Knihy - Literatúra strana 15 z 26
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PEN International
'I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.' Harold Pinter, English PEN President and Literature Nobel 2005
PEN - 'Poets, Essayists, Novelists' - was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship, intellectual co-operation and exchange between writers from around the world. It has since become a worldwide network of writers, a community extended to more than 100 countries who for 100 years has worked to celebrate all literatures without exception and protect freedom of expression.
What was PEN's role in shaping the very concept of human rights even before it was adopted by the United Nations in 1948? How did PEN develop fundamental ideas on free speech as well as the equality of languages and literatures? This book tells the extraordinary story of how writers from around the world placed the celebration of literature and the defence of free speech at the centre of humanity's struggle against repression and terror. From opposing book burning and the persecution of writers in Nazi Germany, to supporting dissident writers during the Cold War and campaigning for imprisoned writers in China today, PEN has worked to safeguard against all kinds of censorship and self-censorship. The extraordinary writers who have been PEN cases is a history of bravery and include Federico Garcia Lorca, Stefan Zweig, Musine Kokalari, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Anna Politkovskaya, Hrant Dink and Svetlana Alexievich.
Those writers' voices, and those of the many others who have battled to uphold the opening phrase of PEN's Charter - 'Literature knows no frontiers' - are still very much with us. Without them, PEN International could not have become the strong, vibrant, active movement it is today.
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Életem
Agatha Christie önéletrajzi könyve időutazásra hívja az olvasót. Az írónő könnyed stílusban, ugyanakkor mély őszinteséggel meséli el saját és családja életét. Az első történetek egészen a viktoriánus korig nyúlnak vissza, bemutatva az angliai közép- és felsőosztály életmódját és szokásait. A fiatal Agathával átélhetjük a táncestek kellemes hangulatát, a párválasztás korabeli nehézségeit, a társadalmi elvárásoknak való megfelelés kényszerét. Az ifjúkori kellemes élmények után megjelennek a háborús borzalmak is, hiszen Agatha ápolónőként közvetlen közelről tapasztalhatta meg a frontról a kórházba került sebesültek szenvedéseit. Az önéletrajz nem csak a korabeli Angliát mutatja be, hiszen az írónő élete során rengeteget utazott, szinte az egész világot bejárta. Első férjével tett világkörüli útját érdekes történetekkel és elragadó természeti leírásokkal eleveníti meg. Időről időre betekintést nyerhetünk egy-egy könyv vagy karakter születésének folyamatába, megismerhetjük a személyt vagy a helyszínt, amely az írónőt ihlette. A könyvben hangsúlyosan szerepelnek Agatha közel-keleti élményei, ezen belül a második férjével végzett régészeti munkássága. A közvetlen hangnemben elmesélt történetek sorozata egy egész világot nyit meg az olvasó számára, ugyanakkor átfogó képet, összegzést nyújt a krimi királynőjének gazdag munkásságáról.
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16,13 €
Dante
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy has defined how people imagine and depict heaven and hell for over 700 years. However, outside of Italy, his other works are not well-known, and less still is generally known about the context he wrote them in.
In Dante, Barbero brings the legendary author's Italy to life, describing the political intrigue, battles, city and society that shaped his life and work.
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23,95 €
The Turning Point
From the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice comes a major new biography of Charles Dickens, tracing the year that would transform his life and times.
The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It's also a turbulent time in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives, and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming.
The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens's London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him, and forever alter Britain's relationship with the world. Fully illustrated, and brimming with fascinating details about the larger-than-life man who wrote Bleak House, this is the closest look yet at one of the greatest literary personalities ever to have lived.
František Topič: příběh nakladatele a obchodníka s uměním
Kniha o Františku Topiči (1858-1941) uzavírá ediční řadu, která mapuje historii a výstavní činnost Topičova domu a salonu, nejstarší soukromé galerie v Praze. Zároveň se jedná také o první monografické dílo věnující se osobě Františka Topiče, který započal v polovině 80. let 19. století na dnešní Národní třídě svou nakladatelskou a později také galerijní činnost. František Topič byl znám svou vlasteneckou veřejnou aktivitou, která se nejvíce odrážela právě v jeho podnikatelské činnosti vydáváním české literatury, podporou českých literátů a následně také českých výtvarných umělců.
