Vintage Books strana 5 z 75

Hemingway's enduring story of resilience and solitude: One of the most powerful tales of courage and endurance ever written An ageing fisherman sets out alone into the Gulf Stream, determined to prove that his strength and skill have not left him. When he hooks a great marlin, he begins a struggle that will test his pride and his place in the world. Simple, powerful and deeply moving, The Old Man and the Sea captures what it means to persist - even in the face of inevitable loss. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

One of Cinema's great masters revisits his childhood - and the end of his parent's marriage - in a novella of awakening Over the course of one summer, eight-year-old Pu Bergman realises that his parents are no longer in love. Surrounded by the quiet idyll of the Swedish countryside, with its ponds, rivers and woods, the daily chaos of the family's ramshackle summer home threatens to end the bright, brilliant haze of Pu's childhood world. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. Then one day a disturbing package arrives in the post... The loft is her retreat, a place she can draw undisturbed, hidden away even from her own family. But the arrival of the parcel threatens her fragile equilibrium. It contains extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. They date back to a time when she was sent away by her husband to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest?

The life of a poet becomes a parable of hope in Yi Mun-yol's searching novella of art, status and selfhood. With their family condemned as traitors, two young brothers are sent away in disguise to save their lives. One grows up by his wits, accepting what has been lost. The other is set on a different path, shaped by a determination to restore the family's place in the world. As he wanders in search of recognition as a poet, ambition and survival begin to pull him in opposing directions. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Arthur Conan Doyle’s tense, unsettlingly supernatural tale of obsession and control After Austin Gilroy’s fiancée is hypnotised, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of the woman responsible – Miss Penclosa. Soon, disturbances begin to unsettle him: actions he cannot account for, thoughts that seem to come from elsewhere. As Penclosa’s hold over Gilroy tightens, he discovers how little control he has over his own mind. Told through a series of journal entries, The Parasite follows a self-declared rational man drawn into a relationship he cannot escape - or fully understand. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Out over the towering Coral D, sky artists paint the sky with clouds. A musical statue is broken down, but finds new life in unwanted places. A mysterious new resident introduces a new way of making poetry - aided by machine. Drawing together some of the most mesmerising and mind-blowing stories from J.G. Ballard's Vermillion Sands art-infused universe, this short collection is a passport into the genius of science fiction's most visionary pioneer. Includes the stories: Cry Hope, Cry Fury!, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral-D, Venus Smiles and Studio 5, The Stars BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

From one of the great Chinese authors of the twentieth century, these newly translated stories illuminate the most intimate matters of the human heart Since childhood, Ruliang has sketched the same face in the margins of his books, tracing its lines without knowing why. Years later, he meets Cynthia – and recognises it at once. As their lives draw together and drift apart, what once seemed like fate begins to feel more uncertain. In these brief, evocative stories, Eileen Chang traces the pull of memory, love and chance. Includes the stories: Young at the Time, Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift and Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message. 2119: With the UK's lowlands submerged by rising seas, those who survive are haunted by all that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, a university scholar, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, he reveals a story of entangled love and a brutal crime that challenges everything he thought he knew about the past.

She's living a perfect life - so why does Laurence feel so torn? Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris - Laurence's life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she's at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth. Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth - by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.

These intimate love letters reveal the open relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre, two of the twentieth century's groundbreaking thinkers. Simone de Beauvoir lived her feminist philosophy. She never married or had children, she had affairs with both men and women, and she actively defied the norms for women of her era. At the same time, she conducted an intense, long-term relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she referred to as her husband. De Beauvoir and Sartre met as philosophy students in Paris in 1929. For over fifty years, until their deaths in the 1980s, the couple had a close open relationship. This book contains her letters to him, revealing the details of her everyday life and her passion for the man who shared her ideals. It is an intimate portrait of a woman living in an adventurous, complicated way in the name of individual freedom.

