Скачать книгу (размер 2 441 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 480) Аннотация: Who was Dmitri Shostakovich? The USSR's official figurehead composer and son of the revolution that brought the Soviet state into being, or a secret dissident whose contempt for the totalitarian regime was scathing? Perhaps both? Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated into the most rancorous…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 870 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 368) Аннотация: In December 2004, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered to defy the results of a transparently rigged presidential election. The charismatic popular candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was disfigured after being poisoned by his opponents. The security forces threatened violent repression. But the demonstrators stayed and, as international pressure grew, the corrupt old…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 789 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 352) Аннотация: After the opening essay on the general significance of literature, Eco examines a number of major authors from the Western canon. A stimulating chapter on the poetic qualities of Dante's «Paradiso» is followed by one on the style of the Communist Manifesto. The next three essays centre on nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature: one on the French writer Nerval's masterpiece, «Sylvie» (a…
Скачать книгу (размер 565 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 112) Аннотация: Ah, the trusty penis. The cock, knob, widgie, pink python, groin bollard — call it what you will, this is one part of the male anatomy that never ceases to provide endless fascination, and frequently mirth. Half the population have one, and the other half, so Freud would have us believe, would like to. And yet still our flaccid friend is so often misunderstood. The «Penis Book» seeks to redress…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 707 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 336) Аннотация: 'My painter friends think I am a die-hard conservative, my writer friends think I am a man of loose morals. In Jushlin Temple I am a quiet disciple, in the Propaganda Department I am a decadent youth. Women call me a cynical artist, the police call me a hooligan. Well, they can think what they like. I only have 20,000 days left to live'. In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was overwhelmed by the…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 544 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 304) Аннотация: Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world — the impending war against Iraq, a gathering…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 789 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 352) Аннотация: Roundworld is in trouble again, and this time it looks fatal. Having created it in the first place, the wizards of Unseen University feel vaguely responsible for its safety. They know the creatures who lived there escaped the impending Big Freeze by inventing the space elevator — they even intervened to rid the planet of a plague of elves, who attempted to divert humanity onto a different time…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 849 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 560) Аннотация: Peter Ackroyd's marvellous biography is a living attempt to reach into the heart of Shakespeare. He creates an intimate and immediate connection with his subject, so that the book reads like the work of a contemporary — meeting Shakespeare afresh on his own ground. Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, this is a book by a writer about a writer, and a fascinating and…
Скачать книгу (размер 3 339 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 656) Аннотация: Los Angeles, 1991. Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is knifed to death in broad daylight on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former United States…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 381 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 272) Аннотация: Alan Hollinghurst's new novel is a comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, an architect in his late forties, who is trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his younger lover, Justin, a would-be actor increasingly disenchanted with the countryside; Robin's 22-year-old son Danny, a volatile beauty who lives for clubbing and casual sex; and…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 544 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 304) Аннотация: Alan Hollinghurst's first novel is a tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.
Скачать книгу (размер 2 605 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 512) Аннотация: An old man wearing a brown robe is found wandering disoriented in the Arizona desert. He is miles from any human habitation and has no memory of how he got to be there, or who he is. The only clue to his identity is the plan of a medieval monastery in his pocket. So begins the mystery of «Timeline», a mystery that will catapult a group of young scientists back to the Middle Ages and into the…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 625 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 320) Аннотация: For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 217 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 240) Аннотация: Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable, except maybe when it's squatting in the Tate or New York's Metropolitan Museum. Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world. Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 544 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 304) Аннотация: Set in Kiev during the Russian revolution, «White Guard» tells a story about the war's effect on a middle-class family and was turned into a hugely successful play on publication. It brought the author overnight success and became 'a new Seagull' for the new generation, although it also received hostile reviews for the sympathetic portrayal of White officers. Paradoxically, «The White Guard» was…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 033 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 400) Аннотация: Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life and Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its admirers is Antony Beevor, the bestselling author of Stalingrad and Berlin. A Writer at War is based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered his raw material. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front and the lives and deaths of…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 778 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 350) Аннотация: From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 299 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 256) Аннотация: Wer Wladimir Kaminers Geschichten kennt, kennt auch seine Familie: seine Frau Olga, seine beiden Kinder und natürlich seine Eltern. Egal ob Erziehungsfragen, sexuelle Aufklärungsarbeit, deutscher Behördendschungel, sportliche Extravaganzen, Mysterien des Religionsunterrichts, Urlaubskatastrophen oder die Invasion der Playmobilfiguren – das Leben mit seiner Familie stellt Wladimir…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 115 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 416) Аннотация: They say there's someone for everyone. But what if ‘The One’ lives in Winnipeg rather than Wimbledon? Or Port Stanley instead of Livingstone? Or, even in Eden... New South Wales? How far would you go to find them? Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco? As a seasoned travel writer and broadcaster, Jennifer has embarked on plenty of epic adventures before and explored some of the world's most remote regions.…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 033 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 400) Аннотация: The Gulf War is imminent and there’s something mighty strange going on in the Agriculture Department of East Iowa University. When an Arab student turns up drunk – and dead – in the lake, redneck Deputy County Sheriff Clyde Banks gets a feeling he’s on to something big. It’s a suspicion shared by low-ranking CIA agent Betsy Vandeventer. But before two great minds yell conspiracy theory, in steps…