Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers.Five Spice Street is one of the most astonishing novels of the past twenty years. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day — whether in China or in the West — where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.

Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers.Five Spice Street is one of the most astonishing novels of the past twenty years. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day — whether in China or in the West — where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.

An entertaining, expansive, and eye-opening novel that captures the vibrance of China today, by a writer whose previous work has been called “mesmerizing,” “haunting,” “breathtaking,” “mercilessly gripping,” “seductive,” and “luminous.”Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job — but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn't exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family's real-estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left-wing activist to a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of Walter Chao, the five-star billionaire of the novel, who — with his secrets and his schemes — has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel's characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants. Five Star Billionaire, the dazzling kaleidoscopic new novel by the award-winning writer Tash Aw, offers rare insight into China today, with its constant transformations and its promise of possibility.

Англия. Лондон. 1666 год.

Промежуток между Великой чумой и Великим пожаром. Архидьякон Собора святого Павла и бывший чумной врач после череды странных и трагических событий оказывается втянут в противостояние с сектой «Отверженных».

Богатые диалоги, красочные описания, продуманные персонажи и нетривиальный сюжет романа «Flamma» погрузят читателя в мрачную атмосферу Лондона 1666 года, полную тайн, мистики, загадочных убийств и конечно же любви.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for FictionFlaubert’s Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert’s Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.

A single streetcar line runs around the sleepy suburban square of an unnamed city. One day — out of nowhere — a group of hapless refugees pour from the streetcar and set up camp in the square. The residents grow hostile to the disruption and chaos, and eventually take matters into their own hands… Flaw is Tulli’s most intense and personally motivated work to date, while still retaining the signature mind-and word-play so admired by critics and her growing readership.

Celestine North lives a perfect life. She's a model daughter and sister, she's well-liked by her classmates and teachers, and she's dating the impossibly charming Art Crevan.But then Celestine encounters a situation in which she makes an instinctive decision. She breaks a rule and now faces life-changing repercussions. She could be imprisoned. She could be branded. She could be found FLAWED.In her breathtaking young adult debut, bestselling author Cecelia Ahern depicts a society in which obedience is paramount and rebellion is punished. And where one young woman decides to take a stand that could cost her everything.

Guitar players change lives. Everybody knows that. Geoff Nicholson's deliriously funny Flesh Guitar is overstimulated love letter to the guitar, complete with feedback, reverb, and special guest appearances, with a lead player the likes of whom has not been seen since Hendrix departed this earth.Into the Havoc Bar and Grill, an end-of-the-world watering hole on the outer fringes of the metropolis, walks the entertainment, Jenny Slade. She has the look down: beat-up leather jacket, motorcycle boots, cheekbones, and wild hair. But she's no ordinary guitar heroine. Her guitar is like none her audience has ever seen, part deadly weapon, part creature from some alien lagoon. Is that hair? Are those nipples? Is it flesh? Where does Jenny Slade come from? Where does she go? Geoff Nicholson fans know that wherever that is, the fide will be like no other.

Hartmut Hainbach ist Ende fünfzig und hat alles erreicht, was er sich gewünscht hat: Er ist Professor für Philosophie und hat seine Traumfrau geheiratet, die er nach zwanzig Jahren Ehe immer noch liebt. Dennoch ist Hartmut nicht glücklich. Seine Frau ist nach Berlin gezogen, sodass aus der Ehe eine Wochenendbeziehung geworden ist, die gemeinsame Tochter hält die Eltern auf Distanz, der Reformfuror an den Universitäten nimmt Hartmut die Lust an der Arbeit. Als ihm überraschend das Angebot zu einem Berufswechsel gemacht wird, will er endlich Klarheit: über das Verhältnis zu seiner Tochter, über seine Ehe, über ein Leben, von dem er dachte, dass die wichtigen Entscheidungen längst getroffen sind.Drei Jahre nach seinem gefeierten Debüt Grenzgang gerät in Stephan Thomes neuem Roman Fliehkräfte wieder einer ins Straucheln. Und mit atemberaubendem Gespür für die Niederlage, für das, was wirklich schmerzt, schickt Thome seinen Helden auf eine alles entscheidende Reise. Über Frankreich und Spanien führt sie ihn bis nach Lissabon und zugleich in die Vergangenheit, ganz nah heran an die Verwerfungen und Abgründe des gelebten Lebens.

