| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||

› Find signed collectible books: 'AAA London'
More editions of AAA London:

› Find signed collectible books: 'AAA Spiral Guides London'
More editions of AAA Spiral Guides London:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'
(Please note that all Timeless Classic Books have been carefully formatted manually with full annotation and proper photo and/or illustration placement since our start in 2010/2011. Each cover is designed with paid or public domain artwork that is pertinent to the title. Each and ever cover is unique. None have ever been used twice.)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891-92) brings together the first twelve short stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes and Watson. These follow Holmes's introduction in the first two novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. [via]
More editions of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Besessen'
Frankfurt 1994, ill. kartonierter Originaleinband, 631 Seiten, Kl.-8°, Schnitt leicht gebräunt, ansonsten gutes Exemplar, ungelesen, [via]
More editions of Besessen:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Birds Of A Feather'
More editions of Birds Of A Feather:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Book Lovers' London'
More editions of Book Lovers' London:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future'
More editions of The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Christmas Carol'
In the history of English literature, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which has been continuously in print since it was first published in the winter of 1843, stands out as the quintessential Christmas story. What makes this charming edition of Dickens's immortal tale so special is the collection of 80 vivid illustrations by Everett Shinn (1876-1953). Shinn, a well-known artist in his time, was a popular illustrator of newspapers and magazines whose work displayed a remarkable affinity for the stories of Charles Dickens, evoking the bustling street life of the mid-1800s. Printed on heavy, cream-colored paper stock, the edges of the pages have been left rough, simulating the way in which the story might have appeared in Dickens's own time. Though countless editions of this classic have been published over the years, this one stands out as particularly beautiful, nostalgic, and evocative of the spirit of Christmas. [via]
More editions of A Christmas Carol:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Christmas Carol in Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas'
In this unabridged version of the original 1843 edition, the classic tale is illustrated with full-color paintings and black-and-white drawings that brilliantly recapture an era and bring Dickens's characters vividly to life. "Michael Foreman's illustrations have brought new life and charm to a story we all know." -- Parents Magazine [via]
More editions of A Christmas Carol in Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas:

› Find signed collectible books: 'El Retrato De Dorian Gray / The Picture of Dorian Gray'
More editions of El Retrato De Dorian Gray / The Picture of Dorian Gray:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fever Pitch'
In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.
Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."
Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger [via]
More editions of Fever Pitch:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Frommer's London 1991'
More editions of Frommer's London 1991:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Hangover Square'
More editions of Hangover Square:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of London'
More editions of A History of London:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Last Chance Saloon'
More editions of Last Chance Saloon:

› Find signed collectible books: 'London'
More editions of London:

› Find signed collectible books: 'London 1998'
More editions of London 1998:

› Find signed collectible books: 'London Condensed'
More editions of London Condensed:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The London Hanged : Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century'
More editions of The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century:
› Find signed collectible books: 'London Labour and the London Poor'
London Labour and the London Poor originated in a series of articles, later published in four volumes, written for the Morning Chronicle in 1849 and 1850 when journalist Henry Mayhew was at the height of his career. Mayhew aimed simply to report the realities of the poor from a compassionate and practical outlook. This penetrating selection shows how well he succeeded: the underprivileged of London become extraordinarily and often shockingly alive.
More editions of London Labour and the London Poor:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The London Market Guide'
More editions of The London Market Guide:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Lonely Planet London Condensed'
More editions of Lonely Planet London Condensed:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost'
At the flat in Weatherall Walk there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit.... The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves.... Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John?
Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century rowhouse once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the spirit of this ancestor, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin?
Winnie begins to investigate, but John's erstwhile girlfriend, Allegra, is aggressively unhelpful, and his downstairs neighbor, the cat-obsessed Mrs. Maddingly, is growing stranger by the day. Gripped by inspiration and desperation alike, Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades, some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past.
In the spirit of A. S. Byatt's "Possession, with dark overtones echoing from "A Christmas Carol, Lostpresents a rich fictional world that will enrapture Gregory Maguire's eager audience. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Maisie Dobbs'
Lady Rowan Compton first met Maisie when, at thirteen, she went into service as a maid at her ladyships Belgravia mansion. A suffragette, Lady Rowan took the remarkably smart youngster under her wing and became her patron. She encouraged Maisie to study at Cambridge, and was aided in this by Maurice Blanche, a friend often retained as an investigator by the elite of Europe when discretion and results were required. It was he who first recognized Maisies intuitive gifts.
