270 results for "Novel"

Ride with the devil

Schamus, James
Adapted from Daniel Woodrell's novel, Ride with the Devil tells the epic story of a group of young Bushwackers - Missouri guerilla fighters who waged a desperate and bloody battle against Union occupiers during the American Civil War. As the war progresses, two of the fighters - a former slave and the son of an immigrant worker - find they have more in common with each other than with their fellow fighters, who begin to suspect them of treason. This book includes a foreward by Ang Lee, and introduction by Schamus in which he discusses the challenge of bringing novels to life on the screen, and copious notes detailing how the finished film differs from the production script - and explaining the behind-the-scenes reasons why.
Faber 1999 143 pages

The secret countess

Ibbotson, Eva
By the award-winning and bestselling author of Journey to the River Sea, a novel that sings with characteristic Ibbotson warmth and wit.Eva Ibbotson's charming and warm-hearted tale, A Secret Countess was originally published as A Countess Below Stairs.Anna, a young countess, has lived in the glittering city of St Petersburg all her life in an ice-blue palace overlooking the River Neva. But when revolution tears Russia apart, her now-penniless family is forced to flee to England. Armed with an out-of-date book on housekeeping, Anna determines to become a housemaid and she finds work at the Earl of Westerholme's crumbling but magnificent mansion. The staff and the family are sure there is something not quite right about their new maid - but she soon wins them over with her warmth and dedication.Then the young Earl returns home from the war - and Anna falls hopelessly in love. But they can never be together: Rupert is engaged to the snobbish and awful Muriel - and anyway, Anna is only a servant. Or so everybody thinks . . .
Macmillan Children's Books 2015-03-26 343 pages

Women, the family, and freedom: the debate in documents

Susan G. Bell,Karen M. Offen
This is the first book in a two-part collection of 264 primary source documents from the Enlightenment to 1950 chronicling the public debate that raged in Europe and America over the role of women in Western society. The present volume looks at the period from 1750 to 1880. The central issues—motherhood, women's legal position in the family, equality of the sexes, the effect on social stability of women's education and labor—extended to women the struggle by men for personal and political liberty. These issues were political, economic, and religious dynamite. They exploded in debates of philosophers, political theorists, scientists, novelists, and religious and political leaders. This collection emphasizes the debate by juxtaposing prevailing and dissenting points of view at given historical moments (e.g. Madame de Staël vs. Rousseau, Eleanor Marx vs. Pope Leo XIII, Strindberg vs. Ibsen, Simone de Beauvoir vs. Margaret Mead). Each section is preceded by a contextual headnote pinpointing the documents significance. Many of the documents have been translated into English for the first time.
Stanford University Press 1983 561 pages

Genocide bad: notes on Palestine, Jewish history, and collective liberation

Kern, Sim
"Part activist memoir, part crash course in Jewish and Palestinian history, Genocide Bad dismantles Zionist propaganda and maps a course towards collective liberation in ten unapologetic essays. Drawing connections between Biblical promises and exploding pagers, medieval dress codes and modern-day apartheid, Kern sketches a sweeping history of imperialism with their characteristic blend of far-ranging research, pop-culture insights, and scathing humor. Kern, a former teacher, journalist, novelist, and book influencer, gained international recognition as an anti-Zionist Jewish activist in the days after October 7th, 2023. At a time when social media was flooded with 'I Stand with Israel' posts, Kern started sharing content encouraging their followers to read Palestinian books, learn Palestinian history, and question Western reporting on Palestine--videos which went viral into tens of millions of views. Despite facing hate messages, death threats, and exile from the Zionist Jewish community, Kern has remained steadfast in their advocacy over the past year. They've posted daily videos on Palestinian, Jewish, and colonial history, and they've raised over $500,000 in direct aid for families in Gaza--all while navigating the challenges of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting a newborn. In Genocide Bad, Kern reflects on the life experiences that led them to anti-Zionist activism, while capturing and expanding upon their online educational content. Kern doesn't flinch when confronting the horrors of genocides past and present, but there is also tremendous hope contained in these pages--hope that springs from examples of courage and resilience in the face of extreme violence, and from the kinds of resistance that might just lead to our collective liberation."--
Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc 2025 241 pages

