HomeLib
Книги по жанру: Современная проза
Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (Albany Cycle[8])
Kennedy William
fb2
From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of Ironweed, a dramatic novel of love and revolution from one of America's finest writers.When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, in 1957, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight.So begins William Kennedy's latest novel — a tale of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro. Quinn's epic journey carries him through the nightclubs and jungles of Cuba and into the newsrooms and racially charged streets of Albany on the day Robert Kennedy is fatally shot in 1968. The odyssey brings Quinn, and his exotic but unpredictable Cuban wife, Renata, a debutante revolutionary, face-to-face with the darkest facets of human nature and illuminates the power of love in the presence of death.Kennedy masterfully gathers together an unlikely cast of vivid characters in a breathtaking adventure full of music, mysticism, and murder — a homeless black alcoholic, a radical Catholic priest, a senile parent, a terminally ill jazz legend, the imperious mayor of Albany, Bing Crosby, Hemingway, Castro, and a ragtag ensemble of radicals, prostitutes, provocateurs, and underworld heavies. This is an unforgettably riotous story of revolution, romance, and redemption, set against the landscape of the civil rights movement as it challenges the legendary and vengeful Albany political machine.
Chanson douce
Slimani Leïla
fb2
Lorsque Myriam, mère de deux jeunes enfants, décide malgré les réticences de son mari de reprendre son activité au sein d’un cabinet d’avocats, le couple se met à la recherche d’une nounou. Après un casting sévère, ils engagent Louise, qui conquiert très vite l’affection des enfants et occupe progressivement une place centrale dans le foyer. Peu à peu le piège de la dépendance mutuelle va se refermer, jusqu’au drame.À travers la description précise du jeune couple et celle du personnage fascinant et mystérieux de la nounou, c’est notre époque qui se révèle, avec sa conception de l’amour et de l’éducation, des rapports de domination et d’argent, des préjugés de classe ou de culture. Le style sec et tranchant de Leïla Slimani, où percent des éclats de poésie ténébreuse, instaure dès les premières pages un suspense envoûtant.Leïla Slimani est née en 1981. Elle est l’auteur d’un premier roman très remarqué, Dans le jardin de l’ogre (« Folio » no 6062), paru en 2014 aux Éditions Gallimard, dans la collection « Blanche ».
Charmed Particles
Kolaya Chrissy
fb2
Set in a fictional prairie town in which the two overarching industries are a living history facility and a laboratory for experiments in high-energy particle physics, Charmed Particles tells the intertwined stories of two families.Abhijat is a theoretical physicist from India now working at the National Accelerator Research Laboratory. His wife, Sarala, home with their young daughter, Meena, struggles to assimilate to their new American culture.Meena’s best friend at school is Lily, a precocious child prodigy whose father self-identifies as “the last great gentleman explorer” and whose mother, a local politician, becomes entangled in efforts to stop to the National Accelerator Research Laboratory’s plans to build a new superconducting supercollider.The conflict over the collider fractures the community and creates deep divides within the families of the novel.
Chasing Harry Winston
Weisberger Lauren
fb2
The bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing is back with a delicious new novel about a trio of best friends in Manhattan who agree to change their lives in the most personal and dramatic way possible – and within one calendar year.
Chateau of Echoes
Mitchell Siri L.
fb2
Frederique Farmer thought she'd found the perfect place to hide-from her life, the world at large, and even from God. She was wrong.
Checkpoint
Baker Nicholson
fb2
Two men — Jay and Ben — sit in a Washington hotel room. Jay has called his old friend Ben there — to tell him why and how he wants to kill the President. Jay is a bit of a loser (he's lost his girlfriend, his job, and his car), generally easy-going, but now he's on edge and he's angry — and he's acquired some radio-controlled flying saws, and is working on a boulder with a depleted uranium centre — but he also has a gun and bullets. Ben is the voice of liberal reason, with a job and a family. Jay switches on a tape machine, and the two men argue. Well, Ben tries feebly to reason or cajole, while Jay rants and rages about everything from the horror of what happened at that southern Iraq checkpoint where US forces opened fire on a Shiite family in a Land Rover, killing most of them, and decapitating two young girls; to the iniquities of the present administration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al., and abortion (if they're against abortion, how come they can kill women and children?), not to mention the napalm-like substance ('improved fire jelly') used in bombs in Iraq. Their dialogue veers from chilling and serious to wacky and crazed (Bush, says Jay, is 'one dead armadillo'). "Checkpoint" is a novel about a man pushed to the extremes, by a writer who is clearly angry. Like Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", it takes the temperature of America just below the surface and finds it at boiling point.