Publikace klade velký důraz na osobnost Františka Topiče, na jeho rodinný původ, společenské vazby, filosofická východiska pro jeho činnost, ale také na jeho podnikatelskou činorodost, se kterou sklízel úspěchy přes 40 let. Zvláštní pozornost je pak věnována jeho zájmu o výtvarné umění, ztělesněném v pořádání výstav a obchodu s uměním, nikoli však primárně s vidinou finančního zisku, ale zejména za účelem kulturního vzdělání veřejnosti a povzbuzení sebedůvěry české společnosti.
Největším přínosem tohoto textu je zpracování dosud nepublikovaných archiválií, které umožnily nahlédnout na osobu významného nakladatele, knihkupce a obchodníka s uměním v širokém kontextu.
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10,81 €
Pessoa
'A completely superb and magisterial life of Fernando Pessoa. Finally, this extraordinary poet gets the great biography he deserves. Unsurpassable' William Boyd
'Definitive and sublime. Zenith has written the only kind of biography truly permissible, an account of a life that plucks at the very borders and burdens of the notion of a self' New York Times
For many thousands of readers Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is almost a way of life. Ironic, haunting and melancholy, this completely unclassifiable work is the masterpiece of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic writers.
Richard Zenith's Pessoa at last allows us to understand this extraordinary figure. Some eighty-five years after his premature death in Lisbon, where he left over 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) can now be celebrated as one of the great modern poets. Setting the story of his life against the nationalistic currents of European history, Zenith charts the heights of Pessoa's explosive imagination and literary genius.
Much of Pessoa's charm and strangeness came from his writing under a variety of names that he used not only to conceal his identity but also to write in wildly varied styles with different imagined personalities. Zenith traces the back stories of virtually all of these invented others, called 'heteronyms', demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself.
Zenith's monumental work confirms the power of Pessoa's words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life. It is also a wonderful book about Lisbon, the city which Pessoa reinvented and through which his different selves wandered.
'Finally! A brilliant biography that places Pessoa where he should have always belonged, with true giants' Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name
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Palm Sunday
'Kurt Vonnegut is either the funniest serious writer around or the most serious funny writer' Los Angeles Times Book Review
An 'autobiographical collage' of speeches, stories and essays, in Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut writes beguilingly about everything from country music to George Bush, his favourite comedians to his mother's midnight mania, and bittersweet tributes to a dead best friend and a dead marriage.
Resonating with his singular voice, this is a self-portrait in writing that showcases why Kurt Vonnegut is as genius an essayist and commentator on American society as he is a novelist.
Somebodys Daughter
If family was everything, the source of all that was needed to complete the picture, I was a wilfully missing piece of the puzzle...'Throughout her adolescence, Ashley Ford doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men.
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Charles Dickens
From a bitter and poverty-stricken childhood to a career as the most acclaimed and best loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels of life in Victorian England. The enormous quantity of work, his public readings and his difficult relationships has made him a figure of enduring fascination.
In this biography Jane Smiley reveals Charles Dickens as his contemporaries would have done, getting to know him more intimately than ever before. At the same time Smiley offers interpretations of almost all of Dickens' major works, showing how 'his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels'.
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11,50 €
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was one of the world's most remarkable writers, whose characters are as alive today as they were two hundred years ago. Despite being one of the most perceptive writers about people and relationships, she never married and always lived with her parents and sister Cassandra.
Perhaps unusual for women at that time, Jane Austen was acutely aware of the larger political and social world around her, but chose to focus her novels on the family as a microcosm through which to explore human nature.
The prizewinning novelist Carol Shields gives us a beautifully written, perceptive look at the life of one of the finest and most popular English novelists of all time.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was undoubtedly one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. She was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, and her writings were works of astonishing originality.
Nigel Nicolson is the son of Vita Sackville-West, who was Virginia Woolf's most intimate friend, and for a short time her lover. He spent many days in her company and he has threaded his recollections of her throughout this unique narrative of her life.
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How the Just So Stories Were Made
From "How the Leopard Got Its Spots" to "The Elephant's Child," Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories have delighted readers across the world for more than a century. In this original study, John Batchelor explores the artistry with which Kipling created the Just So Stories, using each tale as an entry point into the writer's life and work-including the tragedy that shadows much of the volume, the death of his daughter Josephine.
Batchelor details the playful challenges the stories made to contemporary society. In his stories Kipling played with biblical and other stories of creation and imagined fantastical tales of animals' development and man's discovery of literacy.
Richly illustrated with original drawings and family photographs, this account reveals Kipling's public and private lives-and sheds new light on a much-loved and tremendously influential classic.
