In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning...more
This hilarious, brilliantly inventive novel by the author of The Master and Margarita tells the story of a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Thanks to the skills of a renowned Soviet scientist and the transplanted pituitary gland and testes of a petty criminal, Sharik is transformed into a lecherous , vulgar man who spouts Engels and inevitably...more
'Although it is difficult to believe, the 60s are not fictional; they actually happened' (from the Author's Note). "Hearts in Atlantis" comprises of five brilliant, interconnected, sequential narratives, each deeply rooted in the 60s and haunted by the Vietnam War: In "Low Men in Yellow Coats", 11-year-old Bobby discovers that adults are sometimes ...more
This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiographical, narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.
By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of World War I cemented his fame as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian front.
Gaddis's brilliantly experimental first novel, undervalued when it was published in 1974, is generally considered a masterwork of American literature. The 1000-page story is about Wyatt Gwyon, an artist from an old New England family, who devotes his life to obsessively copying the great Flemish Old Masters, seeking not merely to copy but to reprod...more
Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax’s other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has bee...more
In this magical novel, an irresistible boy tells the story of his survival and coming of age against the background of South Africa during and just after World War II.
As with many of Haruki Murakami's novels, the plot curdles with complex diversity only to be resolved by a collision between wild fantasy and outright slapstick. A Wild Sheep Chase refers aptly to the tradition of cool but kitsch detective sagas. Except here, the metaphoric goose is now a literal sheep with a distinctive marking; an urban myth with...more
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