The best-selling author of multiple award-winning books returns with his first novel in ten years, a powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen. This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant — making us laugh while breaking our hearts. Simultaneously wrenching and deeply humorous, wholly contemporary yet steeped in American history, Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and again, groundbreaking Alexie.

Flight from the USSR, the first novel from one of Georgia’s most famous author, Dato Turashvili, was originally published in Georgia in 1988. Since then, it has been adapted as a stage play entitled “Jeans Generation” and translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Greek and Croatian; receiving brilliant reviews everywhere.

The novel is based upon an electrifying and tragic event in 1983. Gega Kobakhidze, a young actor, and seven friends hijack an airplane heading from Tbilisi to Leningrad. They desperately want to flee from the USSR and go to Turkey. They fail, are imprisoned and a number are killed. All of Georgia and the world were caught up in these events.

Turashvili is a master of drama, with a precise and compelling sense of dialogue, his characterizations are complex but powerful, his story-line is totally engrossing, and we do not want to believe the inevitable and disastrous conclusion. He weaves a gripping literary work between historical fact and fiction, leaving the reader transfixed.

Brilliantly portrayed by a novelist with "a talent for hyperbole and downright yarning unequaled since Mark Twain", (Saturday Review), this slave's-eye view of the Civil War exposes America's racial foibles of the past and present with uninhibited humor and panache.Mixing history, fantasy, political reality, and comedy, Ishmael Reed spins the tale of three runaway slaves and the master determined to catch them. His on-target parody of fugitive slave narratives and other literary forms includes a hero who boards a jet bound for Canada; Abraham Lincoln waltzing through slave quarters to the tune of "Hello, Dolly"; and a plantation mistress entranced by TV's "Beecher Hour". Filled with insights into the political consciences (or lack thereof) of both blacks and whites, Flight to Canada confirms Reed's status as "a great writer" (James Baldwin)."A demonized Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with comic rage". - The New York Times Book Review"Wears the mantle of Baldwin and Ellison like a high-powered Flip Wilson in drag…a terrifically funny book". - Baltimore Sun

‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ Economist

Flights is a series of imaginative and mesmerising meditations on travel in all its forms, not only the philosophy and meaning of travel, but also fascinating anecdotes that take us out of ourselves, and back to ourselves.

Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly connects travel with spellbinding anecdotes about anatomy, about life and death, about the very nature of humankind. Thrilling characters and stories abound: the Russian sect who escape the devil by remaining constantly in motion; the anatomist Verheyen who writes letters to his amputated leg; the story of Chopin’s heart as it makes its journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister’s skirt; the quest of a Polish woman who emigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high-school sweetheart…

You will never read anything like this extraordinary, utterly original, mind-expanding book. Many consider Tokarczuk to be the most important Polish writer of her generation and Flights is one of those rare books that seems to conjure life itself out of the air. Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s best and most beloved authors. In 2015 she received the Brueckepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as Poland’s highest literary honor, the Nike, and the Nike Readers’ Prize. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2009 for Flights. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.

‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015

‘Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world… Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the text’s different strands—of fiction, memoir and essay—into a whole.’ Spectator

‘Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don't last. Wrong—they were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does.’ Toby Litt, author of Hospital

‘I have always considered her a person of great literary abilities. With Flights I have my proof. This is one of the most important Polish books I have read for years.’ Jerzy Sosnowski

‘A novel in essays, a world-exploration in words, a soaring journey across space and through time.’ Nicolas Rothwell

A thirteen-year-old hatches a plan of escape, solace, and utter independence through a dream of flight that’s both literal and figurative in this engrossing novel by National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard.As beset by the world as any thirteen-year-old — and maybe a little more so — Biddy Siebert does his best to negotiate both the intimacies and isolations of his world and his own maddening and slightly comical idiosyncrasies. His ferocious younger sister hates everyone, including him; his sprawling Italian family, when it comes to emotional matters, has the touch of a blacksmith; and his Catholic school education provides a ready framework against which he can measure himself as continually falling short of the ideal. As his grades slip and his family begins to come apart, Biddy searches for a focus and finds one during a trip in a family friend’s private plane: To rise above his troubles, he’s going to have to learn to fly.Biddy resolves to steal the plane, having taught himself as a pilot through manuals and observation, and as he moves through the progressions of his plan, he slowly develops the confidence and independence he’s going to need later in life. In this compassionate and honest portrait of the challenges, missteps, and small successes of adolescence, Biddy is an unforgettable character whose problems might seem common but whose solutions are often extraordinary.

