book. As the influence of a paranoid regime steals up on him, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to the mysterious girl to whom he wrote the dedication – to Linda B.
THREE ASSASSINS
SUZUKI IS JUST AN ORDINARY MATHS TEACHER...UNTIL HIS WIFE IS MURDERED.Seeking justice, he leaves his old life behind to infiltrate the criminal gang responsible. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of the most unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda:THE WHALE convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words.THE CICADA is a talkative and deadly knife expert.THE PUSHER dispatches his targets in deadly traffic 'accidents'.Suzuki must take on the three assassins to avenge his wife - but can he keep his innocence in a world of seasoned killers?THEIR MISSION IS MURDER. HIS IS REVENGE.
House of the Spirits
As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, "The House of the Spirits" is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.
Warm Bodies
'I never thought I could care so passionately for a zombie...the most unexpected romantic lead I've ever encountered' Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight. 'A mesmerising evolution of a classic contemporary myth' Simon Pegg. 'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins. This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight...
The Sea, The Sea
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
The decline of religion and ever increasing influence of science pose acute ethical issues for us all. Can we reject the literal truth of the Gospels yet still retain a Christian morality? Can we defend any 'moral values' against the constant encroachments of technology? Indeed, are we in danger of losing most of the qualities which make us truly human? Here, drawing on a novelist's insight into art, literature and abnormal psychology, Iris Murdoch conducts an ongoing debate with major writers, thinkers and theologians—from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Shakespeare to Sartre, Plato to Derrida—to provide fresh and compelling answers to these crucial questions. From Publishers Weekly British novelist-philosopher Murdoch's treatise on contemporary morality spans such topics as Shakespearean tragedy, Martin Buber's philosophy and the nature of the imagination. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This book is about the interplay of metaphysical images in art, religon, and especially morals. Morality is fundamental to human nature and is to be understood, according to distinguished novelist and philosophy professor Murdoch, not merely in piecemeal analysis but in the broad synthesis of metaphysical categories that set the order and pattern of our moral experience and our concepts thereof. Moral discernment comes from concentrated attention and appears ex nihilo , as by a kind of grace that leads us from contingent detail toward a perfection that we (allegedly) know intuitively. The work draws significant influence from Plato and Kant and also discusses aspects of Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and Buber in detail. Far-ranging and rich with well-chosen examples, this insightful book challenges us to think more clearly about its subject.- Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNYCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review "Iris Murdoch has written a book which concerns all of us as human beings … There are pages here that one wants to embrace her for, pages that say things of fundamental human importance in a way that they have never quite been said before" —Noel Malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph"This is philosophy dragged from the cloister, dusted down and made freshly relevant to suffering and egoism, death and religious ecstasy … and how we feel compasison for others" —Terry Eagleton in the Guardian"Gripping … it enchants with a clause that sets you daydreaming, captivates with a stream of thought, empowers with reminiscences" —Ian Hacking in the London Review of Books"Anyone who has even the slightest interest in philosophical matters will find Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals an utterly absorbing book" —The Wall Street Journal"Remarkable … Iris Murdoch has once again put us all in her debt." —Alasdair MacIntyre in The New York Times Book Review About the Author Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.