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Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
by Donald Miller

ISBN 0785263705 (0-7852-6370-5)
Softcover, Thomas Nelson Inc

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Book summary:
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve...I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God. [via]
More editions of Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality:
- Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality: ISBN 0786288434 (0-7862-8843-4)
  Hardcover, Thorndike Press
- Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality: ISBN 0785263705 (0-7852-6370-5)
  Softcover, Thomas Nelson Inc
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The Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

ISBN 0375507256 (0-375-50725-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?)
Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism. --Travis Elborough [via]
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Crash
by J.G. Ballard

ISBN 0312420331 (0-312-42033-1)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.

A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
[via]
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Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles
by Haruki Murakami, Lourdes Porta Fuentes, Jun'ichi Matsuura

ISBN 8483101718 (84-8310-171-8)
Softcover, Tusquets Editor

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Book summary:
Tooru Okada, un joven japonés que acaba de dejar voluntariamente su trabajo en un bufete de abogados, recibe un buen día la llamada anónima de una mujer. A partir de ese momento la vida de Tooru, que había transcurrido por los cauces de la más absoluta normalidad, empieza a sufrir una extraña transformación. A su alrededor van apareciendo personajes cada vez más extraños, y la realidad, o lo real, va degradándose hasta convertirse en algo fantasmagórico.

The masterpiece of Japanese cult writer Haruki Murakami, the story of Tooru Okada, a young lawyer whose life begins to undergo a bizarre transformation. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle presents a collection of characters as surprising as they are real. [via]
More editions of Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles:
- Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles: ISBN 8483101718 (84-8310-171-8)
  Softcover, Tusquets Editor
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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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Don Delillo
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 079107031X (0-7910-7031-X)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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Book summary:
Harold Bloom suggests Don DeLillo's work holds a proleptic sense of the triumph of terror. This text offers critical views on numerous DeLillo novels, including The Names, Mao II, Libra, White Noise, and Underworld. This edition of Bloom's Major Novelists will help any student delve into the work of this contemporary writer.
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; preeminent literary critic of our time. Titles include detailed plot summaries of the novel, extracts from scholarly critical essays on the novels, a complete bibliography of the writer's novels, and more. [via]
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- Don Delillo: ISBN 079107031X (0-7910-7031-X)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
Don Delillo's White Noise
by Harold Bloom, Jesse Zuba

ISBN 0791070441 (0-7910-7044-1)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Don Delillo's White Noise: ISBN 0791070441 (0-7910-7044-1)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk

ISBN 0393327345 (0-393-32734-5)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well... J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregon's "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities of everyday life as nothing more than the severely loosened cap on a seething underworld cauldron of unchecked impulse and social atrocity. Welcome to the present-day U.S. of A. As Ballard's characters get their jollies from staging automobile accidents, Palahniuk's yuppies unwind from a day at the office by organizing bloodsport rings and selling soap to fund anarchist overthrows. Let's just say that neither of these guys are going to be called in to do a Full House script rewrite any time soon.
But while the ingredients are the same, Ballard and Palahniuk bake at completely different temperatures. Unlike his British counterpart, who tends to cast his American protagonists in a chilly light, holding them close enough to dissect but far enough away to eliminate any possibility of kinship, Palahniuk isn't happy unless he's first-person front and center, completely entangled in the whole sordid mess. An intensely psychological novel that never runs the risk of becoming clinical, Fight Club is about both the dangers of loyalty and the dreaded weight of leadership, the desire to band together and the compulsion to head for the hills. In short, it's about the pride and horror of being an American, rendered in lethally swift prose. Fight Club's protagonist might occasionally become foggy about who he truly is (you'll see what I mean), but one thing is for certain: you're not likely to forget the book's author. Never mind Ballardesque. Palahniukian here we come! --Bob Michaels [via]
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A Generous Orthodoxy
by Brian D. McLaren

ISBN 0310258030 (0-310-25803-0)
Softcover, Youth Specialties

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Book summary:
cover wear only [via]
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- A Generous Orthodoxy: ISBN 0310258030 (0-310-25803-0)
  Softcover, Youth Specialties
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A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvini
by Brian D. McLaren

