Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Wintersons writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we call Love.Selected from the books of Jeanette Winterson VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the worlds greatest writers on the exp...

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating powers of the mind. From an exploration of why women were barred from writing and under what conditions they might break free, to the solace derived from haunting Londons streets, these essays and stories present Woolf at her most impassioned, rendering the pursuit of liberty one of lifes most...

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language a muddle of personal pronouns and moody verbs. But with increasing fluency in English surviving turns to living. And they say that the best way to learn a language is to fall in love with a native speaker...Selected from the book A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu GuoVINTA...

Can we truly know the one we love? In this painfully candid book Marcel Proust looks straight into the green eye of every lovers jealous struggle. He broods on why we are driven to try possess one another, how jealousy can outlive death, and whether we can ever reclaim those careless days of first love. There is no greater chronicler of jealousys darkest fears and destructive suspicions than Proust.Selected from the book In Search of Lost Time by Marcel ProustVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEA...

Salman Rushdie, a self-described emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. Selected from the books Shame, Imaginary Homelands and East, West by Salman Rushdie VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short...

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads.How to be a good father? Childrens birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes: the trials of parenthood are all found in Knausgaards compelling and honest account of family life. Contrasting moments of enormous love and tenderness towards his children with the boring struggles of domesticity, this is one fathers personal experience, and somehow, ever...

Whats the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents liquor cabinet, only to drown her sorrows in it, to the suburban swimmer withering away with every plunge he takes, these are stories suffused with beauty, sadness, and the gathering storm of a bender well-done. Seen through the gin-lacquered looking glass of Cheevers writing, your next drink may have you reaching for a l...

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping description of his descent into mental anguish, and his eventual success in overcoming a little-understood yet very common condition.The unabridged text of Darkness Visible ...

When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers and why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect guide to the weirdness of the only thing that binds us all.Selected from the book Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian BarnesVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short ...

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks - lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal honesty and dry wit, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time - how to survive in this modern age.Selected from the book Teach us to Sit Still by Tim ParksVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A serie...

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the mildly curious, can delight in Enrights funny, eloquent and unsentimental account of having babies. Selected from the book Making Babies by ...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Wuthering Heights by Emily BronteMay you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, thenLockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of ...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth GaskellEh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ...Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to remarry, Mollys life is thrown off course by the arrival of her vain, shallow and selfish stepmother. There is some solace in the shape of her new stepsister Cynthia, who is beautiful, sophisticated and irresistible to every man she meets. Soon the girls b...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Villette by Charlotte BronteThat evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol - blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too, that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its climax, and must now be turned by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they wereWith neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls boarding school in the small ...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace ThackerayVanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?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 class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way thr...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Two on a Tower by Thomas HardyThen they proceeded to scan the sky, roving from planet to star, from single stars to double stars, from double to coloured stars...Hardys atmospheric, moving story of star-crossed lovers shows human beings at the mercy of forces far beyond their control, setting a tragic drama of human passion and conflict against a background of vast stellar space and scientific discovery. Two on a Tower tells the story of Lady Constantine, w...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis StevensonOne more step, Mr Hands, said I, and Ill blow your brains outIn Treasure Island, a weathered old sailor known as Billy Bones arrives at the inn of young Jim Hawkinss parents - and it is the start of an adventure beyond anything he could have imagined. For when Bones dies mysteriously, Jim stumbles across a map of a mysterious island in his sea chest - where X marks the spot of a stash of buried pirat...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Woman in White by Wilkie CollinsIn one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ... stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in whiteThe Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartrights eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Gl...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Warden by Anthony TrollopeIt was so hard that the pleasant waters of his little stream should be disturbed and muddied ... that his quiet paths should be made a battlefield: that the unobtrusive corner of the world which been allotted to him ... made miserable and unsoundTrollopes witty, satirical story of a quiet cathedral town shaken by scandal - as the traditional values of Septimus Harding are attacked by zealous reformers and ruthless newspapers - ...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Time Machine by H. G. WellsGreat shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glareChilling, prophetic and hugely influential, The Time Machine sees a Victorian scientist propel himself into the year 802,701 AD, where he is delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty and contentment in the form of the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man. But h...