French dressing: women, men, and Ancien Régime fiction

Miller, Nancy K.
French Dressing looks at the ancien régime's scenarios of libertine seduction--unsafe sex and its consequences for women's lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. French Dressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display--French undressing.
Routledge 1995 240 pages

The will to live on

Wouk, Herman
Herman Wouk has ranged in his novels from the mighty narrative of The Caine Mutiny and the warm, intimate humor of Marjorie Morningstar to the global panorama of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. All these powers merge in this major new work of nonfiction, The Will to Live On, an illuminating account of the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, set against a swiftly reviewed background of history, tradition, and sacred literature. Forty years ago, in his modern classic This Is My God, Herman Wouk stated the case for his religious beliefs and conduct. His aim in that work and in The Will to Live On has been to break through the crust of prejudice, to reawaken clearheaded thought about the magnificent Jewish patrimony, and to convey a message of hope for Jewish survival. Although the Torah and the Talmud are timeless, the twentieth century has brought earthquake shocks to the Jews: the apocalyptic experience of the Holocaust, the reborn Jewish state, the precarious American diaspora, and deepening religious schisms. After a lifetime of study, Herman Wouk examines the changes affecting the Jewish world, especially the troubled wonder of Israel, and the remarkable, though dwindling, American Jewry. The book is peppered with wonderful stories of the author's encounters with such luminaries as Ben Gurion, Isidor Rabi, Yitzhak Rabin, Saul Bellow, and Richard Feynan. Learned in general culture, warmly tolerant of other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own faith with a passion that gives the book its fire and does so in the clear, engaging style tha-as in all Wouk's fiction -- makes the reader want to know what the next page will bring.
HarperCollins World 2001 320 pages

The joyful beggar: a novel of St. Francis of Assisi

De Wohl, Louis
In this magnificent and stirring novel, Louis de Wohl turns his famed narrative skill to the story of the soldier and merchant's son who might have been right-hand man to a king ... and who became instead the most beloved of all saints. Set against the tempestuous background of 13th Century Italy and Egypt, here is the magnificent and inspiring story of Francis Bernardone, the brash, pleasure-loving young officer who was to become immortalized as St. Francis of Assisi. The story teems with action, pageantry and intrigue with finely conceived characters-the beautiful, saintly Clare, Frederick, the hawk-faced King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, the Sultan Al Kamil, Pope Innocent III. The scene shifts from Assisi, Rome and Sicily to the deadly sands of Egypt. This book was made into a feature film by 20th Century Fox entitled Francis of Assisi , now available on video from Ignatius Press.
Ignatius Press 2001 378 pages

Athene Palace

Waldeck, R. G.
As European capitals fell during 1940 and 1941, there swarmed to the Athene Palace, Bucharest’s Grand Hotel, diplomats, generals, Gestapo spies, and demi-mondaines from all over Europe. Arriving at the crowded Athene Palace on the day Paris fell in June 1940, American female journalist Rosa Goldschmidt Waldeck observed for the next seven months all the events that unfolded and the international figures that made Romania Europe’s last sensational hotbed of intrigue and color. Hitler’s beautiful feminine agents held court in the Athene Palace lobby within eyeshot of British diplomats, while around them moved fifth columnists, German economists, and generals, American and English diplomats and newspapermen, all who made the Athene Palace the most glamorous spot on the continent. The dramatic events of this turbulent period are described here chiefly in terms of personalities: Carol and Lupescu, Antonescu and Dr. Clodius, Nazi Gauleiters, British Quislings, Romanian appeasers, and all the types who dominated the scene of World War II Europe... On the surface, this is a fast-moving, dramatic book, as readable as a novel, but it is also a most effective dissection of the Nazi New Order. This penetrating insight into the German administration of Europe reveals the reasons underlying the failure of the Nazi regime. Originally published during the Second World War, this new edition of Athene Palace is enhanced by a thorough introductory study on the author’s life and work by Ernest H. Latham, Jr., former cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Bucharest. Dr. Latham is a well-known specialist in Romanian history and has done extensive research on American and British journalists in Romania during World War II.
Histria, The Center for Romanian Studies 2018 378 pages

