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Kate Dicamillo

Because of Winn-Dixie

<p>The summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida, Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket—and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor. A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tells Opal ten things about her absent mother, one for each year Opal has been alive. Winn-Dixie is better at making friends than anyone Opal has ever known, and together they meet the local librarian, Miss Franny Block, who once fought off a bear with a copy of WAR AND PEACE. They meet Gloria Dump, who is nearly blind but sees with her heart, and Otis, an ex-con who sets the animals in his pet shop loose after hours, then lulls them with his guitar.</p><p>Opal spends all that sweet summer collecting stories about her new friends and thinking about her mother. But because of Winn-Dixie or perhaps because she has grown, Opal learns to let go, just a little, and that friendship—and forgiveness—can sneak up on you like a sudden summer storm. </p><p>Recalling the fiction of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers, here is a funny, poignant, and utterly genuine first novel from a major new talent.</p><

Andrzej Drzewiński

Stało się jutro

Don Delillo

Mao II

<p>Don DeLillo's follow-up to Libra, his brilliant fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, Mao II is a series of elusive set-pieces built around the themes of mass psychology, individualism vs. the mob, the power of imagery and the search for meaning in a blasted, post-modern world. Bill Gray, the world's most famous reclusive novelist, has been working for many years on a stalled masterpiece when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut. Gray sets out on a doomed, quixotic journey, and his disappearance disrupts the cloistered lives of his obsessed assistant and the assistant's companion, a former Moonie who has also become Bill's lover. This haunting, masterful novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award.</p><p>This tale of a reclusive novelist drawn back into the world by acts of terrorism reconfirms DeLillo's status as a modern master and literary provocateur.</p><

Debra Dean

The Madonnas Of Leningrad

<p>This is a brilliant and moving debut novel about one woman’s struggle to preserve an artistic heritage from the horrors and destruction of World War II. In this extraordinary first novel by Debra Dean, the siege of Leningrad by German troops in World War Two is echoed by the destructive siege against the mind and memory of an elderly Russian woman. Marina, the woman in question, was a guide at Leningrad ’s famous Hermitage Museum. In the late autumn of 1941, the Luftwaffe roared over and around Leningrad, she and her colleagues were set the task of taking the thousands of priceless paintings, sculptures and objets d’art out of the grand galleries of the former Tsarist Palace and storing them safely against the German bombardment and seemingly inevitable invasion. The German assault threatened to destroy a large part of Europe’s artistic history: if Leningrad fell to the Germans, everything that was not destroyed would be looted and given to the Nazis. Marina, whose own parents had disappeared during Stalin’s 1930s’ purges of intellectuals, clings to her hope of becoming an art historian herself through her job at the Hermitage. The novel shifts between Marina ’s experiences at the Hermitage during the siege of Leningrad and her current existence as a very old lady in America whose mind has begun to fray. The shifts are masterfully done: Debra Dean depicts, with subtle skill, the way Marina’s mind, already ravaged by disease, picks up some incident, object or person at the wedding she’s been brought to, and flips back to the dreadful year-and-a-half in Leningrad which has informed her life ever since. This is an evocative and deeply moving novel about memory itself.</p><p>Advance Praise for The Madonnas of Leningrad</p><p>“An unforgettable story of love, survival, and the power of imagination in the most tragic circumstances. Elegant and poetic, the rare kind of book that you want to keep but you have to share.” – Isabel Allende, New York Times bestselling author</p><p>“The Madonnas of Leningrad is an extraordinary debut, a deeply lovely novel that evokes with uncommon deftness the terrible, heartbreaking beauty that is life in wartime. Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating for us the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel.” – Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker</p><

Debra Dean

Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

<p>A surprised Southern matriarch is confronted by her family at an intervention… A life-altering break-in triggers insomniac introspection in a desperate actor… Streetwise New York City neighbors let down their guard for a naïve puppeteer and must suffer the consequences…</p><p>In this stunning collection of short stories – five of which are being published for the very first time – bestselling, award-winning author Debra Dean displays the depth and magnitude of her extraordinary literary talent. Replete with the seamless storytelling and captivating lyrical voice that made her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, a national bestseller, Dean's Confessions of a Falling Woman is a haunting, satisfying, and unforgettable reading experience.</p><

