Search results for ""pushkin press""

Everyone has secrets. Especially the king. When a gruesomely mutilated body is found on the squalid streets of Paris in 1759, the Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths is called to the scene. The body count soon begins to rise and the Inspector falls into a web of deceit that stretches from criminals, secret orders, revolutionaries and aristocrats to very top of society. In the murky world of the court of King Louis XV, finding out the truth will prove to be anything but straightforward.

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Every week, the comic book artist Riad Sattouf has a chat with his friend's daughter, Esther. She tells him about her life, about school, her friends, her hopes, dreams and fears, and then he works it up into a comic strip. This book consists of 52 of those strips, telling between them the story of a year in the life of this sharp, spirited and hilarious child. The result is a moving, insightful and utterly addictive glimpse into the real lives of children growing up in today's world.

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Rembrandt's life has always been an enigma. How did a miller's son from a provincial Dutch town become the greatest artist in the world? With his formative years shrouded in mystery, the only remaining evidence of Rembrandt's life as a young man is his work. Deeply rooted in the turbulent changes that his hometown was undergoing, Rembrandt's early paintings tell a fascinating story of artistic evolution against the backdrop of the widening horizons of Leiden's cultural and commercial life during the Dutch Golden Age. Leiden's good fortune facilitated Rembrandt's. But who was that young man inventing himself as the city around him grew and prospered? How did Rembrandt become Rembrandt? To find out, Leiden native Onno Blom immersed himself in the world, the country, the city and the house in which Rembrandt was born in 1606 and where he spent the first twenty-five years of his life. The result is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man, rich in local and biographical detail, and restless in its efforts to seek out the roots of his genius.

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BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitckcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.

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Berlin, November 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silberman must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitchcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.

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During the war, Géraldine Schwarz's grandparents were neither heroes nor villains - they just followed the current. Afterwards they wanted to forget, to bury it all under the wreckage of the Third Reich. But decades later, delving through the basement of their apartment building, Géraldine discovers that her grandfather Karl profited from the forced 'Aryanisation' of Jewish businesses - and so she is compelled to investigate her ancestors' past. On her mother's side, she delves into the role of her French grandfather, a policeman during the Vichy regime. How guilty were they? Combining generations of family stories with the history of Europe's post-war reckoning, Géraldine asks: how did Germans transform their collective guilt into democratic responsibility? And, given rising populism in Europe today, how can we ensure we learn from history?

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In 1940s Japan, the wealthy head of the Inugami Clan dies, and his family eagerly await the reading of the will. But no sooner are its strange details revealed than a series of bizarre, gruesome murders begins. Detective Kindaichi must unravel the clan's terrible secrets of forbidden liaisons, monstrous cruelty, and hidden identities to find the murderer, and lift the curse wreaking its bloody revenge on the Inugamis. The Inugami Curse is a fiendish, intricately plotted classic mystery from a giant of Japanese crime writing, starring the legendary detective Kosuke Kindaichi.

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'Harrowing, suspenseful and convincing . . . beautiful' Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone 'Poignant . . . haunting and altoether memorable' Booklist A story of revenge and salvation Two years ago, Augusto De Boer embarked on his annual journey through the Italian Alps, attempting to smuggle his family's tobacco crop across the border to Austria. He never returned. Now Augusto's daughter Jole must retrace her father's steps alone, navigating the perilous crags and valleys surrounding the border to discover the truth about her father's disappearance. Soul of the Border is a ferocious tale of revenge, salvation, and an exhilarating journey into the wild.

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In January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the 'hour before the end of the world', he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness. Incisive and ironic, the writing evokes Roth's bitterness, frustration and morbid despair at the coming annihilation of the free world while displaying his great nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire into which he was born and his ingrained fear of nationalism in any form.

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The Crooked House sits on a snowbound cliff at the remote northern tip of Japan. A curious place to build a house, but even more curious is the house itself-a maze of sloping floors and strange staircases, full of bloodcurdling masks and uncanny dolls. When a guest is found murdered in seemingly impossible circumstances, the police are called. But they are unable to solve the puzzle, and more bizarre deaths follow. Enter Kiyoshi Mitarai, the renowned sleuth. Surely if anyone can crack these cryptic murders it is him. But you have all the clues too-can you solve the mystery of the murders in the Crooked House first?

