Book picks similar to
The Riddle of Life and Death: Tell Me a Riddle and The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tillie Olsen
favorites
classics
fiction
stylee
What Will People Say?
Rehana Rossouw - 2015
Hanover Park. The heart of the Cape Flats. It is 1986. Michael Jackson and Brenda Fassie rule every hi-fi. Princess Di and George Michael hairstyles are all the rage. There are plans to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1976 student uprising.Neville and Magda Fourie live in Magnolia Court with their three children. They are trying to ‘raise them decent’ in a township festering with gang wars and barricaded with burning tyres. Suzette, the eldest, is beautiful and determined to escape her family’s poverty. Nicky, the sensitive middle child, has ambitions to use her intellect as a way out. Anthony, the only son, attracted by power and wealth, is lured away from his family by a gangster. In What Will People Say? a rich variety of township characters – the preachers, the teachers, the gangsters and the defeated – come to life in vivid language as they eke out their lives in the shadows of grey concrete blocks of flats.Which members of the Fourie family will thrive, which ones will not survive?Generously spiced with Cape Flats slang; lots of vivid and gritty description that give an authentic feel to the story; plenty of plot – the writer draws us in and makes us curious about what will happen next; and very human characters we come to care about.
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck - 1945
Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that introduce us to various denizens of the Row, most of whom are not directly connected with the central story. These vignettes are often characterized by direct or indirect reference to extreme violence: suicides, corpses, and the cruelty of the natural world.The "story" of Cannery Row follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row.Sweet Thursday is the sequel to Cannery Row.
The Invisible Man : H G Wells
Michael Coren - 2019
G. Wells was an international phenomenon, the only writer of his time who could command an audience with both Roosevelt and Stalin. His circle of friends included George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, Somerset Maugham and, of course, the young Rebecca West, with whom he had a long-term affair — perhaps the most tempestuous and sparkling literary liaison of the century. Equally illustrious was his circle of enemies, including the indomitable Hilaire Belloc, who destroyed Wells in a vicious and public argument. Unlike any previous biographer, Michael Coren shows that while many have considered Wells to be on the side of the angels, he was in fact invariably on the wrong side in the major political and literary debates of the age. Drawing on eye-opening new material, The Invisible Man delves deep into the paradoxes that characterized Wells — the utopian visionary and staunch advocate of women’s suffrage who was also a misogynistic womanizer; the epitome of liberal tolerance who was also a social engineer and thoroughgoing anti-Semite. Wells has hitherto remained untouched by charges of anti-Semitism, but Coren reveals for the first time his disturbing views on ‘the Jewish problem’ (for instance, he called Jews ‘termites in the civilized world’), views he defended vehemently even through the 1930s. The avuncular author of Kipps and The Time Machine is depicted, shockingly, as one who advocated concentration camps, racial eugenics and the incarceration or execution of those who did not ‘fit in’. The Invisible Man is one of those iconoclastic biographies that change our perception of their subjects for ever. Praise for Michael Coren: ‘An elegantly written biography’ The Times Michael Coren is a journalist and author, who wrote the highly acclaimed Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton and a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Winter Letters
Sicily Yoder - 2013
He left the Amish to join a biker's club, leaving her heart-broken. However, handsome Amish man, Jeremiah Troyer, fills in the gap that Elijah left; however, there is a major problem: Rachael's grandfather, Ben, keeps comparing him to Elijah. Setting out to prove himself fit for taking Rachael's hand in marriage, Jeremiah moves to Shipshewana to work on her brother's dairy farm. However, there are secrets that Jeremiah is keeping from Rachael. One winter morning, Rachael comes head-first with Jeremiah's secrets and is faced to deal with her own transgressions. Can God help her heal? Will he forgive her for her sins? Will she forgive herself and find true love?
Nick Demske
Nick Demske - 2010
"Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room."—Joyelle McSweeneyHis name is "a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language."
Ногти
Mikhail Elizarov - 2001
"Fingernails" quickly became a sensation when it was released and has long been a bibliographic rarity and one of the most read texts on the Russian internet.
AS/A-Level Student Text Guide to Atonement, Ian McEwan
Robert Swan - 2006
The novel itself can be found here: Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Funeral Party
Lyudmila Ulitskaya - 1999
In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.From the Hardcover edition.