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Don Delillo

Jugadores

<p>Por primera vez en castellano, una de las novelas más emblemáticas del maestro de la ficción norteamericana.</p><p>Pammy y Lyle Wynant son una pareja atractiva, moderna, que parece tenerlo todo. Sin embargo, tras su vida `ideal` ronda un tedio persistente y una desesperación contenida que les llevan a vivir aventuras diferentes, pero igual de letales. Insólitos en su terca normalidad, estos fríos `jugadores` se enfrentan diferentes a la violencia que los rodea y que han contribuido a crear.</p><p>El terrorismo y el lado más oscuro de la clase adinerada contemporánea y su profundo descontento, son la base sobre la que se sustenta esta ácida y curiosísima novela…</p><

Don Delillo

Americana

A young television executive takes to the road in the 1960s with a movie camera to capture his own past in a "cinema verite" documentary. Within this framework, he delivers his observations on the influence of film, modern corporate life, young marriage, New York City and hipness.<

Don Delillo

Cosmopolis

<p>From Publishers Weekly</p><p>DeLillo skates through a day in the life of a brilliant and precocious New Economy billionaire in this monotone 13th novel, a study in big money and affectlessness. As one character remarks, 28-year-old Eric Packer "wants to be one civilization ahead of this one." But on an April day in the year 2000, Eric's fortune and life fall apart. The story tracks him as he traverses Manhattan in his stretch limo. His goal: a haircut at Anthony's, his father's old barber. But on this day his driver has to navigate a presidential visit, an attack by anarchists and a rapper's funeral. Meanwhile, the yen is mounting, destroying Eric's bet against it. The catastrophe liberates Eric's destructive instinct-he shoots another character and increases his bet. Mostly, the action consists of sequences in the back of the limo (where he stages meetings with his doctor, various corporate officers and a New Economy guru) interrupted by various pit stops. He lunches with his wife of 22 days, Elise Shifrin. He has sex with two women, his art consultant and a bodyguard. He is hit in the face with a pie by a protester. He knows he is being stalked, and the novel stages a final convergence between the ex-tycoon and his stalker. DeLillo practically invented the predominant vernacular of the late '90s (the irony, the close reading of consumer goods, the mock complexity of technobabble) in White Noise, but he seems surprisingly disengaged here. His spotlighted New Economy icon, Eric, doesn't work, either as a genius financier (he is all about gadgetry, not exchange-there's no love of the deal in his "frozen heart") or a thinker. The threats posed by the contingencies that he faces cannot lever him out of his recalcitrant one-dimensionality. DeLillo is surely an American master, but this time out, he is doodling.</p><p>From Library Journal</p><p>Unlike his sprawling masterpiece, Underworld, DeLillo's 13th novel is short and tightly focused, indeed almost claustrophobic. Most of the action takes place inside a "prousted" (cork-lined) stretch limo, as the reclusive financial wizard Eric Packer is chauffeured across Manhattan for a haircut. Thanks to a presidential visit, antiglobalization demonstrations, and a celebrity funeral, this journey takes up most of the day. Stuck in traffic, Packer anxiously monitors the value of the yen on the limo's computer. Using the car as his office, he summons advisors from nearby shops and restaurants. His physician gives him a rubber-gloved physical exam in the back seat as Packer discusses imminent financial ruin with his broker and angry crowds block the streets. This work most closely resembles The Body Artist in its brevity and straightforward narrative flow. However, the earlier novel was written in an uncharacteristically warm, poetic style, promising a new direction for this important writer, while Cosmopolis reverts to the standard DeLillo boilerplate, perceptive and funny but also brittle and cold. This, coupled with the book's dated 1990s sensibility, makes Cosmopolis a step backward rather than an artistic advance.</p><

Don Delillo

End Zone

<p>Amazon.com Review</p><p>Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliché by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.</p><

