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Книги по жанру: Современная проза
The Question of Bruno
Hemon Aleksandar
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In this stylistically adventurous, brilliantly funny tour de force-the most highly acclaimed debut since Nathan Englander's-Aleksander Hemon writes of love and war, Sarajevo and America, with a skill and imagination that are breathtaking.A love affair is experienced in the blink of an eye as the Archduke Ferdinand watches his wife succumb to an assassin's bullet. An exiled writer, working in a sandwich shop in Chicago, adjusts to the absurdities of his life. Love letters from war torn Sarajevo navigate the art of getting from point A to point B without being shot. With a surefooted sense of detail and life-saving humor, Aleksandar Hemon examines the overwhelming events of history and the effect they have on individual lives. These heartrending stories bear the unmistakable mark of an important new international writer.
The Quick & the Dead
Williams Joy
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Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old — the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles — and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity.
The Quiet Apocalypse [= Island Zero]
Cracknell Nick
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An injured man awakens in an abandoned island resort. The phones are dead. The clocks are frozen. Piles of food sit untouched… Worse still, strange visions tell him his time may be running out. With no seeming hope of rescue he desperately searches for clues. But he soon realises he’s in a terrifying race against time just to survive…
The Rabbi of Lud
Elkin Stanley
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Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn’t want to live (or die) anywhere else.As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it — or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.
The Raiders
Роббинс Гарольд
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The Razor's Edge
MAUGHAM W. Somerset
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The Reactive
Ntshanga Masande
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"With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts."— VICE"Gritty and revealing, Ntshanga's debut novel offers a brazen portrait of present-day South Africa. This is an eye-opening, ambitious novel."— Publishers Weekly"Ntshanga offers a devastating story yet tells it with noteworthy glow and flow that keeps pages turning until the glimmer-of-hope ending."— Library Journal"Electrifying… [Ntshanga] succeeds at exploring major themes — illness, family, and, most effectively, class — while keeping readers in suspense. Ntshanga's promising debut is both moving and satisfyingly complex."— Kirkus Reviews"A powerful, compassionate story that refuses to rest or shuffle off into the murk of the mind. It exists so that we never forget."— Numero Cinq MagazineFrom the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award comes the story of Lindanathi, a young HIV+ man grappling with the death of his brother, for which he feels unduly responsible. He and his friends — Cecelia and Ruan — work low-paying jobs and sell anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they huff glue, drift through parties, and traverse the streets of Cape Town where they observe the grave material disparities of their country.A mysterious masked man appears seeking to buy their surplus of ARVs, an offer that would present the friends with the opportunity to escape their environs, while at the same time forcing Lindanathi to confront his path, and finally, his past.With brilliant, shimmering prose, Ntshanga has delivered a redemptive, ambitious, and unforgettable first novel.Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone magazine.
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
Llosa Mario Vargas
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The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an astute psychological portrait of a modern revolutionary and a searching account of an old friend's struggle to understand him. First published in English in 1986, the novel probes the long and checkered history of radical politics in Latin America.
The Recognitions
Gaddis William
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The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the “ur-text of postwar fiction” and the “first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn’t read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.
The Reconstructionist
Arvin Nick
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One instant can change an entire lifetime.As a boy, Ellis Barstow heard the sound of the collision that killed Christopher, his older half brother – an accident that would haunt him for years. A decade later, searching for purpose after college, Ellis takes a job as a forensic reconstructionist, investigating and re-creating the details of fatal car accidents – under the guidance of the irascible John Boggs, who married Christopher's girlfriend. Ellis takes naturally to the work, fascinated by the task of trying to find reason, and justice, within the seemingly random chaos of smashed glass and broken lives. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own – not only his memory of the car crash that killed his brother but also his feelings for Boggs's wife, Heather, which soon lead to a full-blown affair. And when Boggs inexplicably disappears, Ellis sets out to find him… and to try to make sense of the crash site his own life has become.Raising a host of universal questions – Can science ever explain matters of the heart? Can we ever escape the gravitational pull of the past? – Nick Arvin's novel is at once deeply moving and compulsively readable.
The Red House
Haddon Mark
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An dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family, from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.The set-up of Mark Haddon's brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just re-married and inherited a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. The stage is set for seven days of resentment and guilt, a staple of family gatherings the world over.But because of Haddon's extraordinary narrative technique, the stories of these eight people are anything but simple. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House becomes a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly-guarded secrets and illicit desires, all adding up to a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt. As we come to know each character they become profoundly real to us. We understand them, even as we come to realize they will never fully understand each other, which is the tragicomedy of every family.The Red House is a literary tour-de-force that illuminates the puzzle of family in a profoundly empathetic manner — a novel sure to entrance the millions of readers of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!