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In these glittering, very funny stories, the acclaimed Danish writer Dorthe Nors sketches ordinary lives taking unexpected turns: a son's love for his father is tested when he suddenly discovers its fragility; a woman in an abusive relationship seeks to better understand the choices she has made; a man with dreams of self improvement is haunted by deceit; and a daughter watches on silently as her mother's search for meaning ends in madness. Blending compassion with dark delight, Nors conjures up a flawed, unsettlingly familiar world with each cautionary glance - as fresh moments of wonder, romance and frail beauty are unexpectedly infiltrated by depravity, isolation and despair.

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'I am still unable to leave the burnt-out ruins' Akiyuki Nosaka, 2014 In 1945, Akiyuki Nosaka watched the Allied firebombing of Kobe kill his adoptive parents, and then witnessed his sister starving to death. The shocking and blisteringly memorable stories of The Cake Tree in the Ruins are based on his own experiences as a child in Japan during the Second World War. They are stories of a lonely whale searching the oceans for a mate, who sacrifices himself for love; of a mother desperately trying to save her son with her tears; of a huge, magnificent tree which grows amid the ruins of a burnt-out town, its branches made from the sweetest cake imaginable. Profound, heartbreaking and aglow with a piercing beauty, they express the chaos and terror of conflict, yet also how love can illuminate even the darkest moment.

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I want to find out how they behave when they're free. Len Howard was forty years old when she decided to leave her London life and loves behind, retire to the English countryside and devote the rest of her days to her one true passion: birds. Moving to a small cottage in Sussex, she wrote two bestselling books, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived nearby, flew freely in and out of her windows, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed. This moving novel imagines the story of this remarkable woman's decision to defy society's expectations, and the joy she drew from her extraordinary relationship with the natural world.

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Sonja's over forty, and she's trying to move in the right direction. She's learning to drive. She's joined a meditation group. And she's attempting to reconnect with her sister. But Sonja would rather eat cake than meditate. Her driving instructor won't let her change gear. And her sister won't return her calls. Sonja's mind keeps wandering back to the dramatic landscapes of her childhood - the singing whooper swans, the endless sky, and getting lost barefoot in the rye fields - but how can she return to a place that she no longer recognises? And how can she escape the alienating streets of Copenhagen? Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a poignant, sharp-witted tale of one woman's journey in search of herself when there's no one to ask for directions.

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A New York Times Notable Book Best book of the year in the New York Times, Bustle, Time Out, The Atlantic, Slate, Electric Literature'Funny, sad, scary and beautiful. I love it' Ursula K. Le Guin If the job market hadn't been so bleak during that long, humid summer, Josephine might have been discouraged from taking the administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town. As the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath, and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sublet. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. Both chilling and poignant, this novel asks the biggest questions about marriage and fidelity, birth and death. Helen Phillips twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder - luminous and new.

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Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a sharp, photo-realistic novella of memory and thwarted hope Divorced and cut off from his family, Taro lives alone in one of the few occupied apartments in his block, a block that is to be torn down as soon as the remaining tenants leave. Since the death of his father, Taro keeps to himself, but is soon drawn into an unusual relationship with the woman upstairs, Nishi, as she passes on the strange tale of the sky-blue house next door. First discovered by Nishi in the little-known photo-book 'Spring Garden', the sky-blue house soon becomes a focus for both Nishi and Taro: of what is lost, of what has been destroyed, and of what hope may yet lie in the future for both of them, if only they can seize it.

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A colour-drenched epic set in Indonesia, filled with vivid sex and violence, from the Man Booker International Prize longlisted author 'A literary child of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie'New York Review of Books 'A howling masterpiece' Chigoze Obioma, author of The Fisherman One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, the beautiful Indonesian prostitute Dewi Ayu rise from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family. Amidst the orange groves and starfruit trees, her children and grandchildren have been living out lives of violence, incest, murder, madness and heartbreak, They are creatures of breathtaking beauty - all but one of them, whose ugliness in unparalleled. And Beauty is her name. Set in the mythical Indonesian town of Halimunda, Beauty is a Wound is a bawdy, epic take of fearsome women and weak-willed men, communist ghosts and vengeful spirits. chaste princesses and ruthless bandits. It is also a satirical portrait of Indonesia's painful past, journeying through almost a century of brutality, from Dutch colonialism and Japanese occupation to revolution, independence and dictatorship. Weaving together history with local legend, Eka Kurniawan spins a fantastical masterpiece in which darkness and light dance hand in hand.

