At Penguin Classics our mission has always been to make the best books ever written available to everyone. And that also means constantly redefining and refreshing exactly what makes a ‘classic’.
That’s where Modern Classics come in. Since 1961 they have been an organic, ever-growing and ever-evolving list of books from the last hundred (or so) years that we believe will continue to be read over and over again.
They could be books that have inspired political dissent, such as Animal Farm, or caused shock and outrage, like Lolita or A Clockwork Orange. Many have even led to great films, from In Cold Blood to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Whatever the reason, Penguin Modern Classics continue to inspire, entertain and enlighten millions of readers everywhere.
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Why Read the Classics? 'A classic book at bedtime, a seductive invitation to forgotten opportunities or rereading' The Times Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are 'rereading', not 'reading'), this is an absorbing collection of Italo Calvino's witty and passionate criticism. With thirty-six essays – including thoughts on figures like Homer, Hemingway, Borges, Tolstoy and Twain – Why Read the Classics? represents Calvino's own canon of great works and is full of the fascinating insights of the mercurial, incisive mind of a brilliant reader, as well as writer. |
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Numbers in the Dark
Numbers in the Dark is a collection of short stories covering the length of Italo Calvino's extraordinary writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. They include witty allegories and wise fables; revolt finally arriving at a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts; a computer programmer considering the possible sequence of a series of brutal acts; and dialogues with Henry Ford, a Neanderthal and the gloomy, overthrown Montezuma... With touches of the sinister and the comic, the moral and the ridiculous, these dozens of stories are full of brilliance and inventiveness. |
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Under the Jaguar Sun 'The pleasure of these stories is intense' Sunday Telegraph A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him – sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile's perfumery, to a London drummer stepping over spent, naked bodies. |
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The Path to the Spiders' Nests 'The novella that established his reputation … has the stark black-and-white quality of the classic Italian neo-realist films' Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who – while the Second World War rages – sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town – particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'. Among those his sister sleeps with is a German sailor, and Pin is dared to steal his pistol, hiding it among the spiders' nests in an act of rebellion that entangles him in the adults' war. Published in 1947, Italo Calvino's first novel remains startling, and the 1964 preface is his most brilliant piece of literary self-examination. |
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Fantastic Tales Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. |
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Six Memos for the Next Millennium 'Describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty' Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books From tales of fabulous enchantments and supernatural horror to subtler, more psychological terrors, the best of nineteenth-century fantastic literature is collected here by Italo Calvino. These mysterious and macabre tales include Hoffmann's nightmarish 'The Sandman', Poe's terrifying 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and Dickens' chilling ghost story 'The Signal-Man', with relatively unknown works from celebrated writers including Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Sir Walter Scott, Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stevenson, alongside lesser-known contributors. Each tale comes with a fascinating introduction by Italo Calvino. |
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The Road to San Giovanni 'Brimming with Calvino's beautifully crafted prose, dry humour and continual questioning of his own writing and memory' Observer The Road to San Giovanni contains five autobiographical essays – fascinating expeditions through the memories of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. In these elegant meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contract, language and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance. |
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Tarka the Otter In the wild there is no safety. The otter club Tarka grows up with his mother and sisters, learning to swim, catch fish – and to fear the cry of the hunter and the flash of the metal trap. Soon he must fend for himself, travelling through rivers, woods, moors, ponds and out to sea, sometimes with the female otters White-tip and Greymuzzle, always on the run. Eventually, chased by a pack of hounds, he meets his nemesis, the fearsome dog Deadlock, and must fight for his life. Tarka the Otter depicts a fierce struggle for survival in the wild that also carries echoes of the author's experiences of the First World War. The result of years spent observing otters in north Devon, it is a celebration of life, the eternal rhythms of nature and the English countryside. |
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Uncommon Danger 'A crackerjack spy story, jammed with action, intrigue, thrills and super-villainy' Saturday Review Kenton's career as a journalist depends on his facility with languages, his knowledge of European politics and his quick judgement. Where his judgement sometimes fails him, however, is in his personal life. When he travels to Nuremberg to investigate a story about a top-level meeting of Nazi officials, he inadvertently finds himself on a train bound for Austria after a bad night of gambling. Stranded with no money, Kenton jumps at the chance to earn a fee helping a refugee smuggle securities across the border. Yet he soon discovers that the documents he holds have far more than cash value – and that they could cost him his life... |
