books tagged “novel”

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About a Boy
by Nick Hornby

ISBN 1573227331 (1-57322-733-1)
Softcover, Riverhead Books

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Book summary:
Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the 1990s. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is unmarried, hyper-concerned with his coolness quotient and blithely living off his father's novelty song royalties. Will sees himself as entirely lacking in hidden depths--and he's proud of it! The only trouble is, his friends are succumbing to responsibilities and children and he's increasingly left out in the cold. How can someone brilliantly equipped for meaningless relationships ensure that he'll continue to meet beautiful Julie Christie-like women and ensure that they'll throw him over before things get too profound? A brief encounter with a single mother sets Will off on his new career, that of "serial nice guy." As far as he's concerned--and remember, concern isn't his strong suit--he's the perfect catch for the young mother on the go. After an interlude of sexual bliss, she'll realise that her child isn't ready for a man in their life and Will can ride off into the Highgate sunset, where more damsels apparently await. The only catch is that the best way to meet these women is at single-parent get-togethers. In one of Nick Hornby's many hilarious (and embarrassing) scenes, Will falls into some serious misrepresentation at SPAT ("Single Parents-- Alone Together"), passing himself off as a bereft single dad: "There was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word."
What interferes with Will's career arc, of course, is reality--in the shape of a 12-year-old boy who is in many ways his polar opposite. For Marcus, cool isn't even a possibility, let alone an issue. For starters, he's a victim at his new school. Things at home are pretty awful, too, since his musical-therapist mother seems increasingly in need of therapy herself. All Marcus can do is cobble together information with a mixture of incomprehension, innocence, self-blame and unfettered clear sight. As fans of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity already know, Hornby's insight into laddishness magically combines the serious and the hilarious. About a Boy continues his singular examination of masculine wish-fulfilment and fear. This time, though, the author lets women and children onto the playing field, forcing his feckless hero to leap over an entirely new--and entirely welcome--set of emotional hurdles. [via]
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Alice Walker
by Alice Walker

ISBN 0671922548 (0-671-92254-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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- Alice Walker: ISBN 0671922548 (0-671-92254-8)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker

ISBN 1568496281 (1-56849-628-1)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self. [via]
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The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 1568493207 (1-56849-320-7)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
The Crying of Lot 49, a novel by Thomas Pynchon. [via]
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The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 0553236911 (0-553-23691-1)
Softcover, Bantam Books

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Book summary:
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
[via]
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- The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine: ISBN 0553236911 (0-553-23691-1)
  Softcover, Bantam Books
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Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 0140188592 (0-14-018859-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.
Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.
That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.
Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Henry James' the Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James

ISBN 0671006797 (0-671-00679-7)
Softcover, Monarch Notes

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- Henry James' the Portrait of a Lady: ISBN 0671006797 (0-671-00679-7)
  Softcover, Monarch Notes
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Henry James's the Portrait of a Lady
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791045145 (0-7910-4514-5)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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Book summary:
In his introduction Harold Bloom calls Henry James "an endlessly fecund novelist and short-story writer." He goes on to suggest that character-portraiture was one of his superb skills. This superb collection of essays touches on topics such as character delineation in the novel, narrative method, imagery, diction, and method. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]
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- Henry James's the Portrait of a Lady: ISBN 0791045145 (0-7910-4514-5)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0812976533 (0-8129-7653-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:
I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.
In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.
We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James

ISBN 1404325794 (1-4043-2579-4)
Softcover, IndyPublish.com

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Book summary:
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Widely regarded as Henry Jamess greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the authors most magnificent heroines: Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe.

As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabels life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences.

Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old.
Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of storiesThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3Wwhich won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader, Scribners British Writers, and on Nerve.com.
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Portraits of Places
by Henry James

ISBN 0715630830 (0-7156-3083-0)
Hardcover, Intl Pub Marketing Inc

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Book summary:
Henry James was not only a novelist who wrote with the elegance of Marcel Proust, he was also a renowned travel writer and wrote prolifically for a dedicated following in American magazines, newspapers and journals. In this volume his best work on Italy, Britain, and the US was collected for a wider audience. [via]
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- Portraits of Places: ISBN 0715630830 (0-7156-3083-0)
  Hardcover, Intl Pub Marketing Inc
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The Secret History : A Novel
by Donna Tartt