Checkpoint
Албахари Давид
fb2

From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can’t be sure whether they’re fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari’s Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

Chef
Singh Jaspreet
fb2
Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years. Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father's life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. 'The smell of a woman is thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid,' he muses over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed – he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani 'terrorist' with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything. Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, "Chef" is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir.
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
Handler Chelsea
fb2
Oh Chelsea, how do I love thee… Seriously, I cannot get enough of Chelsea Handler. She first made it onto my radar when she would make guest appearances on VHI shows such as Best of the and Best Week Ever. Then she got her own show, Chelsea Lately, on E! and it was over for me. I became a devoted fan.Handler’s written three books, this one being the newest (released this month) and I have read all three. Her first, My Horizontal Life: A History of One Night Stands, killed me. In a good way. The crap she gets herself into is laughable, especially given the fact that she has absolutely NO censor and will tell a good story whether it sheds her in a good light or not.Handler’s second book was just as funny, although, like this book, it didn’t have the same connecting factor. Both Chelsea Chelsea, Bang Bang and Are You There Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea involve stories from Handler’s life, both growing up and as an adult. Undoubtedly, the best “character” in the books, especially in CCBB is Handler’s father, Melvin. Melvin is an over-the-top eccentric and trying to talk sense into him is an impossible effort.Melvin’s stubborness is especially apparent in the chapter “Dear Asshole”, in which Melvin rents out his dilapidated vacation home to unsuspecting vacationers. After spending a week in what can only be described a hell hole, the renters send Melvin a multiple page letter describing the most awful living conditions one could imagine in a vacation home, such as a broken refrigerator with liquified squid dripping from the freezer. The letter from the renters makes its way between Handler and her siblings, who are all mortified. However, their father sees nothing wrong with the living conditions and believes the renters are just making a stink over nothing. His obstinancy was unbelievable and quite humerous.If you’ve enjoyed Handler’s previous books, this is one that can’t be missed. Now, if you are new to Handler, I would suggest any of her three books to read. They are all ridiculously funny and entertaining.In closing, here is a picture of me and two of my sisters at a book signing for Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea. I am the one in the middle. I think my enthusiasm is obvious!
Chemistry and Other Stories
Rash Ron
fb2
From the pre-eminent chronicler of this forgotten territory, stories that range over one hundred years in the troubled, violent emergence of the New South.In Ron Rash's stories, spanning the entire twentieth century in Appalachia, rural communities struggle with the arrival of a new era.Three old men stalk the shadow of a giant fish no one else believes is there. A man takes up scuba diving in the town reservoir to fight off a killing depression. A grieving mother leads a surveyor into the woods to name once and for all the county where her son was murdered by thieves.In the Appalachia of Ron Rash's stories, the collision of the old and new south, of antique and modern, resonate with the depth and power of ancient myths.
Chernobyl
Pohl Frederik
fb2
This novel starts April 25, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station which supplies the eastern Ukraine with one quarter of its electrical energy. While the characters are fiction, actual Soviet persons are referred to in the book. Dedicated to the people who kept a terrible accident from becoming far more terrible.
Chicago
Al Aswany Alaa
fb2
The Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany's second novel is a bit of a curate's egg, or maybe a mullah's omelette: on the one hand it's a racy campus novel set among the Egyptian émigré community of the University of Illinois, while on the other it's full of undigested lumps of socio-political commentary that appear to have been cut and pasted from an encyclopedia. But despite the catastrophically pedantic opening chapter, there are some treats. The best characters are worthy of an Arabic David Lodge, particularly Professor Graham, a sad, pony-tailed relic of the 1960s counter-culture who pores over his revolutionary press cuttings as if they were sacred relics; and Dr Ra'fat Thabit, more American than the Americans until his daughter runs off with one. Then at the other end of the scale there's the preposterous, pot-bellied villain Danana, a student informer for the Egyptian security services, whose features cloud over "just as a character's face changes from good to evil in science fiction movies", which makes you wonder if a bad science fiction movie is where he really belongs.