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The Mask of Dimitrios English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrios – an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios' steps across Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually discovers more about his subject's shadowy history, fascination tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios' criminal underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be on the line. |
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Cause for Alarm 'The best spy story in a long time' The New York Times Nicky Marlow needs a job. He's engaged to be married and the employment market in Britain in 1937 is pretty slim. So when his fiancée points out the position with an English armaments manufacturer in Italy, he jumps at the chance. Soon after he arrives, however, he learns the sinister truth about his predecessor's departure and finds himself courted by two agents with dangerously different agendas. In the process, Marlow realizes that it's not so simple just to do the job he's paid for – not in fascist Italy, on the eve of a world war. |
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Epitaph for a Spy At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain, society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother's farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits. |
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Journey into Fear 'Holds one up as effectively as a gun barrel' Evening Standard It is 1940 and Mr Graham, a quietly-spoken engineer and arms expert, has just finished high-level talks with the Turkish government. And now somebody wants him dead. The previous night three shots were fired at him as he stepped into his hotel room, so, terrified, he escapes in secret on a passenger steamer from Istanbul. As he journeys home – alongside, among others, an entrancing French dancer, an unkempt trader, a mysterious German doctor and a small, brutal man in a crumpled suit – he enters a nightmarish world where friend and foe are indistinguishable. Graham can try to run, but he may not be able to hide for much longer... |
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The Death of Grass At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain, society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother's farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits. |
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The Shiralee A shiralee is a swag, a burden, a bloody millstone – and that's what four-year-old Buster is to her father, Macauley. He takes the child on the road with him to spite his wife, but months pass and still no word comes to ask for the little girl back. Strangers to each other at first, father and daughter drift aimlessly through the dusty towns of Australia, sleeping rough and relying on odd jobs for food and money. Buster's resilience and trust slowly erode Macauley's resentment, and when he's finally able to get rid of her, he realises he can't let his shiralee go. |
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love In 1949 two young Cuban musicians, brothers Cesar and Nestor, leave Havana for New York. By day they work hard, by night they are the Mambo Kings: packing out clubs, dance halls and theatres with their sensuous, pulsing Latin music. This is the captivating story of charming, vivacious womanizer Cesar and quiet, romantic Nestor - still nursing an unrequited love for 'beautiful Maria of my soul' - and their changing fortunes as they try to make it big in America. Evoking a world of smoky clubs, steamy nights, sharp suits and stiletto heels, it is a joyous yet ultimately poignant hymn to love, family, community and the life-enhancing power of music |
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A View from the Bridge Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it's a privilege to take in his wife's cousins, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece begins to fall for one of them, it's clear that it's not just, as Eddie claims, that he's too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong, and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can't face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family. |
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All My Sons In Joe and Kate Keller's family garden, an apple tree – a memorial to their son Larry, lost in the Second World War – has been torn down by a storm. But his loss is not the only part of the family's past they can't put behind them. Not everybody's forgotten the court case that put Joe's partner in jail, or the cracked engine heads his factory produced which caused it and dropped twenty-one pilots out of the sky... |
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The Price Victor, a New York cop nearing retirement, moves among furniture in the disused attic of a house marked for demolition. Cabinets, desks, a damaged harp, an overstuffed armchair – the relics of a lost life of affluence he's finally come to sell. But when his brother Walter, who he hasn't spoken to in years, arrives, the talk stops being just about whether Victor's been offered a fair price for the furniture, and turns to the price that one and not the other of them paid when their father lost both his fortune and the will to go on... |
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Focus A reticent personnel manager living with his mother, Mr Newman shares the prejudices of his times and of his neighbours – and neither a Hispanic woman abused outside his window nor the persecution of the Jewish store owner he buys his paper from are any of his business. Until Newman begins wearing glasses, and others begin to mistake him for a Jew. |
