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Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now . . . Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

Isabel Allende (Spanish: [isaˈβel aˈʝende] (listen); born August 2, 1942) is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre of "magical realism", is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) and City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias, 2002), which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.Allende's novels are often based upon her personal experience and historical events and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many U.S. colleges to teach literature. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted United States citizenship in 1993, having lived in California since 1989, first with her U.S husband (from whom she is now separated).

This book won the 1997 Whitbread biography award, so my hopes were high. I knew little about the towering French genius of the Victorian era, the author of Hunchback and Les Miz, and I was curious about the sources of his genius. Well, it's an annoying book. I did learn a good deal about Victor Hugo's sexual proclivities (he was insatiable and omnivorous), the way he mistreated the several long-term women in his life, and his political vacillations (in a time when taking a stand was dangerous in France). Alas, the genius comes across as a thoroughly nasty, self-absorbed, selfish man -- who gave alms to the poor, but made sure everyone knew it. Who switched his political allegiances so many times that no one took him seriously after middle age, except the proletariat who went to their deaths several times because he egged them on to the barricades. And who abandoned his family several times at key moments, leading to (but not directly causing) the death of one of his daughters and the insanity of another. Not to mention his unspeakable, crazy brother. Another semi-victim of the Hugo juggernaut. But that's not why the book is annoying. That's why Victor Hugo turns out to be annoying. No, the book is annoying because it's badly written. It has all the vices of French prose -- playfulness, allusive- and elusiveness -- without any of the virtues -- clarity of thought, structure, or phrase. How it won a prize is a puzzle. I know a good deal more about Victor Hugo than I did before, but I had to wade through 500+ pages of sloppy prose to learn it.

Winner of the 2007 BookBrowse Award for Most Popular Book.An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her. Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals from its war wounds, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julian Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.--back cover

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. (jacket flap)

When Jack Kerouac’s On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever.Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’.With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs. Kerouac’s prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape – ‘the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy’. This Folio Society edition is illustrated with evocative photographs of Kerouac and the landscapes of 1950s America. Now acknowledged as a modern classic, On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Lolita Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.

TheEpic of Gilgamesh() is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia that is often regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh"), king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur (c.2100 BC). These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version dates to the 18th century BC and is titled after itsincipit,Shūtur eli sharrī("Surpassing All Other Kings"). Only a few tablets of it have survived. The later "standard" version compiled by Sîn-lēqi-unninni dates from the 13th to the 10th centuries BC and bears theincipitSha naqba īmuru("He who Saw the Abyss", in modern terms: "He who Sees the Unknown"). Approximately two thirds of this longer, twelve-tablet version have been recovered. Some of the best copies were discovered in the library ruins of the 7th-century BC Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

\
  My vagina is a shell, a round pink tender shell, opening and closing, closing and opening. My vagina is a flower, an eccentric tulip, the center acute and deep, the scent delicate, the petals gentle but sturdy.\
No it isn't. It isn't a flower, it isn't a tulip, it isn't a shell or a piece of coral or an exotic orchid. It's a tract of epithelial tissue, just like everyone else's.Don't get me wrong, vaginas are lovely – I'm a massive fan – but these monologues represent the sort of facile, pseudo-feminist waffle that is actually anti-feminist. First of all, it's questionable that reducing women to their vaginas can really be helpful in the first place; but since that's the premise of the whole thing, I won't go on about it. More to the point though, this is simply the other side of the coin from standard, run-of-the-mill patriarchy: the idea that women are ‘other’ – wild, mysterious, lunar creatures, with baffling anatomies and magical hidden depths that can be reawakened if they would only discover themselves and get comfortable with their own menstrual blood. It's just utter bullshit from start to finish. Or it's not what I believe, anyway: I think women are just normal people, same as men are. Why can't someone write a play about that revolutionary idea.I do feel bad slagging this off, because the stories in here are clearly meaningful for the people that experienced them, and maybe if you have had a certain kind of upbringing then this might be useful or liberating. I don't want to devalue the positive experiences some people have obviously found here. Particularly when I don't have a vagina myself. But Christ, it's all so po-faced and earnest and humourless. My wife has never seen it staged but she started the book and threw it across the room on page 46. The passage that finally finished her:My vagina amazed me. I couldn't speak when it came my turn in the workshop. I was speechless. I had awakened to what the woman who ran the workshop called “vaginal wonder.” I just wanted to lie there on my mat, my legs spread, examining my vagina forever.It was better than the Grand Canyon, ancient and full of grace. It had the innocence and freshness of a proper English garden. It was funny, very funny. It made me laugh. It could hide and seek, open and close. It was a mouth. It was the morning.(‘Why do Americans have to turn every part of my body into some psycho-sexual epiphany?’ — Hannah.) OK, this book isn't aimed at me. And it's probably not cool to borrow Hannah's reactions to try and make my own review seem more valid. But with all of that said and understood, my own humble opinion for what little it's worth is that this goes for lazy, feel-good ‘community’ spirit at the expense of genuine insight, and I suspect that ultimately it's pointing gender relations in the wrong direction. Maybe it's a generational thing.

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, but his family moved to the UK in 1960 when he was five.
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations and won the award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro's 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of the year, and was included in the magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". Ishiguro was knighted in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List.

When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family's Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father's hidden desires. Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.

Based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, a Daytona Beach prostitute who became a serial killer.

Col. Katherine Powell, a military officer in command of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya, sees her mission escalate when a girl enters the kill zone triggering an international dispute over the implications of modern warfa

2015 British thriller film directed by Gavin Hood

A naive teenager is sent to rehab camp when her straitlaced parents and friends suspect her of being a lesbian.

