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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Metadata

Author: Milan Kundera Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

A Quote

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

Author's Insight

" The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.” - Milan Kundera

Applause

"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius. --The New York Times

An Introduction to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced

An Introduction to Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

In 1985, Kundera received the Jerusalem Prize. His acceptance address is printed in his essay collection The Art of the Novel. He has also been mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for literature. He won The Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987. In 2000, he was awarded the international Herder Prize. In 2007, he was awarded the Czech State Literature Prize. In 2010, he was made an honorary citizen of his hometown, Brno. In 2011, he received the Ovid Prize.

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A Time to Love and A Time to Die

Author: Erich Maria Remarque Release Date: June 1999

A Quote

But when I try to think how i would have to be for me not to be sad, then there's just one answer - never to have met you. In that case I wouldn't be sad but would be going away empty and indifferent. And when i think that, then the sadness is not sadness anymore. It's black happiness. The reverse side of happiness.

An Introduction to Time to Love and Time to Die

A novel, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (Time to Live and Time to Die) was published first in English translation in 1954 with the not-quite-literal title A Time to Love and a Time to Die.  This novel is a story of Ernst Graeber, who after two years at the Russian front, finally receives three weeks' leave. When Graeber arrives home, he finds his house bombed to ruin and his parents nowhere in sight. Nobody knows if they are dead or alive. As his leave draws to a close, Graeber reaches out to Elisabeth, a childhood friend. Like him, she is imprisoned in a world she did not create. But in a time of war, love seems a world away.  To quote Remarque’s words from his other novel All Quiet On the Western Front , "I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." 

But then not all is lost. If only for a brief moment, there is love, there is light, and therefore there is hope…

An Introduction to Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque is one of the best known and most widely read authors of German literature in the twentieth century. With the novel All Quiet On the Western Front, first published in 1929, Remarque attained world-wide recognition continuing today. Examples of his other novels also internationally published are: The Road Back (1931), Three Comrades (1936, 38), Arch of Triumph (1945), The Black Obelisk (1956), and Night in Lisbon (1962). Remarque's novels have been translated in more than fifty languages; globally the total edition comes up to several million copies. 

More on Erich Maria Remarque from NYU and  NY Times

This ebook is available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local book store.

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“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”

"To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”

Above quotes are from the most famous novella of French writer, poet and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery,  the Little Prince.

It has been translated into more than 190 languages and has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books ever published. But that is not what makes this book so precious. It is most commonly classified as a "children's book", but i have a feeling it is truly intended for "grown-up". Children still remember and know simple truths described in the book, they haven't forgotten yet...

Whoever you are, whatever age, profession, believe, or from whatever country, pick up this book. You will never look at the stars the same, you will smile at every rose, and more importantly you will somehow remember what it's like to be a child again.

This book is available now Amazon, Barnes & Noble,  your local book store, and Audible.com.

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...And we are back!

Dear followers,

We are continuing Readom adventure and will resume on Monday February 6, 2012.

Please follow us.

Thank you.

Readom team.

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Middlesex

Metadata

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides Release Date: 2002 Pages: 544 Est. Reading Time: 9.2 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Author's Insight

" I wanted it to be about many things. In a way, some people say, the book is not about a hermaphrodite at all. And I understand that, it's about reinventing your identity on different levels, be that Greek to American, female to male -- and there's other instances of it in the book. So, making the book turn into a family saga was something that allowed me to talk about a range of things and a range of characters and a range of a historical period. I was eager to do that, as opposed to constructing the book as merely the story of a hermaphrodite. People have these simplistic ideas about what the book is about. I'm trying to get the message out to potential readers that it is not merely about a sex-change or something like that, but it really is a sort of family saga with this narrator.” ― Jeffrey Eugenides

Applause

"Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator. . . A deeply affecting portrait of one family’s tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century." --The New York Times "Expansive and radiantly generous. . . Deliriously American." --The New York Times Book Review (cover review) "A towering achievement. . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being." --Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review)

An Introduction to Middlesex

Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than three million copies sold as. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; Eugenides is not intersex like the protagonist. The author decided to write Middlesex after he read the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and was unsatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.