ISBN 0310257476 (0-310-25747-6)
Hardcover, Youth Specialties

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Book summary:
A confession and manifesto from a senior leader in the emerging church movement---A Generous Orthodoxy calls for a radical, Christ-centered orthodoxy of faith and practice in a missional, generous spirit. Brian McLaren argues for a post-liberal, post-conservative, post-protestant convergence, which will stimulate lively interest and global conversation among thoughtful Christians from all traditions. In a sweeping exploration of belief, author Brian McLaren takes us across the landscape of faith, envisioning an orthodoxy that aims for Jesus, is driven by love, and is defined by missional intent. A Generous Orthodoxy rediscovers the mysterious and compelling ways that Jesus can be embraced across the entire Christian horizon. Rather than establishing what is and is not 'orthodox,' McLaren walks through the many traditions of faith, bringing to the center a way of life that draws us closer to Christ and to each other. Whether you find yourself inside, outside, or somewhere on the fringe of Christianity, A Generous Orthodoxy draws you toward a way of living that looks beyond the 'us/them' paradigm to the blessed and ancient paradox of 'we.' [via]
More editions of A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvini:
- A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvini: ISBN 0310257476 (0-310-25747-6)
  Hardcover, Youth Specialties
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Giles Goat Boy
by John Barth

ISBN 0449235246 (0-449-23524-6)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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- Giles Goat Boy: ISBN 0449235246 (0-449-23524-6)
  Softcover, Ballantine 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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The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad
by Roger Boylan

ISBN 0802140327 (0-8021-4032-7)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
Roger Boylan's first novel, Killoyle, established him as a brilliant successor to such Irish masters as Joyce, Beckett, and J. P. Donleavy. Now his new farce follows the hapless inhabitants of Killoyle, Ireland, through the frenetic week of the Pint-Pulling Olympiad. After local lush Mick McCreek gets into a car crash with a cross-dressing church sexton, he enlists a lawyer, Tom O'Mallet. As it turns out, the lawyer's real gig is selling missiles to the IRA, and he plans to use his clueless client as a patsy. O'Mallet also hoodwinks Anil, an Indian waiter who has found himself the unlikely target of a manhunt. What Tom doesn't know is that his lucrative weapons are destined for a massive terrorist attack on the Pint-Pulling Olympiad, and that Anil's sexy cousin Rashmi a sweatshop worker turned intelligence operative is hot on the bombers' trail. With a wink and a nudge, Boylan's pyrotechnic prose brings to life Ireland at its manic extremes, proving the author a dazzling and distinctive talent in American fiction.
[via]
More editions of The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad:
- The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: ISBN 0802140327 (0-8021-4032-7)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
National Bestseller The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author. [via]
More editions of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: ISBN 0375725784 (0-375-72578-4)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
  Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story
by Dave Eggers

ISBN 0684863472 (0-684-86347-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").
But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)
The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.
All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park [via]
More editions of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story:
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story: ISBN 0684863472 (0-684-86347-2)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski

ISBN 0375703764 (0-375-70376-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,
For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi [via]
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino

ISBN 0156439611 (0-15-643961-1)
Softcover, Harcourt

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Book summary:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]
More editions of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:
- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: ISBN 0151436894 (0-15-143689-4)
  Hardcover, Harcourt
- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: ISBN 0156439611 (0-15-643961-1)
  Softcover, Harcourt
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by William Weaver, Italo Calvino

ISBN 0679420258 (0-679-42025-8)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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Book summary:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]
More editions of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:
- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: ISBN 0679420258 (0-679-42025-8)
  Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace

ISBN 0316066524 (0-316-06652-4)
Softcover, Back Bay Books

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Book summary:
In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel The Broom of the System. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves. [via]
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Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791059251 (0-7910-5925-1)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: ISBN 0791059251 (0-7910-5925-1)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth

ISBN 0385240872 (0-385-24087-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection. [via]
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- Lost in the Funhouse: ISBN 0385240872 (0-385-24087-2)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Lost in the Funhouse; Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice.
by John Barth

ISBN 038504187X (0-385-04187-X)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection. [via]
More editions of Lost in the Funhouse; Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice.:
- Lost in the Funhouse; Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice.: ISBN 038504187X (0-385-04187-X)
  Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
by Brian D. McLaren

