Book picks similar to
Vintage Wodehouse by Richard Usborne
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A Play On Words
Deric Longden - 1999
The theme is the experience of Longden watching LOST FOR WORDS become a TV drama along with a collection of observations of life at home and abroad.
Maximum Bob
Elmore Leonard - 1991
Maximum Bob is a delightfully dark classic thriller from “the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever” (New York Times Book Review), and any reader who loved getting gleefully lost in criminal mayhem of Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of Sight, The Hot Kid, or any number of the inimitable Leonard’s numerous crime fiction masterworks will get maximum enjoyment out of this one.
Music for Chameleons
Truman Capote - 1980
Taking place in a small Midwestern town in America, it offers chilling insights into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice. Also in this volume are six short stories and seven ‘conversational portraits’ including a touching one of Marilyn Monroe, the ‘beautiful child’ and a hilarious one of a dope-smoking cleaning lady doing her rounds in New York.
Sparks Fly
Nicole Falls - 2017
A simple touch sending currents of electricity flowing through a body. The feeling of coming home. Friends become lovers. Strangers become soulmates. The chemistry ignited when two people are falling in love is undeniable. Over the course of five short stories, follow these couples on journeys of passion and discover what happens when they decide to let sparks fly…
The Plummeting Old Women
Daniil Kharms - 1989
These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.
Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme - 1981
Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
A Confederate General from Big Sur / Dreaming of Babylon / The Hawkline Monster
Richard Brautigan - 1964
Richard Brautigan was the author of ten novels, including a contemporary classic, Trout Fishing in America, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of stories.Here are three Brautigan novels--A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster--reissues in a one-volume omnibus edition.
The Dear Departed: A Comedy in One Act
Stanley Houghton - 1963
Recreation Department twenty-fourth annual one-act play tournament, The Arts Club Players present "The Dear Departed," by Stanley Houghton, directed by Herman P. Riess.
Burning Chrome
William Gibson - 1986
Johnny Mnemonic (1981)The Gernsback Continuum (1981)Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977)The Belonging Kind (1981) with John ShirleyHinterlands (1981)Red Star, Winter Orbit (1983) with Bruce SterlingNew Rose Hotel (1984)The Winter Market (1985)Dogfight (1985) with Michael SwanwickBurning Chrome (1982)
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Will Self - 1991
Psychiatry, anthropology, theology--and literature--will never be the same.
October Ferry To Gabriola
Malcolm Lowry - 1971
It is not a completed novel, however. According to Margerie Lowry, the author's widow, this published version is her "sorting out" of numerous drafts of chapters, paragraphs and even sentences that Lowry began to write in 1946.
One Basket
Edna Ferber - 1947
You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at-in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat in our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women. Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round Christmastime, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent, dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set with flashy imitation stones-or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She owned the House with the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot-did Blanche Devine.
Men, Martians and Machines
Eric Frank Russell - 1955
This set of linked stories describes a part of the epic voyage of the Marathon, powered by the Flettner Drive, seeking new worlds for humanity to spread onto. One planet is inhabited by only machines, survivors perhaps of a civilization in which the machine-makers had perished. Another contains a race of master hypnotists, who make the crew see only what they wish to see! Included is the classic, oft-anthologized novella Jay Score."One of my own all-time favorites, is Men, Martians and Machines... I re-read this one at least once a year, with as much delight and amusement as I got from it the first time."- Bud Webster"A rousing inventive space adventure; and the first story remains a technical marvel. I know of few surprise-ending stories in any category that are so rereadable and so absolutely fair - and what other trick short ever had enough un-tricky meat to it to serve as the foundation for a series?" - Anthony Boucher in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction"A substantial space opera." - Galaxy"Good fun to read, an old and popular formula, happily applied." - P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov - 1995
Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.The Wood-SpriteRussian Spoken HereSoundsWingstrokeGodsA Matter of ChanceThe SeaportRevengeBeneficenceDetails of A SunsetThe ThunderstormLa VenezianaBachmannThe DragonChristmasA Letter That Never Reached RussiaThe FightThe Return of ChorbA Guide to BerlinA Nursery TaleTerrorRazorThe PassengerThe DoorbellAn Affair of HonorThe Christmas StoryThe Potato ElfThe AurelianA Dashing FellowA Bad DayThe Visit to the MuseumA Busy ManTerra IncognitaThe ReunionLips to LipsOracheMusicPerfectionThe Admiralty SpireThe LeonardoIn Memory of L.I. ShigaevThe CircleA Russian BeautyBreaking the NewsTorpid SmokeRecruitingA Slice of LifeSpring in FialtaCloud, Castle, LakeTyrants DestroyedLikMademoiselle OVasiliy ShishkovUltima ThuleSolus RexThe Assistant ProducerThat in Aleppo OnceA Forgotten PoetTime and EbbConversation Piece, 1945Signs and SymbolsFirst LoveScenes From the Life of A Double MonsterThe Vane SistersLance