戏剧与现实交错的杰作在雷格纳·希尔部推理小说《喜欢交际的女人》里,他创造的一对独特的侦探搭档也首度登场。一位是心宽体胖、好色贪怀、爱斗嘴耍活宝的刑事主任达尔齐尔,另一位则是教养优雅、学识丰富的警官帕斯科。自从柯南·道尔创造了华生医生作为神探福尔摩斯的搭档之后,推理小说家就经常使用这种对比手法,用一位“次要而平凡”的角色来衬托神探的不凡。这些二号人物有时候是侦探的朋友,有时候是记者,有时候是助手或忠仆,但多半不脱烘托主角的功能。但雷格纳·希尔采取了另外一种途径:他让侦探的搭档有能力也有作用,甚至是重要的互补,没有对方彼此都不是完整的;他又让两人的文化特质与思考形态南辕北辙,比较与冲突的趣味因而源源不绝。仅此一项,就是希尔对推理小说的重大贡献。希尔的小说结构复杂紧凑,在我们要读的
Nacky and Teedie looked slowly out over the water and what they saw stopped their breath.Wherever they cast their eyes, the surface of the tiny Vole lake was covered with drifting timbers-the shattered remains of a great sailing ship. Such wreckage floating on the ocean would have been a fearsome enough sight. But the same remains,dropped into the little puddle of a mountain lake, were that much more terrifying-if only because whatever violence demol-ished the huge boat likely still lurked. What was dismantled,however, could also be rebuilt. "I think we been given an ocean ship," Nacky whispered hoarsely to Teedie. The question was:What would they do with it? 作者简介: JEFFREY KLUGER discovered a love of writing in the sixth grade and has been crafting stories ever since. Now a senior writer for Time magazine, Mr. Kluger is perhaps best known for coauthoring the book-turned-Oscar-winning-film Apollo 13.He is also the author of Journey Beyond Selene and Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of
At a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, KatherineRussell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, Where she wasseduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language sheheard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determinedshe’d go live and study in the Ancient city of Udaipur. Thatdecision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents herexperiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-outexhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and oftenhilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science oflanguage acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-openingaccount of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distantworlds and, ultimately, about ourselves.
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republicof Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretlygathered seven of her most committed female students to readforbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative andreligious families, others were progressive and secular; some hadspent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first,unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon theyremoved their veils and began to speak more freely–their storiesintertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamicmorality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, asfundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censorstifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living roomspoke not only of the books they were reading but also aboutthemselves, their dreams and disappointments. Azar Nafisi’s luminous masterwork gives us a rare glimpse, fromthe inside, of women’s lives in rev
A REVEALING AND DRAMATIC LOOK AT THE INSIDE OF THE AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAM FROM ONE OF ITS PIONEERS. This is the astronaut story never before told--about the fear, love, and sacrifice demanded of the few men who dared to reach beyond the heavens for the biggest prize of all: the Moon.
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Assembled by best-selling suspense author Nelson DeMille, The Best American Mystery Stories 2004 contains a spectacular array of stories by mystery veterans and talented newcomers. Follow a chain reaction that saves a woman's life, visit a house haunted by a husband's violent killing spree, enter the high-stakes world of Las Vegas gambling, watch the line between reality and dream blur, travel with a bored salesman driven to crime, and much more. Encompassing all aspects
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. Hisjourneys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary,Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train,bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-soundingyet strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," Stasiuktells us, "beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not inVienna." Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he isbeing driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi--loose wireshanging from the dashboard--by a driver in shorts and bare feet, across swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession movesslowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, anold woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the faceof the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-byzantine-Tatar-Turkishencampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, betweenthe Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his firstminaret, "simple and severe, a pencil pointed
What is it about bread? Why am I, here in the middle of mylife, so enamored of French loaves? Two images kept cropping up:two French people sitting in a café for a long afternoon of eatingthick hunks of bread and drinking cups of coffee, and a Frenchmanon a bicycle with a loaf slung across his handlebars. These visionsseemed to depict lives soaked in leisure, where there was time forthe good things. . . . Then this thought ambled forth: It's thedailiness of bread, like a reliable friend. . . . My plan starts tobillow forth. My project, as I imagine it, will be a naturalhistory, an ecology of bread. The story of a loaf. Overcome by a passion for French bread, Sara Mansfield Tabertravels to Brittany in search of a loaf, which like the lifestylethat must surely accompany it, is perfect in its simplicity. Aftermany months of seeking, she tears off a hunk of pain troisrivières, made by Gold Medal baker Monsieur Jean-Claude Choquet ofBlain, Loire-Atlantique. It "smelled like heaven and tasted a miled
Seven years ago, James Raimes and his wife bought a countryhome on nine acres in upstate New York. In the tradition of theirfamily, who once owned a cottage named Fred, this larger propertybecame "Ginger." Inspired by the natural beauty of the land and adesire to learn how to be a gardener, Raimes found himself obsessedwith such questions as why gardeners keep moving plants around,what the names of the lawn grasses are, and how one can imposeorder in a garden and at the same time make it look natural. What,in fact, defines a garden? Gardening at Ginger is full of successesand failures, aches and pains, frustrations and delights. But morethan that, it's the story of a great discovery: as we try to shapea landscape to reflect who we are, we find that who we are has beenreshaped in the process.
When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyonelooks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at thesheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday'sunderwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter,his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as anaccomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable newsnetworks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for thePritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribsfrom the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-bloodedAmerican teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico. Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funnylook at violence, materialism, and the American media.