ISBN 078795599X (0-7879-5599-X)
Hardcover, John Wiley & Sons Inc

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Book summary:
A Leadership Network Publication
A New Kind of Christian's conversation between a pastor and his daughter's high school science teacher reveals that wisdom for life's most pressing spiritual questions can come from the most unlikely sources. This stirring fable captures a new spirit of Christianity--where personal, daily interaction with God is more important than institutional church structures, where faith is more about a way of life than a system of belief, where being authentically good is more important than being doctrinally "right," and where one's direction is more important than one's present location. Brian McLaren's delightful account offers a wise and wondrous approach for revitalizing Christian spiritual life and Christian congregations.
If you are interested in joining a discussion group devoted to a A New Kind of Christian please visit groups.yahoo.com/group/NKOC. [via]
More editions of A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey:
- A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey: ISBN 0787960020 (0-7879-6002-0)
  Hardcover, John Wiley & Sons
- A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey: ISBN 078795599X (0-7879-5599-X)
  Hardcover, John Wiley & Sons Inc
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The New York Trilogy: City Of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room
by Paul Auster

ISBN 1931243573 (1-931243-57-3)
Hardcover, Green Integer Books

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Book summary:
The New York Trilogy is the series that made New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster a renowned writer of metafiction and a special sort of genre-rebelling detective fiction which the New York Review of Books has called "one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature." Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, these uniquely stylized detective novels include City of Glass in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He's drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that's more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. [via]
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Sixty Stories
by Donald Barthelme

ISBN 0525480188 (0-525-48018-8)
Softcover, Dutton

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Book summary:
This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it--and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme's titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected. [via]
More editions of Sixty Stories:
- Sixty Stories: ISBN 0399126597 (0-399-12659-7)
  Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
- Sixty Stories: ISBN 0525480188 (0-525-48018-8)
  Softcover, Dutton
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Slaughter House Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

ISBN 0385333846 (0-385-33384-6)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor. [via]
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Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson, Douglad McMillan

ISBN 0802115489 (0-8021-1548-9)
Hardcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
A classic of modern theatre and perennial favorite of colleges and high schools. "One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation . . . suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity . . . like a sharp stab of beauty and pain".--The London Times. [via]
More editions of Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot:
- Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot: ISBN 0802115489 (0-8021-1548-9)
  Hardcover, Grove Pr
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Underworld
by Don Delillo

ISBN 1416548645 (1-4165-4864-5)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. [via]
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V
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 1568493215 (1-56849-321-5)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Having just been released from the Navy, Benny Profane is content to lead a slothful existence with his friends, where the only real ambition is to perfect the art of "schlemihlhood," or being a dupe, and where "responsibility" is a dirty word. Among his pals--called the Whole Sick Crew--is Slab, an artist who can't seem to paint anything other than cheese danishes. But Profane's life changes dramatically when he befriends Stencil, an active ambitious young man with an intriguing mission--to find out the identity of a woman named V., who knew Stencil's father during the war, but who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. [via]
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Vibrant With Words: The Letters of Ursula Bethell
by Peter Whiteford, Ursula Bethell

ISBN 0864735049 (0-86473-504-9)
Softcover, Victoria Univ Pr

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Book summary:
Ursula Bethell was a modernist poet who helped shape New Zealand's literary scene between the two world wars. This collection of letters tells the story of her early life of travel and social work in Europe and opens a window on her subsequent writerly life as she describes the origins of many of her poems.
[via]
More editions of Vibrant With Words: The Letters of Ursula Bethell:
- Vibrant With Words: The Letters of Ursula Bethell: ISBN 0864735049 (0-86473-504-9)
  Softcover, Victoria Univ Pr
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Vineland
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 0141180633 (0-14-118063-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Seventeen years after he shocked and dazzled readers with Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon returns with a novel as astonishing, as kaleidoscopic, as funny, and as satisfying as that legendary work. Vineland is peopled with a startling array of quirky characters and combines elements of daytime drama and the political thriller, resulting in a haunting evocation of 20th-century America. [via]
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Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett

ISBN 0802118216 (0-8021-1821-6)
Hardcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
Subtitled "A tragicomedy in two Acts", and famously described by the Irish critic Vivien Mercier as a play in which 'nothing happens, twice', "En attendant Godot" was first performed at the Theatre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. It was translated into English by Samuel Beckett, and "Waiting for Godot" opened at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955. 'Go and see "Waiting for Godot". At the worst you will discover a curiosity, a four-leaved clover, a black tulip; at the best something that will securely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live' - Harold Hobson, 7 August 1955. 'I told him that if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly' - Samuel Beckett, 1955. [via]
More editions of Waiting for Godot:
- Waiting for Godot: ISBN 0394172043 (0-394-17204-3)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
- Waiting for Godot: ISBN 0802118216 (0-8021-1821-6)
  Hardcover, Grove Pr
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Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts
by Samuel Becket