Primarily a Bildungsroman and family saga, the novel chronicles the impact of a mutated gene on three generations of a Greek family, causing momentous changes in the protagonist's life.  According to scholars, the novel's main themes are nature versus nurture, rebirth, and the differing experiences of polar opposites—such as those found between men and women. It discusses the pursuit of the American Dream and explores gender identity. The novel contains many allusions to Greek mythology, including creatures such as the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, and the Chimera, a monster composed of various animal parts.

Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review considered Middlesex one of the best books of 2002, and some scholars believed the novel should be considered for the title of Great American Novel. In 2007, the book was featured in Oprah's Book Club. In July 2009, HBO announced that Middlesex would be adapted into a one-hour drama series, with the script written by Donald Margulies.

An Introduction to Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer of Greek and Irish extraction. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, of Greek and Irish descent. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University Liggett School. He took his undergraduate degree at Brown University, graduating in 1983. He later earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. In 1986 he received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship for his story "Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit". His 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, gained mainstream interest with the 1999 film adaptation directed by Sofia Coppola. The novel was reissued in 2009.

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Waterland

Metadata

Author: Graham Swift Release Date: 1983 Pages: 310 Est. Reading Time: 5.2 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.

Author's Insight

" "I took the Ordnance Survey map - King's Lynn up there, Ely down there - and I opened it up, and I put my fictional world in the middle and tried to make it fit.” ― Graham Swift

Applause

"A formidably intelligent book -- animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need.... The most powerful novel I have read for some time." -- The New York Review of Books 

An Introduction to Waterland

Waterland is a ovel by Graham Swift. It is considered to be the author's premier novel and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (a prize Swift finally achieved with Last Orders).

In 1992, the book was made into a film version.

The title of the novel refers to its setting in The Fens in East Anglia. Waterland is concerned with the nature and importance of history as the primary source of meaning in a narrative. For this reason, it is associated with new historicism. Major themes in the novel include storytelling and history, exploring how the past leads to future consequences.

The plot of the novel revolves around loosely interwoven themes and narrative, including the jealousy of his brother for the narrator's girlfriend/wife, a resulting murder, the abortion the girl undergoes, her subsequent inability to conceive, resulting in depression and the kidnap of a baby.

This personal narrative is set in the context of a wider history, of the narrator's family, the Fens in general and the eel.

   An Introduction to Graham Swift

Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born May 4, 1949) is a British author. He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of Ted Hughes. Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.

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Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa

Metadata

Author: Antonio Tabucchi Release Date: 1996 Pages: 136 Est. Reading Time: 2.3 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion. ...I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

Author's Insight

"It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection." - Antonio Tabucchi

An Introduction to Dreams of Dreams

"Elaborately imagined...mini-catalog of great artists' dreams and the author's interpretation of the last three days in the life of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Tabucchi's rich language and his magical-realist charm tinge the volume with a visionary glow."-Publishers Weekly

An Introduction to Antonio Tabucchi

Antonio Tabucchi is an Italian writer and academic who teaches Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy. Deeply in love with Portugal, he is an expert, critic and translator of the works of the writer Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronomouses. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that, back in Italy, he attended a course of Portuguese language for a better comprehension of the poet.

His books and essays have been translated in 18 countries, including Japan. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, he translated many works by Pessoa into Italian and has written a book of essays and a comedy about the writer.

Tabucchi has been awarded the French prize "Médicis étranger" for Indian Nocturne (Notturno indiano) and the premio Campiello, and the Aristeion Prize for Sostiene Pereira.

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A few year end reading selections.

Happy Holidays from the whole Readom team.

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The day of the Triffids

Metadata

Author: John Wyndham Release Date: 1951 Pages: 304 Est. Reading Time: 5.1 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”

Author's Insight

"There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilled milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.” ― John Wyndham

Applause

" ...rarely have the details of [the] collapse been treated with such detailed plausibility and human immediacy, and never has the collapse been attributed to such an unusual and terrifying source."

- Boucher and McComas 

An Introduction to The Day of the Triffids

In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.” Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere twenty-four hours before is gone forever. But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia.

The Day of the Triffids was cited by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best science-fiction horror novels. Arthur C. Clarke called it an "immortal story".

In his book Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss coined the term cosy catastrophe to describe the subgenre of post-war apocalyptic fiction in which society is destroyed save for a handful of survivors, who are able to enjoy a relatively comfortable existence. He specifically singled out The Day of the Triffids as an example of this genre.

 Forrest J Ackerman wrote in Astounding that Triffids "is extraordinarily well carried out, with the exception of a somewhat anticlimactic if perhaps inevitable conclusion."