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On Nineteen Eighty-Four
From the author of the definitive biography of George Orwell, a captivating account of the origin and enduring power of his landmark dystopian novel
Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, George Orwell's 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of "alternative facts." The world we live in is often described as an Orwellian one, awash in inescapable surveillance and invasions of privacy.
On 1984 dives deep into Orwell's life to chart his earlier writings and key moments in his youth, such as his years at a boarding school, whose strict and charismatic headmaster shaped the idea of Big Brother. Taylor tells the story of the writing of the book, taking readers to the Scottish island of Jura, where Orwell, newly famous thanks to Animal Farm but coping with personal tragedy and rapidly declining health, struggled to finish 1984. Published during the cold war-a term Orwell coined-Taylor elucidates the environmental influences on the book. Then he examines 1984's post-publication life, including its role as a tool to understand our language, politics, and government.
In a current climate where truth, surveillance, censorship, and critical thinking are contentious, Orwell's work is necessary. Written with resonant and reflective analysis, On 1984 is both brilliant and remarkably timely.
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Orwell
One of the most enduringly popular and controversial writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell's work is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime. Possibly, in the age of Brexit and populism, even more so. He foresaw 'Fake News' in Nineteen Eighty Four's 'Doublethink', the creation of the EU and predicted that post-Imperial xenophobia would cause Britain to leave it.
Separate from his career as a political theorist and novelist, Orwell's life is fascinating in its own right. Disillusioned with his family's upper middle-class complacency, Orwell grew to despise the class system that spawned him, despite being unable to fully detach from it. In truth, he reserved as much suspicion and distaste for the 'proles' as he did pity.
Orwell: A Man of Our Time offers a vivid portrait of the man behind the writings, placing both him and his work at the centre of the current political landscape.
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Philip Roth
Appointed by Philip Roth and granted complete access and independence, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the post-war literary scene.
Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of post-war American culture.
'Superlative... definitive and genuinely gripping' SUNDAY TIMES
'Utterly engrossing' EVENING STANDARD
'Compulsively readable... Beautifully written... Definitive' OBSERVER
Asleep and Awake
An elegantly jubilant and personal new collection celebrating love, life and creativity from award-winning poet and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, John Fuller
In this personal and characteristically brilliant new collection from John Fuller, an abundance of memories abound. From "those once endless years" of a childhood in wartime - tasting of Granny's chicken soup, twizzers and cherry-go-rips - to the pattern of family and friendships, important milestones are brought to vivid life. In 'Before We Met - and After' a sequence of recollections cherish a wife on her eightieth birthday; 'In Whose Head' a piece by Schumann is revisited through advancing years; and in 'Keeper of the Fire' and 'In Memory of John Bayley' late poems of remembrance memorialise lost friends.
These are poems of being and time, full of lyric feeling and Fuller's distinctive wit and lightness of touch. Alive with the clang and sway of the "chosen colours of daily family life", together they form a resonant gathering of poems that celebrate, with thoughtfulness and joy, "the feel and length of our lives".
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Autobiografie
Proslulý argentinský spisovatel zachytil svůj životní příběh do nerozsáhlé autobiografie. Kapitoly s věcnými názvy: Rodina a dětství, Evropa, Buenos Aires, Dospělost a Přeplněná léta pojednávají o jednotlivých etapách života a tvorby.
Vznik Borgesovy autobiografie podnítil jeho blízký spolupracovník a přítel Norman Thomas di Giovanni, který se dlouhodobě věnoval překládání Borgesova díla do angličtiny, společně koncipovali Borgesovy Spisy a spolupracovali na jejich překladu do angličtiny. Di Giovanni totiž postřehl, že čtenářům výrazně uniká, jak hluboce je Borges a jeho psaní zakořeněno v argentinské zkušenosti, a proto jim připadá jako autor bez kontextu, který se někde náhle zjevil.
Text autobiografie vznikal v roce 1969 za úzké spolupráce Borgese s di Giovannim, jež spočívala nejen v tom, že Borges její znění di Giovannimu diktoval - činil tak z důvodu své oční nemoci již posledních dvacet let se všemi svými díly -, ale zejména v tom, že se di Giovanni výrazně zasadil, aby se Borges držel předem stanovených témat a neodbíhal od nich, jak by jinak činil. O vzniku autobiografie pojednává di Giovanniův text, jejž řadíme jako předmluvu.
Autobiografie poprvé vyšla v americkém časopise The New Yorker 19. září 1970, a byla posléze zařazena do svazku The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969 (New York, E. P. Dutton 1970) s názvem "An Autobiographical Essay". Španělský překlad vyšel pod názvem Autobiografía 1899-1970 až v roce 1999. V našem vydání vycházíme z prvního, tedy anglického znění.