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A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer's cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer's life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late... Twice filmed, I Was Jack Mortimer is a tale of misappropriated identity as darkly captivating and twisting as the books of Patricia Highsmith.

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A Sunday Telegraph, Irish Times and Glasgow Herald Book of the Year "Tender, acute and utterly absorbing" Anna Funder, author of Stasiland "A wry and unheroic witness... an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists" Julian Barnes "Beautiful and supremely touching" Keith Lowe, Sunday Telegraph "Compelling ... [Leo] is terrific at elucidating the slow, incremental steps by which people come to lie to themselves... Guile, guilt and disappointment drip from these pages and Red Love is all the more affecting for it" New Statesman Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say. Now, married with two children and the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the questions he couldn't ask. Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart. "Tender, acute and utterly absorbing. In fine portraits of his family members Leo takes us through three generations of his family, showing how they adopt, reject and survive the fierce, uplifting and ultimately catastrophic ideologies of 20th-century Europe. We are taken on an intimate journey from the exhilaration and extreme courage of the French Resistance to the uncomfortable moral accommodations of passive resistance in the GDR. "He describes these 'ordinary lies' and contradictions, and the way human beings have to negotiate their way through them, with great clarity, humour and truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is delighted to honour Red Love. His personal memoir serves as an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a wry and unheroic witness to the distorting impact - sometimes frightening, sometimes merely absurd - that ideology has upon the daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing machines for reasons of state." Julian Barnes, European Book Prize With wonderful insight Leo shows how the human need to believe and to belong to a cause greater than ourselves can inspire a person to acts of heroism, but can then ossify into loyalty to a cause that long ago betrayed its people." Anna Funder, author of Stasiland >>"Leo uses the intimate scope of his family to explore the turbulent political history of East Germany from a perspective that has not been seen before. The result is an absorbing and personal account that gives outsiders an insight into life in the GDR" Shortlist "Affectionate, insightful... Red Love is a fascinating tale... beautifully written and translated" Bookoxygen Maxim Leo was born in 1970 in East Berlin. He studied Political Science at the Free University in Berlin and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. Since 1997 he is Editor of the Berliner Zeitung. In 2002 he was nominated for the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize, and in the same year won the German-French Journalism Prize. He won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.

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New in paperback: the conversation-starting, engrossing novel about power and consent in the pressure cooker of a high-end restaurantWhen Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she's thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant - the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker. Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains. Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah must reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, the lies we tell and the courage it takes to face the truth.

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A jagged, propulsive story of guilt and youth spinning off its axis in the wake of a drowning.

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Sarah might be poor, but at least she's French, which allows her to attend Casablanca's elite high school. It's there that she first lays eyes on Driss. He's not very good looking-apart from his eyes, which are the deep green of thyme simmering in a tagine-but the word is he's the richest guy in the city. Sarah decides she wants those eyes, and a life like his. So begins a twisted, provocative love story that will see Sarah climbing Casa's social ladder, all the way from street-corner merguez and chips to poolside joints in a mansion overlooking the ocean. But, as Sarah will learn, this city has a way of putting you back in your place...

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The bestselling diaries of WWII in Tuscany, with a new introduction by writer and social historian Virginia Nicholson, and stunning rediscovered photographsAt the height of the Second World War, Italy was being torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the eventual Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born in England, married to an Italian - kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo's compellingly powerful diary, War in Val d'Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground. At great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters and refugees. They took in evacuees, and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them. Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity, and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion, and the devastation that war can bring.

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From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AIJohnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control - and that threatened human destruction.In The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, right to the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early twentieth-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence that outpace the human, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.'Emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges... there is no one writing like him anywhere in the world' - Telegraph

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A delightfully witty and mordant modern classic from Finland: the story of a journalist who befriends an injured hare and embarks into the Finnish wilderness Kaarlo Vatanen is fed up with his life. He's sick of his job, his wife, his urban lifestyle in Helsinki. But all this changes one warm summer's evening, when he encounters an injured hare on a deserted country road. On an impulse he can't fully explain, Vatanen abruptly abandons his car, his home, his wife and his job to chase the hare into the forest. A year of comic misadventures ensues, where Vatanen and his unlikely companion battle through forest fires, pagan sacrifices, military war games and encounters with murderous bears, kept afloat by the help and understanding of other sympathetic free spirits. A much-loved classic in Finland, The Year of the Hare is a freewheeling adventure through the Finnish countryside, and a witty portrayal of one man's long detour from conventional living.