An Introduction to John Wyndham

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris  was an English science fiction writer who usually used the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Many of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes.

The first four of the novels published in his lifetime as by John Wyndham are widely regarded as the peak of his achievement.The Day of the Triffids remains his best known, but some of his readers consider that The Chrysalids was really his best.

He also penned several short stories, ranging from hard science fiction to whimsical fantasy. Of these, Consider Her Ways and Random Quest have both been filmed.

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Strangers on a Train

Metadata

Author: Patricia Highsmith Release Date: 1950 Pages: 256 Est. Reading Time: 4.2 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

“The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.” 

Author's Insight

"My imagination functions better when I don't have to speak to people.” ― Patricia Highsmith

Applause

"Strangers on a Train is a moral-vertigo thriller: Crime and Punishment for a post-atomic age." - Tom Nolan , The Los Angeles Times

An Introduction to Strangers on a Train

Strangers on a Train  is a psychological thriller novel.

Both Highsmith's novel and Hitchcock's film have been referenced, imitated, and parodied in films such as Throw Momma from the Train, Once You Kiss a Stranger, Dead End, Bollywood's Strangers, and the Telugu film Visakha Express,tamil language film "Muran" and television shows such as CSI, Law & Order, Arthur, Peep Show, Castle, and The Simpsons. J. D. Robb's 2008 book, Strangers in Death, references both Highsmith's novel and Hitchcock's film as NYPSD Homicide Detective Eve Dallas attempts to solve two seemingly unrelated murders. Noted Italian horror and thriller director Dario Argento paid homage to this (and several other Hitchcock films) in Do You Like Hitchcock?

Sonic Youth's song "Shadow Of A Doubt" lyrically references Strangers on a Train.

There is a 2009 episode of the ABC series Castle that loosely follows the plot of the novel and is mentioned in the episode.

An Introduction to Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short-story writer most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. In addition to her acclaimed series about murderer Tom Ripley, she wrote many short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humor. Although she wrote specifically in the genre of crime fiction, her books have been lauded by various writers and critics as being artistic and thoughtful enough to rival mainstream literature. Michael Dirda observed, "Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus."

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Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Metadata

Author: Henry Miller Release Date: June 1962 Pages: 196 Est. Reading Time: 3.25 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

“Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious,timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.” 

Applause

"No work more truly captures the spirit and soul of Henry Miller" - Readom

An Introduction to Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays.

An Introduction to Henry Miller

Henry Miller (1891-1980) was an American writer and painter infamous for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. His books were banned in the United States for their lewd content until 1964 when a court ruling overturned this order, acknowledging Miller’s work as literature in what became one of the most celebrated victories of the sexual revolution.

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The Flanders Panel

Metadata

Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte Release Date: 1990 Pages: 304 Est. Reading Time: 5 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

“Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.” 

Author's Insight

It is very much a child of its time. Had it not been written when it was, at a very bad time in the war when there was nothing to eat, it would have been a different book. The fact that it is rich in evocative description—in gluttonous writing—is a direct result of the privations and austerity of the times.

- Evelyn Waugh

Applause

"Paradoxes and puzzles abound.A sleek, sophisticated, madly clever chamber mystery about chess, life, and art." - The New York Times Book Review

An Introduction to The Flanders Panel

A fifteenth-century painting by a Flemish master is about to be auctioned when Julia, a young art restorer, discovers a peculiar inscription hidden in a corner: Who killed the knight? In the painting, the Duke of Flanders and his knight are locked in a game of chess, and a dark lady lurks mysteriously in the background. Julia is determined to solve the five-hundred-year-old murder, but as she begins to look for clues, several of her friends in the art world are brutally murdered in quick succession. Messages left with the bodies suggest a crucial connection between the chess game in the painting, the knight's murder, the sordid underside of the contemporary art world, and the latest deaths. Just when all of the players in the mystery seem to be pawns themselves, events race toward a shocking conclusion. A thriller like no other, The Flanders Panel presents a tantalizing puzzle for any connoisseur of mystery, chess, art, and history.

An Introduction to Arturo Pèrez-Reverte

Arturo Pérez-Reverte lives near Madrid. Originally a war journalist, he now writes fiction full-time. He is the author of twelve novels, including The Flanders Panel, The Club Dumas, The Seville Communion, The Queen of the South, Captain Alatriste and Pirates of the Levant. His works have been translated into twenty-eight languages and published in fifty countries. In 2002, he was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy.