The acclaimed author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy makes his hardcover debut with a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity."A master of the modern snapshot." — Los Angeles Times"A contemporary voice that this new generation of skeptics has long awaited-a young champion of literature." — New York PressIn a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures.A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from-and back toward-each other by the choices they make. A boy's friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fiancée attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer's block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud.From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters. Flings is a commanding work of fiction that captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home.

It is 1839 and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the colonial government declares war.One of the vessels requisitioned for the attack, the Hind, travels eastwards from Bengal to China, sailing into the midst of the First Opium War. The turbulent voyage brings together a diverse group of travellers, each with their own agenda to pursue. Among them is Kesri Singh, a sepoy in the East India Company who leads a company of Indian sepoys; Zachary Reid, an impoverished young sailor searching for his lost love, and Shireen Modi, a determined widow en route to China to reclaim her opium-trader husband's wealth and reputation. Flood of Fire follows a varied cast of characters from India to China, through the outbreak of the First Opium War and China's devastating defeat, to Britain's seizure of Hong Kong.

Alice Fivey, fatherless since she was seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and enters "the San," submitting to years of psychiatric care. She is moved from place to place, remaining still while others mold her into someone different from her namesake mother. But they do share the same name. Is she then her mother?Alice consoles herself with books, and she herself becomes a storyteller who must build her own home word by word. Florida is her story, told in brief scenes of spare beauty as Alice moves ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, into adulthood and closer to the meaning of her own experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Christine Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and, above all, the life-giving power of language.

v1.0 - eBook downloaded from http://torrents.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=463754and after that imported to fb2 by soshial (21.05.2008)Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.—Plato, The RepublicA HARVEST BOOK | HARCOURT, INC.ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO TORONTO LONDONCopyright © 1966,1959 by Daniel Keyes Copyright renewed 1994 1987 by Daniel KeyesAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. www.HarcourtBooks.comLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataKeyes, Daniel.Flowers for Algernon/Daniel Keyes.—1st harvest ed. p. cm."A Harvest Book."ISBN 0-15-603008-XPS3561.E769F562004813'.54—dc22 2004005049Text set in Adobe Garamond Designed by Scott PieblPrinted in the United States of America First Harvest edition 2004K J I H

v0.0 — 21 jul 2002 — proofed for #bookzv1.0 — eBook downloaded from http://torrents.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=463754and after that imported to fb2 by soshial (21.05.2008)wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_AlgernonAny one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.—Plato, The Republic

After reverently lambasting the most cherished rites and credos of virtually every one of the world's major religions in his transcendently hilarious novel Lamb, the one and only Christopher Moore returns with a wild look at interspecies communication, adventure on the high seas, and an eons-old mystery.Marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn is in love — with the salt air and sun-drenched waters off Maui… and especially with the majestic ocean-dwelling behemoths that have been bleeping and hooting their haunting music for more than twenty million years. But just why do the humpback whales sing? That's the question that has Nate and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing any large marine mammal that crosses their path. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me.No one on Nate's team has ever seen such a thing; not his longtime partner, photographer Clay Demodocus, not their saucy young research assistant, Amy. Not even spliff-puffing white-boy Rastaman, Kona (the former Preston Applebaum of New Jersey), could boast such a sighting in one of his dope-induced hallucinations. And when a roll of film returns from the lab missing the crucial tail shot — and their research facility is summarily trashed — Nate realizes that something very fishy indeed is going on.This, apparently, is big, involving dangerously interested other parties — competitive researchers, the cutthroat tourist industry, perhaps even the military. The weirdness only gets weirder when a call comes in from Nate's big-bucks benefactor saying that a whale has made contact — by phone. And it's asking for a hot pastrami and Swiss on rye. Suddenly the answer to the question that has daunted and driven Nate throughout his adult life is within his reach. But it's waiting for him in the form of an amazing adventure beneath the waves, 623 feet down, somewhere off the coast of Chile. And it's not what anyone would think.It must be said: Christopher Moore's Fluke is a whale of a novel.