Fourteen-year-old Gina, the spoiled daughter of a Hungarian general, rails against being sent to boarding school far from Budapest when war breaks out, but finds help in a statue of Abigail and her new "sisters."
"Each chapter in this remarkable consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, as a boy, Henry James has his daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. We encounter Brady again as he photographs Walt Whitman and then Ulysses Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather... Cohen brilliantly...
"A harrowing account of life in Italy in the year leading up to World War II, available in the US for the first time. War in Italy in 1939 was by no means necessary or even beneficial to the country.But in June 1940, Mussolini finally declared war on Britain and France. The awfulinevitability with which Italy stumbled its way into a war for which they were illprepared and largely unenthusiastic is documented here with grace and clarity byone of the...
For forty years Charles Alavoine has sleepwalked through his life. Growing up as a good boy in the grip of a domineering mother, he trains as a doctor, marries, opens a medical practice in a quiet country town, and settles into an existence of impeccable bourgeois conformity. And yet at unguarded moments this model family man is haunted by a sense of emptiness and futility. Then, one night, laden with Christmas presents, he meets Martine. It is...
"A classic encyclopedia of symbols by Catalan polymath Joan Cirlot that illuminates the symbolic underpinnings of myth, modern psychology, literature, and art."-- Amazon.ca.
Afloat, originally published as Sur l'eau in 1888, is a book of dazzling but treacherously shifting currents, a seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast that opens up to reveal unexpected depths, as Guy de Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in a wholly original style. Humorous and troubling stories, unreliable confessions, stray reminiscences, and thoughts on life, love, art, nature,...
Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, the French rat. That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if its Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge - or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle...
"Winner of the UK's Encore Award for best second novel, a lyrical story of a Bengali student at Oxford University who is caught in the complications of a love triangle. A young man arrives in Oxford and finds himself involved in relationships with two women, neither of which is destined for fulfillment. Interspersed between glimpses of students' lives and friendships are fragmentary memories of the narrator's parents, the death of his music teacher,...
A decade-spanning love story from an author who is “the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike” (The Independent) Haunted by unspoken tensions and stifled ardor, two lovers navigate shifting expectations and societal changes in inter-war England.
The mid-twentieth century British novelist Elizabeth Taylor numbered among her admirers Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Kingsley Amis....
"Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the so-called "man without qualities" who is the major character in Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of that name. Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system-political, ethical, metaphysical-strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich...
"A thirteen-year-old boy spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort feels displaced in his beautiful widowed mother's affections by her cocksure new companion and strays into the company of some local young toughs and their unsettling leader, a fleshy older boatman with six fingers on each hand. Initially repelled by their squalor and brutality, repeatedly humiliated for his well-bred frailty and above all for his ingenuousness in matters of women...
"Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, which gives voice to the inhabitants of a rural village in Suffolk, England, was an early and shining example of what an oral history could be. This colorful, perceptive portrayal of country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants. Blythe let his subjects speak their minds, and we are privileged to listen in on recollections and opinions of a wide variety of village residents, from the schoolteacher...
Deep in winter, inhabitants of the village begin mysteriously to disappear, and Langlois is sent to investigate. A manhunt begins and Langlois brings the case to what appears to be a successful conclusion. Some years later, again in winter, Langlois returns to the village, now having been promoted to the position of captain of the brigade that protects the inhabitants and their property from wolves. Langlois is a charismatic and enigmatic kingly figure...
"A Legacy is the tale of two very different families. The Merzes are members of the Jewish upper bourgeoisie of Berlin and direct descendants of Henriette Merz, friend of Goethe and Mirabeau. But this imposing legacy has long since ceased to mean much of anything in the Merzes' huge town house, where the family devotes itself to little more than enjoying its comfort and ensuring its wealth. The Feldens are landed Catholic aristocracy, well off but...
Alien Hearts "was the last novel that Guy de Maupassant completed before succumbing to the effects of tertiary syphilis of which he was to die at forty-three. It is the most original and surprising of his novels and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. "Alien Hearts "is the story of lovers bound by bitterness as much as by passion. Maupassant's hero falls for a woman of the world, a glacially dazzling beauty...
"The last novel by one of Germany's most important postwar writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before Walter Kempowski's death. It describes with matter-of-fact clarity and acuity, and a roving point of view, the atmosphere in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-1945 as the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army approaches. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into a state of disrepair....
