Book picks similar to
Alexander's Feast: Macflecknoe and St. Cecilia's Day by John Dryden
poetry
satire
britain
rec_pol_inc_lit
Educating Rita
Willy Russell - 1980
It premiered in London, in 1980 and won the Society for West End Theatres (SWET) award for Best Comedy of the Year. It was made into a highly successful film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters and won the 1983 BAFTA award for Best Film.Commentary and notes by Steve Lewis.
Millennium People
J.G. Ballard - 2003
Never more timely, Millennium People “seeks to illuminate our hearts of darkness while undermining our assumptions about what literature is meant to do” (Los Angeles Times).
In Shadow of the Glen
J.M. Synge - 1904
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future
Will Self - 2006
Fearing his son will never know his father, Dave pens a gripping text--part memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, and part handbook of "the Knowledge" learned by all London cab drivers. Meant for the boy when he comes of age, the book captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life. Five hundred years later, the Book of Dave is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet.
Adam Bede
George Eliot - 1859
However much the reader may sympathize with Hetty Sorrel and identify with Arthur Donnithorne, her seducer, and with Adam Bede, the man Hetty betrays,it is George Eliots's creation of the distant aesthetic whole - the complex, multifarious life of Hayslope - which so grips the reader's imagination. As Stephen Gill comments: 'Reading the novel is a process of learning simultaneously about the world of Adam Bede and the world of Adam Bede.'
Flashman
George MacDonald Fraser - 1969
Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world.Can a man be all bad? When Harry Flashman’s adventures as the reluctant secret agent in Afghanistan lead him to join the exclusive company of Lord Cardigan’s Hussars and play a part in the disastrous Retreat from Kabul, it culminates in the rascal’s finest – and most dishonest – turn.
The Heir's Pendant: Paranormal Romance Reverse Harem (Lydia Pack Book 1)
A.P. Cole - 2018
Spending her adolescent life in foster care didn’t give her the best life, but she made due with what she had. Now, she finally gets to peruse her dream degree at a small college in Spokane, Washington. Everything is going great. In the beginning, she has an amazing class schedule and she has a job. But, there was one thing she didn’t prepare for. In her first few weeks of classes, she meets four, absolutely drop-dead gorgeous men. But, when her past comes back to haunt her, they will change her life forever. Will she be able to take these new developments in stride or will they prove to be too much to handle? ***Warning*** This is a slow burn reverse harem with one woman and multiple men. Contains bad language, violence, and sexual content. This book is meant for mature audiences only. ***Trigger warning*** Contains rape and abuse scenes.
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Philip Zaleski - 2015
Tolkien and C. S. Lewis C.S. Lewis is the twentieth century’s most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis’s Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times.In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings’ lives and works. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant.Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years--and did so in dazzling style.
Inferno
Dante Alighieri
In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem’s line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.
Love for Sale
Whitney Dineen - 2021
She doesn't have bleached hair, a boob job, or a love of five-inch stilettos. She also harbors a secret talent. Using her psychic abilities, she knows which house her clients need to buy in order to find love. Too bad her gift doesn't seem to work for her.Enter movie mogul Jonathon Silver.Emily wonders why a Hollywood big wig needs help finding love. She soon discovers his superior and fussy ways might be getting in his way. Even so, she's determined to do her best and help him find his soulmate. Unfortunately, things don't go as planned.Will Emily accidentally close the deal on her own happily-ever-after? Find out in this laugh-out-loud tale of love, house hunting, and new beginnings!*** Novella previously released as part of the USA Today Bestselling Love in the City anthology.
Back to Reality
Mark Stay - 2017
Jo's world is about to change forever, and it’s about time Her marriage is on auto-pilot, daughter hates her, job sucks and it’s not even Tuesday. As Jo's life implodes, a freak event hurls her back through time and space to ‘90s Los Angeles where, in a parallel universe, she’s about to hit the big time as a rock star. Jo has to choose between her dreams and her family in an adventure that propels her from London to Hollywood then Glastonbury, the world’s greatest music festival. In her desperate quest, Jo encounters a disgraced guru, a movie star with a fetish for double-decker buses, and the biggest pop star in the world... who just happens to want to kill her.
The Life and Loves of a She Devil
Fay Weldon - 1983
Rather the opposite in fact -- simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge. A blackly comic satire of the war of the sexes, LIFE AND LOVES OF A SHE DEVIL is the fantasy of the wronged woman made real.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
G.K. Chesterton - 1908
K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory.As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.