Book picks similar to
the autobiography of albert einstein by Gerhard Roth
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literature
Hotel Sacher
Rodica Doehnert - 2016
Against all odds, at the height of Belle Époque splendor, Anna Sacher has taken possession of her late husband’s hotel, across the street from the famous opera house. At a time when controlling such a business was an opportunity afforded only to men, Anna is as vigilant as she is relentless. Now, under her ownership, the Hotel Sacher thrives amid the tumult of a changing continent, even as intrigue follows in the shadows. Through its opulent halls stride visitors from all walks of life, including some of the most glamorous figures of Viennese society—opera singers, princes, princesses—and the maids and manservants who wait on them. Some guests will find romance. Some will unearth secrets. And some will discover much more than they expected…
James Clavell His Three Epic Novels: Shogun, Tai Pan, And King Rat
James Clavell - 1975
Empty Hearts
Juli Zeh - 2017
With their democracy facing the wrecking ball, most well-off Germans turn inward, focusing on their own lives. Britta, a wife, mother, and successful businesswoman, ignores the daily news and concentrates on her family and her work running a clinic specializing in suicide prevention. But her legitimate business is connected to a secret and far more lucrative operation known as The Bridge, an outfit that supplies terrorist organizations looking to employ suicide bombers. Using a complex candidate-identifying algorithm designed by Babak, a brilliant programmer and Britta's only employee, The Bridge has effectively cornered the market, and terrorism almost never takes place without Britta's services--which is why news of a thwarted suicide attack in Leipzig comes as a shock. Then The Bridge's database is stolen and a colleague at the clinic murdered, driving Britta, Babak, and their latest recruit into hiding. On their heels is a new terrorist organization called Empty Hearts, a group unlike any they've encountered before. Part suspenseful thriller, part wickedly effective social satire, Empty Hearts is a novel for our times, examining urgent questions of morality, politics, and culture, and presenting a startling vision of a future where empathy is a thing of the past.
Whores of Lost Atlantis: A Novel
Charles Busch - 1993
Set in downtown New York City, Whores of Lost Atlantis features Julian Young, a performer and playwright who tells the story of his acting troupe's hilarious struggle to assemble an Off-Broadway production of Julian's play, Whores of Lost Atlantis, in which Julian acts in drag. The novel's unforgettable cast of characters includes Joel, a perfect English gentleman from Indiana; Roxie, an actress/librarian with moxie; Buster, a voluptuous young alcoholic; Camille, the fiery wig designer Julian considers having an affair with; Perry, Julian's best friend, with a weakness for plastic surgery and peroxide; and Kiko, the wonderfully wicked performance artist who tries to sabotage Julian's career. Getting his play produced proves to be a picaresque adventure with plenty of surprises, leaving the reader feverishly turning pages to see if the show can go on.
The Colour of Memory
Geoff Dyer - 1990
They while away their hours drinking cheap beer, landing jobs and quickly squandering them, smoking weed, dodging muggings, listening to Coltrane, finding and losing a facsimile of love, collecting unemployment, and discussing politics in the way of the besotted young—as if they were employed only by the lives they chose. In his vivid evocation of council flats and pubs, of a life lived in the teeth of romantic ideals, Geoff Dyer provides a shockingly relevant snapshot of a different Lost Generation.
Steal Away: Selected and New Poems
C.D. Wright - 2002
Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning."from "Our Dust"You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity,I was the poetof shadow work and towns with quarter-inchphone books, of failedroadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs andsharpening shops,jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybellinefactory on the penitentiary road."Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."—The New Yorker"Wright shrinks back from nothing."—Voice Literary Supplement"C.D. Wright is a devastating visionary. She writes in light. She sets language on fire."—American LettersC.D. Wright has published nine collections of poetry and earned many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers.
A Tramp Abroad
Mark Twain - 1880
Twain's abundant humor waxes as freely as ever; this time, however, his amusement bears a more cynical cast, as he regards the grand tourist sights of 'Innocents' through older and more experienced eyes.
Scented Gardens for the Blind
Janet Frame - 1963
With alternating interior monologues, the author conjures up the members of the Glace family: Vera, the mother who has willed herself sightless; Erlene, the daughter, who has stopped speaking; and Edward, the husband who abandons his family to make a genealogical study of a family in a distant land. Beyond this is a mind that has burst the confines of everyday individual consciousness and invented its own tormented reality.
The Illicit Happiness of Other People
Manu Joseph - 2012
His wife Mariamma stretches their money, raises their two boys, and, in her spare time, gleefully fantasizes about Ousep dying. One day, their seemingly happy seventeen-year-old son Unni—an obsessed comic-book artist—falls from the balcony, leaving them to wonder whether it was an accident. Three years later, Ousep receives a package that sends him searching for the answer, hounding his son’s former friends, attending a cartoonists’ meeting, and even accosting a famous neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, younger son Thoma, missing his brother, falls head over heels for the much older girl who befriended them both. Haughty and beautiful, she has her own secrets. The Illicit Happiness of Other People—a smart, wry, and poignant novel—teases you with its mystery, philosophy, and unlikely love story.
After Midnight
Irmgard Keun - 1937
Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's Jewish lover, a blockade cuts off the girls' path -- it is the Fürher in a motorcade procession, and the crowd goes mad striving to catch a glimpse of Hitler's raised "empty hand." Then the parade is over, and in the long hours after midnight Sanna and Gerti will face betrayal, death, and the heartbreaking reality of being young in an era devoid of innocence or romance. In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite, and devastating book. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions, and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel. Yet, even as it exposes human folly, the book exudes a hopeful humanism. It is full of humor and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare. After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered.
A Woman in the Polar Night
Christiane Ritter - 1938
Hence, Austrian painter Christiane Ritter was at best ambivalent when her husband asked her to join him on the small Arctic island of Spitsbergen in a tarpaulin-covered hut sixty miles from the nearest neighbor. Yet his descriptions were filled not with cold and hardship but tales of remarkable wildlife, alluring light shows, and treks over water and ice. Won over, Ritter joined her husband and grew to love life on this small isle off Norway's coast, and in this charming memoir she describes her experiences, with insight and wry humor. Whether or not you ever plan a trip to the Arctic, A Woman in the Polar Night offers thoughtful reflections on isolation and the place the natural world holds in the human psyche.
One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition
Paul Verlaine - 1999
Norman Shapiro's superb translations display Verlaine's ability to transform into timeless verse the essence of everyday life and make evident the reasons for his renown in France and throughout the Western world.