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Incident at Vichy In Vichy France, 1942, a group of men sit outside an office, waiting to be interviewed. The reason they have been pulled off the street and taken there is obvious enough. They are, for the most part, Jews. But how serious an offence this is, and how they are to suffer for it, is not clear, and they hope for the best. But as rumours pass between them of trains full of people locked from the outside and furnaces in Poland, and although they reassure themselves that nothing so monstrous could be true, their panic rises. |
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Incident at Vichy Quentin is a successful lawyer in New York, but inside his head he is struggling with his own sense of guilt and the shadows of his past relationships. One of these an ill-fated marriage to the charming and beautiful Maggie, who went from operating a switchboard to become a self-destructive star – a singer everyone wanted a piece of. After the Fall is often seen as the most explicitly autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, and Maggie as an unflinching portrait of Miller's ex-wife Marilyn Monroe, only two years after her suicide. But in its psychological acuity and depth, and its brilliant, dreamlike structure, it is a literary, and not just biographical, masterpiece. |
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Baby Doll and Other Plays Tennessee Williams's controversial Hollywood screenplay Baby Doll opens with Archie Lee's teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Vaccaro, Archie's rival both in the cotton business and for the affections of the flirtatious Baby Doll, and things reach breaking-point. This volume also contains Something Unspoken, a brilliantly comic study of a wealthy, manipulative Southern spinster, and Summer and Smoke, a sexually charged portrayal of Alma, a sensitive, unmarried minister's daughter, and her childhood love, the wild, sensual doctor's son John. |
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The Glass Menagerie Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tome, poet with a job is a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee William's evocation of loneliness and lost love, is one of his most powerful and moving plays. |
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Brideshead Revisited 'Expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit' The Times |
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Maggie Cassidy 'A very unique cat-a French-Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant' Allen Ginsberg |
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Make Room! Make Room! A cautionary tale of what might happen if American consumption goes unchecked' Los Angeles Times |
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Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems Ginsberg, as chief figure among the Beats, was at the centre of a social and political revolution, yet his groundbreaking verse also changed the course of American poetry with its freewheeling spontaneity, rawness, honesty and energy. Also containing illustrations by Ginsberg's artist friends, illuminating notes to the poems, original prefaces and photographs, this is the essential record of one of the most influential voices in twentieth century poetry. |
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Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This volume brings together the poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counter-culture. |
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London Belongs to Me It is 1938 and the prospect of war hangs over every London inhabitant. But the city doesn't stop. Everywhere people continue to work, drink, fall in love, fight and struggle to get on in life. |
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The Flood François Besson listens to a tape recording of a girl contemplating suicide. Drifting through the days in a provincial city, he thoughtlessly starts a fire in his apartment, attends confession, and examines, with great intentness but without affection, a naked woman he wakes beside. And, as Besson moves through an ugly and threatening rain, his thoughts eventually lead to violence, first turned outward and then directed languidly against himself. |
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Terra Amata For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of language and the imagination, Terra Amata brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live. |
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Fever
In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Clézio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. Set in a timeless, spaceless universe, these experimental and haunting works portray the landscape of the human consciousness with dazzling verbal dexterity and power. |
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The Harp in the South Novels
Three of Ruth Park's best loved books – Missus, The Harp in the South and Poor Man's Orange – are brought together in this volume, tracing the saga of the Darcy family over thirty years. The story has its beginnings in the awkward courtship of dreamily innocent Margaret Kilker and unwilling hero Hugh Darcy in the dusty country towns of rural Australia. After their marriage, the couple moves to Sydney and raises a family amid the brothels, grog shops and run-down boarding houses of inner-city Surry Hills, where money is scarce and life is not easy. Filled with beautifully drawn characters that will make you laugh as much as cry, Ruth Park's Australian classics take you from the barren landscapes of the outback to the colourful slums of Sydney with convincing depth, careful detail and great heart.
