The Novel of the Century

2017-03-21
The Novel of the Century

PDF The Novel of the Century Download

  • Author: David Bellos
  • Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
  • ISBN: 0374716293
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 339

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2017 Les Misérables is among the most popular and enduring novels ever written. Like Inspector Javert’s dogged pursuit of Jean Valjean, its appeal has never waned, but only grown broader in its one-hundred-and-fifty-year life. Whether we encounter Victor Hugo’s story on the page, onstage, or on-screen, Les Misérables continues to captivate while also, perhaps unexpectedly, speaking to contemporary concerns. In The Novel of the Century, the acclaimed scholar and translator David Bellos tells us why. This enchanting biography of a classic of world literature is written for “Les Mis” fanatics and novices alike. Casting decades of scholarship into accessible narrative form, Bellos brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed to write his novel of the downtrodden despite a revolution, a coup d’état, and political exile; how he pulled off a pathbreaking deal to get it published; and how his approach to the “social question” would define his era’s moral imagination. More than an ode to Hugo’s masterpiece, The Novel of the Century also shows that what Les Misérables has to say about poverty, history, and revolution is full of meaning today.

The Novel of the Century

2017-01-26
The Novel of the Century

PDF The Novel of the Century Download

  • Author: David Bellos
  • Publisher: Random House
  • ISBN: 0141969792
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 336

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Never mind those self-help manuals urging that some classic novel may change your life; in this sparkling study of the birth, growth and afterlife of Hugo's evergreen blockbuster, David Bellos argues that Les Misérables already has' Boyd Tonkin, Economist 'Any reader who hasn't yet embarked on Hugo's book might be converted to the idea by this one' Daniel Hahn, Spectator The extraordinary story of how a simple tale of love and revolution, the poor and the downtrodden - Victor Hugo's beloved classic Les Misérables - conquered the world. There has never been a book like it. It is the most widely read and frequently adapted story of all time, on stage and on film. But why is Les Misérables the novel of the century? David Bellos's remarkable new book brings to life the extraordinary story of how Hugo managed to write his epic novel despite a revolution, a coup d'état and political exile; how he pulled off the deal of the century to get it published, and set it on course to become the novel that epitomizes the grand sweep of history in the nineteenth century. Packed full of information about the background and design of Les Misérables, this biography of a masterpiece nonetheless insists that the moral and social message of Hugo's ever-popular novel is just as important for our century as it was for its own. The Novel of the Century is a book as rich, remarkable and long-lasting as the novel at its heart. Les Misérables is available as a Penguin Classic, in an acclaimed new translation by Christine Donougher, with an introduction by Robert Tombs.

Little Century

2012-06-05
Little Century

PDF Little Century Download

  • Author: Anna Keesey
  • Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
  • ISBN: 1429945273
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 293

In the tradition of such classics as My Ántonia and There Will Be Blood, Anna Keesey's Little Century is a resonant and moving debut novel by a writer of confident gifts. Orphaned after the death of her mother, eighteen-year-old Esther Chambers heads west in search of her only living relative. In the lawless frontier town of Century, Oregon, she's met by her distant cousin, a laconic cattle rancher named Ferris Pickett. Pick leads her to a tiny cabin by a small lake called Half-a-Mind, and there she begins her new life as a homesteader. If she can hold out for five years, the land will join Pick's already impressive spread. But Esther discovers that this town on the edge of civilization is in the midst of a range war. There's plenty of land, but somehow it is not enough for the ranchers—it's cattle against sheep, with water at a premium. In this charged climate, small incidents of violence swiftly escalate, and Esther finds her sympathies divided between her cousin and a sheepherder named Ben Cruff, a sworn enemy of the cattle ranchers. As her feelings for Ben and for her land grow, she begins to see she can't be loyal to both. Little Century maps our country's cutthroat legacy of dispossession and greed, even as it celebrates the ecstatic visions of what America could become.

Storm of the Century

1999-02
Storm of the Century

PDF Storm of the Century Download

  • Author: Stephen King
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 067103264X
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 406

Complemented by an author introduction, the screenplay for a six-hour television miniseries follows the residents of Little Tall Island as they prepare to cope with both a dangerous storm and an mysteriously evil force

Pale Fire

2024-02-18
Pale Fire

PDF Pale Fire Download

  • Author: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Publisher: ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 282

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America

2012-06-16
Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America

PDF Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America Download

  • Author: Mark McWilliams
  • Publisher: Rowman Altamira
  • ISBN: 0759120943
  • Category : Cooking
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 221

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America revolves around the 1840 presidential election when, according to campaign slogans, candidates were what they ate. Skillfully deploying the rhetoric of republican simplicity—the belief that plain dress, food, and manners were signs of virtue in the young republic—William Henry Harrison defeated Martin Van Buren by aligning the incumbent with the European luxuries of pâté de foie gras and soupe à la reine while maintaining that he survived on “raw beef without salt.” The effectiveness of such claims reflected not only the continuing appeal of the frontier and the relatively primitive nature of American cooking, but also a rhetorical struggle to define how eating habits and culinary practices fit into ideas of the American character. From this crucial mid-century debate, the book’s argument reaches back to examine the formation of the myth of republican simplicity in revolutionary America and forward to the popularization of cosmopolitan sophistication during the Gilded Age. Drawing heavily on cookbooks, domestic manuals, travel writing, and the popular press, this historical framework structures a discussion of ways novelists use food to locate characters within their fictional worlds, evoking or contesting deeply held social beliefs about gender, class, and race. In addition to mid-century novelists like Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Warner, the book examines popular and canonical novels by writers as diverse as Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Susanna Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Harriet Wilson. Some of these authors also wrote domestic manuals and cookbooks. In addition, McWilliams draws on a wide range of such work by William Alcott, Catharine Beecher, Eliza Leslie, Fannie Merrit Farmer, Maria Parloa, and others.

Fight of the Century

2021-01-19
Fight of the Century

PDF Fight of the Century Download

  • Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
  • ISBN: 1501190415
  • Category : Literary Collections
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 336

The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

City of the Century

2014-04-09
City of the Century

PDF City of the Century Download

  • Author: Donald L. Miller
  • Publisher: Rosetta Books
  • ISBN: 0795339852
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 1084

“A wonderfully readable account of Chicago’s early history” and the inspiration behind PBS’s American Experience (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Depicting its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics, to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its multitude of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last. The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews since its publication in 1996, and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life. “With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.” —John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times “Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of John Adams and Truman “An invaluable companion in my journey through Old Chicago.” —Erik Larson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Devil in the White City

The Scandal of the Century

2019-05-14
The Scandal of the Century

PDF The Scandal of the Century Download

  • Author: Gabriel García Márquez
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 052565643X
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 336

“The articles and columns in The Scandal of the Century demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start . . . He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding . . . He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.” --Dwight Garner, The New York Times From one of the titans of twentieth-century literature, collected here for the first time: a selection of his journalism from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s--work that he considered even more important to his legacy than his universally acclaimed works of fiction. "I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism," Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career--years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. Here are the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fictionlike reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain's El País. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be "the best in the world."

The Self and It

2010
The Self and It

PDF The Self and It Download

  • Author: Julie Park
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • ISBN: 0804756961
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 308

The Self and It makes a fresh and bold intervention in histories and theories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects proliferating in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel as vital tools for fashioning the modern self.