The outbreak of war changed everything. Maisie left for France to train as a nurse, then served at the front, where she fell in love with a handsome young doctor.
After the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie hangs out her shingle: M. Dobbs, Trade and Personal Investigations. Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but turns up something else, a tombstone with only a first nameVincent. And then she finds another. The deceased had lived on a cooperative farm called The Retreat, a well-regarded convalescent refuge for those grievously wounded in the war, ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life. When Lady Rowans son makes plans to join the reclusive community, Maisie hurriedly investigates and finds a disturbing mystery at its core whose resolution gives her the courage to confront the ghost that has haunted her for ten years. [via]
More editions of Maisie Dobbs:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare'
In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."
But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried [via]
More editions of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Master Cornhill'
More editions of Master Cornhill:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Money: A Suicide Note'
Absolutely one of the funniest, smartest, meanest books I know. John Self, the Rabelaisian narrator of the novel, is an advertising man and director of TV commercials who lurches through London and Manhattan, eating, drinking, drugging and smoking too much, buying too much sex, and caring for little else besides getting the big movie deal that will make him lots of money. Hey, it was the '80s. Most importantly, however, Amis in Money musters more sheer entertainment power in any single sentence than most writers are lucky to produce in a career. [via]
More editions of Money: A Suicide Note:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr Phillips'
More editions of Mr Phillips:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The National Gallery Companion Guide'
More editions of The National Gallery Companion Guide:
› Find signed collectible books: 'New Grub Street'
The commercial hacks of "Grub Street" are now in the ascendent. Sensitive novelist, Edwin Reardon, thought his reputation was safe, but poverty undermines his temperament and he finds it hard to produce marketable work. The future belongs to self-seeking writers such as Jasper Milvain. [via]
More editions of New Grub Street:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
"Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere."
The year is 1984; the scene is London, largest population center of Airstrip One.
Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia. Winston Smith knows this, because his work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant "correction" of such records. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. He knows the Party's official image of the world is a fluid fiction. He knows the Party controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing their imaginations through a process of bewilderment and brutalization that alienates each individual from his fellows and deprives him of every liberating human pursuit from reasoned inquiry to sexual passion. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime--in 1984, George Orwell created a whole vocabulary of words concerning totalitarian control that have since passed into our common vocabulary. More importantly, he has portrayed a chillingly credible dystopia. In our deeply anxious world, the seeds of unthinking conformity are everywhere in evidence; and Big Brother is always looking for his chance. --Daniel Hintzsche [via]
More editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Of Human Bondage'
Her voice was so weak that it seemed to come already from a great distance. The child did not answer, but smiled comfortably. He was very happy in the large, warm bed, with those soft arms about him. He tried to make himself smaller still as he cuddled up against his mother, and he kissed her sleepily. In a moment he closed his eyes and was fast asleep. The doctor came forwards and stood by the bedside. "Oh, don't take him away yet," she moaned. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Old Curiosity Shop'
The sound of Little Nell clattering hurriedly over cobblestones immediately sets the stage by bringing to mind the narrow and dangerous streets of Victorian London. No fewer than 20 performers are called upon to conjure up the Dickensian world of wanderers, ne'er-do-wells, con artists, and kind Samaritans--and each performance is excellent. Tom Courtenay plays the sadistic Quilp, "the ugliest dwarf that could be seen anywhere for a penny" with magnificent sarcastic glee, and Teresa Gallagher's silvery, childlike voice is ideally suited for the role of the angelic Little Nell.
Nell is on her way home to the dusty shop where she and her grandfather live a rather mysterious life. The old man disappears every night--visiting gambling dens with the naive hope of winning a fortune. Instead he sinks deeper and deeper into debt. Enter Daniel Quilp, moneylender, who becomes furious upon learning that the grandfather is a pauper and will never be able to repay his tremendous debt. Quilp seizes the curiosity shop and begins making lecherous overtures to Nell, so she and her grandfather steal away one morning to seek their fortunes elsewhere. But the demonic dwarf is never far behind.
Sound effects are employed judiciously and serve mainly as a springboard for the listener's imagination. The sound of a crying baby is enough to convey the image of crowded lodgings and genteel Victorian poverty, while raucous laughter and high-pitched squawks evoke the barely controlled chaos of an outdoor Punch and Judy show. The dramatization pares Dickens's weighty novel down to two and one-half hours, but does so skillfully, retaining Dickens's wit, marvelous dialogue, and delightful characterizations. (Running time: 155 minutes, 2 cassettes) --Elizabeth Laskey [via]
More editions of The Old Curiosity Shop:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Once and Always'
More editions of Once and Always:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism'
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written. [via]
More editions of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The People of the Abyss'
London wrote this book after passing a American sailor stranded in London in 1902. He had been sleeping in flop houses and living among the destitute. A classic novel that can be seen in light of the people who live in the abyss of poverty. [via]
More editions of The People of the Abyss:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."