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Junky Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author's original text word for word. |
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The Wild Boys In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific. |
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Exterminator! A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man's face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs' compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface. |
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The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs William Burroughs' work was dedicated to an assault upon language, traditional values and all agents of control. Produced at a time when he was at his most extreme and messianic, The Job lays out his abrasive, incisive, paranoiac, maddened and maddening worldview in interviews interspersed with stories and other writing. On the Beat movement, the importance of the cut-up technique, the press, Scientology, capital punishment, drugs, good and evil, the destruction of nations, Deadly Orgone Radiation and whether violence just in words is violence enough - Burroughs' insights show why he was one of the most influential writers and one of the sharpest, most startling and strangest minds of his generation. |
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The Yage Letters William Burroughs closed his classic debut novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage' which he believed transmitted telepathic powers, a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters - a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel - he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space, to derange his senses - the perfect drug for the author of the wild decentred books that followed. Years later, Ginsberg writes back as he follows in Burroughs' footsteps, and the drug worse and more profound than he had imagined. |
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Child of All Nations Because Kully's father has written the wrong things about his country, and because there might be a war coming (Kully's heard of some of the men involved, like Hitler, Chamberlain and Mussolini) her family can't go back to Germany. But because visas run out, they can't stay anywhere else either. So they keep moving from country to country and staying in hotels. Often Kully's father travels off to stir up an advance while she and her mother stay at the hotels in hock, while bills mount up and it becomes harder and harder to leave . . . |
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Bonjour Tristesse & A Certain Smile Published when she was only nineteen, Françoise Sagan's astonishing first novel Bonjour Tristesse became an instant bestseller. It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways. These two acerbically witty and delightfully amoral tales about the nature of love are shimmering masterpieces of cool-headed, brilliant observation. |
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On Photography Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives. |
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Ways of Seeing John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole hose of assumptions concerning that nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images. |
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Design as Art Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as 'the new Leonardo'. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children's books, advertising, cars and chairs - these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze. |
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The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of the modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960s classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively shaped by the means we use to communicate. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media 'global village' have proved decades ahead of their time. |
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The Psychedelic Experience From Timothy Leary's first trip (on psilocybin) in Mexico in 1960, his life's work became exploring and preaching the benefits - social, aesthetic and spiritual - that psychedelic drugs had to offer. Leary, with fellow psychologists Metzner and Alpert, began experimenting with LSD on themselves and others at Harvard, and from this came The Psychedelic Experience and, with it, the future of the counterculture. Both a manual to ease the reader through drug-induced enlightenment and a reinterpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead by way of chemical mind-expansion, The Psychedelic Experience is a controversial step-by- step guide to how we should all, as Leary (called by Nixon 'the most dangerous man in America') would later put it, 'turn on, tune in and drop out' |
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here - including 'The Cut-Glass Bowl' in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family's misfortunes, 'The Four Fists' where a man's life shaped by a series of punches to his face, and the revelry, mobs and anguish of 'May Day' - F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unmatched gift as a writer of short stories.
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Anthem Equality 7-2521 is a man apart. Since The Great Rebirth it has been a crime in his world to think or act as an individual. Even love is forbidden. Yet since his childhood in the Home of the Infants, Equality 7-2521 has felt that he is different. When he is sent by The Council of Vocations to work as a road sweeper, he stumbles upon a link to the old world that gives him the spur to break free.
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The Witches of Eastwick The air of Eastwick breeds witches – women whose powerful longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio, luring them to his mansions...
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Wake Up Never published in Kerouac's lifetime, this 1955 biography of the founder of Buddhism is a clear and powerful study of Siddhartha Gautama's life and works. Wake Up recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all human suffering, despite a prediction that he would become a great holy man in later life. Leaving his father's palace, Siddhartha adopts a homeless life, stuggles with his meditations, and eventually finds Enlightenment. Written at a time when Kerouac had become increasingly interested in Buddhist teachings, this fresh and accessible biography is both an important addition to Kerouac's work and a valuable introduction to the world of Buddhism. |
