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Showing 1 - 20 of 263 items
By Mark Polizzotti, Eric Vuillard, Éric Vuillard. 2018
An account of pivotal meetings that took place among the European powers in the time leading up to World War…
II. Reflects on the instances of failed diplomacy, broken relationships, and the momentum that led to war. Translated from the French edition. Prix Goncourt. 2018By Eric A. Kimmel, Jim Madsen. 2009
Story based on childhood events of Harry Houdini (1874-1926), who became a famous magician and escape artist. Describes Harry and…
his brother Dash learning to walk a tightrope after going to the circus with their family for the first time. For grades 2-4. 2009By Jeanette Winterson. 1997
The Passion intertwines the destinies of a simple French soldier and the daughter of a Venetian Boatman, blending reality with…
fantasy, dream and imagination to weave a hypnotic tale. Some descriptions of sex. UnratedBy Jonah Winter, Richard Egielski. 2009
In the late nineteenth century, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan, who write operas together for a theater called Topsy-Turvydom, have…
a falling-out when Mr. Sullivan refuses to write music for another ridiculous story that is like all the others. Caldecott Medalist Richard Egielski teams up with Jonah Winter for a story about how fights sometime make a stronger friendship (and beautiful music to boot!). For grades K-3. 2009By Roberta Gellis. 2001
London, 1139. Beautiful brothel-keeper Magdalene la Bâtarde enlists the help of her admirer, Sir Bellamy, when blind prostitute Sabina, one…
of Magdalene's former employees, needs assistance. Sabina's lover, Master Mainard the saddle maker, has been accused of murdering his nagging wife. Some descriptions of sex. 2001By Jean Plaidy, Jhan Robbins. 1977
In this sequel to The Three Crowns (RC 39450), Britain is on the eve of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. The…
Protestant Stuart sisters, Mary, the queen, and Anne, the future monarch, are continually haunted by their betrayal of their Catholic father, James II, exiled to France. 1966By Henryk Sienkiewicz, H Sienkiewicz, Miroslaw Lipinski. 1993
In this epic by the 1905 Nobel Prize winner for literature, the united peoples of Poland and Lithuania fight against…
the oppression of the Teutonic Knights, a fifteenth-century Prussian religious and military order. The search for Zbyszko's wife, kidnapped by the Knights, inspires the nation to defend their land and familiesBy Roy Hoopes. 1994
Tells the stories of the roles that Hollywood stars played during World War II, both on and off the screen.…
While many stayed home and worked or had affairs with the spouses of those who went off to war, many others contributed actively to the war effort. Some, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda, enlisted and fought. Some, like Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, and Groucho Marx, raised money. Others, like Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney, and Bob Hope, put their lives at risk by entertaining troopsBy Lisa T. Bergren. 2012
When Cora Kensington learns she is the illegitimate daughter of a copper king, her life changes forever. Even as she…
explores Europe with her new family, she discovers that the most valuable journey is within. The first book in the Grand Tour series takes you from the farms of Montana through England and France on an adventure of forgiveness, spiritual awakening, and self-discovery.By Rachel Seiffert. 2014
Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has. Only he's not…
so sure he was right to go. He's been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he's working as a laborer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But Stevie hasn't told his family--what's left of them--that he's back. Not yet. He's also not far from his uncle Eric, another one who left--for love this time. Stevie's toughened himself up against that emotion. And as for his mother, Lindsey . . . well, she ran her whole life. From her father and Ireland, from her husband, and eventually from Stevie, too. Moving between Stevie's contemporary Glaswegian life and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a powerful novel about the risk of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Without your past, who are you? Where does it leave you when you go against your family, turn your back on your home; when you defy the world you grew up in? If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift? Yearning to belong exerts a powerful draw, and Stevie knows there are still people waiting for him to walk home. An extraordinarily deft and humane writer, Rachel Seiffert tells us the truth about love and about hope.By Lara Vergnaud, Zahia Rahmani. 2016
This moving tale of imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, is narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an…
Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War for Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki families sought refuge but instead faced contempt, discrimination, and exclusion. Zahia Rahmani blends reality and imagination in her writing, offering a fictionalized version of her own family's struggle. Lara Vergnaud's beautiful translation from the French perfectly captures the voices and emotions of Rahmani's childhood in a foreign land. While the author delves deeply into the past, she also indicts present-day France and Algeria. From the unique perspective of the daughter of an accused Harki, she examines France's complex and controversial history with its former colony and offers new insight into the French civil riots of 2005. She makes a stirring plea for understanding between generations and cultures, and especially for an end to the destructive practice of condemning children for their fathers' actions and beliefs.By Bruno Landis, Pierluigi Serra. 1865
El omicidio del capit n Looman en el puerto de Cagliari es una de las piezas de…
un complicado mosaico que hace de escenario a la b squeda de un misterioso objeto f sico o quiz s no material peleado por dos cofrad as en lucha secular por su posesi n La b squeda de los rastros del pasado y el viaje entendido como camino no solamente material se vuelven el fil rouge que une los acontecimientos narrados en esta novela hist rica Personajes contempor neos y del pasado en planos temporales separados y sin embargo misteriosamente conectados se encuentran el las distintas etapas de un recorrido que presenta todas las caracter sticas del camino inici tico Una v a marcada en los nimos y en los mapas de Europa donde amor caballer a medieval venganza y ocultismo juegan en el antiguo en gma escondido en el Libro del misterioBy Sena Jeter Naslund. 2006
Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her…
family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas--eager to be a good wife and strong queen--she warmly embraces her adopted nation and its citizens. She shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in so doing is unable to give what she and the people of France desire most: a child and an heir to the throne. Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle, and apart from the social life of the court, she allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises, even as poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge. The young queen, once beloved by the common folk, becomes a target of scorn, cruelty, and hatred as she, the court's nobles, and the rest of the royal family are caught up in the nightmarish violence of a murderous time called "the Terror." With penetrating insight and with wondrous narrative skill, Sena Jeter Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, heartbreaking, and dramatic reimagining of this truly compelling woman that goes far beyond popular myth--and she makes a bygone time of tumultuous change as real to us as the one we are living in now.By Jacques Chessex, Donald Wilson. 1973
