Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.This improbable story of Christopher’s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neigh...more
From back cover: "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has written one of the major novels of the year... Haunting... Irresistible Reading... Poignant and Hilarious threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement... work of art" (Boston Globe) "Splendid art and simplicity... Nerve-racking control... a funny book at which...more
Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.
In the 1920s, Asakusa was to Tokyo what Montmartre had been to 1890s Paris and Times Square was to be to 1940s New York. Available in English for the first time, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, captures the decadent allure of this entertainment district, where beggars and teenage prostitutes mixed with revue da...more
She is a former child beauty pageant contender. He is a hard-living movie producer. She walks away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch. He comes away from a near-death experience with a unique, vivid plan.She, refusing to spend one more day peddling herself for cheesy TV sitcom parts, disappears. He turns his back on a hedonistic life m...more
Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, whi...more