Title search results
Showing 1 - 11 of 11 items
Memoirs of Montparnasse
By John Glassco. 2007
Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best…
and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco's memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings: And Other Writings
By John Banville, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, Joel Rotenber. 2005
Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss's greatest…
operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here--fin-de-siècle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before translated into English--propel the reader into a shadowy world of uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman; a cavalry sergeant meets his double on the battlefield; an orphaned man withdraws from the world with his four servants, each of whom has a mysterious power over his destiny.The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century.He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka (riverrun editions)
By Franz Kafka. 2020
'Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who's…
standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.' Joshua Cohen, from his preface to He: Shorter Writings of Franz KafkaThis is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo and a diary entry, also including popular favourites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka's preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food and exercise, each in his signature style.Cohen's selection emphasises the stately structure of utterly coherent logic, within an utterly incoherent illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator, but the absence of the universe's only reliable narrator. Who is God.The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
By Peter Haining, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1981
An absolute must-have for Sherlock Holmes fans, this collection is a treasure trove of little-known pieces and rarities featuring the…
world's most famous detective, gathered by expert Peter Haining.Collated with extensive notes and background material, the collection includes twelve unmissable works by Arthur Conan Doyle, ranging from short stories and plays to parodies, poems and commentaries.Haining's appendices add some very rare material, including a revealing interview with Conan Doyle about his inspiration for Holmes - and his reasons for killing him off. This is an outstanding compilation.84 Charing Cross Road (Virago Modern Classics #776)
By Helene Hanff. 1970
INCLUDES AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE READERS'Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print…
books. The phrase 'antiquarian book-sellers' scares me somewhat, as I equate 'antique' with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble's grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.'So begins the delightfully reticent love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. For 20 years, this outspoken New York writer and Frank Doel, a rather more restrained London bookseller carry on an increasingly touching correspondence. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, a letter informed Helene that Frank Doel had died. In the collection's penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, ''If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much.'Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published…
in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.Roy & Me: This Is Not a Memoir
By Maurice Yacowar. 2010
Maurice Yacowar challenges genre and form in Roy & Me, a cross between memoir and fiction, truth and distortion. It…
is the exploration of Yacowar’s relationship with Roy Farran—soldier, politician, author, mentor—and his conflict with Farran’s anti-Semitic past.Best known for his service with the British Special Air Service during World War II, Roy Farran served as a politician in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Premier Peter Lougheed. During his time in Israel as a soldier, Farran allegedly kidnapped and murdered a sixteen-year-old member of the Lehi group, also known as the Stern Gang.Roy & Me is a memoir that edges toward fiction by venturing into Roy Farran’s thoughts, drawing simultaneously on his writings and Yacowar’s own imagination.The Professor and Other Writings
By Terry Castle. 2010
“[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” —Susan Sontag From one of America’s most…
brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written autobiographical essays and a new, long-form piece about the devastation and beauty of early love. James Wolcott, contributing writer to Vanity Fair, calls Terry Castle a “Jedi knight of literary exploration and lesbian scholarship,” and The Professor and Other Writings “a greatest-hits package of show-stopping monologues and offhand-genius riffs.” The Professor and Other Writings is a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of gender, identity, and sexuality in the grand tradition of such feminist luminaries as Susan Sontag, Camille Paglia, and Joan Didion.Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird
By Mary Murphy. 2010
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird, filmmaker Mary Murphy has interviewed prominent…
figures—including Oprah, Anna Quindlen, and Tom Brokaw—on how the book has impacted their lives. These interviews are compiled in Scout, Atticus, and Boo, the perfect companion to one of the most important American books of the 20th Century. Scout, Atticus, and Boo will also feature a foreword from acclaimed writer Wally Lamb.The Diary of a Nobody
By George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith. 1999
'The funniest book in the world' Evelyn Waugh'The jewel at the heart of English comic literature' William Trevor Mr Pooter…
is a man of modest ambitions, content with his ordinary life. Yet he always seems to be troubled by disagreeable tradesmen, impertinent young office clerks and wayward friends, not to mention his devil-may-care son Lupin with his unsuitable choice of bride. In the bumbling, absurd, yet ultimately endearing character of Pooter, the Grossmith brothers created a wonderful portrait of the class system and the inherent snobbishness of the suburban middle-class suburbia - one which sends up the late Victorian crazes for Aestheticism, spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody. This edition contains the original illustrations by Weedon Grossmith and an introduction by Ed Glinert, author of The London Compendium, discussing the novel's serialisation in Punch, the growth of the suburbs and the figure of Mrs Pooter.George Grossmith (1847-1912) initially worked as a journalist, reporting Police Court proceedings for The Times. In 1870 he began his career as a singer and entertainer, creating some of the most memorable characters in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas. Weedon Grossmith (1854-1919) brother of George, was educated at the Slade and the Royal Academy with a view to following a career as a painter, and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Academy. Joining a theatre company in 1885, he toured the provinces and America. The best-known of his many plays, The Night of the Party, was published in 1901.'True humour ... with its mixture of absurdity, irony and affection ... a masterpiece, immortal' J.B. PriestleyA Room of One's Own (Penguin Great Ideas)
By Virginia Woolf. 2004
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other.…
They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.