Don Delillo

Falling Man

<p>Amazon.com Review</p><p>The defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man.</p><p>Keith Neudecker, a lawyer and survivor of the attack, arrives on his estranged wife Lianne's doorstep, covered with soot and blood, carrying someone else's briefcase. In the days and weeks that follow, moments of connection alternate with complete withdrawl from his wife and young son, Justin. He begins a desultory affair with the owner of the briefcase based only on their shared experience of surviving: "the timeless drift of the long spiral down." Justin uses his binoculars to scan the skies with his friends, looking for "Bill Lawton" (a misunderstood version of bin Laden) and more killing planes. Lianne suddenly sees Islam everywhere: in a postcard from a friend, in a neighbor's music-and is frightened and angered by its ubiquity. She is riveted by the Falling Man. Her mother Nina's response is to break up with her long-time German lover over his ancient politics. In short, the old ways and days are gone forever; a new reality has taken over everyone's consciousness. This new way is being tried on, and it doesn't fit. Keith and Lianne weave into reconciliation. Keith becomes a professional poker player and, when questioned by Lianne about the future of this enterprise, he thinks: "There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."</p><p>DeLillo also tells the story of Hammad, one of the young men in flight training on the Gulf Coast, who says: "We are willing to die, they are not. This is our srength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom." He also asks: "But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?" His answer is that he is one of the hijackers on the plane that strikes the North Tower.</p><p>At the end of the book, De Lillo takes the reader into the Tower as the plane strikes the building. Through all the terror, fire and smoke, De Lillo's voice is steady as a metronome, recounting exactly what happens to Keith as he sees friends and co-workers maimed and dead, navigates the stairs and, ultimately, is saved. Though several post-9/11 novels have been written, not one of them is as compellingly true, faultlessly conceived, and beautifully written as Don De Lillo's Falling Man. -Valerie Ryan</p><p>From Publishers Weekly</p><p>Starred Review. When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." DeLillo's new novel begins 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. On that day, Keith, one half of a classic DeLillo well-educated married couple, returns to Lianne, from whom he'd separated, and to their young son, Justin. Keith and Lianne know it is Keith's Lazarus moment, although DeLillo reserves the bravura sequence that describes Keith's escape from the first tower-as well as the last moments of one of the hijackers, Hammad-until the end of the novel. Reconciliation for Keith and Lianne occurs in a sort of stunned unconsciousness; the two hardly engage in the teasing, ludic interchanges common to couples in other DeLillo novels. Lianne goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Mideastern; Keith is drawn to another survivor. Lianne's mother, Nina, roils her 20-year affair with Martin, a German leftist; Keith unhooks from his law practice to become a professional poker player. Justin participates in a child's game involving binoculars, plane spotting and waiting for a man named "Bill Lawton." DeLillo's last novel, Cosmopolis, was a disappointment, all attitude (DeLillo is always a brilliant stager of attitude) and no heart. This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here, down to the interludes following Hammad as he listens to a man who "was very genius"-Mohammed Atta. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cuteness-save, perhaps, the falling man performance artist. It is as if Players, The Names, Libra, White Noise, Underworld-with their toxic events, secret histories, moral panics-converge, in that day's narrative of systematic vulnerability, scatter and tentative regrouping.</p><

Don Delillo

Great Jones Street

The narrator of this novel is Bucky Wunderlick, a Dylan-Jagger amalgam who finds he's gone as far as he knows how. Mid tour he leaves his rock band and holes up in a dingy East Village apartment, in Great Jones Street. The plot revolves around his retreat and a drug designed to silence dissidents.<

Don Delillo

Players

<p>In Players DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple… And still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them, and that they have helped to create.</p><p>Originally published in 1977 (before his National Book Award-winning White Noise and the recent blockbuster Underworld), Players is a fast-moving yet starkly drawn socially critical drama that demonstrates the razor-sharp prose and thematic density for which DeLillo is renown today.</p><p>"The wit, elegance and economy of Don DeLillo's art are equal to the bitter clarity of his perceptions."-New York Times Book Review</p><

Don Delillo

The Names

<p>Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.</p><p>***</p><p>"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."-Chicago Sun-Times</p><p>***</p><p>"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."-Village Voice Literary Supplement</p><p>***</p><p>"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."-New York Times</p><