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When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

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Meet Louis Ives: well-groomed, romantic, and as captivating as an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero. Only this hero has a penchant for ladies' clothes, and he's just lost his teaching job after an unfortunate incident involving a colleague's brassiere. Meet Henry Harrison: former actor, brilliant but failed playwright, and a well-seasoned escort for New York City's women of means. What can this ageless Don Quixote of the Upper East Side have to offer a young gentleman such as Louis? What, indeed... The Extra Man is a story of friendship and frustration, of cocktails and cross-dressing, a hilarious tale for our times from America's most versatile wit.

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'Ólafsdóttir's specialty is the small journeys we take to save ourselves and the ones we care for. She is the heart's finest map-maker' Sjón Winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize< Jónas feels like his life is over. His wife has left him, his mother is slipping deeper into dementia, and his daughter is no longer who he thought. So he comes up with a foolproof plan: to buy a one-way ticket to a chaotic,war-ravaged country and put an end to it all. But on arriving at Hotel Silence, he finds his plans - and his anonymity - begin to dissolve under the foreign sun. Now there are other things that need his attention, like the crumbling hotel itself, the staff who run it, and his unusual fellow guests. And soon it becomes clear that Jónas must decide whether he really wants to leave it all behind; or give life a second chance, albeit down a most unexpected path...

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Kate has been trying to do things right. To mark an important anniversary, she plans an exquisite dinner for her family. Yet by the end of the night, the drinking games have ended in awkward silence, the guests have fled, and Kate feels herself spinning out of control. Told across the decades, this is the story of a family shattered by grief, but tied by bonds too knotty to untangle. It's the story of what happens when the past catches up with the present, and of why, despite everything, we can't help returning home. ---- READERS LOVE DINNER PARTY 'A tense, literary page-turner' 'An incredibly poignant story of a family torn by loss and grief' 'A totally compelling read about fraught family relationships, sisterhood, loss, grief and everything in between'

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In this little-known classic of Italian literature, young Arturo grows up in near-isolation on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples. His mother died in childbirth and his wayward father, who left him as a child in the care of a servant on the island, returns only sporadically. Cut off from the island community, Arturo exists almost entirely in solitude: he roams the island with his beloved dog, sails in his boat and reads tales of virtuous heroes and adventurers whom he imagines resemble his father. The boy's world is upended when his father arrives from Naples with his new wife Nunziata, who at sixteen is only a few years older than Arturo. Their presence shatters his childhood idyll, awakening passionate feelings and drawing the family towards painful conflict. Arturo's Island is a moving and dramatic portrayal of the loss of childhood idealism and the inescapable force of desire.

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Bringing to life one of the most complex characters in European history Stefan Zweig based his biography of Marie Antoinette, who became the Queen of France at the age of fifteen, on the correspondence between her and her mother, and her great love the Count Axel von Fersen. Zweig analyzes the chemistry of a woman's soul from her intimate pleasures to her public suffering as a Queen under the weight of misfortune and history. Zweig describes Marie Antoinette in the King's bedroom, in the enchanted and extravagant world of the Trianon, and with her children. And in his account of 'The Revolution', he describes her resolve during the failed escape to varennes, her imprisonment in the Conciergerie and her final tragic destiny under the guillotine. Zweig's account has been the definitive biography of Marie Antoinette since its publication, inspiring Antonia Fraser and the recent film adaptation. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

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Murakami's 69, a side-splittingly funny coming-of-age novel set in the Japan of the sixties In a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at high speed and with irresistible humour by Kensuke himself, this is the story of their 1969, as they engage in heated conversations about Marxism, Rimbaud, Godard, the Beatles and the Stones, set up a barricade in their school, organise a rock festival and map out a highly successful strategy in girl-winning. This is a young Japan entirely turned towards the West, pervaded by Western music, where the girls have nicknames pulled from famous British films, but still locked in a fight with the rigid post-war conservatism of the older generation. Translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and published by Pushkin Press 'A light, rollicking, sometimes hilarious, but never sentimental picture of late-sixties Japan.' Library Journal 'A great deal of fun, and Murakami ... is a find.' Kirkus Reviews 'The hero is a thoroughly engaging smartass.' Los Angeles Times A superb and very funny bluffer, and one sympathizes with him all the way. Atlantic Monthly 'A cross between The Catcher and the Rye and The Strawberry Statement.' Review of Contemporary Fiction Born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition, In the Miso Soup and From the Fatherland, with Love. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.