ISBN 0802130348 (0-8021-3034-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
A seminal work of twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone-or something-named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time. [via]
More editions of Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts:
- Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts: ISBN 0802130348 (0-8021-3034-8)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
Waiting for Godot/Coles Notes
by Beckett

ISBN 0774033630 (0-7740-3363-0)
Softcover, Coles Pub Group Ltd

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More editions of Waiting for Godot/Coles Notes:
- Waiting for Godot/Coles Notes: ISBN 0774033630 (0-7740-3363-0)
  Softcover, Coles Pub Group Ltd
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White Noise
by Don Delillo

ISBN 0140077022 (0-14-007702-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Winner of the National Book Award in 1985, White Noise is the story of Jack and Babette and their children from their six or so various marriages. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading from the tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.
[via]
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 1860464696 (1-86046-469-6)
Softcover, Harvill Pr

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Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake [via]
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Spanish

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Esperando a Godot / Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett

ISBN 8472238652 (84-7223-865-2)
Softcover, Ediciones Urano

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- Esperando a Godot / Waiting for Godot: ISBN 8472238652 (84-7223-865-2)
  Softcover, Ediciones Urano
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La Trilogia De Nueva York/the Trilogy of New York
by Paul Auster

ISBN 8433906992 (84-339-0699-2)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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Book summary:
La ciudad de cristal, Fantasmas y La habitación cerrada, son las tres novelas que forman esta trilogia. En la primera, a Daniel Quinn, escritor de literatura policiaca, su interlocutor telefonico lo toma por un detective y le encarga un caso. Quinn se mete en el papel que le han adjudicado y se ve envuelto en una historia repleta de enigmas, complicadas relaciones paternofiliales, locura y delirio. En Fantasmas, un detective privado y el hombre al que tiene que vigilar juegan al escondite en un claustrofobico universo urbano. En la tercera novela, el protagonista se ve confrontado a los recuerdos de un amigo de infancia, cuando la mujer de este le escribe una carta explicandole que su marido ha desaparecido misteriosamente. Esta es sin dudas una de las obras mas memorables de los anos ochenta, uno de los cimientos sobre los que se sustenta el prestigio internacional de Paul Auster. [via]
More editions of La Trilogia De Nueva York/the Trilogy of New York:
- La Trilogia De Nueva York/the Trilogy of New York: ISBN 8433906992 (84-339-0699-2)
  Softcover, Ld Books Inc

French

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En Attendant Godot
by Samuel Beckett

ISBN 2707301485 (2-7073-0148-5)
Softcover, Editions de Minuit

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Book summary:
Cette pièce de théâtre en deux actes de Samuel Beckett est parue en 1952 aux Editions de Minuit et a été créée le 5 janvier 1953 au théâtre de Babylone à Paris, dans une mise en scène de Roger Blin. C'est la première pièce de Beckett écrite directement en français. Elle met en scène deux couples de personnages - les clochards Estragon et Vladimir, les maître et esclave Pozzo et Lucky - et répète le même scénario sur deux actes. L'action se déroule le soir sur une route de campagne. Le seul élément de décor est un arbre dénudé. [via]
More editions of En Attendant Godot:
- En Attendant Godot: ISBN 2707301485 (2-7073-0148-5)
  Softcover, Editions de Minuit

Italian

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Se Una Notte D'Inverno UN Viaggiatore
by Italo Calvino

ISBN 8804482001 (88-04-48200-1)
Softcover, Mondadori

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More editions of Se Una Notte D'Inverno UN Viaggiatore:
- Se Una Notte D'Inverno UN Viaggiatore: ISBN 8804482001 (88-04-48200-1)
  Softcover, Mondadori

Danish

Borgerlige Partisaner
by Leif Larsen

ISBN 8700000612 (87-00-00061-2)
Hardcover, Gyldendal

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More editions of Borgerlige Partisaner:
- Borgerlige Partisaner: ISBN 8700000612 (87-00-00061-2)
  Hardcover, Gyldendal

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