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Hothouse In a strange future, the few remaining humans are regularly consumed by savage greenery, and their only allies are the giant Termights. Spiders over a mile in length travel to the Moon on interplanetary cobwebs, and the stationary world is now split between perpetual day and unending night. But the elders are facing the end of their time, so leadership is given to a young girl, Toy. The groups manchild Gren wants to be his own leader, however, and with his maring partner will tear apart the group in his search of a new eden. Summoning up a world of carnivorous trees and giant insects, Hothouse is a landmark novel of the environment in crisis. |
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The Essential Groucho Groucho was the linchpin of the Marx Brothers, the brilliant comic act that emerged from New York to conquer the vaudeville circuit, Hollywood and then the world by the end of the 1920s, and remains one of the most unique and influential figures in the history of comedy. From early stage scripts to complete screenplays, from magazine articles to fascinating personal correspondence, via books, greedy banks, even greedier lawyers and the coming of television, the writings by, for and about Groucho Marx collected here are an indispensable introduction to the essence of a comic genius. 'His outrageous, unsentimental disregard for order will be equally funny a thousand years from now' - Woody Allen |
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Journey Through a Small Planet In Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working class Jewish childhood in the East End of London, a small cluster of streets right next to the City, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smell of pickled herring and onion bread, the rattle of sewing machines and chatter in Tiddish. He also relates stories of his parents, who fled Russia in 1914, his experiences at school and a brief flirtation with Communism. Unsentimental, vital and almost dreamlike, this is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world. With a new introduction by Patrick Wright 'Litvinoff has long had an eye for the glowing Whitechapel fragment that lights up a wider history' - Patrick Wright |
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Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories To celebrate the release of the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, all Ian Fleming's short stories are being published in one volume for the first time. Inside this short story collection you'll find From a View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, Quantum of Solace, Risico, The Hildebrand Rarity, Octopussy, The Living Daylights, The Property of a Lady and 007 in New York. |
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The Mortgaged Heart Few writers have expressed the search for love and the need for human understanding with such power and poetic sensibility as Carson McCullers. Th Mortgaged Heart contains some of the landmarks in the literary careers that would see her become one of the twentieth century's great American writers: 'Wunderkind', her first published story, 'The Mute', her outline of what was to become her great first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as well as her haunting poetry and essays and articles on subjects ranging from her neighbourhood of Brooklyn to life in wartime, from Christmas to the art of writing. 'A kind of literary biography. . . one sees the style and perception developing and expressing a unique sensibility' - Paul Theroux, Guardian |
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Siddhartha Siddhartha, a handsome Brahmin's son, is clever and well loved, yet increasingly dissatisfied with the life that is expected of him. Setting out on a spiritual journey to discover a higher state of being, his quest leads him through the temptations of luxury and wealth, the pleasures of sensual love, and the sinister threat of death-dealing snakes, until, eventually, he comes to a river. There a ferryman guides him towards his destiny, and to the ultimate meaning of existence. Inspired by Hermann Hesse's profound regard for Indian transcendental philosophy and written in prose of graceful simplicity, Siddhartha is one of the most influential spiritual works of the twentieth century. 'A writer of genius' The Times 'A subtle distillation of wisdom, stylistic grace and symmetry of form' Sunday Times Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature |
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Steppenwolf Harry Haller is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, shy and alienated from society. His dispair and desire for death draw him into a dark, enchanted underworld. Through a series of shadowy encounters - romantic, freakish and savage by turn - the misanthropic Haller gradually begins to rediscover the lost dreams of his youth. This blistering portrayal of a man who feels himself to be half-human and half-wolf was the bible of teh 1960s counterculture, capturing the mood of a disaffected generation, and remains a haunting story of estrangement and redemption. This Faust-like and magical story of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope was described in The New York Times as a 'savage indictment of bourgeois society'. But, as the author notes in this edition, Steppenwolf is a book that has been consistently misinterpreted. This self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of intellectual hypocrisy. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature |
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The Glass Arena John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind. |
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On the Road: the Original Scroll On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.
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Robert Graves: Complete Short Stories In this complete collection of his short fiction, Robert Graves demonstrates his incredible range, from the descriptions of an unhappy life at boarding school in 'The Abominable Mr Gunn", to the evocative Majorcan tales of 'Esta en su Casa' and 'The Lost Chinese'. Also here are the charming letters of young Margaret in '6 Valiant Bulls 6', the autobiographical war story of 'Christmas Truce', and the Roman tale 'Honey and Flowers', while Graves explores mysticism with the supernatural tale 'The Shout' and the wittily haunting anecdote 'Bins K to T'. On the themes of love and war, myth and history, these pieces illustrate the brilliance of Robert Graves in the short-story form.
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Hindoo Holiday First time in Penguin Classics for this classic travel story, with a new introduction by William Dalrymple. In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. Hindoo Holiday is an intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel literature.