The story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program.

A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents in suburban Detroit in the mid 1970s.

Saw 3D is a 2010 American 3D horror film directed by Kevin Greutert and written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. It is the sequel to 2009's Saw VI and seventh installment in the Saw film series. The film stars Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Sean Patrick Flanery, and Cary Elwes.

A young boy and his little sister struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.

1988 Japanese animated film directed by Isao Takahata

Animation, testimony, and archival footage combine to relate the events of August 1, 1966 when a gunman opened fire from the University of Texas clock tower, killing 16 people.

A team of brave individuals risk their lives to protect the last mountain gorillas.

2014 British documentary film directed by Orlando von Einsiedel

An exploration of various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's horror film, The Shining (1980).

A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world.

2016 American science fiction drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve

A drama based on the experiences of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country.

2015 war drama movie directed by Cary Fukunaga

After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.

The adventures of writer Newt Scamander in New York's secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.

A look at the lives and relationships among girls at an elite boarding school.

While waiting for her divorce papers, a repressed professor of literature is unexpectedly seduced by a carefree, spirited young lesbian.

A woman who studies butterflies and moths tests the limits of her relationship with her lesbian lover.

An unexpected affair quickly escalates into a heart-stopping reality for two women whose passionate connection changes their lives forever.

In a world where women have become asexual and are no longer giving birth to males, a quiet, unassuming housekeeper named Andrew Myers finds himself at the center of a battle to keep men from going extinct.

A story about fame, addiction and a custody battle over a man's leg.

Russian-born American singer-songwriter and pianist

American singer, songwriter, musician and activist

Peter, Paul and Mary was an American folk group formed in New York City in 1961 during the American folk music revival phenomenon. The trio consisted of tenor Peter Yarrow, baritone Paul Stookey, and contralto Mary Travers. The group's repertoire included songs written by Yarrow and Stookey, early songs by Bob Dylan, and covers of other folk musicians. They were enormously successful in the early- and mid-1960s, with their debut album topping the charts for weeks, and helped popularize the folk music revival. After the death of Travers in 2009, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform as a duo under their individual names.

A young woman, destined to slay vampires, demons and other infernal creatures, deals with her life fighting evil, with the help of her friends.

1997 American supernatural drama TV series

After her best friend is murdered, and her father is removed as county Sheriff, Veronica Mars dedicates her life to cracking the toughest mysteries in the affluent town of Neptune.

Generation War (German: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, translated as "Our Mothers, our Fathers") is a German World War II TV miniseries in three parts. It was commissioned by public broadcasting organization ZDF, produced by the UFA subsidiary TeamWorx, and first aired in Germany and Austria in March 2013. The series tells the story of five German friends, aged around 20, on their different paths through Nazi Germany and World War II: as Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front, a war nurse, an aspiring singer, and a Jewish tailor. The narrative spans four years, starting in 1941 Berlin, when the friends meet up for a last time before embarking on their journeys, enthusiastically vowing to meet up again the following Christmas. The story's conclusion is set shortly after the end of the war in 1945.

Follows the lives and loves of a small, close-knit group of gay women living in Los Angeles as well as the friends and family members that either support or loathe them.

Obsessed with the disappearance of a 12-year-old pregnant girl near a freezing lake in New Zealand, a brave detective will find herself up against small-town secrets and a side of herself that was meticulously kept at bay.

Ten of the country's most creative and skilled tattoo artists are judged by icons of the tattoo world. They compete for a hundred thousand dollars and the title of "INK MASTER".

TV series contest revolving around tattooing

Set in 1996 in Lincolnshire, the show tells the tragic and humorous story of a very troubled young girl, Rae, who spent four months in a psychiatric hospital for attempted suicide. After finally leaving the hospital, Rae reconnects w

Tierra de Lobos is a western set in 19th century Spain. Translated as Land of Wolves, it's actually named after Anotonio Lobo, the wealthy landowner who controls and owns most of the land. His whole world turns upside down when two o

In France during World War II, Rene Artois runs a small café where Resistance fighters, Gestapo men, German Army officers and escaped Allied POWs interact daily, ignorant of one another's true identity or presence, exasperating Rene.

The story of a group of British teens who are trying to grow up and find love and happiness despite questionable parenting and teachers who more want to be friends (and lovers) rather than authority figures.

An L.A. family with serious boundary issues have their past and future unravel when a dramatic admission causes everyone's secrets to spill out.

Joys and sorrows in a department of a female prison.

In 1869 Janestown on the Alberta-Montana border, three women band together for survival after the men in their town are murdered.

After numerous attempts of trying to be popular two best friends decide to come out as lesbians, which launches them to instant celebrity status. Seduced by their newfound fame, Karma and Amy decide to keep up their romantic ruse.

A young, devout Catholic woman discovers that she was accidentally artificially inseminated.

In a dystopian America dominated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, a young woman discovers a mysterious film that may hold the key to toppling the totalitarian regimes.

American dystopian alternate history television series

A musical comedy adventure featuring a knight on a quest for love who helps a childish king to see the error of his ways.

American fairy tale-themed musical comedy television series

In a parallel present where the latest must-have gadget for any busy family is a 'Synth' - a highly-developed robotic servant that's so similar to a real human is transforming the way we live.

2015 British-American science fiction television series

Five hundred years in the future, a renegade crew aboard a small spacecraft tries to survive as they travel the unknown parts of the galaxy and evade warring factions as well as authority agents out to get them.

Martin Rauch is recruited by the HVA to infiltrate the West Germany army. As a rookie spy, his decisions constantly put his cover at risk and force his agency to take extreme measures.

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