This stunning and steamy debut chronicles the adventures ofNan King, a small town girl at the turn of the century whose lifetakes a wild turn of its own when she follows a local music hallstar to London...
Saviez-vous qu'un pays communiste, c'est un pays où il y a desventilateurs ? Que de 1972 à 1975, une guerre mondiale a fait ragedans la cité-ghetto de San Li Tun, à Pékin ? Qu'un vélo est enréalité un cheval ? Que passé la puberté, tout le reste n'est qu'unépilogue ? Vous l'apprendrez et bien d'autres choses encore dans ceroman inclassable, épique et dr?le, fantastique et tragique, quinous conte aussi une histoire d'amour authentique, absolu, celuiqui peut na?tre dans un coeur de sept ans. Un sabotage amoureux :sabotage, comme sous les sabots d'un cheval qui est un vélo... Avecce roman, son deuxième livre, Amélie Nothomb s'est imposée comme undes noms les plus prometteurs de la jeune générationlittéraire.
Un ouvrier pris dans la tourmente de la Commune, déporté aubagne de Nouméa, s'évade et retrouve sa femme mariée à un autre...Mis à la retraite prématurément, un fonctionnaire se montreincapable de vivre en dehors du cadre étroit de l'administration...Sur son lit de mort, un riche paysan révèle sa double vie à sonfils et lui demande de prendre soin de sa ma?tresse... Voici deshistoires insolites contées par trois ma?tres du naturalisme.
This collection brings together perhaps the finest of Dickens' shorter novels, filled with event, character, and the unsurpassed brilliance of his story-telling. Oliver Twist enhanced and strengthened Dickens' reputation and contains classic Dickensian themes - grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity. Hard Times was attacked by Macaulay for its 'sullen socialism', but 20th-century critics - George Bernard Shaw and F.R. Leavis praised it in the highest terms. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens' greatest historical novel, traces the lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. A fascinating range of characters and Dickens' usual superb command of language combine to make this an exciting and tantalising story. Great Expectations traces the life of Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man of character. From its dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abou
An upper-class woman, recovering from a suicide attempt, visitsthe women's ward of Millbank prison as part of her rehabilitation.There she meets Selina, an enigmatic spiritualist-and becomes drawninto a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits andunseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct adesperate plot to secure Selina's freedom, and her own. "Unfoldssinuously and ominously...a powerful plot-twister. The book ismultidimensional: a naturalistic look at Victorian society; a trulysuspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veilederotica." ("USA Today") "Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzlenarrative-Sarah Waters' second novel is all of these wrapped intoone, served up to superbly suspenseful and hypnotic effect." ("TheSeattle Times")
On the day after Halloween, in the year 1327, four children slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. In the forest they see two men killed. As adults, their lives become braided together by desire, determination, avarice and retribution. They will see prosperity and famine, plague and war. Yet they wilt always live under the shadow of the unexplained killing on that fateful childhood day. Ken Follett's masterful epic The Pillars oft& Earth enchanted millions of readers with its compelling drama of war, passion and family conflict, set around the building of a cathedral. Now World With out End takes readers back to medieval Kingsbridge two centuries later, as the men, women and children of the city once again grapple with the devastating sweep of historical change.
Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac tobe the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare,classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father'shysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. Oneof the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-centuryFrench provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whomnothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of thehuman animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R.Jameson Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor ofComparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Hispublications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures ofthe Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Qu'importe que la cantatrice soit chauve puisqu'elle n'existepas ! Dans cette petite "anti-pièce", première oeuvredramatique de Ionesco, il n'est fait référence que deux fois à lacantatrice chauve, personnage dont on ne sait rien et quin'appara?t jamais. Il s'agit bien là d'un Nouveau Thé?tre, celuiqui donne naissance à des pièces sans héros, sans sacro-saintedivision en actes, sans action, sans intrigue, avec en guise dedénouement la quasi-répétition du début, et dont lestraditionnelles retrouvailles sont remplacées par une parodie dereconnaissance d'une invraisemblance ahurissante. Les personnages,tout droit sortis d'un manuel de langue, ne s'expriment que parclichés, disent une chose pour aussit?t affirmer son contraire,trouvent une jubilation idiote à employer proverbes et maximes touten les pervertissant sans même s'en apercevoir... Cependant, trèsvite, le langage s'"autonomise", se libère de toute contrainte, etl'on assiste avec plaisir au divorce du sens et du verbe. Il enré
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.
