Søgeresultater: 152

Summary: Rafael Yglesias’s novel of trauma, loss, and the bonds formed between victims of catastrophe. Max Klein suffers from many anxieties—including a terrible fear of flying—but after surviving a plane crash his worries vanish and he suddenly believes himself invincible. Back home, a psychiatrist puts him in touch with Carla, a victim of the same crash who lost her infant son and suffers from a morbid, debilitating depression. Now Max and Carla begin a relationship that is sometimes intimate, sometimes painful, and perhaps the only path to recovery for both.  Fearless is a brilliant portrait of trauma and its aftermath—the shock of loss and the sometimes unexpected ways that people learn to cope with disaster.  This ebook features a new illustrated biography of Rafael Yglesias, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection

Summary: Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own. Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson's dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated. At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola's story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him. 'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

Summary: New York Times bestseller: A "powerful" Southern drama about the destructive repercussions of keeping an unspeakable family secret ( The Atlanta Journal ). Tom Wingo has lost his job, and is on the verge of losing his marriage, when he learns that his twin sister, Savannah, has attempted suicide again. At the behest of Savannah's psychiatrist, Dr. Susan Lowenstein, Tom reluctantly leaves his home in South Carolina to travel to New York City and aid in his sister's therapy. As Tom's relationship with Susan deepens, he reveals to her the turbulent history of the Wingo family, and exposes the truth behind the fateful day that changed their lives forever. Drawing richly from the author's own troubled upbringing, The Prince of Tides is a sweeping, powerful novel of unlocking the past to overcome the darkest of personal demons—it's Pat Conroy at his very best

Summary: Begun in 1959 by a then twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico,in the late 1950s. The autobiographical hero, a young writer dreaming of Hemingway but stuck in a dead-end newspaper job, embarks on a carousing, hell-raising journey through the tropics. Along the way, he comes between a wild-spirited comrade and his temptress girlfriend and gets in the middle of a violent clash between the island culture and the encroaching American tourist values. Exuberant and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's best-selling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels

Summary: A man struggles to mend his fractured family in the wake of his sudden success as a bestselling author in this masterful novel from Scott Spencer Sam Holland is a pen-for-hire, with nonfiction titles such as Traveling with Your Pet and An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Pro Football to his name—or rather his pseudonym, John Retcliffe. But when his latest project, Visitors from Above , takes off, Sam is ill-equipped to handle this sudden fame: His marriage is in trouble and, as a result, his teenage son runs away. As he tours the country in support of his book, he must endeavor to put back the pieces of his broken life.  At turns funny and moving, Men in Black is Spencer’s insightful take on the pitfalls of fame, and a poignant story of familial love. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Scott Spencer, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection

Summary: My first collision with fame was hardly memorable. I was a busboy at Marx's Deli. The year was 1934. The place was Third and Hill, Los Angeles. I was twenty-one years old, living in a world bounded on the west by Bunker Hill, on the east by Los Angeles Street, on the south by Pershing Square, and on the north by Civic Center. I was a busboy nonpareil, with great verve and style for the profession, and though I was dreadfully underpaid (one dollar a day plus meals) I attracted considerable attention as I whirled from table to table, balancing a tray on one hand, and eliciting smiles from my customers. I had something else beside a waiter's skill to offer my patrons, for I was also a writer

Summary: Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades. 'Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece' Sunday Times In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. In its sequel Heaven and Hell , he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written. WITH A FOREWORD J.G. BALLARD

Summary: In 1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return - and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas. Spanning four generations, two world wars and a hundred years, We, The Drowned is an epic tale of adventure, ruthlessness and passion

Summary: Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.   William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.   John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world

Summary: Young, gay, William Beckwith spends his time, and his trust fund, idly cruising London for erotic encounters. When he saves the life of an elderly man in a public convenience an unlikely job opportunity presents itself - the man, Lord Nantwich, is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to take a look at Nantwich's diaries. But in the story he unravels, a tragedy of twentieth-century gay repression, lurk bitter truths about Will's own privileged existence

Summary: A Selection from The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

Summary: A New York Times bestseller by the author of Sophie’s Choice : Two Americans search for the truth about a mysterious long-ago murder in Italy.   Shortly after World War II, in the village of Sambuco, Italy, two men—Virginia attorney Peter Leverett and South Carolina artist Cass Kinsolving—crossed paths with Mason Flagg. They both had their own reactions to the gregarious and charismatic movie mogul’s son. For the impressionable Peter, it was something close to awe. For the alcoholic Cass, it was unsettled rage. Then, after the rape and murder of a peasant girl, Mason’s body was found at the base of a cliff—an apparent suicide. He’d been distraught, the authorities said, over committing such a heinous crime. Peter and Cass went their separate ways, and never spoke of it again.   Now, years later, Peter is still haunted by what he knows—and by what he doesn’t. He’s sought out Cass in Charleston for closure, and something close to the truth. Together both men will share their tales of that terrible season in Italy, each with their own ghosts—and their own reasons to exorcise them. But neither Peter nor Cass is prepared for where this path of revenge, complicity, and atonement will take them.   A profound exploration of the evil that men do, and what the innocent must endure to accommodate it, Set This House on Fire is more than a byzantine murder mystery, it’s “one of the finest novels of our times” from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner , Darkness Visible , and other modern classics ( San Francisco Chronicle ).   This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives