One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1962
    The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison SalisburyThis unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.

Oceanside blues =: Samudrantike


Dhruv Bhatt - 1993
    My heart suddenly grew heavy with sadness. I 'felt that the entire system needed a complete change. Education should mean teaching to love nature. A system that can produce many more Noor-bhāis should be evolved. Man, too, should be able to inspire in birds and beasts the same confidence and trust that the black drongo inspired in the smaller birds. But who would be able to bring about that big a change? Could I, one who had come here on an assignment to draw up blueprints of a chemical industrial zone, affect that change? ...

Lonely Traveller


Sereno Sky - 2014
    Bernardo was 14 years old when Woodstock took place. Follow his spiritual development from an early age to becoming a full-fledged hippie. His travels will take you to former famous hippie-hangouts like Amsterdam, Ibiza, Formentera and La Gomera. Somewhere along his way he meets Anne, another hippie drop-out. From that point on the story takes you on a very intensive spiritual journey as they struggle to find their way in search of a better world. The story focuses on the idealism of many young people in those days and their quest to find inner peace and what to do with their lives in a world they don’t understand. This novel is not only of historical value, but also addresses a lot of problems that humanity is still facing today, such as the ongoing destruction of mother earth and its resources, the way people treat each other and animals, and the pursuit of inner peace. The message contained in this book promotes tolerance, understanding, love and peace in the world.

Captain Maximus


Barry Hannah - 1985
    hard drinkers, passionate lovers, good haters, living on the edge, hurling fury at a complacent world."

Tess of the D'Urbervilles


John Escott - 2005
    Tess Durbeyfield leaves home on the first of her fateful journeys, and meets the ruthless Alec d'Urberville. Thomas Hardy's impassioned story tells of hope and disappointment, rejection and enduring love.

Homo Faber


Max Frisch - 1957
    Walter Faber is an emotionally detached engineer forced by a string of coincidences to embark on a journey through his past.

River God (Ancient Egypt, #1) / Gold Mine (Omnibus)


Wilbur Smith - 2005
    But Tanus will have to defy the same gods to attain the reward they have forbidden him, an object more prized than battle's glory: possession of the Lady Lostris, a rare beauty with skin the color of oiled ceder--destined for the adoration of a nation, and the love of one extraordinary man.Gold MineNorth of Johannesburg, five companies share the Kitchenerville fields, furiously blasting and digging deep into the earth. For some men, gold mining is a way of life--and death. For some it's just a business. For one man, it's the most dangerous game of all...Rod Ironsides makes love to his boss's wife and drives his miners faster and harder than anyone has ever dared. A few weeks ago, Ironsides had a passion for golf and one-night stands. Now, he has been handed a prize and a curse: to blast through rock and reap a fortune--or be destroyed.From a split-second, oxygen-sucking explosion to a looming underground wall of water, there are a dozen ways Rod can fail. But his passion and fury won't let him back down from a conspiracy he cannot see: men who want to turn his mine into a death trap--for the bloodiest pay-day of all...

The Golovlyov Family


Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin - 1880
    There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry. One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Shanghai


Christopher New - 1985
    Shocked and sickened though he is, he must adapt himself to the brutal but fascinating city of extremes, and he spends the rest of his life there, through all the vicissitudes of revolution, riot, lawlessness and war. He makes, loses, and regains a fortune, dangerously crosses a powerful triad leader, enters politics, is imprisoned by the Japanese and survives to see the communists march in to mete out their own brand of cruel justice. An intricate weaving of fact with fiction, Shanghai is the story of a man at the centre of one of history's most dangerous and crucial epochs. It is also the love story of Denton and his exquisite mistress, Su-mei, who eventually becomes his wife.

Futureproof


N. Frank Daniels - 2006
    No future. Only now.Originally a self-publishing success launched on N. Frank Daniels's MySpace page, the novel Futureproof tells the story of Luke and his friends as they navigate Atlanta’s subculture of delinquents. In short order, the seemingly harmless high from his first cigarette sends Luke on a downward spiral that ends only after years of self-abuse. It is an extreme cautionary tale told with sensitivity, ferocity, and grit.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge


Rainer Maria Rilke - 1910
    The very wide audience which Rilke’s work commands today will welcome the reissue in paperback of this extremely perceptive translation of the Notebooks by M. D. Herter Norton. A masterly translation of one of the first great modernist novels by one of the German language's greatest poets, in which a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death within them and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilke's semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful coming-of-age story.

The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes


Stephen Marlowe - 1991
    Marlowe gives it to us. The backdrop is Renaissance Europe, a world alive with creative ferment, triple-crossing intrigue, and the passionate quest for novelty. Lofty tragedy and lyric poetry still reign as queens of the literary arts, but young writers heady with ambition seek live action to give substance to their teeming imaginations. It is scoundrel time, and the novel is in gestation. To enter Cervantes's world we cross a threshold that is Shakespearean and quixotic into a metaphysical wonderland where time expands to become space and vast vaulted distances bend back on themselves, where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle back and forth in the great loom of the artist's imagination. Marlowe's Cervantes is a towering creation: flesh and blood and living legend, actor in and creator of the events in his own fantastical life story. He not only survives war, prison, torture, and poverty, he survives death itself, growing inexorably toward the writing of Don Quixote, which would bring both him and his character immortal fame.

The Gadfly


Ethel Lilian Voynich - 1897
    The story centers on the life of the protagonist, Arthur Burton, as a member of the Youth movement, and his antagonist, Padre Montanelli. A thread of a tragic relationship between Arthur and his love Gemma simultaneously runs through the story. It is a story of faith, disillusionment, revolution, romance, and heroism.

The Lost Deep Thoughts: Don't Fight the Deepness


Jack Handey - 1998
    Illustrated with aptly corny nature photographs, The Lost Deep Thoughts takes a profound plunge into the world of Handey's life-altering aphorisms. 96 photos.

Vera & Linus


Jesse Ball - 2006
    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.