An immersive hidden history of the female body, with radical implications for how we understand our bodies today Sex and abortion, pregnancy and birth, feeding and rocking and washing: these are embodied practices with a deep past. Yet the history of the female body remains largely unknown - even unimagined. Combining memoir with archival research, from fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries, Erin Maglaque assembles a chorus of women's voices from the pre-modern past. We encounter a vanished past both strikingly recognisable and strange, when ideas of the female body, sexuality, work and pleasure were more varied, more unruly, and sometimes freer. This is the invisible history of the female body - birthing, caring, working, desiring. Reaching deep into the shared history of women's lives, Presence points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.

Rome's Age of Revolution corrects the triumphalist narrative that the Christian message was so persuasive, and indeed superior, that people converted in huge numbers, abandoning their pagan beliefs, thereby turning a small, persecuted sect into the state religion of the Roman Empire. Tim Whitmarsh shows that Christianity would never have succeeded if it had not taken advantage of the infrastructure and culture of the Roman Empire; in turn the new religion was indelibly shaped and transformed by Roman beliefs and ideas, especially those circulating in the Greek-speaking, or Hellenistic, eastern parts of the empire. This radical transformation, Tim argues, can only be described as a revolution. And the consequences are with us to this day.

The pre-eminent exponent of anti-monopoly law explains why we have no option but to break Big Tech's monopolies, and that doing so would unleash innovation and growth. Today's dominant tech platforms - the places where we exchange information and buy things online - could be the most powerful engines of prosperity ever invented. Instead, they are the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever created and a grave threat to our societies. Here the pre-eminent exponent of anti-monopoly law Tim Wu, who coined the phrase 'net neutrality', explains why breaking Big Tech's monopolies would unleash innovation and growth and is essential if we are to avoid further social division. In their place he sets out the five key ways in which future platforms should be managed to harness the extraordinary potential of these essential technologies and to help build the balanced economies we so badly need.

The tech disruptor. The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk's SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use - without really questioning what it means - and asks if the modern idea of genius is distorting our view of the world.

Rachel Long’s vivid new collection is a study of toxic love, crisis and recovery, at once moving and whip-smart, from one of our brightest stars in poetry. 'At first you eat less because you’re happy, / so fricking happy, the way you are in high summer / when you just can’t because of the sun.' Sparrow on the Rooftop tells a story of new love: the summer-like giddiness of it, the ferocity of obsession, and the stark hollowing of absence. Alongside this affair, and unleashed by its intensity, unfolds another story, half-buried, about our young narrator’s uneasy relationship with her body: ‘Black girls// don’t get/ eating disorders./ That’s a white girl/ thing.’ Desire, indulgence, denial, and transformation are some of the themes that animate this engrossing, at times frighteningly intimate, narrative collection. With fierce wit and uncommon insight, Sparrow interrogates the self and other, and the experience of self as other. These remarkable, penetrating, headlong poems chart disorder and desire, break-up and breakdown, and the hard path towards recovery, confirming Rachel Long as one of the most gifted poets of her generation.

A profoundly personal and moving portrait of a misunderstood people and their on-going journey - shedding new light on Romani history and what it means to be Romani in Europe today. The Romani story is not widely known, and that invisibility has allowed fear and hostility to thrive. The Roma, full of extraordinary individuals and hitherto ignored moments from history, corrects this. We meet the artist who chronicled her experiences of the Holocaust in Austria; the boxer who should have become Germany's light-heavyweight champion only to have his win scratched from the record by the Nazis; and a eighteenth-century woman in London who was sentenced to death for kidnapping to be exonerated by the detective work of an unconvinced judge. Throughout, Madeline Potter weaves in her travels though Romani Europe and experience as a Romani woman in Romania and in Britain. Blending evocative history and lyrical travel writing with intimate accounts of racism and calls for change, The Roma is a powerful story of resistance, resilience and survival - and a celebration of a vibrant culture and misunderstood people.