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An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further adventures.

One of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928. The unexpurgated edition did not appear in America until 1959, after one of the most spectacular legal battles in publishing history.With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralyzed as her husband Clifford is paralyzed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment.

***AWARDED THE 1984 PRIX GONCOURT***“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”\
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The young Marguerite DurasShe has pretty hair, copper hair that spools down her back in waves of alluring movement. People always comment on how beautiful her hair is which she interprets to mean that they don’t find her pretty. She cuts her hair off. She wears what is left in pigtails. She buys a man’s hat that is certainly eccentric for a young girl to wear in Saigon in 1929. She wants people to notice her eyes, her lips, certainly something other than her hair. She wants reassurance that her beauty is larger than one exquisite feature. She is fifteen and a half. Her father is dead. Her mother is poor. Her older brother is a layabout, spoiled by her mother. Her other brother is nice, but no match for the rest of the family. She is lost in a world between adulthood and childhood, a dream world, and a world of harsh realities. Her mother insists that she study mathematics, but she wants to be a writer. She has a friend at school. A lovely friend totally uninhibited and unaware of how beautiful she is. ”Hélène Logonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much….I am worn out with desire for Hélène Logonelle. I am worn out with desire.”He has a limousine with a chauffeur. He is rich, or let me be more precise, his father is rich. He is Chinese. He is infatuated with her. He trembles with fear born desire.She wants them both. ”I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to giver herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Logonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me. A pleasure unto death.”\
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Tony Leung Ka Fai and Jane March star in the 1992 French Film.He is twenty-seven, but it is as if she were older. He is slender, insubstantial, built like a boy. A man trapped in a young mind. Arrested development. ”He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money.” He is hindered instead of strengthened by his father. He is obsessed with her, with her nubile body, but knows his father will never let him keep her. ”She wasn’t sure that she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.”This book is based on the real life of Marguerite Donnadieu better known as Marguerite Duras. She was born in Saigon and did have a wealthy, much older, Chinese lover. At fifteen I think most of us believe we will love many people. We will have many exciting affairs of the heart. True love will be a field of flowers not a single stem already residing in the hand. At fifteen, even when we think we are in love, we can’t know whether it is real. Our basis of comparison is too slender, too new, too wrapped in hormonal need to really know what we feel is love. \
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I love this picture of Marguerite Duras. The languid, weighted eyelids are a point of fascination.She wrote this novel at the age of seventy. After fifty-five years I’m sure that Duras’s memories have been filtered through many lenses. The sepia tones of her time with her Chinese lover have deepened. The uncertainty is gone and she is left with clear, concise, brush strokes of a commemoration of lost love. This is a novel and from what I read there are deviations from her nonfiction accounts of her first affair, but this book reads of truth. The reader is left with a precise picture of a young woman who may have lost some of her innocence, but gains a self-confidence to break away from her meaningless life and swim for a new shore. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras’s adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover, this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina, and possesses the intimate feel of a documentary.Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is “so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it . . . lingers like a strong perfume” (Publishers Weekly). Hailed by the French critics as a return to “the Duras of the great books and the great days,” it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author’s life.

The Leopard is a story of a decadent and dying aristocracy threatened by the forces of revolution and democracy. Set against the political upheavals of Italy in the 1860s, it focuses on Don Fabrizio, a Sicilian prince of immense sensual appetites, wealth, and great personal magnetism. Around this powerful figure swirls a glittering array of characters: a Bourbon king, liberals and pseudo liberals, peasants and millionaires.

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they must win. This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able a judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about the kind of world we ourselves live in. David Coward's introduction explodes myths about Laclos's own life and puts the book in its literary and cultural context.

Madame Bovary (; French: [madam bɔvaʁi]), originally published as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (French: Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province [madam bɔvaʁi mœʁ(s) də pʁɔvɛ̃s]), is a novel by French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.When the novel was first serialized in Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history.

One of Zola's most famous realist novels, Therese Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Parisian society.Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man, and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.Zola's shocking tale dispassionately dissects the motivations of his characters--mere "human beasts", who kill in order to satisfy their lust--and stands as a key manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which the author was the founding father. Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work before the Rougon-Macquart series and introduces many of the themes that can be traced through the later novel cycle.

The New York Times Best Seller is now a major motion picture starring Lily James and Sam Riley, with Matt Smith, Charles Dance, and Lena Headey. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ﬁrst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting inﬂuence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book is recognized as a classic in children's literature, and is one of the best-selling books of all time with over 100 million copies sold.

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. At the center of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury. It presents an American society where books have been personified and outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The novel follows Guy Montag, a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings.

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel presents with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction - at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful - and completely unforgettable.

Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.For the Movie tie-in edition with the same ISBN go to this Alternate Cover Edition

At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

Tells the story of Benjamin Button, a man who starts aging backwards with consequences.

Four teenagers at a British private school secretly uncover and explore the depths of a sealed underground hole created decades ago as a possible bomb shelter.

Six complete strangers with widely varying personalities are involuntarily placed in an endless maze containing deadly traps.

1997 Canadian independent science-fiction horror film by Vincenzo Natali

A genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel.

1997 science fiction film directed by Andrew Niccol

An artificial man, who was incompletely constructed and has scissors for hands, leads a solitary life. Then one day, a suburban lady meets him and introduces him to her world.

1990 American fantasy romance film by Tim Burton

A newspaper photographer researches an 1873 double homicide and finds her own life paralleling that of a witness who survived the tragic ordeal.

Three friends discover their new flatmate dead but loaded with cash.

When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community, it's up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.

1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg

After a space merchant vessel receives an unknown transmission as a distress call, one of the crew is attacked by a mysterious life form and they soon realize that its life cycle has merely begun.

1979 British-American science-fiction horror film by Ridley Scott

A research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims.

The life of a divorced television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.

The relationships of two couples become complicated and deceitful when the man from one couple meets the woman of the other.

A troubled woman living in an isolated community finds herself pulled between the control of her oppressive family and the allure of a secretive outsider suspected of a series of brutal murders.

2017 British psychological thriller film directed by Michael Pearce

When their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories.

Life and facts of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who at 16 met 21 year old poet Percy Shelley, resulting in the writing of Frankenstein.

In 19th-century rural England, a young bride who has been sold into marriage discovers an unstoppable desire within herself as she enters into an affair with a worker on her estate.

A fictitious love story loosely inspired by the lives of Danish artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. Lili and Gerda's marriage and work evolve as they navigate Lili's groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.

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

Léon: The Professional (French: Léon), titled Leon in the United Kingdom (and originally titled The Professional in the United States), is a 1994 English-language French action-thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson. It stars Jean Reno and Gary Oldman, and features the film debut of Natalie Portman. The plot centers on Léon (Reno), a professional hitman who reluctantly takes in twelve-year-old Mathilda Lando (Portman) after her family is murdered by corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration agent Norman Stansfield (Oldman). Léon and Mathilda form an unusual relationship, as she becomes his protégée and learns the hitman's trade.Léon is an Italian hitman (or "cleaner", as he refers to himself) in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York City working for a mafioso named "Old Tony". One day, Léon meets Mathilda Lando, a lonely twelve-year-old who lives with her dysfunctional family in an apartment down the hall from Léon, and has stopped attending class at her school for troubled girls. Mathilda's abusive father attracts the ire of corrupt DEA agents, who have been paying him to stash cocaine in his apartment. After they discover that he has been stealing the cocaine, DEA agents storm the building, led by their boss, the sharply dressed drug-addict Norman Stansfield. During the raid, Stansfield murders Mathilda's family while she is out shopping for groceries. When she returns, Mathilda realizes what has happened just in time to continue down the hall to Léon's apartment; he hesitantly gives her shelter.

A malfunction in a sleeping pod on a spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet wakes one passenger 90 years early.

In a seafaring world, a young pirate captain sets out with his crew to attain the title of Pirate King and to discover the mythical treasure One Piece.

In an amoral science-based company, a manager tries to keep control of his scientists while being pressured by his shrewd boss.

The comedic misadventures of Roy, Moss and their grifting supervisor Jen, a rag-tag team of IT support workers at a large corporation headed by a hotheaded yuppie.

A high school mathlete starts hanging out with a group of burnouts while her younger brother navigates his freshman year.

American teen comedy-drama television series

A comedy revolving around a group of teenage friends, their mishaps, and their coming of age, set in 1970s Wisconsin.

Dramatization of Louisa May Alcott's novel about the lives of the four March sisters during the American Civil War as they learn to navigate love, loss, and the trials of growing up.

Set against a backdrop of war, religious strife and power struggles which tears lives and families apart.

2010 television miniseries directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan

The social and class divisions in early 20th century England through the intersection of three families - the wealthy Wilcoxes, the gentle and idealistic Schlegels and the lower-middle class Basts.

Emma Woodhouse seems to be perfectly content, to have a loving father for whom she cares, friends, and a home. But Emma has a terrible habit: matchmaking. She cannot resist finding suitors for her friends, most of all Harriet Smith. 

The story of Tess Durbeyfield, a low-born country girl whose family find they have noble connections.

As the Russian conflict with Napoleon reaches its peak, five aristocratic families face the possibility of their lives being changed forever.

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