As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]
More editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Plays, Prose Writings & Poems'
Famed as a wit and bon viveur, Oscar Wilde lived up to his reputation. This selection of plays, poems and prose writings, introduced by Terry Eagleton, includes "The Importance of Being Earnest", "Lady Windermere's Fan", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The Critic as an Artist", Apologia", "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism", "Letter to Robert Ross", "Requiescat" and "The Ballad of Reading Goal". Terry Eagleton is the author of "Criticism and Ideology", "Marxism and Literary Criticsm" and "Literary Theory: An Introduction". [via]
More editions of Plays, Prose Writings & Poems:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Quicksilver'
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson launches his most ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with the ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for MIT in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to resolving an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the Minerva, readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with young Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early drawings of microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious radicals, and the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and enjoys a lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-all before the year 1700.
In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked" Jack (also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a Turkish harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by Eliza's lust for fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of Daniel in the third book of the novel.
The book courses with Stephenson's scholarship but is rarely bogged down in its historical detail. Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory. Though replete with science, the novel is as much about the complex struggles for political ascendancy and the workings of financial markets. Further, the novel's literary ambitions match its physical size. Stephenson narrates through epistolary chapters, fragments of plays and poems, journal entries, maps, drawings, genealogic tables, and copious contemporary epigrams. But, caught in this richness, the prose is occasionally neglected and wants editing. Further, anticipating a cycle, the book does not provide a satisfying conclusion to its 900 pages. These are minor quibbles, though. Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Slammerkin'
More editions of Slammerkin:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Slow Chocolate Autopsy: Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London'
A highly original collabortion between cult novelist Iain Sinclair and cult comics artist dave McKean, combining text and graphics in a paranoid and dystopian vision of london, following the central character, Norton, who is trapped within the city of London, but not in time... [via]
More editions of Slow Chocolate Autopsy: Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot'
More editions of Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Thieves' Opera'
More editions of The Thieves' Opera:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Time Out London'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Time Out London'
More editions of Time Out London:

› Find signed collectible books: 'To Sir, With Love'
More editions of To Sir, With Love:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tower Menagerie: The Amazing 600-Year History of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts Kept at the Tower of London'
More editions of The Tower Menagerie: The Amazing 600-Year History of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts Kept at the Tower of London:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tower of London : The Official Illustrated History'
More editions of The Tower of London : The Official Illustrated History:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Vanity Fair'
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the social ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of English society in the early 1800s, battles-military and domestic-are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honorable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin, devoted to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to William Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Vanity Fair'
This is Thackeray's rich and gloriously chaotic sketch of English society during the Napoleonic wars. At the centre of this picture is the scheming and disreputable Becky Sharp, one of Thackeray's greatest creations. The style here is fast-paced and comic, but the character of Dobbin and his unrequited love for Amelia bring depth and pathos to the novel. Dobbin, the unheroic hero, is Thackeray's realistic answer to the hero-worship of high romanticism. The novel stands as a landmark in the development of European Realism. [via]
