Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 1400041252
Total Pages : 482 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by : Penelope Fitzgerald

Download or read book Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2003-09-23 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world. The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain’s heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

Human Voices

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Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780395956175
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (561 download)

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Book Synopsis Human Voices by : Penelope Fitzgerald

Download or read book Human Voices written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "human voices" of Penelope Fitzgerald's enchanting novel are those of an eccentric group of broadcasters at the BBC in London during the air raids of World War II. When British listeners tuned in to the Nine O'Clock News in the middle of 1940, they had no idea what human dramas -- and follies -- were unfolding behind the scenes. Targeted by enemy bombers, the BBC had turned its concert hall into a dormitory for both sexes. And, as in any dormitory, romance and intrigue prevailed. At the center of Human Voices is the tense relationship between two departmental directors and a surprising love affair with a sixteen-year-old intern named Annie, who has the perfect pitch. Like Fitzgerald's novels Offshore and The Bookshop, Human Voices grew out of her personal experience -- she worked for the BBC during the war, when the station served as a lifeline to the troops and a singular source of truth to the public. Romantic, ironic, tragic, as only Penelope Fitzgerald can be, Human Voices is an unexpected treat for her many American fans.

The Beginning of Spring

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Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780395908716
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (87 download)

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Book Synopsis The Beginning of Spring by : Penelope Fitzgerald

Download or read book The Beginning of Spring written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frank Reid is a struggling printer in Moscow. On the eve of the Revolution, his wife returns to her native England, leaving him to raise their three young children alone. How does a reasonable man like Frank cope? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his bookkeeper? And should he, in his wife's absence, resist his desire for his lovely Russian housemaid? How can anyone know how to live the right life?

Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 131545100X
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (154 download)

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Book Synopsis Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction by : Christopher Knight

Download or read book Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction written by Christopher Knight and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher J. Knight’s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare’s late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald’s ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimism notwithstanding, seeks (with the aid of her own religious understandings), in each of her novels, to wrestle meaning, consolation and even comedy from circumstances not noticeably propitious. Or as she herself memorably spoke of her own "deepest convictions": "I can only say that however close I’ve come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?" The recipient of Britain’s Booker Prize and America’s National Book Critics Circle Award, Penelope Fitzgerald’s reputation as a novelist, and author more generally, has grown, since her death, significantly, to the point that she is now widely judged one of Britain’s finest writers, comparable in worth to the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Penelope Fitzgerald

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0385352352
Total Pages : 491 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (853 download)

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Book Synopsis Penelope Fitzgerald by : Hermione Lee

Download or read book Penelope Fitzgerald written by Hermione Lee and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography The acclaimed biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf gives us an intimate portrait of one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century. Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer whose career didn't begin until she was nearly sixty. She would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature—the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald's greatest champions, gives us this remarkable writer’s story. Lee’s critical expertise is on dazzling display on every page, as it illuminates this extraordinary English life. Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald’s very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the “blonde bombshell”; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career. Fitzgerald’s early novels draw on her own experiences—working at the BBC in wartime, at a bookshop in Suffolk, at an eccentric stage school in the 1960s—while her later books open out into historical worlds that she, magically, seems to entirely possess: Russia before the Revolution, postwar Italy, Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald’s novels are short, spare masterpieces, and Hermione Lee unfurls them here as works of genius. Expertly researched, written out of love and admiration for this wonderful author’s work, Penelope Fitzgerald is literary biography at its finest—an unforgettable story of lateness, persistence and survival.

The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the 'Beagle'

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Author :
Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0307824209
Total Pages : 1034 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the 'Beagle' by : Charles Darwin

Download or read book The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the 'Beagle' written by Charles Darwin and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 1034 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easily the most influential book published in the nineteenth century, Darwin’s The Origin of Species is also that most unusual phenomenon, an altogether readable discussion of a scientific subject. On its appearance in 1859 it was immediately recognized by enthusiasts and detractors alike as a work of the greatest importance: its revolutionary theory of evolution by means of natural selection provoked a furious reaction that continues to this day. The Origin of Species is here published together with Darwin’s earlier Voyage of the ‘Beagle.’ This 1839 account of the journeys to South America and the Pacific islands that first put Darwin on the track of his remarkable theories derives an added charm from his vivid description of his travels in exotic places and his eye for the piquant detail.

Orlando

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 1101908327
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis Orlando by : Virginia Woolf

Download or read book Orlando written by Virginia Woolf and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman. With a new introduction by Jeanette Winterson. Woolf’s most lighthearted novel is a playful and exuberant romp through history. As a teenage nobleman, Orlando spends his days in revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, having reached his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride and returns to England, where she engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with an unconventional husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928, the same year that Woolf published her novel. With its blend of fantastical adventure and satirical wit, Orlando was an immediate popular and critical success, one whose status as a classic has only grown with time. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

A Bend in the River

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 110190819X
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis A Bend in the River by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book A Bend in the River written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely hailed as Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul’s greatest work, A Bend in the River takes us deeply into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home—an unnamed country that resembles the Congo—by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past.