Don Delillo

White Noise

<p>Amazon.com Review</p><p>Better than any book I can think of, White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. Nice-guy narrator Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a small college. His wife may be taking a drug that removes fear, and one day a nearby chemical plant accidentally releases a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Writing before Bhopal and Prozac entered the popular lexicon, DeLillo produced a work so closely tuned into its time that it tells the future.</p><p>From Publishers Weekly</p><p>Chairman of the department of Hitler studies at a Midwestern college, Jack Gladney is accidently exposed to a cloud of noxious chemicals, part of a world of the future that is doomed because of misused technology, artifical products and foods, and overpopulation. PW appreciated DeLillo's "bleak, ironic" vision, calling it "not so much a tragic view of history as a macabre one."</p><

Don Delillo

The Body Artist

<p>Amazon.com Review</p><p>Don DeLillo's reputation rests on a series of large-canvas novels, in which he's proven to be the foremost diagnostician of our national psyche. In The Body Artist, however, he sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld)-an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the window, and makes idle chat. Rey, alas, will proceed directly from the breakfast table to the home of his former wife, where he'll unceremoniously blow his brains out.</p><p>What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. And like James's tale, it seems to partake of at least seven kinds of ambiguity, leaving the reader to sort out its riddles. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?</p><p>DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. And Lauren's performances-for she is the body artist of the title-sound pretty awful, the kind of thing Artaud might have cooked up for an aerobics class. Still, when DeLillo reins in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking:</p><p>Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.</p><p>At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better. -James Marcus</p><p>From Publishers Weekly</p><p>After 11 novels, DeLillo (Underworld; White Noise) is an acknowledged American master, and a writer who rarely repeats his successes. This slim novella is puzzling, and may prove entirely mystifying to many readers; like all DeLillo's fiction, it offers a vision of contemporary life that expresses itself most clearly in how the story is told. Would you recognize what you had said weeks earlier, if it were the last thing, among other last things, you said to someone you loved and would never see again? That question, posed late in the narrative, helps explain the somewhat aimless and seemingly pointless opening scene, in which a couple gets up, has breakfast, and the man looks for his keys. Next we learn that heDfailed film director Rey Robles, 64Dis dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. SheDLauren, a "body artist"Dgoes on living alone in their house along a lonely coast, until she tracks a noise to an unused room on the third floor and to a tiny, misshapen man who repeats back conversations that she and Rey had weeks before. Is Mr. Tuttle, as Lauren calls him, real, possibly an inmate wandered off from a local institution? Or is he a figment of Lauren's grieving imagination? Is thisDas DeLillo playfully slips into Lauren's mind at one pointDthe first case of a human abducting an alien? One way of reading this story is as a novel told backwards, in a kind of time loop: DeLillo keeps hidden until his closing pages Lauren's role as a body artistDand with it, the novel's true narrative intent. DeLillo is always an offbeat and challenging novelist, and this little masterpiece of the storyteller's craft may not be everyone's masterpiece of the storytelling art. But like all DeLillo's strange and unforgettable works, this is one every reader will have to decide on individually.</p><

