Vintage Books strana 7 z 48

Fury is a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since, the Bombay of "Midnight's Children" have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. "Fury" opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives looking, perversely, for escape. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of the hugely popular doll, Little Brain, whose multiform ubiquity - as puppet, cartoon and masked woman - now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating: it escalates into a rage-filled battle, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgiveable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees home and family and becomes a sort of spiritual mendicant - except that he has a credit card and a duplex on the Upper West Side. Solanka discovers that he has come to a city roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentment. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild.

A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; and more. This work presents a collection of stories.

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever. They are told by the people who have all answered an ad headlined ‘Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months’. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of ‘real life’ that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But ‘here’ turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world – and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell – and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Lindbergh had publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany. Then, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he also negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst. Praise for The Plot Against America": ""The Plot Against America" is an epic, built - painstakingly, passionately, near perfectly - of the small structures of the particular. A dark, humane masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers" - "The Times". "The word genius doesn't seem excessive - utterly plausible. "The Plot Against America" creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism" - "The Guardian". "Magnificent. Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive""

Cats slink across the pages; the seasons are marked by cherry blossom and Japanese maple; spaghetti strands or telephone cords separate the days; and a generous selection of quotations and extracts from Murakami's novels and stories appear on almost every page to inspire, amuse or entertain. This is a diary like no other, faithful to all that is witty, surreal, sexy and beautiful in Murakami's work. A must-have for fans of Murakami, fans of Vintage fiction and fans of unique design, this diary will appeal to everyone as a quirky companion for 2009.

Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, the Gallipoli campaign and the subsequent bitter struggle between Greeks and Turks, Birds Without Wings" traces the fortunes of one small community in south-west Anatolia - a town in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully for centuries. When war is declared and the outside world intrudes, the twin scourges of religion and nationalism lead to forced marches and massacres, and the peaceful fabric of life is destroyed. Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim the Goatherd who has courted her since infancy are but two of the many casualties. With the end of a community that once transcended religious differences, their great love seems destined to end in tragedy and madness..."

Pierre and Agnès marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. This is Balzac or The Forsyte Saga on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close-up with Némirovsky’s characteristically sly humour and clear-eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, telling observation of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, this is Némirovsky at the height of her powers. The exodus and flow of refugee humanity through the town in both wars foreshadows Suite Française, but differently, because this is Northern France, near the Somme, and the town itself is twice razed. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly... It opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach, and ends with a changed world, under Nazi occupation.

In November 2008, the United States elected a new President. But the collapse of twenty years of Republican conservativism means the country is already conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America that began as 'the last best hope for mankind' came to be so suspected and vilified around much of the world. "The American Future: A History", written by an author who has spent half his life there, takes the long view of how the United States has come to this anguished moment of truth about its own identity as a nation and its place in the world. In each of the chapters devoted to the most compelling issues facing Americans now - the projection of power ('American war'); race, immigration and the problematic promise of e pluribus unum ('American skin'); the intensity of religious conviction in public life ('American fervour'); the mystique of American land ('American Space') and its battles with the imperatives of profit - Schama traces the deep history of the present crisis. Cumulatively the chapters build into a history of American exceptionalism - the 'American difference' that means so much to its people but which has led it into calamities as well as triumphs. "The American Future: A History" argues that if you want to know what is truly at stake, you need to absorb these stories and understand this history - for understanding is the condition of hope.

Born in pre-Revolutionary China and brought up in the Midlands, Esther Cheo Ying returned to China in 1949 after a traumatic childhood, convinced that there she would find the happiness and sense of belonging she longed for. Caught up in the turmoil of civil war and sympathetic to the Communist Revolution, she joined the Red Army and then stayed on to work in the new People's Republic. But despite her determination to make a new life in China, could she truly be happy in a country which encouraged constant self criticism and viewed her as a "false foreign devil?" Here is an extraordinary account of life before the Cultural Revolution, and a fascinating insight into one woman's struggle to come to terms with her own identity.

Azaro is a spirit child who is born only to live for a short while before returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companions. Now he has chosen to stay in the world of the living. This is his story.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. "The Gathering" is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Sammy's had a bad week - his wallet's gone, along with his new shoes, he's been arrested then beaten up by the police and thrown out on the street - and he's just gone blind. He remembers a row with his girlfriend, but she seems to have disappeared. Things aren't looking too good for Sammy and his problems have hardly begun.

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he here and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighbourhood butcher seems to have gone mad – mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in the every corner for his beloved boy. So Marcus leaves and, far from home, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation is the story of a young man’s education in life’s terrifying chances and bizarre obstructions. It is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage and error, told with all the inventive energy and with Roth has at his command.

Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize-winning novel describes the world of ten-year-old Paddy Clarke, growing up in Barrytown, north Dublin. From fun and adventure on the streets, boredom in the classroom to increasing isolation at home, "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" is the story of a boy who sees everything but understands less and less.

When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his past.