Mr Vertigo
Title | Mr Vertigo PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Auster |
Publisher | Faber & Faber |
Pages | 279 |
Release | 2010-11-25 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0571264875 |
'I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water . . .' So begins Mr Vertigo, the story of Walt, an irrepressible orphan from the Mid-West. Under the tutelage of the mesmerising Master Yehudi, Walt is taken back to the mysterious house on the plains to prepare not only for the ability to fly, but also for the stardom that will accompany it. At the same time a delighted race through 1920s Americana and a richly allusive parable, Mr Vertigo is a compelling, magical novel - a work of true originality by a writer at the height of his powers. 'A virtuoso piece of storytelling by a master of the modern American fable.' The Independent
Timbuktu
Title | Timbuktu PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Auster |
Publisher | Henry Holt and Company |
Pages | 196 |
Release | 2010-04-01 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1429900059 |
Meet Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's remarkable new novel, Timbuktu. Mr. Bones is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled, and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure, heading for Baltimore, Maryland in search of Willy's high school teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who knew him in his previous incarnation as William Gurevitch, the son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs. Swanson still alive? And if she isn't, what will prevent Willy from vanishing into that other world known as Timbuktu? Mr. Bones is our witness. Although he walks on four legs and cannot speak, he can think, and out of his thoughts Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in recent American fiction. By turns comic, poignant, and tragic, Timbuktu is above all a love story. Written with a scintillating verbal energy, it takes us into the heart of a singularly pure and passionate character, an unforgettable dog who has much to teach us about our own humanity.
The Book of Illusions
Title | The Book of Illusions PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Auster |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | Absence and presumption of death |
ISBN | 0312990960 |
A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico-supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.
Vertigo
Title | Vertigo PDF eBook |
Author | W. G. Sebald |
Publisher | New Directions Publishing |
Pages | 168 |
Release | 2016-11-08 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0811221318 |
A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund Perfectly titled, Vertigo —W.G. Sebald's marvelous first novel — is a work that teeters on the edge: compelling, puzzling, and deeply unsettling. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys accross Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader, line by line, into a dizzying web of history, biography, legends, literature, and — most perilously — memories.
Digital Vertigo
Title | Digital Vertigo PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Keen |
Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2012-05-22 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1429940964 |
"Digital Vertigo provides an articulate, measured, contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist, I'm grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution." —Larry Downes, author of The Killer App In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen presents today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution and critiques of "social" companies like Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn, Keen argues that the social media transformation is weakening, disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.
Invisible
Title | Invisible PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Auster |
Publisher | Macmillan + ORM |
Pages | 178 |
Release | 2009-10-23 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1429982462 |
From the internationally bestselling author of The New York Trilogy and 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster "One of America's greatest novelists" dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story with Invisible. Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster's fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers."
Mr. Peanut
Title | Mr. Peanut PDF eBook |
Author | Adam Ross |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 353 |
Release | 2010-06-22 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0307593762 |
A New York Times Noteable Book Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart. David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games David designs for a living, these complex, interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And what, in the end, is the truth about love?