Don Delillo

Libra

<p>For a few years, this book was everywhere-if by everywhere one means used bookstore shelves and remainder tables-a very visible reminder of what happens when the publishing industry misjudges a print run. I bought three or four copies of the book, not because I didn't remember buying it but because every six months the price would be even lower. The copy I read was a two dollar paperback, but I'm sure there's the dollar hardcover still on my shelves, probably right next to where the three dollar and four dollar hardcovers used to sit. Stupidly, I assumed that this meant Libra was a bad book, an assumption my seven dollar copy of Infinite Jest should have disproved. But even after reading and enjoying White Noise, I didn't think of reading Libra. Only recently, scrambling around on my shelves for prose that would actually inspire me, did I pick it up. I'm ashamed to admit I was desperate, yet the shame is mitigated by the rewards I received.</p><p>Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves. A book about the history of event, and the John F. Kennedy assassination, Libra is also a study of the men who shape history, and the men who record history. And best of all, a book about society and the forces sweeping through it, Libra feels like a personal statement, an honest challenge to measure oneself, an expression of intimacy in recounting an event in which so many have lost themselves by creating paranoid spirals that are both joyous and dreadful celebrations of the helplessness of the self.</p><p>DeLillo accomplishes this by doing what I believe is a fairly radical act: daring to empathize with Lee Harvey Oswald (I can't help but think this is what led George Will to denounce Libra as "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship"). I barely know anything about DeLillo, and yet even to me, the very first section, In The Bronx, a section that opens with an anonymous "he" riding the subway to the ends of the city ("There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little."), seems an acknowledgment of equivalency-DeLillo grew up in the Bronx, and generously gives young Oswald, who is living there at the book's opening, the keenly observed details only a longtime resident or a talented artist might notice. From this, DeLillo measures Oswald's meandering grasping life in terms with which any struggling artist, feeling adrift and alone in the grip of a desire to accomplish something great, could identify. (Until finally, after the shooting of Kennedy, Oswald making his way through the poor section of Dallas avoiding police, there is this: "A dozen old hair-drying machines stood along the curbside. A mattress on a lawn. He wanted to write short stories about contemporary American life.") By the end, DeLillo gives us Oswald as someone almost like Kafka's hunger artist ("He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying."), revealing the horror of art and its motivations when they cannot escape into art's abstract realm.</p><p>Libra also considers the men who might have been involved in the plot to kill a president, moving inside the heads of George de Mohrenschildt, crime lord Carmine Latta, Jack Ruby, Agency spook T.J. Mackey and most stunningly David Ferrie, the odd hairless man somehow always at the center of everything. Ferrie was a man who might have been famously eccentric on his own, what with his rare disease that rendered him completely hairless, and resultant crazy wigs and glued on eyebrows, and pilot's uniforms, and open homosexuality, and links to crime figures, gunrunners, and other figures not normally given to mingling with openly gay wig-wearing hairless men. He feels fully like a literary creation, endlessly chattering on about death, about cancer, about fear, about ESP and hypnotism and astrology, but David Ferrie was a very real figure-one whom DeLillo manages to recreate so completely it feels like an act of utter invention.</p><p>And so, mirroring DeLillo, there's Win Everett, a CIA man disgraced by his role in the Bay of Pigs disaster, who hatches the Kennedy assassination plot and similarly finds himself creating a man who already exists. (Everett creates forged documents and fake items to cast Oswald's life in a strangely ambiguous light, so that investigators will continue to follow all the twisting paths to the truths Everett wishes them to discover. But he finds that Oswald, independently of Everett, is creating such a life already, following Everett's plans without actually knowing them.) In the shadow of retirement, Everett plans to refire his countrymen's passion for a democratic Cuba by using a failed assassination attempt on Kennedy; an attempt that, in the following investigation, will also throw light on the CIA's role (and his own) in the overthrow of Cuba. Everett is the artist at another extreme, safely installed in American culture (married, with a young daughter, teaching at Texas Women's University), and yet also plotting to change the way Americans see America, with a plan that, like the best literature, mixes the deeply personal with the sweepingly resonant. It is Everett that observes: "Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the nature of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men." It is, of course, the observation of a writer.</p><p>Everett's twin is Nicholas Branch, a present-day senior analyst of the CIA, hired by them on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy. Branch is thus both a writer and literary critic of historic event: "Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, grateful." Throughout most of the book, a section on Branch usually immediately follows or precedes a section on Everett, joining them in the reader's mind, and it is Branch who gets the lines Kennedy conspiracy theorists (of which I could consider myself, if there is a weight division below "piker") will find the richest, such as referring to the Warren Report as "the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred" and commenting on how different Oswald looks from one photo to the next. (I laughed out loud at the description of a famous photo of Oswald as a marine, with a group of fellow marines on a rattan mat under palm trees: "Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him." This was doubly funny to me having just seen the photo on the web, the day before I read that section, and, without registering it, having thought the same thing.) (Of course, now, just a few days later, I can't find that photo online anymore.)</p><p>And it is through Branch, I think, that DeLillo writes the lines emphasizing how the creation of event and the creation of fiction are conjoined. Referring to Branch's paper-laden workroom, there is this: "This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crimes but men in small rooms." The men in Libra, including Lee Harvey Oswald, are such men, as are all writers. But Libra is all too aware of how such men, like Branch himself (in his small room seeing his subject as men in small rooms), and perhaps like all men, are ultimately only capable of writing on the vast skein of reality not what they do know, but merely tacit admissions of everything they don't know-about themselves and about the world, and about the strange vector where the two unknown variables meet, creating the ambiguous equations of history.</p><