"Silky prose in this harrowing account of crime and punishment."--Kirkus Reviews "Using spare, effective prose, Chessex brilliantly renders both the…
inhospitable winter landscape of the mountains and the harshness of a society that makes monsters of its victims.'--London Review of Books"A superb novel, hard as a winter in these landscapes of dark forests, where an atmosphere of prejudice and violence envelops the reader."--L'Express"It's beautiful; it's pure, like a blue sky over a black forest. Giono without garlic and olives."--Le Point"Far from just telling us a simple story Chessex has had the intelligence to integrate a dose of poetry, of the aesthetics of sin, and of the metaphysics of the monster."--LireJacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Goncourt prize, takes a true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty.1903, Ropraz, a small village near the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. On a howling December day, a lone walker discovers a recently opened tomb, the body of a young woman violated, her left hand cut off, genitals mutilated, and heart carved out. There is horror in the nearby villages: the return of atavistic superstitions and mutual suspicions. Then two more bodies are violated. A suspect must be found. Favez, a stableboy with bloodshot eyes, is arrested and placed in psychiatric care. He escapes, enlists in the Foreign Legion as the First World War begins, and is sent into battle in the trenches of the Somme.Jacques Chessex, born in 1934, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize for his novel A Father's Love. He is considered one of Switzerland's greatest living authors. He lives in Ropraz.By Sigrid Undset, Tiina Nunnally. 2014
"I have been unfaithful to my husband." Marta Oulie's opening line scandalized Norwegian readers in 1907. And yet, Sigrid Undset…
had a gift for depicting modern women "sympathetically but with merciless truthfulness," as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. At the time she was one of the youngest recipients and only the third woman so honored. It was Undset's honest story of a young woman's love life--"the immoral kind," as she herself bluntly put it--that made her first novel an instant sensation in Norway.Marta Oulie, written in the form of a diary, intimately documents the inner life of a young woman disappointed and constrained by the conventions of marriage as she longs for an all-consuming passion. Set in Kristiania (now Oslo) at the beginning of the twentieth century, Undset's book is an incomparable psychological portrait of a woman whose destiny is defined by the changing mores of her day--as she descends, inevitably, into an ever-darker reckoning. Remarkably, though Undset's other works have attracted generations of readers, Marta Oulie has never before appeared in English translation. Tiina Nunnally, whose award-winning translation of Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter captured the author's beautifully clear style, conveys the voice of Marta Oulie with all the stark poignancy of the original Norwegian.By R. A. MacAvoy. 1987
Set against the colorful and magical backdrop of Ireland, The Grey Horse chronicles a time when the Irish people suffered…
under harsh English overlords who sought to destroy their culture and way of life. In the Irish town of Carraroe, a magnificent, completely gray stallion appears. The horse brings with him the promise of better times and magical happenings, for he is actually the shape-shifted form of Ruairi MacEibhir, journeyed to such a time of danger in order to win the hand of the woman he loves.By Lara Vergnaud, Zahia Rahmani. 2016
This moving tale of imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, is narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an…
Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War for Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki families sought refuge but instead faced contempt, discrimination, and exclusion. Zahia Rahmani blends reality and imagination in her writing, offering a fictionalized version of her own family's struggle. Lara Vergnaud's beautiful translation from the French perfectly captures the voices and emotions of Rahmani's childhood in a foreign land. While the author delves deeply into the past, she also indicts present-day France and Algeria. From the unique perspective of the daughter of an accused Harki, she examines France's complex and controversial history with its former colony and offers new insight into the French civil riots of 2005. She makes a stirring plea for understanding between generations and cultures, and especially for an end to the destructive practice of condemning children for their fathers' actions and beliefs.By Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano. 2018
The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations Patrick…
Modiano’s first book since his 2014 Nobel Prize revisits moments of the author’s past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women—Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson—in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become. This is classic Modiano, utilizing his signature mix of autobiography and invention to create his most intriguing and intimate book yet.By Günter Grass, Breon Mitchell. 2009
The Tin Drum, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translation in…
1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young author to the forefront of world literature.To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass's publishers all over the world, is bringing out a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: from a wealth of detailed scholarship; from a wide range of newly-available reference works; and from the author himself. The result is a translation that is more faithful to Grass's style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work.After fifty years, THE TIN DRUM has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass's amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar's midget friends-Bebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke; the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jews-waiting to be discovered and re-discovered.A comprehensive, illustrated guide to the history, lands, and inhabitants of Middle-earth. The fantasy world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s…
Middle-earth contains a rich assortment of people, cities, and creatures—as well as a deep, intertwined history that spans thousands of years. In this beautifully illustrated volume, best-selling author and Tolkien scholar David Day presents four decades of research and writing on the lands and inhabitants Middle-earth. Sections of this A-to-Z dictionary are devoted to discussion of the battles, history, beasts, and heroes of Tolkien’s stories. This comprehensive volume on Tolkien’s world also includes an appendix of three primary legends that served as sources for Tolkien’s creations—the Volsunga saga, the Nibelungenlied, and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle—and more than 200 black-and-white illustrations