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The Bodysurfers 'These stories breathe. Taut yet teeming with life, they are shot through with gritty phrases that catch at one's throat.' - Sydney Morning Herald Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach - and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family - this bestselling collection of short stories is an Australian classic. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, all the while hinting at a deep undercurrent of suburban malaise. From first publication, these poignant and seductive stories marked a major change in Australian literature.
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South From Granada Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan's friends from the Bloomsbury group - Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain's vanished past. |
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The Merry-Go-Round In The Sea In 1941, Rob Coram is six. The war feels far removed from his world of aunties and cousins and the beautiful, dry landscape of Geraldton in Western Australia. But when his favourite, older cousin, Rick, leaves to join the army, the war takes a step closer. When Rick returns from the war several years later, he has changed and Rob feels betrayed. The old merry-go-round that represents Rob's dream of utopia (the security of his family and of the land that is his home) begins to disintegrate before his eyes. The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea allows us a precious glimpse into a simpler kind of childhood in a country that no longer exists.
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Cat's Cradle Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ... Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to mankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh ... |
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The Children's Bach Athena and Dexter lead an enclosed family life, innocent of fashion and bound towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a world whose casual egotism they had barely dreamed of. How can they get home again?
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Honour & Other People's Children In Honour & Other People's Children, Helen Garner examines the idiosyncratic and bothersome notions of honour by which her characters - adults and children - shape their untidy lives. Honour is about a couple whose marriage, though abandoned in practice, persists in spirit. But the arrival of a new lover obliges them to make a proper separation and draw their child into the conflict. Other People's Children is a witty, sad story of the breakdown of friendship between two women, Scotty and Ruth, and the collapse of their collective household. Scotty loves Ruth's daughter as only the childless can love other people's children, but the broken friendship leaves Scotty with no claims. Into this mess blunders Madigan, looking for something that Scotty has long ago trained herself not to give. |
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A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. This landmark selection of seventeen short stories, translated into English for the first time, opens up a world of wonder, love, cruelty and curious twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems. In 'The Fugitive' an office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever with unforseen consequences, while 'Magic Paint' sees a group of researchers develop a paint that mysteriously protects them from misfortune. 'Gladiators' and 'The Knall' are chilling explorations of mass violence, and in 'The Tranquil Star' a simple story of stargazing becomes a meditation on language, imagination and infinity. |
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The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia The Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur and the Trans-Siberian Express - only a few of the evocative names that fill this, the story of Paul Theroux's epic journey by rail through India and Asia. A journey on which he encounters a huge variety of places and people, food, faiths and cultures, and which has at its heart an enduring fascination with trains and railways.
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The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas Beginning his journey in Boston, where he boarded the subway commuter train, and catching trains of all kinds on the way, Paul Theroux tells of his voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts and Illinois to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip. Sweating and shivering by turns as the temperature and altitude shot up and down, thrown in with the appalling Mr Thornberry in Lim-n and reading nightly to the blind writer, Borges, in Buenos Aires, Theroux vividly evokes the contrasts of a journey 'to the end of the line'.
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My Father's Moon Vera is young, awkward and naive. As schoolgirl she has her sheltered idealism, her Quaker boarding-school education, and the warm, enveloping security of her parents. As student nurse at the large military hospital during the war, her transition to womanhood – and victim to more experienced players – is rapid, painful and disastrous. And as unmarried mother she flees, from the nagging tension of her home and the gossipy stares of the hospital, to Fairfields, a place of poetry, music and of people with interesting lives and ideas. Quickly she learns it is otherwise. Yet, for Vera, always there is the moon – her companion, comforter, and the unbreakable link with her father... My Father's Moon is one of Elizabeth Jolley's finest novels, full of alarming perceptions, black irony and tenderness. It is a remarkable achievement.