Casanova The World of a Seductive Genius

Laurence Bergreen
“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” ( Huffington Post )—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni . And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life . Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” ( Kirkus Reviews ).
Simon & Schuster 2018-02-13 544 pages

The American people. Volume 2. The brutality of fact

Kramer, Larry
In The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact , Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country’s history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America’s two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise of Sexopolis , the country’s favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems. The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends—Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America’s preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was abused by many powerful men. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it and depict the bold and imaginative activists who set out to shock the nation’s conscience. In Kramer’s telling, the United States is dedicated to the proposition that very few men are created equal, and those who love other men may be destined for death. Here is a historical novel like no other—satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.
Picador 2021-01-12 896 pages

The glass pearls

Pressburger, Emeric
For fans of The Passenger , this thrilling tale of an ex-Nazi surgeon hiding in plain sight in 1960s London by the celebrated filmmaker is a lost noir gem, introduced by Anthony Quinn and narrated on audio by Mark Gatiss, as chosen by Ian Rankin on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read . 'Stunning: incredibly good, tense and compelling and morally complex.' Ian Rankin 'This extraordinary novel had me hooked from start to finish.' Sarah Waters 'An outstanding novel: gripping, tense and darkly unsettling. ' Jonathan Freedland 'A wonderfully compelling noir thriller and audacious and challenging act of imagination.' William Boyd 'One of the best London novels of the 20th century.' Benjamin Myers Nothing is more inviting to disclose your secrets than to be told by others of their own ... London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse ... 'A haunting, remarkable novel, as startlingly original as any of Pressburger's films.' Nicola Upson 'A dark and harrowing window on the past: the ending will haunt your dreams.' Janice Hallett
Faber & Faber 2022 260 pages

The mural at the Waverly Inn: a portrait of Greenwich Village bohemians

Sorel, Edward
The Waverly Inn has been a landmark in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1920’s. But since 2006, when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter bought and refurbished the restaurant, it has also been one of the most sought after destinations in the city. And while we can’t guarantee you a reservation there, we can bring you the wonderful, witty mural by Edward Sorel that graces its walls. Sorel--whose caricatures and drawings regularly appear in The New Yorker and on its cover--chose forty Greenwich Village greats from the past 150 years to cavort in bacchanalian splendor. Each of the 40 makes a solo appearance in these pages alongside a charming, telling vignette of his or her life by Dorothy Gallagher, then appears in a foldout of the entire mural at the back of the book. Here you will find Walt Whitman being attacked by a ferocious Truman Capote butterfly; Jane Jacobs, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Willa Cather playing ring-around the rosy; those famous denizens of the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas--who breakfasted on beer and lunched on brandy--and Jack Kerouac, typing his long roll of a novel. Anais Nin appears nude, which, Gallagher points out, was her usual state. Norman Mailer admires himself in a reflecting pond. Here, too, are Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jackson Pollack and James Baldwin, Thelonius Monk, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, Andy Warhol and Fran Lebowitz, Margaret Sanger, Marlon Brando, and many others. The Mural at the Waverly Inn is an enduring delight to treasure and to give.
Pantheon Books 2008 56 pages

The waterworks

Doctorow, E. L.
“An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.” –The Washington Post Book World One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times , “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.” “Startling and spellbinding . . . The waters that lave the narrative all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of [Doctorow’s] poetic imagination.” – The New York Times Book Review “Hypnotic . . . a dazzling romp, an extraordinary read, given strength and grace by the telling, by the poetic voice and controlled cynical lyricism of its streetwise and world-weary narrator.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer “A gem of a novel, intimate as chamber music . . . a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders.” – Boston Sunday Herald “Enthralling . . . a story of debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last.” – Chicago Sun-Times “An immense, extraordinary achievement.” –San Francisco Chronicle
Random House Trade Paperbacks 2007-05-08 253 pages

Married life

Vogel, David
Set in Vienna, the novel tells of the relationship between the penniless writer Rudolf Gurdwell and Baroness Thea von Takow, who treats her husband with cruelty and disdain, In spite of this, Gurdwell struggles to find the will to leave his wife, even when the devoted Lotte Bondheim offers him the prospect of true happiness. Yet this is no mere story of a love triangle. In astonishingly vivid detail, Vogel evokes the atmosphere of 1920s Vienna, taking us from fashionable cafes and aristocratic estates to the shoemaker's workshop and the almshouse. With decadence and poverty existing side by side, Vienna is depicted as a city on the brink of collape - a haunting prefigurement of the horrors to come
Scribe 2014 506 pages

Death and the idea of Mexico

Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio
Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from the sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican American identity politics, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz’s innovative study marks a turning point in understanding Mexico’s rich and unique use of death imagery. Unlike contemporary Europeans and Americans, whose denial of death permeates their cultures, the Mexican people display and cultivate a jovial familiarity with death. This intimacy with death has become the cornerstone of Mexico’s national identity. It is tempting to view this rich elaboration of death imagery as yet another example of an “invented tradition,” that is, a cult shaped by the modern state’s cultural policies or by the narrow interests of contemporary identity politics. Lomnitz takes a different approach. Rather than flattening out the tradition by insisting only on the ways it is willfully manipulated, this book focuses on the dialectical relationship between dying, killing, and the administration of death, and the very formation of the colonial state, of a rich and variegated popular culture, and of the Mexican nation itself. The elevation of Mexican intimacy with death to the center of national identity is but a moment within that history ― within a history in which the key institutions of society are built around the claims of the fallen. Based on a wide range of sources ― from missionary testimonies to newspaper cartoons, from masterpieces of artistic vanguards to accounts of public executions and political assassinations ― Death and the Idea of Mexico moves beyond the limited methodology of traditional historiographies of death to probe the depths of a people and a country whose fearless acquaintance with death shapes the very terms of their social compact. This work effects a novel turn in the classical historiography of death ― a turn that can be characterized by a move from social and cultural history to political history. The move toward the politics of death gives readers a unique insight into the peculiar story of death in the Americas.
Zone Books 2005-10-07 581 pages

Destruction and sorrow beneath the heavens: reportage

Krasznahorkai, László
"Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens is both a travel memoir and the chronicle of a distinct intellectual shift as one of the most captivating contemporary writers and thinkers begins to engage with the cultures of Asia and the legacies of its interactions with Europe in a newly globalized society. Rendered in English by award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens is an important work, marking the emergence of Krasznahorkai as a truly global novelist"-- Amazon.com
Seagull Books 2016 287 pages

Strange devices of the sun and moon

Goldstein, Lisa
Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon is set in an imaginative recreation of Elizabethan London, a rich, intense city overflowing with life and action, a city of spies and booksellers, alchemists and playwrights, poets, witches, plague and salvation. A series of strange events links the lives of an ordinary woman, a bookseller in St. Paul's, and the great writer Christopher Marlowe, as the Faerie Queen and her court invade London in search of the Queen's son, the reborn King Arthur. Marlowe must become in effect a detective, and Alice, strangely favored by the fairies, must become a heroine in a struggle against evil forces. The culmination of this extraordinary fantasy, a battle between the opposing dragons of good and evil, is certainly one of the most weird and enchanting events in all contemporary fantasy. Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon is a big, delicious fantasy adventure filled with strange creatures and ordinary people, famous characters, and mysterious historical doings. It is a triumph of entertainment and one of the finest fantasy novels of the decade.
TOR 1993 301 pages