More editions of Vanity Fair:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Walks in London and Southeast England'
More editions of Walks in London and Southeast England:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Walks in the Country Near London'
More editions of Walks in the Country Near London:
› Find signed collectible books: 'White Fang'
Part wolf and part dog, orphaned White Fang relies on his instincts as well as his inborn strength and courage to survive in the Yukon wilderness despite both animal and human predators but eventually comes to make his peace with man. [via]
More editions of White Fang:

› Find signed collectible books: 'La Conjura / A Spectacle of Corruption'
More editions of La Conjura / A Spectacle of Corruption:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Expiacion / Atonement'
La trama de esta fascinante y perfecta novela, sucede en la gran casa de campo de la familia Tallis. El padre está en Londres, la madre con migraña encerrada en su habitación, la hija menor desesperada por ser adulta y ya herida por la literatura, el hermano que finalizó sus estudios y regresa con un amigo, la hermana mayor que tambien ha regresado con notas no tan altas, una prima nínfula quinceañera y seductora que ha venido a vivir para la casa, y el brillante hijo de la criada, protegido de la familia, que finaliza con excelentes notas sus estudios. La precoz escritora y menor de los Tallis, cambia irremediablemente el curso de varias vidas cuando acusa al amante de su hermana mayor de haber cometido un crimen en el que no tuvo nada que ver. Todos ellos conforman una novela que va abriéndose a distintas novelas de géneros diferentes: una intensa novela de amor, una durísima novela de guerra, y la novela de una novela, la narración de esta Expiación de la cual la hija menor escribió varias versiones en su vida.Considerada la mejor novela de McEwan, ha sido llevada al cine por Joe Wright, con un estruendoso éxito de taquilla y crítica. [via]
More editions of Expiacion / Atonement:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Posesion/ Possession'
Esta extraordinaria novela, cuenta su autora, tiene su remoto origen en las reflexiones que le inspiro una biografa americana de Coleridge que habia dedicado toda su vida al estudio del poeta. Todo empieza con unas cartas robadas. Roland Mitchell, un oscuro graduado en literatura inglesa, descubre entre unos libros, dos cartas inconclusas y nunca enviadas a una desconocida mujer. Roland investiga la identidad de la misteriosa corresponsal y descubre que esta es Christabel LaMotte, oscura, ambigua poetisa de la epoca, reivindicada en la actualidad por feministas y lesbianas. Roland ha hecho un descubrimiento que puede lanzarle a una brillante carrera academica y constituir un hito en el estudio de la poesia victoriana. Y acompanado por una mas que atractiva especialista en la obra de Christabel, seguiran un rastro de poemas, diarios y cartas, y gradualmente poseidos por aquellos que buscaban poseer, reconstruiran una historia de pasiones alli donde nunca se supo que las hubiera. [via]
More editions of Posesion/ Possession:
› Find signed collectible books: 'El Ratrato De Dorian Grey'
More editions of El Ratrato De Dorian Grey:
› Find signed collectible books: 'El Retrato De Dorian Gray / The Picture of Dorian Gray'
More editions of El Retrato De Dorian Gray / The Picture of Dorian Gray:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Ore'
More editions of Le Ore:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Quando Eravamo Orfani'
More editions of Quando Eravamo Orfani:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Das Buch Ruth'
Willkommen im Reich der postmodernen Narrativität ( Narri! Narro!). Nun gut, Scherz beiseite, wer Ishiguro kennt, wird, auch wenn es sich wie hier um eine Kriminalgeschichte handelt, ohnehin keinen Schlaf raubenden Reißer erwarten. Kunst darf (muss?) schließlich auch ein wenig anstrengen.
Was uns erwartet: Christopher Banks, der Protagonist des Romans, ist, nach erfolgreichem Universitätsbesuch, zum berühmtesten Londoner Detektiv der 30er Jahre geworden. Er ist ein Philosoph, ein Metaphysiker des Detektivischen. Doch was treibt ihn ins Investigative? Wir erfahren es mittels ausführlicher Rückblenden. Banks verbringt Kindheit und Jugend in Shanghai und muss erleben, dass eines Tages seine Eltern verschwunden sind. Er ist besessen davon, das Geheimnis dieses Verschwindens zu ergründen. Nach und nach wird jedoch deutlich, dass diese scheinbar präzisen Erinnerungen in den zahllosen Rückblenden nicht so sehr der Aufhellung der Vergangenheit, als der Konstruktion eines Idealbildes seiner Kindheit dienen. Wir hören, dezent, dezent, die postmoderne Nachtigall trapsen: Nicht die Geschichte als solche ist besonders wichtig, sondern die Beschreibung des postmodernen Ego im Prozess seiner Selbstfindung, seines Bemühens, Ordnung ins allgegenwärtige Chaos zu bringen.
In gewissem Sinne steht dieser Roman in einer Tradition des Kafkaesken ( nicht Kafkas!!): der Beschreibung des Unwirklichen und Unlogischen im vorgeblich Sinnhaften.