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Cabin Fever Vera has cabin fever. Confined with her thoughts in the concrete tower of a New York hotel, she is haunted by her mother's reminders of what she should have been, and the desperate choices she faced as an unprotected single mother. Elizabeth Jolley writes lucidly of betrayal and survival, loneliness and desire, and with compassion for the sad dislocations of love between parents and children. In Cabin Fever she again beguiles with her particular blend of humour and the serious, and a splendid array of characters. |
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The Georges' Wife Vera and Mr George have made a new life together but Vera's thoughts return again and again to loves and lovers, meetings and partings - the voices that echo in the mind like music. In The Georges' Wife, Elizabeth Jolley returns to the themes of discord and harmony between brothers and sister, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Her spare and sensitive prose is illuminated with compassion and understanding for the intricacies of human relationships. |
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Marry Me ‘I'm asking you, I think very nicely, to keep your hands off my husband' Over a summer of snatched weekends, furtive phone calls and illicit trysts under the hot sun at Connecticut beach, Sally and Jerry begin a passionate affair. They wish to be together, but both are married to other people - Sally to Richard and Jerry to Ruth, whom he still loves. Ruth and Richard, meanwhile, have a secret of their own... Matters soon come to a head, and the four must confront each together to dispute the new rules of engagement. As promises are made and broken, lies told and revealed, it seems that nothing is clear-cut. Who will end up with whom?
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The Assistant Dressed in his cheap, battered suit, Joseph Marti arrives at the impressive villa of Karl Tobler, an enthusiastic but ill-starred inventor, to begin employment as his clerk. Tobler is determined to finance his family's lavish lifestyle with the proceeds from his latest idea - a clock adorned with advertisements. But Tobler's grand plans are destined for failure and the household, including Marti, refuse to acknowledge their approaching ruin. Robert Walser claimed to have written The Assistant, a semi-autobiographical work, in just six weeks as an entry for a literary competition. The second of his few surviving novels, it is now regarded as major work of modernist literature.
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Clock Without Hands In a small town in the American South, four men, young and old, consider their pasts and their futures. J.T. Malone, a lonely middle-aged drugstore owner, discovers he is dying and tries to atone for his misspent life. The aged Judge Clane resists integration and longs for the old ways of the South, white his idealistic grandson, Jester is drawn to Sherman, a volatile, blue-eyed black orphan in search of his own identity. Gradually they will discover that their lives are inextricably bound together. Through their interlocking stories Carson McCullers explores prejudice, secrets and redemption with both humour and poignancy.
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The Victim While his wife is away visiting her mother, Leventhal feels lost and alone. One evening, seeking relief from the New York heat wave, he is accosted in a park near his apartment by a seedy-looking drunk. Levelthal faintly recognizes the hostile man as someone he once met in the past. The man, however, claims Leventhal ruined his life. Can this be true? Did he cause harm to this man? Unable to shake the stranger loose or stop his own self-doubt, Leventhal soon descends into a state of paranoia and fear that threatens his sanity. 'A kind of Dostoyevskian nightmare. . . written with unusual power and insight' The New York Times
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The Actual Harry Trellman, an ageing, astute Chicago businessman, has never really belonged anywhere. His human attachments, life everything else in his life, are singular and irregular. But Harry's observational talents have not gone unnoticed by billionaire Sigmund Adletsky, who retains him as his advisor. Soon the old man discoveres behind Harry's stoic mask an intense forty-year-old passion – and the opportunity arises for Harry to take his last chance with the only woman he has ever loved. |
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Ravelstein Abe Ravelstein – ferocious intellectual, bestselling author, confident of presidents and prime ministers and possessor of tastes that would bankrupt a king – is celebrating his success in Paris. He and his friend Chick trawl the Parisian streets in search of haute couture, fine foods and fresh arguments. But Ravelstein is dying and, in challenging Chick to record his life, he sets in motion their last great debate. A tale of philosophy, love, mortality, vaudeville routines and $4,500 suits ensues as the two old rogues come to scrutinize their very existence. 'A wonderfully sympathetic addition to Bellow's cast of bruised romantics' Sunday Express |
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The Dean's December Albert Corde, dean of a Chicago college, is unprepared for the violent response to his scathing articles on city corruption and his involvement in the trial of two black people charged with killing a white student. He finds himself accused of being a civic-minded fool and a racist. Journeying to Bucharest, where his mother-in-law lies dying, Corde compares the corruption and inhumanity of Communism with the rotting, domed cityscapes of Chicago. As December draws to a close and events – public and intimate – come to a head in both cities, Corde vents his fury at the mayhem and carnage of the modern world.
