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In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last...
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"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication...
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"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....
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"A vivid coming-of-age tale set in a big Nigerian city about a young man trying to make his way as a journalist and band leader in the big city. When People of the City was published in 1954 it was immediately acclaimed as the first major novel in English by a West African to be widely read throughout the English-speaking world. People of the City tells the story of a young crime reporter and dance-band leader in a great West African city who comes...
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Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig: "I had never heard of Zweig...when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book. I also read the The Post-Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself — our “Author” character,...
6) Agostino
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"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...
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'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' Haunting, moving, evocative, The Go-Between is L.P. Hartley's heartbreaking novel about social constraints and childhood innocence. During the long hot summer of 1900, young Leo Colston is invited to stay for a month at a lordly, aristocratic manor in Norfolk. There he falls in love with his friend's older sister, who commissions him to ferry secret messages to the local farmer, her...
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"We think of Honore Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy stand many shorter works, and it's here that we get some of his most daring explorations of crime, sexuality, and artistic creation. As Marcel Proust noted, it is in these tales that we detect, under the surface, the mysterious...
9) Belchamber
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In his remarkably interesting novel, Howard Sturgis, with a skillful touch, describes life in the rich and self-indulgent aristocratic society. It traces the career of a young man, Sainty, brought up in the midst of great luxury. Indecision of character is the weakness of Sainty. He allows himself to become the prey of a scheming mother and her worthless daughter, and, in spite of the tremendous advantage of his wealth and position, and a strong desire...
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"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes...
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A sly, funny novel about an American girl trying to make it in 1960s London–and discovering that she's in over head.
In The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy revealed the life of the young expatriate in Paris in all its hilarious and heartbreaking drama. With The Old Man and Me, written when Dundy was living in England in the early 1960s, she tackles the American girl in London, a bit older but certainly no wiser.
Honey...
In The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy revealed the life of the young expatriate in Paris in all its hilarious and heartbreaking drama. With The Old Man and Me, written when Dundy was living in England in the early 1960s, she tackles the American girl in London, a bit older but certainly no wiser.
Honey...
12) Pedigree
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Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest, most unlikely, and most adventurous novel, the book that is increasingly seen to lie at the heart of his outsize achievement as a chronicler of modern self and society. In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to André Gide, who urged him to turn them into a novel. The result was, Simenon later quipped, a book in which everything...
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"The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing--where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods--and he's a loser. Well into his forties, he's divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while...
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With Eve's Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine...
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"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...
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