1923 results for "Literary Fiction"

Love and Garbage

Klima, Ivan
The narrator of Ivan Klima's novel has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress -an essay on Kafka -and exchanged his writer's pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and, obsessively, on his passionate and adulterous love affair with the sculptress Daria. Gradually he admits the impossibility of being at once an honest writer and an honest lover, and with that agonizing discovery comes a moment of choice.
Knop 1991

Matisse Picasso & Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories;With an Introduction by Sherwood Anderson

Gertrude Stein
First published in 1933, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein contains three prose pieces written in the stream-of-consciousness style that Stein was famous for. A modernist classic not to be missed by fans and collectors of Stein's seminal work. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American poet, novelist, art collector, and playwright who famously hosted a Paris salon frequented by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. Before she was a patron to "The Lost Generation" artists, Stein was an esteemed author who influenced many 20th-century writers with her innovative and experimental prose. Other notable works by this author include: Three Lives (1909), White Wines (1913), and An Exercise in Analysis (1917). Featuring an introduction by Sherwood Anderson, this volume is an essential read for fans of Gertrude Stein's work and those with an interest in Jazz Age literature.
Read Books 2021-05-06 336 pages

War Babies A Novel

Frederick Busch
Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp, the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.
New Directions Publishing 2001 114 pages

The circle

Elaine Feinstein
'Feinstein's triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena's predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful ... [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.' Guardian Lena's seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.
Faber and Faber 2008-10 165 pages

Lear's shadow: a novel

Rothman, Claire
A captivating novel about aging fathers and their grown daughters, childhood scars, and rewriting the script with a little help from Shakespeare, from the acclaimed author of My October . On the brink of forty, Bea Rose has lost her lover, her business, and her bearings. When the opportunity arises to work on a summer production of King Lear to be staged in various parks around Montreal, she takes it, despite her utter lack of theatre experience. Things get off to a rocky start when Bea meets the artistic director, Artie White, a childhood friend whose presence stirs up painful memories. Then, inadvertently attracting the attentions of the play's aging star, she learns that she must tread carefully among the egos and relationships of the company. At the same time, Bea's father begins behaving erratically, and her younger sister Cara discovers cracks in the foundation of an apparently perfect life. The sisters do their best to care for their beloved, demanding father, but his deteriorating condition is more than they can handle. Meanwhile, the star of Lear is also faltering amidst the confusions of age, illness, and regret. When a raucous party whirls out of control, the various forces in Bea's life collide, culminating in a violent act that could destroy more than one life. But that act also reveals how lives might be united in new ways. Tender, vivid, and powerful, Lear's Shadow is a richly satisfying meditation on love's power to bind and to liberate. It's a lyrical reminder that even in the face of grief, life's joy can be embraced.
Penguin 2018-07-10 319 pages

Midnight is not in everyone's reach

Antunes, António Lobo
"A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone's Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal's greatest living writer. The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone's Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios. Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator's corrosive psyche toward our real destination-the place inside herself where the family's grief-stricken secrets are kept"--
Dalkey Archive Press 2025 573 pages

A private view

Brookner, Anita
'Seated at a café table, in the syrupy warmth of out-of-season Nice, he reviewed his life and found it to be alarmingly empty.' George Bland had planned to spend his retirement in leisurely travel and modest entertainment with his friend Putnam. When Putnam dies George is left attempting to impose some purpose on the solitary end of his life. Then Katy Gibb appears as a temporary resident, perhaps even squatter, in a neighbouring apartment. Greedy, selfish, sometimes alluring, often manipulative, Katy exerts a strange influence on George, forcing him to recognize that his own careful, fastidious life has shown a distinct lack of passion and daring. As the realization takes hold, George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo .
Penguin Books 2016-11-03 219 pages

The Worship of Augustus Caesar

DelMar, Alexander
The Worship of Augustus Caesar is a book written by Alexander DelMar that explores the cult of Augustus Caesar in ancient Rome. The book delves into the origins of the cult, the rituals and practices associated with it, and the political and social implications of its establishment. DelMar provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which Augustus Caesar's image and power were used to create a sense of unity and loyalty among the Roman people, and how this worship of the emperor became an integral part of Roman society. The book also examines the role of religion in the political and social structures of ancient Rome and the ways in which Augustus Caesar's cult helped to shape these structures. Overall, The Worship of Augustus Caesar offers a fascinating insight into the religious and political landscape of ancient Rome and the enduring legacy of Augustus Caesar's rule.1899. Derived from a study of coins, monuments, calendars, aeras and astronomical and astrological cycles, the whole establishing a new chronology and survey of history and religion. Contents: cycle of the eclipses; ancient year of ten months; Ludi Seculars and Olympiads; astrology of the divine year; Jovian Cycle and worship; various years of the incarnation; aeras; cycles; chronological problems and solutions; Maetho's false chronology; forgeries in stone; the Roman Messiah.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Kessinger Publishing, LLC 2010-09-10 370 pages

All Whom I Have Loved A Novel

Aharon Appelfeld
All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part. The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2015-03-10 256 pages

The Nervous Housewife

Abraham Myerson
The Nervous Housewife has been regarded as significant work throughout human history, and in order to ensure that this work is never lost, we have taken steps to ensure its preservation by republishing this book in a contemporary format for both current and future generations. This entire book has been retyped, redesigned, and reformatted. Since these books are not made from scanned copies, the text is readable and clear.
Alpha Editions 2022-12-14 122 pages

Fire and Knowledge Fiction and Essays

Péter Nádas
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The U.S. publication of A Book of Memories in 1997 introduced to our shores the work of an extraordinary novelist, Péter Nádas. Now, in Fire and Knowledge , a superb collection of short stories, essays, and literary criticism, we discover other aspects of Nádas's major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, and as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree. Here, in full, is a rich and rewarding compilation of brilliantly original, touching, witty, and thought-provoking works by one of our greatest living writers.
Picador 2008-07-22 400 pages

Upward mobility and the common good: toward a literary history of the welfare state

Robbins, Bruce
We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good , Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority. -- "Modern Language Quarterly"
Princeton University Press 2007 304 pages

You are not what we expected

Ludwig, Sidura
"When Elaine Levine's eccentric older brother, Isaac, moves back from LA to the quiet suburb of Thornhill, Ontario, to help her care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more neighbourhood drama than he would like. Meanwhile, a nanny, miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn't fit in at school. In a house down the street, a young mother is given the news that her marriage is over by her mother-in-law while her husband sits silent. And a woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. This stunningly intimate collection of stories, which spans fifteen years in the lives of the Levine family and the other characters, is an exquisite portrait of a Jewish community, the secular and religious families who inhabit it, and the tensions that exist there, by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent."--
Astoria / House of Anansi 2020-05 223 pages