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To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account In the mid-1970s, Saul Bellow visited Israel and To Jerusalem and Back is his account of his time there. Immersing himself in its landscape and culture, he records the opinions, passions and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints – from Prime Minister Rabin, novelist Amos Oz and the editor of an Arab-language newspaper to a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and the barber at Bellow's hotel. Through meditations steeped in history and literature he adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Bellow's exploration of a beautiful and troubled city is a powerful testament to the unique spirit and challenges of Israel, its history and its future.
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The Theory of the Modern Stage In The Theory of the Modern Stage, leading drama critic, Eric Bentley, brings together landmark writings by dramatists, directors and thinkers who have had a profound effect on the theatre since the mid nineteenth century, from Adolphe Appia to •mile Zola. Here, Antonin Artaud sets out a manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty, Bertolt Brecht discusses the tension between entertainment and instruction in experimental drama and Bernard Shaw defends himself as a realist, while W. B. Yeats describes the creation of a People's Theatre. The ideas of theatre's great makers are revealed by their best expositors, as Eric Bentley writes about Stanislavsky belief in the importance of emotional memory when creating a dramatic role and Arthur Symons considers Richard Wagner and the relationship between genius, art and nature.
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The Empty Space In The Empty Space, groundbreaking director Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing any theatrical performance. Here he describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht's revolutionary alienation technique to the free form Happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war. Passionate, unconventional and fascinating, his book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions and creates lasting memories for its audiences.
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Monkey Grip Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways. Monkey Grip is a lyrical and gritty first novel that deserves its place as a classic of Australian literature.
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Postcards from Surfers Postcards from Surfers is eleven stories about the complexities of live and love; of looking back and longing; of what it means to be a stranger, on foreign ground and known, told with the piercing familiarity and resonance we have come to expect from Helen Garner. |
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Science Fiction Omnibus This new edition of Brian Aldiss's classic anthology brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov's 'Nightfall', first published in 1941, to the 2006 story 'Friends in Need' by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford Simak, Harry Harrison, Bruce Sterling, A. E. Van Vogt and Brian Aldiss himself, these stories portray struggles against machines, epic journeys, genetic experiments, time travellers and alien races. From stories set on Earth, to uncanny far distant worlds and ancient burnt-out suns, the one constant is humanity itself, compelled by an often fatal curiosity to explore the boundless frontiers of time, space and probability. |
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POPism A cultural storm swept through the 1960s – Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies – and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens) and everybody knew Andy. His studio, the Factory, was the place: where he created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined Pop Art, where one could listen to the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant-guarde.
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Love in a Fallen City: And Other Stories Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction – tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.
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The Adventures of Augie March A penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up in the Great Depression, Augie March drifts through life latching on to a wild succession of occupations, including butler, thief, dog-washer, sailor and salesman. He is a 'born recruit', easily influenced by others who try to mould his destiny. Not until he tangles with the glamorous Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, can he attempt to break free. A modern day Everyman on an odyssey in search of reality and identity, Augie March is the star performer in Bellow's exuberant, richly observed human variety show. 'Funny, poignant, crowded with carnivalesque types and yet narrated in a voice that is lonely and simple, it is Bellow's fat comic masterpiece' Observer |
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Herzog Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend and he is left alone with his whirling thoughts, yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and those of the modern age. His head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart. A masterpiece...Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization' The New York Times Book Review |
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Henderson the Rain King Bellow evokes all the rich colour and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson's awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life earns him the admiration of the tribe – but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story, Henderson the Rain King is also a profound look at the forces that drive a man through life.
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Mr Sammler's Planet Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler – who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings – a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him." To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live.
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It All Adds Up Saul Bellow's fiction, honoured by a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer, among other awards, has made him a literary giant. Now the man himself and a lifetime of his insightful views on a range of topics spring off the page in this, his first non-fiction collection, which encompasses articles, lectures, essays, travel pieces, and an 'Autobiography of Ideas'. It All Adds Up is a fascinating journey through literary America over the last forty years. |
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Memoirs When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media – though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays. |
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The Lucky Country Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.' The phrase 'the lucky country' has become part of our lexicon; it's forever being invoked in debates about the Australian way of life, but is all too often misused by those blind to Horne's irony. When it was first published in 1964 The Lucky Country caused a sensation. Horne took Austra |