Gonzales Manuel
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In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization — the Regional Office — and its coterie of super-powered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation.At its helm, the mysterious Oyemi and her oracles seek out new recruits and root out evil plots. Then a prophecy suggests that someone from inside might bring about its downfall. And now, the Regional Office is under attack.Recruited by a defector from within, Rose is a young assassin leading the attack, eager to stretch into her powers and prove herself on her first mission. Defending the Regional Office is Sarah — who may or may not have a mechanical arm — fiercely devoted to the organization that took her in as a young woman in the wake of her mother’s sudden disappearance. On the day that the Regional Office is attacked, Rose’s and Sarah’s stories will overlap, their lives will collide, and the world as they know it just might end.Weaving in a brilliantly conceived mythology, fantastical magical powers, teenage crushes, and kinetic fight scenes, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a seismically entertaining debut novel about revenge and allegiance and love.
The Rehearsal
Catton Eleanor
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All the world's a stage—and nowhere is it that more true than at an all-girls high school, particularly one where a scandal has just erupted. When news spreads of a high school teacher's relationship with his underage student, participants and observers alike soon take part in an elaborate show of concern and dismay. But beneath the surface of the teenage girls' display, there simmers a new awareness of their own power. They obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity, jealousy, and approbation native to any adolescent girl, under the watchful eye of their stern and enigmatic saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Hamid Mohsin
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At a cafe table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter…Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.
The Reserve
Banks Russell
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Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness — and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules.Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake. .Jordan's reputation has preceded him; he is internationally known as much for his exploits and conquests as for his paintings themselves, and, here in the midst of the Great Depression, his leftist loyalties seem suspiciously undercut by his wealth and elite clientele. But for all his worldly swagger, Jordan is as staggered by Vanessa's beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. He falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father's unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.
The Residue Years
Jackson Mitchell S.
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Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America’s whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the ’90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that’s nothing less than extraordinary.The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart.Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.
The Restless Supermarket
Vladislavić Ivan
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"Vladislavic is amazing!" — Teju ColeIt is 1993, and Aubrey Tearle's world is shutting down. He has recently retired from a lifetime of proofreading telephone directories. His favorite neighborhood haunt in Johannesburg, the Café Europa, is about to close its doors; the familiar old South Africa is already gone. Standards, he grumbles, are in decline, so bad-tempered, conservative Tearle embarks on a grandiose plan to enlighten his fellow citizens. The results are disastrous, hilarious, and poignant.Ivan Vladislavic is the author of a number of prize-winning fiction and nonfiction books. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Resurrectionist (Quinsigamond[5])
O'Connell Jack
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The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. Part classic noir thriller, part fabulist fable, it is the story of Sweeney and his comatose son, Danny. Hoping for a miracle, Sweeney has brought Danny to the fortresslike Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have "resurrected" patients who were similarly lost in the void. but the real cure for his son's condition may lie in Limbo, a comic book world beloved by Danny before he slipped into a coma.O'Connell has crafted a spellbinding novel about stories and what they can do for and to those who create them and those who consume them. About the nature of consciousness and the power of the unknown. And, ultimately, about forgiveness and the depth of our need to extend it and receive it.
The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
Johnson Denis
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"Denis Johnson is an artist. He writes with a natural authority, and there is real music in his prose." — Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book ReviewIn the bleak of November, Lenny English drifts into the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown. Recovering from a recent suicide attempt, his soul suspended in its own off-season, he takes a job as a third-shift disk jockey, with a little private detective work on the side for his boss. As Lenny falls in love with a beautiful young local, a woman whose sexual orientation should preclude the affair, he soon begins his first assignment, a search for a missing painter whose personal history seems to mirror his own. In pursuit of the artist — and love, and redemption — Lenny will resort to great and desperate measures to revive himself, and his faith in the world.
The Retrospective
Yehoshua A. B.
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Winner, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.An aging Israeli film director has been invited to the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his work. When Yair Moses and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel room, a painting over their bed triggers a distant memory in Moses from one of his early films: a scene that caused a rift with his brilliant but difficult screenwriter — who, as it happens, was once Ruth’s lover. Upon their return to Israel, Moses decides to travel to the south to look for his elusive former partner and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for it that will have strange and lasting consequences.A searching and original novel by one of the world’s most esteemed writers, The Retrospective is a meditation on mortality and intimacy, on the limits of memory and the struggle of artistic creation.
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