When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved? To be irrevocably in love with a vampire is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, a tumultuous year of temptation, loss, and strife have led her to the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or to pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fates of two tribes hangs. Now that Bella has made her decision, a startling chain of unprecedented events is about to unfold with potentially devastating, and unfathomable, consequences. Just when the frayed strands of Bella's life-first discovered in Twil
In his introduction to the The BestAmerican Noir of the Century , James Ellroywrites, “noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of thehard-boiled school of fiction. It’s the long drop off theshort pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfectmisalliance. It’s the nightmare of flawed souls with bigdreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing thatgoes bad.” Offering the best examples of literary surethings gone bad, this collection ensuresthat nowhere else can readers find a darker, morethorough distillation of American noir fiction.
'...it is an universal phenomenon of our nature that the mournful, the fearful, even the horrible, allures with irresistible enchantment.' Chaucer Burr, Memoir, 1850 The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories is a superb collection of some of the greatest tales of the genre, many are classics while others are lesser -known gems unearthed from this vintage era of the supernatural. From time immemorial, man the world over has drawn upon the worst fears of his conscious and subconscious mind to furnish legends of terrror. In this volume authors such as M.R.James, Le Fanu, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Bierce, Balzac, Gaskell, and many others invite you to close the curtains, lock the doors, draw the armchair closer to the blazing fire and settle down to a spine-chilling read.
More than four million readers fell in love with Nan, the smart, spirited, and sympathetic heroine of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Nanny Diaries. Now she's back. After living abroad for twelve years, she and her husband, Ryan, aka H.H., have returned to New York to make a life for themselves. In the midst of getting her new business off the ground and fixing up their fixer-upper, Ryan announces his sudden desire to start a family. His timing simply couldn't be worse. To compound the mounting construction and marital chaos, her former charge, Grayer X, now sixteen years old, makes a drunken, late-night visit, wanting to know why she abandoned him all those years ago. But how can she explain to Grayer what she still hasn't come to terms with herself? In an attempt to assuage her guilt, yet against every instinct, Nan tries to help Grayer and his younger brother, Stilton, through their parents' brutal divorce, drawing her back into the ever-bizarre life of Mrs. X and her Upper
I stuck my finger under the edge of the paper and jerked it under the tape. 'Shoot,' I muttered when the paper sliced my finger. A single drop of blood oozed from the tiny cut. It all happened very quickly then. 'No!' Edward roared ...Dazed and disorientated, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm - and into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is more dangerous than Bella ever could have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of an evil vampire but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realise their troubles may just be beginning ...
Every critic agrees that William Boyd is a shamefully overlooked author on this side of the Atlantic. A powerful storyteller whose novels span genres and continents, Boyd often subtly ruminates on the thin line between private and public life. In Restless he fictionalizes a little-known moment of international espionage while using the conventions of spy thrillers to explore a generation gap. Critics roundly praise Sally's story. It's her daughter's story that's the trouble: a few reviewers find it sorely mismatched with the more dramatic elements of the book. A frequent prizewinner in England (including the Whitbread First Novel Award for A Good Man in Africa), Boyd has yet to catapult to the popularity of the Ian McEwans of the world. Whether Restless is the book to push him into wider renown is up for debate.
Former marshal-turned-rebel Jim Raynor has broken away from the power-crazed Emperor Arcturus Mengsk. Enraged over Mengsk's betrayal of the powerful telepath, Sarah Kerrigan, to the ravenous Zerg, Raynor has lost all faith in his fellow humanity. Yet, in the aftermath of Mengsk's treachery, Raynor is plagued by strange visions of Char -- a deadly, volcanic world haunted by horrifying alien creatures. As the nightmares grow in intensity, Raynor begins to suspect that they may not be figments of his imagination -- but a desperate form of telepathic contact. Convinced that the woman he loves is still alive, Raynor launches a hasty mission to rescue Kerrigan from Char. But deep beneath the planet's smoldering surface, Raynor finds a strange chrysalis...and is forced to watch in horror as a terrible, all-too-familiar entity rises from it. Before him stands a creature of depthless malice and vengeance... Sarah Kerrigan: the Zerg Queen of Blades.