Dead Souls

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 1400043190
Total Pages : 490 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Dead Souls by : Nikolai Gogol

Download or read book Dead Souls written by Nikolai Gogol and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2004-09-21 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literature–a satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces. Gogol hoped to show the world “the untold riches of the Russian soul” in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensian swarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs, conniving petty officials–all of them both utterly lifelike and alarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is the wily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in “dead souls”–deceased serfs who still represent profit to those clever enough to trade in them. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel’s lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

Collected Stories of Franz Kafka

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0375712690
Total Pages : 570 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (757 download)

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Book Synopsis Collected Stories of Franz Kafka by : Franz Kafka

Download or read book Collected Stories of Franz Kafka written by Franz Kafka and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—a collection of stories that represent the art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real. Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales that are scrupulously naturalistic on the surface and uncanny in their depths. This edition of his stories includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that bring out the writer’s extraordinary range and intensity of vision. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Adam Bede

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0679409912
Total Pages : 666 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis Adam Bede by : George Eliot

Download or read book Adam Bede written by George Eliot and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1992-04-28 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkably vivid depiction of village life provides the backdrop to George Eliot’s first novel, a story of love and betrayal invested with social realism of unprecedented sensitivity. Adam Bede is an upstanding young carpenter whose greatest weakness is his infatuation with the self-absorbed village beauty, Hetty Sorrel. Hetty has secretly set her sights on Captain Arthur Donnithorne, heir to the local squire’s estate; his abandonment of her and her engagement to Adam set in motion a tragedy that will touch many people’s lives. When Hetty lands in prison, accused of murder and facing a sentence of execution by hanging, it is her fervent young cousin Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, whose intervention offers both Hetty and Adam comfort and the hope of peace. The evocations of a lost rural world for which Adam Bede was so resoundingly praised on its publication in 1859 are charged in Eliot’s hands with a personal compassion that intensifies the novel’s outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption. With an introduction by Leonee Ormond

The Leopard

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 067940757X
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis The Leopard by : Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Download or read book The Leopard written by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1991-10-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES • “A majestic, melancholy, and beautiful novel” (The New Yorker), THE LEOPARD is one of the best-selling Italian novels of the twentieth century and an acclaimed masterpiece of world literature. This beautiful hardcover edition, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, also includes two short stories and a brief memoir of the author’s childhood. Set in Sicily in the 1860s, during the tumult of Italian unification, THE LEOPARD tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, fading aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of revolution and democracy. Its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who was the last in a line of Sicilian princes, wrote the novel in the 1950s, inspired by the decline of his own family. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, remains skeptical and stoic as he finds himself beset by civil war, social change, and his family’s loss of wealth and status. While his beloved nephew, Tancredi, more practical and flexible than he, joins the nationalist rebels and marries the ambitious daughter of a newly rich upstart, Don Fabrizio takes refuge in his love of astronomy, gazing at the unchanging stars while the world as he has known it crumbles around him. The dramatic sweep and richness of Lampedusa’s observation, his seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and his sure grasp of human frailty imbue THE LEOPARD with its melancholy beauty and power. “No novel in Italian literature has aroused so much passion or caused so much argument… The book is more than the memorable invocation of a certain place in a certain epoch. It is a work of art that will survive, long after the last sad palaces of Palermo have gone, because it deals with the central problems of the human experience.” —from the Introduction by David Gilmour "The genius of its author and the thrill it gives the reader are probably for all time."—The New York Times Book Review "A masterwork . . . A superb novel in the great tradition and the grand manner."—Newsweek Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Washington Square

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0307961427
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Washington Square by : Henry James

Download or read book Washington Square written by Henry James and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Square is one of Henry James’s most appealing and popular novels, with the most straightforward plot and style of any of his works. Set in the genteel New York of James’s early childhood, it is a tale of cruelty laced with comedy. Dr. Austin Sloper is a wealthy and domineering father who is disappointed in the unremarkable daughter he has produced; he dismisses her as both plain and simpleminded. The gentle and dutiful Catherine Sloper has always been in awe of her father, but when she falls in love with Morris Townsend, a penniless charmer whom Dr. Sloper accuses of being a fortune hunter, she dares to defy him and a battle of wills ensues that will leave her forever changed. Readers have long admired the way that the innocent Catherine, misled by her meddling aunt and mistreated by both her father and her lover, grows in strength and wisdom over the course of her ordeal.

Dubliners

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0679405747
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis Dubliners by : James Joyce

Download or read book Dubliners written by James Joyce and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1991-11-26 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though James Joyce began these stories of Dublin life in 1904 when he was twenty-two and completed them in 1907, their unconventional themes and language led to repeated rejections by publishers and delayed publication until 1914. In the century since, his story “The Dead” has come to be seen as one of the most powerful evocations of human loss and longing that the English language possesses; all the other stories in Dubliners are as beautifully turned and as greatly admired. They remind us once again that James Joyce was not only modernism’s chief innovator but also one of its most intimate and poetic writers. In this edition the text has been revised in keeping with Joyce’s wishes, and the original versions of “The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race” have been made available in an appendix, along with Joyce’s suppressed preface to the 1914 edition of Dubliners.

Romances

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 067945487X
Total Pages : 666 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis Romances by : William Shakespeare

Download or read book Romances written by William Shakespeare and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1997-04-07 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare’s last four plays carry us across space and time—from classical antiquity to Roman Britain to pagan Sicily to a remote island—and they move as well into a wilder geography of the imagination, one dominated by the wondrous and fantastical, and by reconciliation and renewal. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest are famously fraught with shipwrecks and adventures, magic and disguise, speaking statues and ethereal spirits, tragic deceptions and moving reunions, and they number among the most enduringly delightful of Shakespeare’s works. The texts of the plays, authoritatively edited by Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented here with textual notes, a bibliography, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times, and a substantial introduction in which acclaimed scholar Tony Tanner discusses each play individually and in the context of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

The Periodic Table

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0679444637
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis The Periodic Table by : Primo Levi

Download or read book The Periodic Table written by Primo Levi and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1996-10-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him. The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that are capable of resisting and enduring in the face of tyranny.

Pale Fire

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Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0679410775
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis Pale Fire by : Vladimir Nabokov

Download or read book Pale Fire written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1992-03-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure. An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance. With an introduction by Richard Rorty.