ISBN 0449911519 (0-449-91151-9)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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"Powerful...Enthrallling...A ferociously well-paced entertainment."THE NEW YORK TIMESRichard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning...."A smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling novel."TIMESelected by the Book-of-the-Month ClubA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKFrom the Paperback edition. [via]
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- The Secret History : A Novel: ISBN 0449911519 (0-449-91151-9)
  Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Casebook
by Arthur Pollard

ISBN 0333215133 (0-333-21513-3)
Hardcover, Macmillan

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- Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Casebook: ISBN 0333215133 (0-333-21513-3)
  Hardcover, Macmillan
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Helen Washington, Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

ISBN 0060931418 (0-06-093141-8)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers

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Book summary:
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackery

ISBN 0141439831 (0-14-143983-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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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]
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Vanity Fair
by John Carey, William Makepeace Thackery

ISBN 0140437533 (0-14-043753-3)
Softcover, Penguin USA

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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]
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- Vanity Fair: ISBN 0140437533 (0-14-043753-3)
  Softcover, Penguin USA
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Vanity Fair
by John Sutherland, William Makepeace Thackery

ISBN 019281642X (0-19-281642-X)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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This edition of one of the greatest social satires of the English language reproduces the text of the Oxford Thackeray and includes all of Thackeray's own illustrations. [via]
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- Vanity Fair: ISBN 019281642X (0-19-281642-X)
  Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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A Propos D'UN Gamin
by Nick Hornby

ISBN 2264030305 (2-264-03030-5)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
Pour Marcus, douze ans, une mère divorcée, dépressive et baba cool, la vie n'est pas toujours facile. Surtout quand de surcroît cette mère végétarienne n'écoute que des tubes des années soixante-dix, vous attife de vêtements ringards et que les durs de l'école ne jurent que par le hip-hop. Quant à Will, la trentaine, branché, riche, oisif et fier collectionneur d'amours épisodiques, il a du mal à trouver sa place dans la société. Malgré leur méfiance réciproque, l'homme et l'enfant que tout oppose vont finir par se trouver et s'épauler pour affronter l'adolescence et des liens sociaux distendus. Cette rencontre paradoxale entre un mâle solitaire prototype de l'homme moderne ! et un gosse tendre et marginal est magistralement orchestrée par Nick Hornby. Une histoire de parents célibataires, d'enfants solitaires, de fringues, de foot et de musique. Après les succès de Haute fidélité et Carton jaune, l'auteur signe là son livre le plus accompli. Le ton est sarcastique et drôle, les situations d'un réalisme désarmant et les émotions sincères. C'est enfin un regard d'une grande lucidité sur les désordres amoureux de cette fin de siècle. --Stellio Paris [via]
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- A Propos D'UN Gamin: ISBN 2264030305 (2-264-03030-5)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

Spanish

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Erase Una Vez UN Padre
by Nick Hornby, Miguel Martinez-Lage

ISBN 8466304886 (84-663-0488-6)
Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc

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Book summary:
Will, 36, is the eternal bachelor, unmarried, and does not feel any necessity to procreate. His goal is to have meaningless relationships with beautiful women that will leave him before things get too intense. As part of his plan to attract single women, he decides to pass himself off as a single dad. To do this, he befriends a young boy named Marcus. But little does he know that Marcus will change his outlook on life forever.
Description in Spanish: Will Freeman, soltero de treinta y seis años, tiene dinero suficiente para vivir sin trabajar y disfruta de mucho tiempo libre. No siente ninguna necesidad de procrear, pero ha descubierto que los hijos democratizan a las mujeres hermosas y esto ha despertado su interés por las madres solteras o separadas. De modo que se apunta a un grupo de autoayuda al que sólo asisten padres -pocos- o madres separadas. Para ello, naturalmente, debe fingir que tiene un hijo. Pero poco importa, a Will se le da bien contar mentiras. Marcus no tiene padre ni amigos, sus estudios no van bien y tampoco recibe demasiada ayuda de su madre. Cuando conoce a Will, cree haber hallado en él al sustituto del padre ausente. Sin embargo, ¿ cómo puede Will, un completo inmaduro, cumplir las funciones de progenitor? La relación entre ambos personajes nunca será la de un padre con su hijo, pero sí contribuirá a que maduren y se desenvuelvan mejor. [via]
More editions of Erase Una Vez UN Padre:
- Erase Una Vez UN Padre: ISBN 8466304886 (84-663-0488-6)
  Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc

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