"V mém věku by si člověk měl být vědom vlastních hranic a toto vědomí by mohlo vést ke štěstí. Když jsem byl mladý, považoval jsem literaturu za hru šikovných a překvapujících variací; teď když jsem nalezl svůj vlastní hlas, mám pocit, že opravování a předělávání moje koncepty ani moc nezlepší ani moc nezkazí. To je samozřejmě jeden z největších prohřešků proti jedné z hlavních tendencí literatury tohoto století - malichernému přepisování -, která vedla člověka, jako byl Joyce, k vydávání nákladných fragmentů, vznešeně nazvaných ,Rozpracované dílo'. Myslím, že svá nejlepší díla už mám za sebou. To mi dodává jisté tiché uspokojení a klid." J. L. Borges - Autobiografie
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8,88 €
Agatha Christie: Životopis
Život a dielo Agathy Christie spracovalo množstvo autorov a sama kráľovná detektívok vydala svoj vlastný životopis, Janet Morganová však dostala ponuku priamo od Agathinej rodiny, aby napísala jej „oficiálnu biografiu“. Vďaka tomu získala exkluzívny prístup k Agathiným zápisníkom, korešpondencii i ďalším písomnostiam a tiež mala príležitosť vyspovedať početných Agathiných príbuzných, priateľov a spolupracovníkov.
Výsledkom je obsiahla a dôkladne spracovaná publikácia, ktorá sa opiera predovšetkým o citáty a svedectvá jednak samotnej Agathy Christie, ako aj tých, ktorí k nej mali blízko. Čitateľom tak ponúka nové uhly pohľadu na Agathinu osobnosť, prácu, rodinu, názory, skúsenosti – a možno dokonca aj na jej záhadné a nikdy nevysvetlené jedenásť dní trvajúce zmiznutie...
dostupné aj ako:
I Wanna Be Yours
This is a memoir as wry, funny, moving and vivid as its inimitable subject himself. This book will be a joy for both lifelong fans and for a whole new generation. John Cooper Clarke is a phenomenon: Poet Laureate of Punk, rock star, fashion icon, TV and radio presenter, social and cultural commentator.
At 5 feet 11 inches (32in chest, 27in waist), in trademark dark suit, dark glasses, with dark messed-up hair and a mouth full of gold teeth, he is instantly recognizable. As a writer his voice is equally unmistakable and his own brand of slightly sick humour is never far from the surface. I Wanna Be Yours covers an extraordinary life, filled with remarkable personalities: from Nico to Chuck Berry, from Bernard Manning to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Elvis Costello to Gregory Corso, Gil Scott Heron, Mark E.
Smith and Joe Strummer, and on to more recent fans and collaborators Alex Turner, Plan B and Guy Garvey. Interspersed with stories of his rock and roll and performing career, John also reveals his boggling encyclopaedic take on popular culture over the centuries: from Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe to Pop Art, pop music, the movies, fashion, football and showbusiness - and much, much more, plus a few laughs along the way.
Biografie v kategórii Literatúra sa zaoberajú životnými príbehmi a skúmaním významných spisovateľov a literárnych osobností. Tieto knihy nám ponúkajú hlbší pohľad do života a diela jednotlivcov, ktorí zanechali trvalý odkaz vo svete literatúry.
V biografiách literárnych osobností sa často analyzujú a opisujú významné udalosti a skúsenosti, ktoré formovali spisovateľov a ovplyvnili ich tvorbu. Autori týchto kníh sa zameriavajú na výskum životných príbehov, vzťahov, tvorivých procesov a vplyvov, ktoré formovali jedinečný literárny hlas a príspevok týchto osobností.
Tieto životopisy nám umožňujú priblížiť sa k mysli a inšpiráciám spisovateľov, pochopiť ich tvorivý vývoj, motívy, témy a techniky písania. Tieto knihy nám poskytujú kontext prechodu od života spisovateľa k ich literárnemu dedičstvu, a tak nám umožňujú hlbšie porozumieť a interpretovať ich diela.
Biografie literárnych osobností sa zameriavajú na rôzne literárne epochy, žánre a kultúrne kontexty. Medzi populárne témy patria životopisy klasických spisovateľov, moderných autorov, básnikov, dramatikov a literárnych ikon, ktorých diela majú významný vplyv na literárnu kultúru.
