Book picks similar to
Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings by Günter Eich
contemporary
f-fiction
literature
recommended-by-harold-bloom
A Perfect Peace
Amos Oz - 1982
On a kibbutz, the country’s founders and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other. The messianic father exults in accomplishments that had once been only dreams; the son longs to establish an identity apart from his father; the fragile young wife is out of touch with reality; and the gifted and charismatic “outsider” seethes with emotion. Through the interplay of these brilliantly realized characters, Oz evokes a drama that is chillingly, strikingly universal.
Selected Poems
Boris Pasternak - 1960
Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'
Loop Tracks
Sue Orr - 2021
It’s 2019: Charlie’s tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions of Tommy’s first girlfriend, Jenna, and the father he has never known, Jim. The year turns, and everything changes again.Loop Tracks is a major New Zealand novel, written in real time against the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum.‘Loop Tracks is an urgent and unexpected novel about freedom and responsibility – about a woman forced to wear her solitary and unsupported choice as a puzzling mistake, and about the very present past that she must face to help her family and herself.’ —Elizabeth Knox‘This fictional inter-generational story will speak to a wide readership about the choices that are important for our future.’ —Dame Margaret Sparrow
Don Carlos and Mary Stuart
Friedrich Schiller - 1800
Dating from 1787 and 1800 respectively, one play was written before the French Revolution, the other in its aftermath. Both dramatize periods of crisis in 16th-century Europe, and in doing so reflect Schiller's passionate engagement with the great themes of his own age - justice, power, freedom of conscience, legitimacy of government.
Putney Bridge
Helen Ryan - 2015
Her two daughters, from a previous relationship, are now both adult. Jo, ambitious and independent, is pursuing a career as a barrister. Jo’s younger sister is very different. Shelley, just 20, sweet natured, trusting and innocent, still lives at home and works at a local animal clinic. They are a normal, happy family - and then Shelley meets Sam on the street and everything changes. Martha struggles to accept Shelley’s choice of boyfriend as, with increasing anger, she witnesses the erosion of all Shelley’s values under Sam’s influence. When Martha’s efforts to persuade Shelley to give Sam up fail, she decides on a more direct approach. The consequences of her actions are devastating for everyone and change the course of Martha’s life forever. “After I’d gone up to bed that night, leaving Gabe amidst the carnage I had created in the living room, I formulated my plan. But it was pure chance that I met Sam on Putney Bridge some three weeks later and I went ahead with it.”
Selected Essays
T.S. Eliot - 1950
37 essays in an expanded edition of the author's major volume of criticism.
To a Fault
Nick Laird - 2005
Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, he balances ideas of home and flight, the need for belonging and the need to remain outside. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops. But these are brave, resolute writings that resist despair at all times, affirming instead the need to rebuild and to right oneself, to dust down and carry on.
Egmont: A Tragedy in Five Acts
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1788
His works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism, and science. His Magnum Opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part dramatic poem Faust: A Tragedy. He was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. His scientific text Theory of Colours influenced Darwin with its focus on plant morphology. His influence on German philosophy is virtually immeasurable, having major impact especially on the generation of Hegel and Schelling, although Goethe himself expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense. His other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
Giordano Bruno
He might have been referring to the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was tried by two Inquisitions and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.Bruno's most representative work, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), published in an atmosphere of secrecy in 1584 and never referred to as anything but blasphemous for more than a century, was singled out by the church tribunal at the summation of his final trial. That is hardly surprising because the book is a daring indictment of the corruption of the social and religious institutions of his day. The "triumphant beast" signifies the reign of multifarious vices. Cast in the form of allegorical dialogues, Bruno's work presents the deliberations of the Greek gods who have assembled to banish from the heavens the constellations that remind them of their evil deeds. The crisis facing Jove, the aging father of the gods, is symbolic of the crisis in a Renaissance world profoundly disturbed by new religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas.Arthur D. Imerti, former head of the Department of Foreign Languages at the New School for Social Research in New York City, provides a brilliant introduction to the philosopher who dared to voice his audacious theories of nature, religion, and history.
Spain, Take This Chalice from Me and Other Poems: Parallel Text edition
César Vallejo - 1974
Challenging, intense, and difficult to translate, Vallejo's work has often been overshadowed by his fervent endorsement of communism. Noted scholar Ilan Stavans tackles the avant- garde poet's politics head-on in an enlightening new introduction that places Vallejo in his proper literary context, while Margaret Sayers Peden's new translation does full justice to Vallejo's complex literary style. Including Spanish and English versions of more than eighty poems that span the arc of his career, this volume is certain to become the leading collection of Vallejo's work for years to come.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Architects Are Here
Michael Winter - 2007
As the journey progresses, secrets are unveiled, a friendship is tested, and there is a run-in with the Hurley family, a family both men have feared since childhood. In The Architects Are Here, Winter’s fifth and most emotionally resonant novel to date, he explores the nature of grief and friendship in unwaveringly powerful prose, and sheds light on who we are and how we go on when the future seems uncertain.
The Twelve & Other Poems
Alexandr Blok - 1968
In his diary he says he wrote it 'in harmony with the elements...perhaps all political sentiment is so unclean that a single drop of it poisons and renders worthless all the rest; but perhaps, again, it does not destroy the meaning of the poem; and, who knows, perhaps it will in the end prove a ferment, resurrecting The Twelve for another time than ours.' The poem is a unique work, even for Blok himself. The three shorter poems included here will give at least a faint idea (I hope) of the quiet, Symbolist-Romantic flavor of most of Blok's other work." - Anselm Hollo
Mr. Bedford and the Muses
Gail Godwin - 1983
Her novels and short stories speak to women and men about their most intense relationships and heartfelt feelings.In this collection of five short stories and a novella, Ms. Godwin is at her best. In the title novella, "Mr. Bedford," a young would-be writer spends time in England under the strange and watchful eye of a rather unusual elderly couple; in "Amanuensis," a charming college student cares for a famous but blocked novelist, with unpredictable results; and in "The Angry Year," a rebellious student is drawn to two different kinds of men until she discovers what she has been running to and from.
The Shadow of a Gunman
Seán O'Casey - 1923
It centres on a building tenant who is mistaken for an IRA assassin.