He spent many years there as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. He even wrote Requiem in Portuguese; it had to be translated into Italian for publication in his native Italy.Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. But, it turns out, not twelve noon, twelve midnight, so he has a long time to while away. As the day unfolds, he has many encounters—a young junky, a taxi driver who is not familiar with the streets, several waiters, a gypsy, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel, an accordionist, in all almost two dozen people both real and illusionary. Finally he meets The Guest, the ghost of the long dead great poet Fernando Pessoa. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, and even a bit of a cookbook, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality.

    But nevertheless Vian was a great songwriter, playwright, singer, jazz critic and, of course novelist so it should have been Boris instead of Jack. Vian's 1947 novel Autumn in Peking (L'Automne a Pekin) is perhaps Vian's most slapstick work, with an added amount of despair in its exotic recipe for a violent cocktail drink. The story takes place in the imaginary desert called Exopotamie where all the leading characters take part in the building of a train station with tracks that go nowhere. Houses and buildings are destroyed to build this unnecessary structure - and in Vian's world waste not, make not. In Alistair Rolls' pioneering study of Vian's novels, "The Flight of the Angels," he expresses that Exopotamie is a thinly disguised version of Paris, where after the war the city started changing its previous centuries of architecture to something more modern. Yes, something dull to take the place of what was exciting and mysterious. Vian, in a mixture of great humor and unequal amount of disgust, introduces various 'eccentric' characters in this 'desert' adventure, such as Anne and Angel who are best friends; and Rochelle who is in love and sleeps with Anne, while Angel is madly in love with her. Besides the trio there is also Doctor Mangemanche; the archeologist Athanagore Porphyroginite, his aide, Cuivre; and Pipo - all of them in a locality similar to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where there is a tinge of darkness and anything is possible, except for happiness.

    Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' became an important part of the 'Sturm und Drang movement, and greatly influenced later 'Romanticism'. The work is semi-autobiographical - in 1772, two years before the novel was published, Goethe had passed through a similar tempestuous period, when he lost his heart to Charlotte Buff, who was at that time engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner.

    The "Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts," "Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk," and "The Adventure of the Hansom Cab" chronicle the exploits of Prince Florizel of Bohemia and Colonel Geraldine through some of 19th-century London's most dangerous haunts.

    

    The love-story of Tristram and the beautiful Isoult, of King Mark and of magic potions; the wondrous legend of Launcelot's emergence from the castle of the Round Table; Percival's championship of the Lady Yvette and his adventures at the Castle of Beaurepaire — these are all retold in Pyle's inimitable style, capturing perfectly the tone and spirit of ancient romance. Just as successful are Pyle's illustrations. 50 drawings, 31 of them full-page size, help make this one of the most memorable adventure books ever written for young readers.These stories have inspired numerous film adaptations, including the 2017 release Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Eric Bana, Djimon Hounsou, and Annabelle Wallis.

    "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator's family, including the lodging of a tiger-just one tiger- "for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity." Finally, the "Cronopios and Famas" section delightfully characterizes, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, "those enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity-a band of literary Marx Brothers."

    Emotionally charged, sparsely written, and vicariously compelling, Marguerite Duras's novel centers on the desire of a young man for another man he has only glimpsed once, but with whom he falls desperately in love.

    She's happy, but she doesn't know what she wants from life.But when her adoptive mother dies and leaves her twenty-five-year-old daughter a scrapbook of memories, Daisy finally discovers who she is and where she came from. Her real mother was a teenage farmer's daughter from Cornwall - and Daisy drops everything to go and find her. But in going in search of her past, is Daisy risking the future of her relationship not only with her adored dad but also with Joel? And will she be able to deal with the truth about her real parents and the real Daisy?

    A new translation by Scot James Hogarth for the first unabridged English edition of the novel, which tells the story of a reculsive fisherman from the Channel Islands who must free a ship that has run aground in order to win the hand of the woman he loves, a shipowner's daughter.

    This tale of seduction is itself a seduction, with a plot that could be said to slowly unveil itself before arriving at last at an unexpected consummation.Summoned by Madame de T—— to her country house, the young hero of Deion's novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights but will give rise to unforeseen, perhaps unanswerable, questions. Lydia Davis's definitive translation of Denon's slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text. Peter Brooks's illuminating introduction explores the mysteries of No Tomorrow's original publication and the subtleties of Denon's ethics of pleasure.

    Pushkin wrote the story in autumn 1833 in Boldino and it was first published in literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya in 1834. It was turned into the opera The Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky.

    Tolkien's classic essay on fantasy, "On Fairy Stories", is complemented by his charming story, "Leaf by Niggle" and the poem "Mythopoeia".

    The Nobel Laureate's first novel spotlights a small circle of young Nigerian intellectuals living in Lagos.

    It is a compilation of episodes approaching racism as a psychological reality.Everyday racism, argues Grada Kilomba, is experienced as a violent shock which suddenly places the Black subject in a colonial scene – depriving one’s link with society. Unexpectedly, the past comes to coincide with the present and the present is experienced as if one were in that agonizing past, as the title Plantation Memories announces.Linking postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and poetic narrative, she provides a new and inspiring interpretation of everyday racism, memory, trauma and decolonization in the form of short stories.From the question “Where do you come from?” to the N-Word or Hair politics, the book is essential to anyone studying African studies, postcolonialism, critical whiteness and psychoanalysis.Grada Kilomba is a writer and psychologist, lecturing Frantz Fanon, Colonialism, Psychoanalysis and Decolonization at the Free University of Berlin. She is the Co-Editor of the book Mythen, Masken, Subjekte