Vintage Books strana 26 z 49

Now a Major Motion Picture starring Dame Judi Dench from director Stephen Frears. History's most unlikely friendship--this is the astonishing story of Queen Victoria and her dearest companion, the young Indian Munshi Abdul Karim. In the twilight years of her reign, after the devastating deaths of hertwo great loves--Prince Albert and John Brown--Queen Victoria meets tall and handsome Abdul Karim, a humble servant from Agra waiting tables at her Golden Jubilee. The two form an unlikely bond and within a year Abdul becomes a powerful figure at court, the Queen's teacher, her counsel on Urdu and Indian affairs, and a friend close to her heart. This marked the beginning of the most scandalous decade in Queen Victoria's long reign. As the royal household roiled with resentment, Victoria and Abdul's devotion grew in defiance. Drawn from secrets closely guarded for more than a century, Victoria & Abdul is an extraordinary and intimate history of the last years of the nineteenth-century English court and an unforgettable view onto the passions of an aging Queen.

From the author of the beloved New York Times best-selling The End of Your Life Book Club, an inspiring and magical exploration of the power of books to shape our lives in an era of constant connectivity. For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, and to find the answers to life's questions big and small. In each chapter, he discusses a particular book and how it relates to concerns we all share. These books span centuries and genres--from Stuart Little to The Girl on the Train, from David Copperfield to Wonder, from Giovanni's Room to Rebecca, and from 1984 to Gifts from the Sea. Throughout, Schwalbe tells stories from his life and focuses on the way certain books can help us honor those we've loved and lost, and also figure out how to live each day more fully.

The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face. Alexander Bruno travels the world playing high stakes backgammon and hunting for amateur "whales" who think they can challenge him. Lately he's had a run of bad luck, not helped by the blot that has emerged in his field of vision, which forces him to look at the board sideways. As the blot grows larger, his game gets worse, until, at an opulent mansion in Berlin, he passes out in the middle of a match and receives an alarming diagnosis. Out of money and out of friends, he turns to the only person who can help (and the last person he wants to see): a high-rolling former childhood acquaintance who agrees to pay for Bruno's experimental surgery in Berkeley. But Berkeley is the place where Bruno discovered his psychic gift and where he vowed never to return. There, forced to confront patchouli flashbacks and his uncertain future, he must ask himself: Is he playing the game, or is the game playing him?

Everyone likes Olive Piper. A happy, open-hearted child growing up in the 1950s, her life is contented. When her passion for reading gets her into university she feels sure the world is waiting for her. But then she makes a mistake - the kind any one of us could make - and faces an impossible choice. 'A shattering coming-of-age story' Daily Telegraph

There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearning for connection and betterment, in very different ways, but each of them seems destined to be tripped up by their own baser impulses. What makes these stories so moving is the emotional balance that Moshfegh achieves - the way she exposes the limitless range of self-deception that human beings can employ while, at the same time, infusing the grotesque and outrageous with tenderness and compassion. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources, and the dark energy surging through these stories is oddly and powerfully invigorating. One of the most gifted and exciting young writers in America, she shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.

**A New York Times top 100 Notable Book of the Year**Alexander Bruno is a man with expensive problems. Sporting a tuxedo and trotting the globe, he has spent his adult life as a professional gambler. His particular line of work: backgammon, at which he extracts large sums of money from men who think they can challenge his peerless acumen. In Singapore, his luck turned. Maybe it had something to do with the Blot - a black spot which has emerged to distort Bruno's vision. It's not showing any signs of going away. As Bruno extends his losing streak in Berlin, it becomes clinically clear that the Blot is the symptom of something terrible. There's a surgeon who can help, but surgery is going to involve a lot of money, and worse: returning home to the garish, hash-smoke streets of Berkeley, California. Here, the unseemly Keith Stolarsky - a childhood friend in possession of an empire of themed burger bars and thrift stores - is king. And he's willing to help Bruno out. But there was always going to be a price.

*Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017* *Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2017**Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Sunday Times*Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home. 'This generation's Wild Swans' Daily Telegraph

The prescient and now-classic analysis of the forces of anti-intellectualism in contemporary American life--updated for the era of Trump, Twitter, Breitbart and fake news controversies. The searing cultural history of the last half-century, The Age of American Unreason In A Culture of Lies focuses on the convergence of social forces--usually treated as separate entities--that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; the triumph of internet over print culture; and America's toxic addition to infotainment. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation and sparing neither the right nor the left, Susan Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced "junk thought" that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion. At today's critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the crisis described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's powerful prison memoir begins half an hour before his release on 12 December 1978. A year earlier, he recalls, armed police arrived at his home and took him to Kenya's Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. There, Ngugi lives in a block alongside other political prisoners, but he refuses to give in to the humiliation. He decides to write a novel in secret, on toilet paper - it is a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross. Wrestling with the Devil is Ngugi's unforgettable account of the drama and challenges of living under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the pain caused by his isolation from his family, but also the spirit of defiance and the imaginative endeavours that allowed him to survive.

*** Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Observer and The Economist ***`A gripping story of Churchill's unlikely rise to power' ObserverLondon, May 1940. Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain's government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking the helm, but in Six Minutes in May Nicholas Shakespeare shows how easily events could have gone in a different direction. It took just six minutes for MPs to cast the votes that brought down Chamberlain. Shakespeare moves from Britain's disastrous battle in Norway, for which many blamed Churchill, on to the dramatic developments in Westminster that led to Churchill becoming Prime Minister. Uncovering fascinating new research and delving into the key players' backgrounds, Shakespeare gives us a new perspective on this critical moment in our history. `Totally captivating. It will stand as the best account of those extraordinary few days for very many years' Andrew Roberts`Superbly written... Shakespeare has a novelist's flair for depicting the characters and motives of men' The Times`Utterly wonderful... It reads like a thriller' Peter Frankopan

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

A timely and powerful must-read on how the big tech companies are damaging our culture - and what we can do to fight their influenceFour titanic corporations are now the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. We shop with Amazon, socialise on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information. They have conquered our culture and set us on a path to a world without private contemplation or autonomous thought: a world without mind. In this book, Franklin Foer makes a passionate, deeply informed case for the need to restore our inner lives and reclaim our intellectual culture before it is too late. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. It is a message that could not be more timely.

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction - his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis's heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump's rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING GLENN CLOSE A husband. A wife. A secret. Behind any great man, there's always a greater woman. Joe and Joan Castleman are on an aeroplane, 35,000 feet above the ocean. Joe is thinking about the prestigious literary prize he is about to receive and Joan is plotting how to leave him. For too long Joan has played the role of supportive wife, turning a blind eye to his misdemeanours, subjugating her own talents and quietly being the keystone of his success. The Wife is an acerbic and astonishing take on a marriage from its public face to the private world behind closed doors. Wolitzer has masterfully created an expose of lives lived in partnership and the truth that behind the compromises, dedication and promise inherent in marriage there so often lies a secret...

Jaron Lanier, `the father of Virtual Reality ... a high-tech genius' (Sunday Times), tells the extraordinary story of how in just over three decades Virtual Reality went from being a dream to a reality - and how its power to turn dreams into realities will transform us and our world. Virtual Reality has long been one of the dominant cliches of science fiction. Now Virtual Reality is a reality: those big headsets that make people look ridiculous, even while radiating startled delight; the place where war veterans overcome PTSD, surgeries are trialled, aircraft and cities are designed. But VR is far more interesting than any single technology, however spectacular. It is, in fact, the most effective device ever invented for researching what a human being actually is - and how we think and feel. More than thirty years ago, legendary computer scientist, visionary and artist Jaron Lanier pioneered its invention. Here, in what is likely to be one of the most unusual books you ever read, he blends scientific investigation, philosophical thought experiment and his memoir of a life lived at the centre of digital innovation to explain what VR really is: the science of comprehensive illusion; the extension of the intimate magic of earliest childhood into adulthood; a hint of what life would be like without any limits. As Lanier shows, we are standing on the threshold of an entirely new realm of human creativity, expression, communication and experience. While we can use VR to test our relationship with reality, it will test us in return, for how we choose to use it will reveal who we truly are. Welcome to a mind-expanding, life-enhancing, world-changing adventure.

What is the secret behind happiness? In an attempt to find out, Burkeman tackles a range of subjects from stress, procrastination, laughter, time management and creativity. It's a subject that has occupied some of the greatest philosophers of all time, from Aristotle to Paul McKenna. But how do we sort the good ideas from the terrible ones? Over the past five years, Oliver Burkeman has delved deep into the `happiness industry.' Witty and thought-provoking, Help! doesn't claim to have solved the problem of human happiness, but it might just bring us one step closer.