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Katherine Mansfield was one of the true pioneers of the short story. Her style shifts subtly between the comic and the tragic, as calm surfaces are punctured by moments of disruption, insight and strange beauty. This new collection gathers together the best of Mansfield's work exploring different facets of relationships between women. From complex expressions of desire and connection to shared experiences of frustration and release, these stories capture fleeting movements of feeling with unmatched precision.

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'When we read Tolstoy, it feels easy. This is life itself' Howard Jacobson 'No other writer wrote so often, or so imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying' Orlando Figes Tolstoy's stories contain many of the most acutely observed moments in his monumental body of work. This new selection of his shorter works, sensitively translated by the award-winning Boris Dralyuk, showcases the peerless economy with which Tolstoy could render the passions and conflicts of a life. These are works that take us from a self-interested judge's agonising deathbed to the bristling social world of horses in a stable yard, from the joyful vanity of youth to the painful doubts of sickness and old age. With unwavering precision, Tolstoy's eye brings clarity and richness to the simplest materials.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century the villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life, much as they have always done. The modern world has yet to reach the inhabitants of this remote region of the Habsburg Empire. Among them is Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, who wants nothing more from life than an official railway cap, a cottage, and a bride with a dowry. But then the First World War reaches the mountains and Piotr is drafted into the army. All the weight of imperial authority is used to mould him into an unthinking fighting machine, forced to fight a war he does not understand, for interests other than his own. The Salt of the Earth is a classic war novel and a powerfully pacifist tale about the consequences of war for ordinary men.

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This is a celebration of family - of shifting allegiances, riotous laughter, complicated love. Meet four sisters - Cassandra, Fay, Lela, and Suzette - and their sprawling circle of daughtersand sons, parents and cousins, friends and lovers. Here are strong women and enigmatic men whose quirks are written in their children's faces, whose siblings are always getting their shared stories wrong, whose needs weigh heavily: money, status, a lover, a child - or simply company. Journeying from a glittering soirée to a haunted porch, Company is a multigenerational, joyfully honest expression of belonging - and of how far we sometimes land from home.

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A 'deeply felt and achingly intimate' (Annie Lord) debut novel about the complexities of gender, power, race and fame for readers of Sheena Patel's I'm A Fan and Madeleine Grey's Green DotI made up my mind to meet you. Your book had cast a spell on me the previous night. What better way to stay spellbound than to orbit the magician? You write your favourite author a fan letter and he writes back. An intoxicating, undefinable, all consuming relationship ensues. Ten years later, a slew of allegations emerge that will shatter the story you have told yourself, leaving behind a blank page for something new...Like Happiness is a headfirst dive into a young woman's destructive obsession with a legendary writer. Razor-sharp, delectably witty, and told with blistering emotional honesty, this electric debut novel reckons with the stories we choose to believe, about the past, our relationships and above all about ourselves.'An e

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Death follows young Tommy McBride everywhere. Five years ago his family was murdered, now a freak accident sends him fleeing into the wilderness of the Australian outback with a man lying dead in his wake. But Tommy is haunted by even worse - as children, he and his brother Billy witnessed the state-sanctioned massacre of the indigenous Kurrong people, and they haven't seen each other since. When an official inquiry is launched into the massacre, the successful life that Billy has built for himself comes under threat. He desperately needs to find Tommy, long disappeared into the bush. And he's not the only one - ruthless Inspector Noone, the man with perhaps the most to hide, is on Tommy's trail as well.

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What does it mean to lose your roots within your culture, within your family? And what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, pre-packaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up - facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer - she began to wonder if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections, and family secrets.