Running on Waves
Alexander Grin - 1926
Content of the novel is based upon background of sea travel, heroes have portraits for the characters. Action is running in the "invented" places, whose names resemble names of the real cities in Crimea. Novel was written in 1928.
Worldwide Ward Cookbook: 440 Recipes from LDS Cooks Around the Globe
Deanna Buxton - 2009
With comfort-food recipes gathered from across America as well as 46 other countries, you'll find homemade classics along with dishes that may be difficult to pronounce, but are easy to enjoy. And nearly all 440 of these simple and economical recipes are made from ingredients available in most local groceries, so you can delight your family and friends again and again. As you turn the more than 340 pages of this charming book, you'll discover recipes for real food cooked by real people around the globedishes for every occasion and every taste. Enjoy a traditional British Sunday dinner, or delight your family and friends with a delicious Finnish glass cake. You may even want to whip up a batch of Brigham Young's favorite buttermilk donuts. You'll find savory soups to sweet treats, creamy casseroles, entrées with a little bit of kick, and dishes that younger taste buds will like. But perhaps your favorite part of this delightful book will be the stories behind the recipessnippets that will bring a smile, and maybe even inspire you to start a few new traditions. So pull out the pans, fire up the stove, and create some new favorites with the abundance of appetizing ideas found in your Worldwide Ward Cookbook. 9.5" X 11", 342 pages ISBN 978-1-59811-779-0
Snow
Orhan Pamuk - 2002
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides. No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness. Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties
The Turn of the Screw/Daisy Miller
Henry James - 1878
. . or tragedy. But the subtle danger lurking beneath the surface in Daisy Miller evolves into a classic tale of terror and obsession in The Turn Of The Screw. "The imagination," Henry James said to Bernard Shaw, "has a life if its own." In this blood-curdling story, that imagination weaves the lives of two children, a governess in love with her employer, and a sprawling country house into a flawless story, still unsurpassed as the prototype of modern horror fiction.
Hell to Pay
Shaun Hutson - 2003
A couple tens of thousands of pounds in debt. And a young girl with a mysterious, terrifying illness...
The Type-Writer Girl
Olive Pratt Rayner - 1897
Having been trained in typewriting and shorthand, she obtains employment at a law office, only to find that she cannot bear to work with her unpleasant colleagues and employer. Juliet possesses some of the characteristics of the infamous "New Woman": she has attended Girton College, she smokes cigarettes, and she travels the countryside on her bicycle. After various adventures, Juliet finds a new opportunity as a type-writer girl for a publishing company. She falls in love with her employer, and he with her, but complications inevitably ensue. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Canadian-born Grant Allen was a prolific professional author of popular science texts on evolution as well as a fiction writer. The Type-Writer Girl (1897) is one of only two novels he wrote under a female pseudonym, possibly to lend credibility to his first-person female narrator. The Type-Writer Girl invokes tensions typical of the fin de siècle concerning evolution, technology, and the role of women. This Broadview edition provides a reliable text at a very reasonable price. It contains textual notes but no appendices.Excerpt: ... THE TYPEWRITER .GIRL, Chapter' i: INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE. I Was twenty-two, and without employment. I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy me. A swallow's back, as he turns in the sunshine, is so full of meaning. If you dwell in the country, you need but pin on a hat and slip out into a meadow, and there, in some bight of the hedgerow, you shall see spring buds untwisting, sulphur butterflies coquetting; hear nightingales sing as they sang to Keats, and streamlets make madrigal as they wimpled for Marlowe. Nay, even Lhere m London, where life is rarer, how can I cruise down the Strand without encountering strange barks--mysterious argosies that attract and intrigue me? That living stream is so marvelous! Whence come they, these shadows, and whither do they go?--innumerable, silent, each wrapped in his own thought, yet each real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars, phantoms that flash athwart .the, bribit of my life one second, and .then.vanish.-. But io themselves they are the: ceirCre of *a Wdrld--of the world; and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon. I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at least it amuses me. Every morning I see them stream in from the Unknown, by the early 1 rains, and disperse like sparks that twinkle on the thin soot of the chimney-back--men with small black bags, bound for mysterious offices. What happens in those offices I have no idea: they may lend money, or buy shares, or...
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink - 1995
In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.