Catalog Search Results
1) Lucky Jim
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the 20th century, this book remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.
Author
Language
English
Description
Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Journalist, party girl, bookworm, muse, artist: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had been all of these things. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing Duchamp over a chessboard and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, it turns out that Babitz was a writer with stories of her own. In Eve's Hollywood she gives us indelible snapshots of southern California's haute bohemians, of surpassingly lovely high school ingenues ("people with brains...
4) Abigail
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution...
Author
Language
English
Description
A beloved Viking saga and masterpiece of historical fiction, The Long Ships is a high spirited adventure that stretches from Scandinavia to Spain, England, Ireland, and beyond.
Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships resurrects the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean. Bengtsson’s hero,
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L.P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece - a richly layered,...
7) Augustus
Author
Language
English
Description
"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
H.G. Wells' original masterpiece now includes a newly established text, a full biographical essay on the author, a list of further reading, and detailed notes. Famous for the mistaken panic that ensued from Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatization, "The War of the Worlds" remains one of the most influential of all science fiction works.
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"When World War I broke out the author of ''Buddenbrooks'' was almost 40 but not yet in the public view one of the giants of European literature. In his native Germany it was thought that Gerhart Hauptmann and probably a few of his elder contemporaries were towering above him. But he already had a reputation as one of the most interesting writers in Europe and as a moralist from whom his many readers expected a message in a time of great trials. His...
10) Fat city
Author
Language
English
Description
Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring — the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger -...
11) The door
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship with Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken...
12) The summer book
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland."--Publisher's description.
13) Life and fate
Author
Series
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Completed in the late 1950s by its distinguished Russian author, this novel has been recognized as fiction on an epic scale: powerful, deeply moving, and devastating in its depiction of a world mutilated by war and ideological tyranny. A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Formats
Description
A classic California noir with a feminist twist, this prescient 1947 novel exposed misogyny in post-World War II American society, making it far ahead of its time.
Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele. To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the...
Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele. To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the...
15) Chess story
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The art of the great Austian writer Stefan Zweig was a difficult balancing act. Zweig's major subject was human limitation, above all the ways in which the best of intentions can lead people into the murkiest of emotional and moral cul-de-sacs. And yet Zweig also hoped to illumine those dark places of the heart and mind, to show that it is not, finally, impossible to attain a true perspective on our limitations, even to care for each other. Zweig,...
16) Lies and sorcery
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths....
17) Ghosts
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton's most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton's final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her own most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In 'The Lady's Maid's Bell,' the earliest tale included here, a servant's dedication to her mistress continues...
18) The Chrysalids
Author
Series
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
The terrifying story of a world paralyzed by genetic mutation. In a community where deviations are rooted out as abominations, David's ability to communicate by "thought shapes" is a dangerous secret. When his ability is discovered, the results are horrific.
19) Katalin Street
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2017 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE
From the author of The Door, selected as one of the New York Times "10 Best Books of 2015," this is a heartwrenching tale about a group of friends and lovers torn apart by the German occupation of Budapest during World War II.
In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which...
From the author of The Door, selected as one of the New York Times "10 Best Books of 2015," this is a heartwrenching tale about a group of friends and lovers torn apart by the German occupation of Budapest during World War II.
In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which...
20) Family lexicon
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
Giuseppe Levi is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking-when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that...
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