Vintage Books strana 43 z 69

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's "Inside the Whale", providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. Profound, passionate and insightful, "Imaginary Homelands" is a masterful collection from one of the greatest writers working today.

Wise, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Amidst the tragedy, Marjane's child's eye view adds immediacy and humour, and her story of a childhood at once outrageous and ordinary, beset by the unthinkable and yet buffered by an extraordinary and loving family, is immensely moving. It is also very beautiful; Satrapi's drawings have the power of the very best woodcuts. Persepolis ends on a cliffhanger in 1984, just as fourteen-year-old Marjane is leaving behind her home in Tehran, escaping fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in the West. In Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return we follow our young, intrepid heroine through the next eight years of her life: an eye-opening and sometimes lonely four years of high school in Vienna, followed by a supremely educational and heartwrenching four years back home in Iran. Just as funny and heartbreaking as its predecessor - with perhaps an even greater sense of the ridiculous inspired by life in a fundamentalist state - Persepolis 2 is also as clear-eyed and searing in its condemnation of fundamentalism and its cost to the human spirit. In its depiction of the universal trials of adolescent life and growing into adulthood - here compounded by being an outsider both abroad and at home, and by living in a state where you have no right to show your hair, wear make-up, run in public, date, or question authority - it's raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the fi rst people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's passionate love for each other with grace and humour.Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena budú však identické, bez ohľadu na obálku.

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games. John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of human complexities. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, "The Magus" is a feast for the mind and the senses.

Seymour Levov, a devoted family man and inheritor of his father's factory, comes of age in thriving post-war America. His daughter Merry is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s, and Merry grows up to be a terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.

A shocking and explicit story about obsessive love and Japanese youth counter-culture that sold over a million copies in Japan. This tale of sex and darkness is narrated by Lui, an alienated young Japanese woman who becomes disastrously involved with two dangerous men. Lui first meets her boyfriend Ama in a bar after finding herself mesmerised by his forked tongue. She immediately moves in with him and begins following him down the path to body modification by having her tongue pierced and planning a beautiful tattoo for her back. Ama’s friend Shiba creates this exquisite tattoo and as he works on it Lui begins an illicit and brutal sexual relationship with him. Then, after a violent encounter on the back streets of Tokyo, Ama goes missing and Lui must face up to her choices...

In these pages you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie, and see how warmly Franco greets his sister's boyfriend and the news of their engagement. You will discover, in "The Rosewell Incident", how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance, and plan to install the local casuals as the new governors of Planet Earth. You will not be surprised to read that a televised Hibs v. Hearts game might matter more to one character than the life of his wife, or that two guys fighting over a beautiful girl might agree - on reflection, and after a few pills and many pints of lager - that their friendship is actually more important. And you will be delighted to welcome back 'Juice' Terry Lawson, and to watch what happens when he meets his old nemesis, retired schoolmaster Albert Black, under the strobe-lights of a Miami Beach nightclub.

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

Tender Branson is the last surviving member of the "Creedish Death Cult" and is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Before it crashes he will unfold the tale of his journey from Creedish child to media messiah.

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. Not only a novel of war, A Farewell to Arms is also a love story of immense drama and uncompromising pass ion.Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena budú však identické, bez ohľadu na obál ku.

Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people, fish tumble from the sky, a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night, a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle. Murakami's novel is at once a classic quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary taboos, of patricide, of mother-love, of sister-love. Above all it is an entertainment of a very high order.

In early 1998 I went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, and part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way further north. Th e landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps of dark red earth and rock poking out of the never-ending bush. I imagine that Mars must have a similar feel to it. I went exploring and discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the to wn of Dampier. I felt straight away that I had to find out more about this splendid dog. A few months later I returned to Western Australia and spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories and visiting the places that he knew, w riting up the text as I went along. I hope my cat never finds out that I have written a story to celebrate the life of a dog.'Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena budú však identické, bez ohľadu na obálku.

Rant is the oral history of one Buster Rant Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, detractors, lovers and relations have their say on the man who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. Rant is a darkly glitterin g anti-hero whose recreational drug of choice is rabies, and whose own personal Viagra is the venom of a black widow spider. He soon leaves his half-feral hometown for the big city, where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Part y Crashing. On designated nights, the Party Crashers chase each other in cars in the hope of a collision, and all the while Rant, the 'superspreader', transmits his lethal disease...Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahra ničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena budú však identické, bez ohľadu na obálku.

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden;

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence.In “Confido,” a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention.In “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town.In “Look at the Birdie,” a quack psychiatrist turned “murder counsellor” concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients.The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut’s early style