Don Delillo

The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life

A One-Minute Play<

Don Delillo

Running Dog

DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.<

Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz

Znachor

Profesor Wilczur

<p>Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz (1898-1939) — prozaik, dziennikarz, scenarzysta. Dołęga-Mostowicz w swych powieściach wprowadzał wątki melodramatyczne, romansowe, szpiegowskie, poruszał aktualne tematy społeczne, świetnie ukazując przedwojenną rzeczywistość. </p><p>"Znachor" pierwotnie powstał jako scenariusz filmowy. Kiedy został odrzucony przez wytwórnię, Mostowicz stworzył z niego powieść, która następnie była przerobiona na scenariusz przez Anatola Sterna i stała się podstawą filmu Michała Waszyńskiego.</p><p>To wzruszająca historia chirurga, który doznał amnezji. Profesor Rafał Wilczur, od którego odeszła żona z córeczką, szuka zapomnienia w alkoholu. Traci pamięć, kradnie cudzy akt urodzenia. Jako Antoni Kosiba znajduje schronienie na wsi. Operuje kalekiego syna młynarza i wkrótce zyskuje sławę znachora. Miejscowy lekarz, zazdrosny o sukces, grozi mu sądem za nielegalne wykonywanie praktyki lekarskiej. W końcu jednak nieskazitelny moralnie bohater odnosi zwycięstwo, triumfuje miłość, a zdrada zostaje ukarana.</p><

Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz

Profesor Wilczur

Profesor Wilczur

"Profesor Wilczur" to kontynuacja Znachora, w której odnajdziemy motywy melodramatyczne, ujęte w sensacyjno-obyczajową fabułę. Po tragicznych przejściach wywołanych utratą pamięci profesor Wilczur wraca do swej dawnej pracy w klinice. Jednak intrygi jego dotychczasowego zastępcy Dobranieckiego doprowadzają Wilczura do takiego rozgroczynienia, iż decyduje się on, tym razem już świadomie, opuścić stolicęi zamieszkać z powrotem na wsi. Tam przeprowadza skomplikowaną operację, ale kosztem własnego zdrowia. Nad ciężko chorym ojcem czuwa zrozpaczona córka Marysia, gdy niespodziewanie przybywa żona doktora Dobranieckiego, błagając o ratowanie jej męża chorego na raka.W powieści dobro triumfuje nad złem, nieskazitelna cnota nad ludzką małością, etos wsi nad zepsuciem miasta. Dołęga-Mostowicz pokazuje zatem świat, jakiego pragniemy, przywraca wiarę w godność człowieka..<

Apostolos Doxiadis

Uncle Petros and Goldbach

<p>Amazon.co.uk Review</p><p>"Every family has its black sheep-in ours it was Uncle Petros": the narrator of Apostles Doxiadis's novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is the mystified nephew of the family's black sheep, unable to understand the reasons for his uncle's fall from grace. A kindly, gentle recluse devoted only to gardening and chess, Petros Papachristos exhibits no signs of dissolution or indolence: so why do his family hold him in such low esteem? One day, his father reveals all:</p><p>Your uncle, my son, committed the greatest of sins… he took something holy and sacred and great, and shamelessly defiled it! The great, unique gift that God had blessed him with, his phenomenal, unprecedented mathematical talent! The miserable fool wasted it; he squandered it and threw it out with the garbage. Can you imagine it? The ungrateful bastard never did one day's useful work in mathematics. Never! Nothing! Zero!</p><p>Instead of being warned off, the nephew instead has his curiosity provoked, and what he eventually discovers is a story of obsession and frustration, of Uncle Petros's attempts at finding a proof for one of the great unsolved problems of mathematics-Goldbach's conjecture.</p><p>If this might initially seem undramatic material for a novel, readers of Fermat's Last Theorem, Simon Singh's gripping true-life account of Andrew Wiles's search for a proof for another of the great long-standing problems of mathematics, would surely disagree. What Doxiadis gives us is the fictional corollary of Singh's book: a beautifully imagined narrative that is both compelling as a story and highly revealing of a rarefied world of the intellect that few people will ever access. Without ever alienating the reader, he demonstrates the enchantments of mathematics as well as the ambition, envy and search for glory that permeate even this most abstract of pursuits. Balancing the narrator's own awkward move into adulthood with the painful memories of his brilliant uncle, Doxiadis shows how seductive the world of numbers can be, and how cruel a mistress. "Mathematicians are born, not made," Petros declares: an inheritance that proves to be both a curse and a gift.-Burhan Tufail</p><p>Review</p><p>If you enjoyed Fermat's Last Theorem, you'll devour this. However, you don't need to be an academic to understand its imaginative exploration of the allure and danger of genius. Old Uncle Petros is a failure. The black sheep of a wealthy Greek family, he lives as a recluse surrounded by dusty books in an Athenian suburb. It takes his talented nephew to penetrate his rich inner world and discover that this broken man was once a mathematical prodigy, a golden youth whose ambition was to solve one of pure maths' most famous unproven hypotheses – Goldbach's Conjecture. Fascinated, the young man sets out to discover what Uncle Petros found – and what he was forced to sacrifice. Himself a mathematician as well as a novelist, Doxiadis succeeds in shining a light into the spectral world of abstract number theory where unimaginable concepts and bizarre realities glitter with a cold, magical and ultimately destructive beauty. (Kirkus UK)</p><