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Venices by Paul MorandA poetic evocation of the French ambassador’s encounters and experiences, filtered through the one constant in his life - Venice. Translated by Euan Cameron • 256ppLoving Venice by Petr KrálThe Czech poet writes a love letter to a place that arouses strong and contradictory emotions and provides a portrait both intimate and universal. Translated by Christopher Moncrieff • 96ppAgainst Venice by Regis DebrayAn irreverent and witty criticism of the world of parties and palazzo but the city loses none of its seduction, even to a skeptic. Translated by John Howe • 80ppLetters from the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry JamesThe great writer went to Venice and instantly fell in love with the city: this selection of letters provides a unique record of his impressions • 224ppCasanova’s Return to Venice by Arthur SchnitzlerAn ageing Casanova longs to return to Venice after a

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A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explore the greatest enigmas of the universe in this scintillatingly original book about the limits of human knowledge'Fascinating' Carlo Rovelli'Remarkable... Exciting, provocative, and illuminating' John Banville, Wall Street JournalArgentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth - that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn't exist without the other.German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment about the absurdity of the quantum realm when he had his own epiphany - that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason as far as they could go, concluding that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limi

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Tattooed from her neck to her toes and sporting a gold tooth as sharp as her wisecracks, Sister Holiday struggles to stay on the righteous path. She's committed both to taking her permanent vows with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and joining Magnolia Riveaux's latest venture, Redemption Detective Agency-both in service of satisfying her eternal quest for answers. When Sister Holiday and Riveaux set out to bust a philandering husband, they instead find the body of a priest floating in the Mississippi river, and with it, Redemption's next case. As a torrential rainstorm drowns New Orleans for three harrowing days over Easter weekend, Sister Holiday and Riveaux follow the clues. With the stakes rising alongside the relentless floodwaters, our favourite punk nun-sleuth throws herself into the deep end yet again.

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A startling novella from the heir to Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing

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Surrounded by the artists, writers and musicians who made up her court in Boston as they did in Venice, Isabella Stewart Gardner, a passionate art collector, was as revered and sought after as royalty. Henry James was inspired by the rich and powerful Gardner, as well as by the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, when he wrote his novel The Wings of the Dove. Gardner was to recreate a larger-than-life version of Palazzo Barbaro in Boston, which is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. These dazzling letters bring to life James's passion for Venice and the Palazzo Barbaro, and serve as an introduction to the fascinating world of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself.

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A collection of witty, transgressive tales from the great Enlightenment thinker, best known for his inimitable blend of philosophy and scandalous sexualityThe Marquis de Sade's fiction has electrified generations of readers and earned him a scandalous reputation. But Sade was a moralist above all. In these baroque, salacious tales, aristocrats are caught in a web of incestuous misunderstandings, village priests deceive godly parishioners, and modest housewives satisfy immodest appetites. Comic and tragic by turns, all pose a profound challenge to convention. These witty, transgressive stories reveal France's infamous libertine as an author whose range and insight can still astonish, centuries after he first shocked polite society.

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Writings on people and places, theater and film, in a portfolio of essays and photographs informing Wes Anderson's film Asteroid City. Featuring 8 newly commissioned pieces alongside more than 20 classic essays from the likes of François Truffaut and Jonas Mekas, DO NOT DETONATE explores key influences on celebrated director Wes Anderson's new film Asteroid City. Together they form a detailed, captivating portrait of the mid-century film world and the enduring myths of the American West. Contents: A Conversation Between Wes Anderson and Jake Perlin A Life excerpt - Elia Kazan The Celluloid Brassière - Andy Logan Rainy Day - Lillian Ross The Outskirts: Other Men's Women - Gina Telaroli The Petrified Forest - Jorge Luis Borges Ace in the Hole: Noir in Broad Daylight - Molly Haskell What Makes a Sad Heart Sing: Some Came Running - Michael Koresky One False Start, Never Wear the Same Dress Twice - Durga Chew-Bose Maigret at the Coroner's excerpt - Georges Simenon Sunbelt Noir: Desert Fury - Imogen Sara Smith The Voyage Down and Out: Inferno - Kent Jones Bad Day Near The River's Edge - Nicolas Saada Watching Fail Safe at the End of the World - K. Austin Collins Black Desert, White Desert - Serge Toubiana Marilyn Monroe and the Loveless World - Jonas Mekas Beyond the Stars - Jeremy Bernstein Coming: Nashville - Pauline Kael Coming Around the Mountain: Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Matt Zoller Seitz Selections from Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary - Bob Balaban Introduction to Small Change: A Film Novel - François Truffaut By The Time I Get to Phoenix - Thora Siemsen My Guy - Hilton Als Wild to the Wild - Sam Shepard

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