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"It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffith's ingenious and delightful novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee the first performance of the work. Griffiths grants the composer an additional lease on life of several, and starting with his voyage across...
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"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend...
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Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian....
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The British residents of Krishnapur, a Victorian outpost on the subcontinent of India in 1857, are initially unperturbed by rumors of strife from afar, but when they find themselves under siege by native soldiers, they withdraw into the Residency where they slowly come to realize the true character of colonialism.
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"South of France, 1950: A solitary vagabond walks through the villages, towns, valleys, and foothills of the region between northern Provence and the Alps. He picks up casual work along the way, and spends the winter as the custodian of a walnut oil mill. He also picks up a problematic companion: a card sharp and con man, whom he calls "the Artist." The action moves from place to place, and episode to episode, in truly picaresque fashion. Everything...
6) Troubles
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"1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiance;e is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games...
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Though it tells the stories of the defeated, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays features four tragedies that depict both unfortunate demises and the essence of the fighting human spirit. The Suppliants, the first play of the collection, follows the daughters of Danaus as they flee from the loveless marriages that had been forced upon them. The Persians, perhaps the oldest surviving play in existence, portrays the defeat of the Persian King Xeroxes....
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"First published in 1963, The Stone Face tells the tale of a young African-American man who takes refuge from American racism in France, only to find himself complicit in a racist order of another sort. Simeon Brown, a journalist who, as a teenager, lost an eye in a racist attack, lives in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension, and after a violent encounter with some white sailors on shore leave, he decides to pack up and leave for...
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"Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a...
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"Who was Louki? Did anyone really know? She made her mark on all of us in different ways. We all remember her, some of us more than others, but did any of us truly know her? Can anyone honestly say they know another person? In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, which includes vignettes...
12) Zama
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"First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. Eaten up by...
13) The ivory tower
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Unfinished at the time of James's death in 1916, the Ivory Tower utilizes a classic Jamesian theme-American innocence transformed by European experience. Here, however, there's a twist: the hero was raised abroad and returns to America with its immense Gilded Age fortunes to discover the corrupting effects of wealth and possessions.
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"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led...
15) Grand hotel
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"A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum's celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he's been awaiting for years has arrived....
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"Fear is a classic of war literature, a book to place on the shelf with Storm of Steel, A Farewell to Arms, and Going After Cacciato. Jean Dartemont, the hero of Gabriel Chevallier's autobiographical novel, enters what was not yet known as World War I in 1915, when it was just beginning to be clear that a war that all the combatants were initially confident would move swiftly to a conclusion was instead frozen murderously in place. After enduring...
17) Little reunions
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A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China. Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang's dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie's opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie's horrifying but...
18) The hive
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"The translator Anthony Kerrigan has compared the work of Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte. These are, Kerrigan writes, "ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, foul mouthed." However provocative and disturbing, they are also flat-out dazzling as writers, whose sentences, as rigorous as riotous, lodge like knives in the reader's mind. Cela called himself...
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An actor, recently divorced, at loose ends in New York; a woman, no less lonely, perhaps even more desperate than the man: they meet by chance in an all-night diner and are drawn to each other on the spot. Roaming the city streets, hitting its late-night dives, dropping another coin into yet another jukebox, these two lost souls struggle to understand what it is that has brought them, almost in spite of themselves, together. They are driven—from...
20) Hav
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“Journey through a mystical country where everything is possible and easily arranged” in this 2-part travelogue set in a fictional Mediterranean city of dreams (Los Angeles Times).
“A touching lover letter . . . to life itself”—featuring Last Letters from Hav, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Independent)
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“A touching lover letter . . . to life itself”—featuring Last Letters from Hav, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Independent)
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