Bradley Denton

Blackburn

<p>From Publishers Weekly</p><p>Denton 's third novel (after Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede) takes the overworked serial-killer concept and wrings from it a striking depiction of middle-American despair, betrayed innocence, and transcendent hope. Jimmy Blackburn is a roaming murderer with an idiosyncratic moral code: he kills only those he feels deserve to die. His victims include cheating auto mechanics, bullying bosses and a thieving encyclopedia salesman. In intervening chapters, Denton traces Blackburn's childhood in small-minded small-town Kansas, in a home haunted by an abusive father, a world prescribed by casual cruelties and repressive, untrustworthy authority. Denton doesn't settle for facile connections between Blackburn's early years and his criminal turn, playing his life off against some Norman Rockwell vision of an America that never was. He portrays Blackburn's childhood not as unusually bleak or cruel, but as an all-too-common experience, so it's the reality of a mundane world-not some exceptional horror-that produces Blackburn the killer. And Blackburn himself is no simplistic figure of evil; he retains a sympathetic innocence, a stubborn hope, throughout his doomed journey, and his end yields a surprising sense of redemption. Denton 's hand never falters as he shows us an America of petty injustices and vanished dreams, where a sensitive Kansas boy can grow into a killer.</p><p>From Library Journal</p><p>Abused and unloved, Blackburn is a true victim of circumstance who devises his own strict moral code to guide him in all matters including whom and what to kill. On his 17th birthday, Blackburn shoots a cop who has just killed a dog in the town church. He then embarks on a career as a one-man eliminator of those who mistreat and prey upon others. Using stark, unadorned prose, Denton (Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Morrow, 1991) has created a modern-day parable illustrating the shades of good and evil and the meanings of life. Sometimes humorous but more often heart-wrenching, Blackburn delivers a knockout punch to rigid, self-satisfied thinking everywhere. Excellent.</p><

Nelson Demille

Gold Coast

What happens to a priggish, WASPy, disillusioned Wall Street lawyer when a Mafia crime boss moves into the mansion next door in his posh Long Island neighborhood? He ends up representing the gangster on a murder rap and even perjures himself so the mafiosostet lc can be released on $5 million bail. That's the premise of DeMille's (The Charm School) bloated, unpersuasive thriller. Attorney John Sutter has problems that would daunt even Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. His marriage is crumbling, despite kinky sex games with his self-centered wife, Susan, who's the mistress of his underworld client Frank Bellarosa. The IRS is after Sutter, and his law firm wants to dump him. As a sardonic morality tale of one man's self-willed disintegration, the impact is flattened by its elitist narrator's patrician tones. A comic courtroom scene and some punches at the end, however, redeem the novel somewhat.<

Fedor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski

L’Idiot. Tome II

Ce roman, l'un des livres phare de Dostoïevski, reprend le credo de l'auteur: un homme profondément bon répand, tel le Christ, la lumière autour de lui. Il découvre, à Saint-Pétersbourg, une société cupide et hypocrite et s'il parvient à révéler le bien chez chacun c'est au prix d'une lutte permanente contre le mal.<