Lesbar und wider Erwarten unterhaltsam wird dieses Buch durch Ishiguros parodistisches Talent, auch wenn die manchmal unambitionierte bis fantasielose Übersetzung dem hohen literarischen Rang dieses Autors nicht immer gerecht wird. Trost und Versprechen zum Schluss: Das Mysterium des elterlichen Verschwindens wird tatsächlich enträtselt. --Dietrich Clausen [via]
More editions of Das Buch Ruth:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Studen'
Die Stunden ist eine Hommage an Virginia Woolf und zugleich ein sehr eigenständiges Werk. Während Michael Cunningham sein literarisches Idol zu neuem Leben erweckt, verflechtet er ihre Geschichte mit denen von zwei weiteren, eher zeitgenössischen Frauen. Eines grauen Morgens im Jahre 1923, in einem Vorort von London, erwacht Woolf von einem Traum, der bald zu ihrem Roman Mrs. Dalloway führen sollte. In der Gegenwart, an einem schönen Junitag in Greenwich Village in New York, bereitet die 52-jährige Clarissa Vaughan eine Party für ihre alte Liebe vor, einen Dichter, der an Aids stirbt. Und in Los Angeles im Jahre 1949 bemüht sich die schwangere und ruhelose Laura Brown so gut sie kann, sich für den Geburtstag ihres Mannes zurecht zu machen, kann aber irgendwie nicht aufhören, Woolf zu lesen. Das Leben dieser drei Frauen verbindet sowohl der Roman aus dem Jahre 1925 als auch die wenigen kostbaren Momente der Möglichkeit, zu denen sie alle immer wieder zurückkehren. Clarissa wird irgendwann zu folgender Feststellung kommen: "Als Trost gibt es nur dies: hier und da eine Stunde, wenn unser Leben -- entgegen aller Erwartungen -- sich zu öffnen scheint und uns alles schenkt, was wir uns jemals gewünscht haben... Trotzdem, wir lieben die Stadt, den Morgen; wir hoffen, mehr als alles andere, mehr zu bekommen."
Wenn Cunningham zwischen den drei Frauen hin- und herwechselt, sind die Übergänge völlig nahtlos. Ein Kapitel am Anfang des Buches endet damit, dass Woolf ihren Stift nimmt und ihren ersten Satz schreibt: "Mrs. Dalloway sagte, sie würde die Blumen selbst kaufen." Das nächste Kapitel beginnt damit, dass sich Laura an diesem Satz und an der literarischen Welt erfreut, in die sie gerade im Begriff ist, sich zu begeben. Clarissas Tag ist, auf der anderen Seite, ein Spiegelbild von Mrs. Dalloways -- allerdings mit einem entsprechenden Maß an moderner Angleichung, da Cunningham seine Quelle der Inspiration aktualisiert und ausfeilt. Clarissa weiß, daß ihr Wunsch, ihrem Freund eine perfekte Party zu bieten, für viele trivial erscheinen mag. Sie findet das jedoch besser, als sich dem Unglück und der Verzweiflung zu verschließen. Wie seine literarische Inspiration ist Die Stunden eine Hymne an das Bewusstsein und an die Schönheit und die Verluste, die man damit wahrnimmt. Es erinnert uns auch daran -- wie uns Cunningham immer wieder bewusst macht -- dass Kunst bei weitem nicht nur "der Welt der Gegenstände" angehört. --Kerry Fried [via]
More editions of Die Studen:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Quand Nous Etions Orphelins'
383pages. 17x10,8x2,4cm. Poche. Christopher Banks, Anglais né à Shanghai à l'aube du XXe siècle, est devenu orphelin à 9 ans, à la suite de la disparition énigmatique de ses parents. Envoyé en Grande-Bretagne pour y poursuivre ses études, il devient un détective célèbre, résolvant les affaires les plus difficiles, avant de décider finalement de revenir sur les lieux de son enfance pour s'attaquer à l'énigme qui n'a cessé de le hanter : pourquoi ses parents ont-ils été enlevés ? Cet événement lourd de conséquences serait-il lié au trafic d'opium ? Mais est-il possible de cerner la vérité à partir de souvenirs évanescents, qui plus est dans une ville quotidiennement défigurée par les ravages de la guerre sino-japonaise ? Et peut-on faire confiance à un homme certes rigoureux, mais forcément impliqué émotionnellement dans son enquête ? Le lecteur est alors amené à endosser lui aussi l'habit de détective, en quête des bribes de vérité que livre la conscience labyrinthique du personnage. L'auteur virtuose des Vestiges du Jour explore ainsi à nouveau le territoire du dédale de la mémoire. Avec originalité et subtilité, perspicacité et finesse d'humour, il nous livre un roman remarquable, riche en émotions et en rebondissements. Le lecteur se laisse emporter avec plaisir par le souffle de cette ?uvre à l'atmosphère désenchantée, et qui invite à profiter des plaisirs minuscules de la vie. Un très bon cru, à consommer sans modération. -Nathalie Gouiffès [via]
More editions of Quand Nous Etions Orphelins:
