Vastralaya

Evan Shively (Perseus271)

Edgar Colt

Vitor Miguel

Prisma Soulstorm

Serena

Jordan

Bruna Guedes

Husain Kothari

FRNK

Uendi Prifti

Abdul Hasib

An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own—a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come to work on a ranch in the fertile Salinas Valley of California, their hopes, like "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men," begin to go awry.Of Mice and Men also represents an experiment in form, as Steinbeck described his work, "a kind of playable novel, written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands." A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films. Steinbeck's tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels.--front flap

This is an alternate cover ed. for ISBN 0679732241.The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel—a scathing satire on a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism.“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.  When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

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.

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.

Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0553213695 / 9780553213690"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes." With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."

I don’t know what to do with these stars anymore. I give stars to books and then I think, ‘god, you give five stars to everything, people will think you are terribly undiscriminating’ – so then I give four stars or even three stars to some books. Then I look back and it turns out that that I’ve given four stars to Of Human Bondage and honestly, how could I possibly have thought it was a good idea to give that book less than five stars? It is the absurdity of human conventions that has us doing such things.Now, that is what is called a segue, from the Italian ‘seguire’ – to follow. For the last thirty years I have studiously avoided reading this book. I have done that because for the last thirty years I have known exactly what this book is about and there just didn’t seem any point in reading it. In high school friends (one of them even became my ex-wife) told me it was a great book about a man condemned to die because he was an outsider. Later I was told that this book was a story about something much like the Azaria Chamberlain case. A case where someone does not react in a way that is considered to be ‘socially appropriate’ and is therefore condemned.But after 30 years of avoiding reading this book I have finally relented and read it. At first I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it. It didn’t really get off to the raciest of starts and the character's voice – it is told in first person – was a bit dull. He is a man who lives entirely in the present, how terribly Buddhist of him – although, really there doesn’t seem to be all that much to him.My opinion of the book began to change at his mother’s funeral. I particularly liked the man who kept falling behind in the march to the cemetery and would take short cuts. Okay, so it is black humour, but Camus was more or less French – so black humour is more or less obligatory.I really hadn’t expected this book to be nearly so funny as it turned out. I’d always been told it was a ponderous philosophical text – and so, to be honest, I was expecting to be bored out of my skull. I wasn’t in the least bit bored.A constant theme in my life at present is that I read ‘classics’ expecting them to be about something and they end up being about something completely different. And given I’ve called this a ‘constant’ theme then you might think I would be less than surprised when a read a new ‘classic’ and it turns out to be completely different to my expectations. I’m a little more upset about this one than some of the others, as I’ve been told about this one before, repeatedly, and by people I’d have taken as ‘reputable sources’ – although, frankly, how well one should trust one’s ex-wife in such matters is moot.I had gotten the distinct impression from all of my previous discussions about this book that the guy ends up dead. In fact, this is not the case – he ends up at the point in his life where he has no idea if he will be freed or not. The Priest who comes to him at the end is actually quite certain that he will be freed. Let’s face it, he is only guilty of having murdered an Arab, and as we have daily evidence, Westerners can murder Arabs with complete impunity. The main point of the book to me is when he realises he is no longer ‘free’. He needs this explained to him – because life up until then had been about ‘getting used to things’ and one can 'get used to just about anything'. But the prison guard helpfully informs him that he is being ‘punished’ and the manifestation of that punishment is the removal of his ‘freedom’. Interestingly, he didn’t notice the difference between his past ‘free’ life and his current ‘unfree’ one. The most interesting part of the book to me was the very end, the conversation with the priest. The religious often make the mistake of thinking that Atheists are one thing – I’ve no idea how they ever came to make this mistake, but make it they do. Given that there are thousands upon thousands of different shades of Christians – from Jesuit Catholics to Anti-Disney Episcopalians – it should be fairly obvious that something like Atheism (without any ‘organised’ church or even system of beliefs) could not be in anyway ‘homogeneous’.I am definitely not the same kind of Atheist as Camus. To Camus there is no truth, the world is essentially absurd and all that exists is the relative truth an individual places on events and ideas. This makes the conversation with the priest fascinatingly interesting. To the priest the prisoner who is facing death is – by necessity – someone who is interested in God. You can play around with ideas like the non-existence of God when it doesn’t seem to matter (life is long and blasphemy can seem fun) – but surely when confronted with the stark truth of the human condition any man would turn away from their disbelief and see the shining light.Not this little black duck. Now, if I was in that cell I would have argued with the priest too – but I would not have argued in the same way that Meursault argues. No, I do not believe in God, but I do believe in truth, and so Camus’ arguments are barred to me.Meursault essentially says, “Look, I’m bored, I’m totally uninterested in the rubbish you are talking – now go away”. Now, this is a reasonable response. What is very interesting is that the priest cannot accept this as an answer. The world is not allowed to have such a person in it – if such a person really did exist then it would be a fundamental challenge to the core beliefs of the priest. So, he has to assume Meursault is either lying to him or is trying to taunt him. But it is much worse – he is absolutely sincere, he is not interested in this ‘truth’.I don’t know that the world is completely meaningless, it is conventional rather than meaningless. That those conventions are arbitrary (decided by the culture we grew up in) doesn’t make them meaningless, it makes them conventional. I don’t think I would like to live in a world where people go up and kill Arabs pretty much at random and with impunity, but then again, we have already established this is precisely the world I do live in. My point is that it would be better if we did adhere to some sort of moral principles and that these should be better principles than ‘he should be killed because he didn’t cry at his mum’s funeral’. Camus is seeking to say that all of our ‘moral principles’ in the end come to be as meaningless as that – we judge on the basis of what we see from the framework of our own limited experience. And look, yes, there is much to this – but this ends up being too easy.The thing I like most about Existentialism, though it isn’t really as evident in this book as it is in the actual philosophy – although this is something that Meursault is supposed to have grown to understand (sorry, just one more sub-clause) even though this wasn’t something I noticed at all while reading the book, was the notion of responsibility. I didn’t think in the end Meursault was all that much more ‘responsible’ for his actions than he had been at the start. But I do think that ‘responsibility’ is a key concept in morality and one that seems increasingly to be ignored.Better by far that we feel responsible for too much in our lives than too little – better by far that we take responsibility for the actions of our governments (say) than to call these governments ‘them’. I’m not advocating believing in The Secret - but that if one must err, better to err on the side of believing you have too much responsibility for how your life has turned out, rather than too little.So, what can I say? I enjoyed this much more than I expected – but I’m still glad I waited before reading it, I really don’t think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it at 15 as I did now.

Meet Bridget Jones—a 30-something Singleton who is certain she would have all the answers if she could:a. lose 7 poundsb. stop smokingc. develop Inner Poise"123 lbs. (how is it possible to put on 4 pounds in the middle of the night? Could flesh have somehow solidified becoming denser and heavier? Repulsive, horrifying notion), alcohol units 4 (excellent), cigarettes 21 (poor but will give up totally tomorrow), number of correct lottery numbers 2 (better, but nevertheless useless)..."Bridget Jones' Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud daily chronicle of Bridget's permanent, doomed quest for self-improvement — a year in which she resolves to: reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult, and learn to program the VCR.Over the course of the year, Bridget loses a total of 72 pounds but gains a total of 74. She remains, however, optimistic. Through it all, Bridget will have you helpless with laughter, and — like millions of readers the world round — you'll find yourself shouting, "Bridget Jones is me!"

Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

Composed in the last two years of Bolaño's life, 2666 has been greeted as his greatest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness,beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student caring for her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the desert sprawl of Santa Teresa--a fictional Juárez--on the US-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. Audacious, impassioned and profoundly inspired, 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork.

To become engaged within the first few pages of a book is always a good sign. However, at the back of my mind, history kept telling me that many other novels have started out in the stratosphere only to plummet to the bottom of the ocean. Milan Kundera's 'Immortality', starts great, gets better, and ended with a lump in my throat, and a soul that was struck by a chord. No actually, forget the single chord, this was more like an Orchestra going in full swing. Kundera has worked wonders here.Witnessing a playful, sexual, yet sweet physical gesture of a woman by the swimming pool, begins. Kundera weaves a story around this starting gesture. Slowly introducing other characters that are part of her life and compares her life in the 20th century with another one a century earlier. It is an interesting perspective on what immortality is. What do people remember you for? is it what you have achieved?, or maybe just solely based on the perception that others have of you? Are you remembered only by your loved ones, or are you revered or scorned by the entire world? These are questions that will definitely get you thinking, and thinking plays an integral part in Immortality, as the words on each and every page only go so far, as Kundera puts the emphasis on the reader to sit comfy, and give his or hers full attention. (Tried reading on the metro, forget it), this is a book that pays off reading in seclusion as much as possible. In a skillful way, new characters silently crawl out of the woodwork, leaving you hanging, only to be bought up randomly somewhere else in some other context. This does keep you engrossed, it does also become a pain, but a pain worth putting with.Empathy is slowly drawn into the picture, as characters are slowly woven in an intermittently way, that it strangely sexual and often quite perplexing. Kundera's characters acquire psychologies and histories, but they start out and continue to function chiefly as images, provocations: a man staring at a wall, or repeating a phrase; a woman arguing, putting on her glasses, shaking her head; a girl sitting in the middle of a major road amidst rushing traffic. These images are not illustrations of pre-formed thoughts, but they are not simply pieces of novelistic behaviour either. They are meetings between persons and notions, or more precisely, written, re-created, invented records of such meetings. He is clearly a most confident writer, I mean, Goethe &amp; Hemingway in conversation?, Genius!.There are some beautifully written passages of writing, likened to a philosophical voyage into Paradise, and there IS a wonderfully elegant and provocative story lurking under, indicating a second read may help untangle the knots of uncertainty, as Kundera teases the reader with provocations and paradoxes that require some deep pondering. This is a book without conclusion, there really isn't a beginning, middle or end. After the closing pages, I was left moved, awestruck, and slightly mentally exhausted.

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.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to try and come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed.The introduction for this edition of Nausea by Hayden Carruth gives background on Sartre's life and major works, a summary of the principal themes of Existentialist philosophy, and a critical analysis of the novel itself.

The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

In 1930s Italy, a carefree Jewish waiter named Guido starts a fairy tale life by courting and marrying a lovely woman from a nearby city. Guido and his wife have a son and live happily together until the occupation of Italy by German forces. In an attempt to hold his family together and help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido imagines that the Holocaust is a game and that the grand prize for winning is a tank.

On the day that Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, elderly Daisy Williams (nee Fuller) is on her deathbed in a New Orleans hospital. At her side is her adult daughter, Caroline. Daisy asks Caroline to read to her aloud the diary of Daisy's lifelong friend, Benjamin Button. Benjamin's diary recounts his entire extraordinary life, the primary unusual aspect of which was his aging backwards, being diagnosed with several aging diseases at birth and thus given little chance of survival, but who does survive and gets younger with time. Abandoned by his biological father, Thomas Button, after Benjamin's biological mother died in childbirth, Benjamin was raised by Queenie, a black woman and caregiver at a seniors home. Daisy's grandmother was a resident at that home, which is where she first met Benjamin. Although separated through the years, Daisy and Benjamin remain in contact throughout their lives, reconnecting in their forties when in age they finally match up. Some of the revelations in Benjamin's diary are difficult for Caroline to read, especially as it relates to the time past this reconnection between Benjamin and Daisy, when Daisy gets older and Benjamin grows younger into his childhood years.

McMurphy has a criminal past and has once again gotten himself into trouble and is sentenced by the court. To escape labor duties in prison, McMurphy pleads insanity and is sent to a ward for the mentally unstable. Once here, McMurphy both endures and stands witness to the abuse and degradation of the oppressive Nurse Ratched, who gains superiority and power through the flaws of the other inmates. McMurphy and the other inmates band together to make a rebellious stance against the atrocious Nurse.

The film follows three young men and their time spent in the French suburban "ghetto," over a span of twenty-four hours. Vinz, a Jew, Saïd, an Arab, and Hubert, a black boxer, have grown up in these French suburbs where high levels of diversity coupled with the racist and oppressive police force have raised tensions to a critical breaking point. During the riots that took place a night before, a police officer lost his handgun in the ensuing madness, only to leave it for Vinz to find. Now, with a newfound means to gain the respect he deserves, Vinz vows to kill a cop if his friend Abdel dies in the hospital, due the beating he received while in police custody.

After his death sometime in his 43rd year, suburbanite Lester Burnham tells of the last few weeks of his life, during which he had no idea of his imminent passing. He is a husband to real estate agent Carolyn Burnham and father to high school student Jane Burnham. Although Lester and Carolyn once loved each other, they now merely tolerate each other. Typical wallflower Jane also hates both her parents; the three suffer individually in silence in their home life. Jane tries to steer clear of both her parents. Carolyn, relatively new to the real estate business, wants to create the persona of success to further her career, aspiring to the professional life of Buddy Kane, the king of the real estate business in their neighborhood. Lester merely walks mindlessly through life, including at his job in advertising. His company is downsizing, and he, like all the other employees, has to justify his position to the newly hired efficiency expert to keep his job. Things change for Lester when he falls in love at first sight with Jane's more experienced classmate, Angela Hayes. Both Janie and Angela can see Lester's sexual infatuation with Angela, who courts such attention from any man as a sign that she is model material, she having once appeared in Seventeen and is a career to which she aspires. Lester's infatuation with Angela gives him a reenergized view on life, where he openly doesn't care anymore what anyone thinks about what he does, anyone except Angela. This infatuation coincides with the Fittses moving in next door: homophobic disciplinarian US Marine Colonel Frank Fitts who rules the house with a military fist (that fist being both figurative and literal), his semi-comatose wife Barbara Fitts, and their bright and quietly subversive 18-year-old son Ricky Fitts, who openly abides by his father's rules while behind the scenes lives by his own quite different perspective. Much like Lester's infatuation, Ricky immediately becomes infatuated with Jane; he considers girls like Angela as ordinary. The entry of Angela and the Fittses into the Burnhams' lives ultimately leads to each of the players confronting what is truly in his or her heart.

Following the death of his employer and mentor, Bumpy Johnson, Frank Lucas establishes himself as the number one importer of heroin in the Harlem district of Manhattan. He does so by buying heroin directly from the source in South East Asia and he comes up with a unique way of importing the drugs into the United States. As a result, his product is superior to what is currently available on the street and his prices are lower. His alliance with the New York Mafia ensures his position. It is also the story of a dedicated and honest policeman, Richie Roberts, who heads up a joint narcotics task force with the Federal government. Based on a true story.

Following a truck hijack in New York, five criminals are arrested and brought together for questioning. As none of them are guilty, they plan a revenge operation against the police. The operation goes well, but then the influence of a legendary mastermind criminal called Keyser Söze is felt. It becomes clear that each one of them has wronged Söze at some point and must pay back now. The payback job leaves 27 men dead in a boat explosion, but the real question arises now: Who actually is Keyser Söze?

In this comedy, Lars Lindstrom is an awkwardly shy young man in a small northern town who finally brings home the girl of his dreams to his brother and sister-in-law's home. The only problem is that she's not real - she's a sex doll Lars ordered off the Internet. But sex is not what Lars has in mind, but rather a deep, meaningful relationship. His sister-in-law is worried for him, his brother thinks he's nuts, but eventually the entire town goes along with his delusion in support of this sweet natured boy that they've always loved.

Zack and Miri are two lifelong platonic friends who make an adult film to pay the rent of their apartment. With their friend Delaney, the couple set out for auditionees for their porn film, but in the process of filming, they realize they feel more for each other than they had before.