Chicos prodigiosos
Chabon Michael
fb2
Grady Tripp es un escritor ya cercano a la mediana edad y profesor en una universidad de provincias. En su juventud fue una promesa de la literatura, un esplendoroso chico prodigio que tuvo su fugaz temporada de gloria, pero el tiempo ha pasado y Grady arrstra desde hace ocho años una inmensa novela inconclusa, cada vez más larga e hirsuta y cuyo título es, claro está, Chicos prodigiosos. A Grady le gusta compararla con Ada, de Navokov, y dice que es la clase de obra que "enseña al lector cómo debe leerla a medida que se interna en ella". En una palabra, que Grady no sabe qué hacer con su novela, y está absolutamente perdido en una maraña de páginas que no llevan a ninguna parte.Y, en medio de toda esta confusión literaria y también vital -Sara, su amante, está embarazada; su tercera esposa lo ha abandonado, y una joven escritora, alumna de sus talleres literarios, está fascinada por él, y le fascina-, recibe la visita del siempre sorprendente Terry Crabtree, su editor y cómplice desde hace muchos años, que declara que perderá su puesto en la editorial si no vuelve con un manuscrito genial bajo el brazo.Y desde el mismo instante en que Crabtree baja del avión acompañado por la maravillosa Miss Sloviack -un(a) guapísimo(a) travesti-, y en los tres días que durará la Fiesta de las Palabras, una feria literaria que cada año se celebra en la universidad donde enseña Grady, se despliega ante el lector una de las novelas más deleitosas, brillantes y diversidad de los últimos años. Un irónico viaje por la espuma de los libros y la vida, donde la literatura y sus géneros, el cine y las mitologías de nuestra época son también protagonistas.
Child of God
McCarthy Cormac
fb2
In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard-a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape-haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
Children of Light
Stone Robert
fb2
A searing, indelible love story of two ravaged spirits-a screenwriter and an actress- played out under the merciless, magnifying prism of Hollywood.
Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History
Galeano Eduardo
fb2
Galeano's new book is his richest and most poetic yet, a joyous calendar of the sacred and the damned, a book of inspiration for those fighting tyranny, greed, and amnesia.Unfurling like a medieval book of days, each page of Galeano's new work has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that day of the calendar year. Each entry resurrects the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map.Among many others, you will discover the Brazilians who held a "smooch in" to protest a dictatorship that banned kisses, the "sacrilegious" women who had the effrontery to marry each other in a church in 1901, and Abdul Kassem Ismael, the grand vizier of Persia, who kept books safe from war by creating a walking library, 117,000 books aboard four hundred camels, forming a mile-long caravan.Beautifully translated by Galeano's longtime collaborator, Mark Fried, Children of the Days is a great humanist treasure that shows us how to live and how to remember. It awakens the best in us.
Chill Factor
Caine Rachel
fb2
Weather Warden Joanne Baldwin hasn't had it easy. In the previous two books in Caine's sharply written series, she "had a really bad week, died, got reborn as a Djinn, had an even worse week, and saved the world, sort of" and "died again, sort of" before waking up human. Normally, Weather Wardens must simply protect the rest of the human race from deadly weather, but Joanne, who's deeply tough, resolutely moral and highly fond of fast cars and "bitchin' shoes," keeps getting tasked with saving the world. This time, a surly teenager named Kevin has holed up in Las Vegas with the world's most powerful Djinn and is wreaking utter havoc. In order to stop him, she'll have to surrender her own Djinn and lover David, die yet again, get resuscitated, interrogated and electrocuted by members of a powerful secret society, and experience countless other injuries and indignities, all the while trying to figure out who-among the detectives, Wardens, Djinns, Ikrits (a dark, undead Djinn), former bosses and former lovers-is really on her side. It's all a bit confusing, for Joanne and readers alike, especially those who haven't followed her through Ill Wind and Heat Stroke, but it's a rollicking good ride. Caine's prose crackles with energy, as does her fierce and lovable heroine.
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Beattie Ann
fb2
This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the Phi Beta Kappa and former coat salesman; and Charles' mother, who spends a lot of time in the bathtub feeling depressed.
China Rich Girlfriend
Кван Кевин
fb2
**Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of *Crazy Rich Asians*, is back with a wickedly funny new novel of social climbing, secret e-mails, art-world scandal, lovesick billionaires, and the outrageous story of what happens when Rachel Chu, engaged to marry Asia's most eligible bachelor, discovers her birthfather. ** On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiance willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won't be able to walk her down the aisle. Until: a shocking revelation draws Rachel into a world of Shanghai splendor beyond anything she has ever imagined. Here we meet Carlton, a Ferrari-crashing bad boy known for Prince Harry-like antics; Colette, a…
Chłód Od Raju
Frey Jana
fb2
Hannah ma 15 lat. Dotąd czuła się bezpiecznie w społeczności świadków Jehowy, teraz jednak chciałaby z niej wystąpić, by żyć tak jak jej rówieśnicy. Hannah walczy o prawo wyboru, a dzięki wsparciu i miłości Paula postanawia uczynić pierwszy krok ku wolności, jakiej zaznają jej szkolni koledzy i koleżanki.
< 1 1582 1583 1584 1585 1586 1891 >