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The Decay of the Angel

Metadata

Author: Yukio Mishima Release Date: April 1990 Pages: 256 Est. Reading Time: 4.25 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

"No, Mr. Honda, I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae. Don’t you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was; but don’t you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? I couldn’t help thinking so as I listened to you."

Applause

"here was ample reason to expect "The Decay of the Angel" to be a failure. There was a candid suspicion abroad in the West that Yukio Mishima's final work might appear no more than a gesture, a literary ritual as incomprehensible to us as his last-stand and certainly grandstand act, committing suicide to stop the rush of history." - The New York Times

An Introduction to The Decay of the Angel

The dramatic climax of the SEA OF FERTILITY, bringing together the dominant themes of the three previous novels; the decay of Japan's courtly tradition and samurai ideal, and the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy.

An Introduction to Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor - the same code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he performed. Several films have been made from his novels, including The Sound of Waves, Enjo which was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Among his other works are the novels Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short story collections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship.

The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is his masterpiece. After Mishima conceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility in 1964, he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On 25 November 1970, the day he completed The Decay of the Angel, the last novel of the cycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age of forty-five. The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is his masterpiece. After Mishima conceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility in 1964, he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On November 25th, 1970, the day he completed The Decay of the Angel, the last novel of the cycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age of 45.

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Hunger

Metadata

Author: Knut Hamsun Release Date: 1890 Pages: 272 Est. Reading Time: 4.5 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

“I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.” 

Applause

"The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. They were all Hansun's disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler . . . and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

An Introduction to Hunger

A true classic of modern literature that has been described as “one of the most disturbing novels in existence” (Time Out), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starvation. As hunger overtakes him, he slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose, as he loses his grip on reality.

An Introduction to Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some essays. Learn more via Wikipedia.

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Brideshead Revisited

Metadata

Author: Evelyn Waugh Release Date: 1945 Pages: 368 Est. Reading Time: 6.15 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

"You may think it charming. I think it's devilish. Do you know he spent the whole of yesterday evening trying to turn me against you, and almost succeeded?"

Author's Insight

It is very much a child of its time. Had it not been written when it was, at a very bad time in the war when there was nothing to eat, it would have been a different book. The fact that it is rich in evocative description—in gluttonous writing—is a direct result of the privations and austerity of the times.

- Evelyn Waugh

Applause

"Here's perhaps the first chance we have had to make Waugh an item for big sales. Contradictory as it may sound, this may well be the most popular book Waugh has written and at the same time the most serious. There is none of the intense if sterile brilliance of his earlier books -- their world of sybaritic pleasures and empty lives. Here, if unobtrusively, is the corrective of faith -- Waugh, as did Huxley, has turned from nihilism to belief -- in this case that of the Catholic Church." - Kirkus Reviews

An Introduction to Brideshead Revsisted

Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama of extraordinary richness and depth. The novel Waugh thought of as his magnum opus, it is the story of the intense entanglement of a young, middle-class Englishman, Charles Ryder, with a wealthy, eccentric Anglo-Catholic family, the Marchmains: in particular, with Sebastian, the flamboyant young man Charles meets at Oxford in the 1920s; and Sebastian’s sister Julia, who will become the great and unrequited love of Charles’s life.

Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the world of Waugh’s own youth, but it is also a story about religious and secular love, about the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment and how, almost unaccountably, they can give shape to one’s life. By turns romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s familiar satiric exploration of English society and mores, revealing an elegiac, lyrical writer of the most lucid and profound feeling.

An Introduction to Evelyn Waugh

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (28 October 1903  – 10 April 1966), known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include his early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), his novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his trilogy of Second World War novels collectively known as Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh is widely recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. Learn more via Wikipedia.

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This week we are featuring a number of unique works that should deliver a strong beginning to your holiday reading ... or your 2012 reading list!

Enjoy.

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Cat's Cradle

Metadata

Author: Kurt Vonnegut Release Date: 1963 Pages: 304 Est. Reading Time: 5 hours Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

A Quote

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

Applause

“Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”

- Atlantic Monthly

An Introduction to Cat's Cradle

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.

An Introduction to Kurt Vonnegut 

Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, "one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.