Fedor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski

L’Idiot. Tome I

Le prince Mychkine est un être fondamentalement bon, mais sa bonté confine à la naïveté et à l'idiotie, même s'il est capable d'analyses psychologiques très fines. Après avoir passé sa jeunesse en Suisse dans un sanatorium pour soigner son épilepsie (maladie dont était également atteint Dostoïevski) doublée d'une sorte d'autisme, il retourne en Russie pour pénétrer les cercles fermés de la société russe. Lors de la soirée d'anniversaire de Nastassia Filippovna, le prince Mychkine voit un jeune bourgeois, Parfen Semenovitch Rogojine arriver ivre et offrir une forte somme d'argent à la jeune femme pour qu'elle le suive. Le prince perçoit le désespoir de Nastasia Philippovna, en tombe maladivement amoureux, et lui propose de l'épouser. Après avoir accepté son offre, elle s'enfuit pourtant avec Rogojine. Constatant leur rivalité, Rogojine tente de tuer le prince mais ce dernier est paradoxalement sauvé par une crise d'épilepsie qui le fait s'écrouler juste avant le meurtre… Ayant créé des liens auprès de la famille Epantchine, il fait la connaissance d'une société petersbourgeoise mêlant des bourgeois, des ivrognes, des anciens militaires et des fonctionnaires fielleux. Se trouvant du jour au lendemain à la tête d'une grande fortune, il avive la curiosité de la société pétersbourgeoise et vient s'installer dans un lieu de villégiature couru, le village de Pavlovsk…<

Jared Mason Diamond

The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

Arthur Conan Doyle

Playing With Fire

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

The Scream

Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle

<p>The narrator of THE GARGOYLE is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide - for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.</p><p>A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life - and finally in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she only has twenty-seven sculptures left to complete - and her time on earth will be finished.</p><p>Already an international literary sensation, THE GARGOYLE is an for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.</p><

Anatoly Dnieprov

The Maxwell Equations

Действие происходит во времена ламповых компьютеров. Молодой физик, безуспешно решая сложное уравнение, натыкается на объявление в газете о создании вычислительного центра в его городишке. Чрезвычайно удивлённый, он заказывает решение своей задачи, а затем, поражённый результатом, пытается выяснить способ его получения, не подозревая об угрозе своему рассудку и самой жизни.<

Tim Dorsey

Hammerhead Ranch Motel

The sequel to the remarkable Florida Roadkill – an extraordinarily original novel from a new young American author – a funny, stylish, irreverent and shocking thriller. Tim Dorsey's sparklingly original debut novel – Florida Roadkill – was a hyper, jump-cut, manic black comedy that took Florida Noir to new extremes. Fellow writers and critics were quick to acclaim the bright new talent that created a high-voltage crime tale suffused with blacker-than-black humour and an infectious fascination with Florida 's strange beauty. In Florida Roadkill, the strangely lovable homicidal maniac Serge Storms drove a series of stolen cars around Florida in pursuit of five million dollars hidden in the boot of the wrong car, leaving behind him a bewildering trail of bodies. Now, Serge takes up the chase once more, tracking the car and its hidden money to a dilapidated motel in Tampa – the Hammerhead Ranch Motel.<

Colin Dexter

The Way Through The Woods

On holiday in Lyme Regis, Chief Inspector Morse has decided to go without newspapers. But in the hotel he finds himself seated opposite a woman reading her paper, and Morse cannot help but notice an intriguing headline. Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award.<

Mark Del-Franco

Unquiet Dreams

Connor Grey

Fueled by a mysterious new drug, Celtic fairies and Teutonic elves battle for turf and power-with humans caught in the middle. As the body count rises, Connor Grey uncovers a vast conspiracy that threatens to destroy not only the city, but the world.<

Mark Del-Franco

Unfallen Dead

Connor Grey

<p>For a century since the Convergence of Faerie and modern reality, the Ways between this world and the next have been closed. But now signs point to the chance that the veil may lift again.</p><p>Connor Grey has enough problems with a vengeful Queen of Faerie and the return of his old Guild partner. Add an occult string of murders, and it's another case that just may kill him.</p><

Colin Dexter

The Riddle Of The Third Mile

Once again Oxford becomes the scene of the crime as Inspector Morse investigates a baffling case involving a mysterious disappearance, an unidentified corpse, and a brutal murder.<

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