In the dystopian world of 2027 London, humans have been incapable of reproducing for 18 year for an unknown reason, meaning the imminent extinction of the species. Britain is the one remaining civilized society on the planet, which has resulted in people wanting to migrate there, so it has become a police state to handle the immigrants, who are placed into refugee camps. Lowly government bureaucrat Theo Faron, once an activist, is approached by the Fishes, deemed a terrorist group, led by his ex-wife Julian Taylor, whom he hasn't seen in almost 20 years, since their marriage disintegrated after their infant son Dylan's death during the 2008 flu pandemic. Although the Fishes did use terrorist means in their on-going revolution against the state in the fight for immigrant rights, Julian vows that they now garner support solely by speaking to the people, and she wants Theo to use his connections to get transit papers for a young immigrant woman named Kee who needs to get to the coast. Although initially reluctant to do it because of the difficulty, Theo is able to grant Julian this favor, however with the change that he now needs to accompany Kee on her journey. As Theo and Kee progress on that journey, Theo learns more and more about what's going on, including the reason that Kee needs to get to the coast, the fact that no one in the group knows if their end destination even exists, and that his and Kee's lives are in greater danger than he believed when they started the journey. But Theo's sole mission becomes to help Kee at any cost for the survival of the species.

Follow a week in the life of a young folk singer as he navigates the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Guitar in tow, huddled against the unforgiving New York winter, he is struggling to make it as a musician against seemingly insurmountable obstacles -- some of them of his own making.

Precocious Oliver struggles with being popular in school but when a dark-haired beauty takes interest in him, he's determined to become the best boyfriend in the world. Meanwhile, his parents' already rocky relationship is threatened when his mother's ex-boyfriend moves in next door. Oliver makes some unorthodox plans to ensure that his parents stay together and that Jordana still likes him.

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a widower who holds onto his prejudices despite the changes in his Michigan neighborhood and the world around him. Kowalski is a grumpy, tough-minded, unhappy old man who can't get along with either his kids or his neighbors. He is a Korean War veteran whose prize possession is a 1972 Gran Torino he keeps in mint condition. When his neighbor Thao Lor (Bee Vang), a young Hmong teenager under pressure from his gang member cousin, tries to steal his Gran Torino, Kowalski sets out to reform the youth. Drawn against his will into the life of Thao's family, Kowalski is soon taking steps to protect them from the gangs that infest their neighborhood.

THE READER opens in post-war Germany when teenager Michael Berg becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate secret affair. Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from "The Odyssey," "Huck Finn," and "The Lady with the Little Dog." Despite their intense bond, Hanna mysteriously disappears one day and Michael is left confused and heartbroken. Eight years later, while Michael is a law student observing the Nazi war crime trials, he is stunned to find Hanna back in his life--this time as a defendant in the courtroom. As Hanna's past is revealed, Michael uncovers a deep secret that will impact both of their lives. THE READER is a story about truth and reconciliation, about how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another.

Despondent over his breakup with Desiree, Zia slashes his wrists and goes to an afterlife peopled by suicides, a high-desert landscape dotted by old tires, burned-out cars, and abandoned sofas. He gets a job in a pizza joint. By chance, Zia learns that Desiree offed herself a few months after he did, and she's looking for him. He sets off with Eugene (an electrocuted Russian rocker) to find her, and they pick up a hitchhiker, Mikal, who's looking for the People in Charge, believing she's there by mistake. They're soon at the camp of Kneller, where casual miracles proliferate. They hear rumors of a miraculous king. Can Zia find Desiree? Then what? Where there's death there's hope.

From the heights of notoriety to the depths of depravity, John Forbes Nash, Jr. experienced it all. A mathematical genius, he made an astonishing discovery early in his career and stood on the brink of international acclaim. But the handsome and arrogant Nash soon found himself on a painful and harrowing journey of self-discovery. After many years of struggle, he eventually triumphed over his tragedy, and finally - late in life - received the Nobel Prize.

A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. In 1974, the sisters were seventeen year old Therese, sixteen year old Mary, fifteen year old Bonnie, fourteen year old Lux, and thirteen year old Cecilia. Their fascination still remains as they try to piece together the entire story. The sisters were mysteries if only because of having a strict and overprotective upbringing by their father, who taught math at the girls' private co-ed school, and overly devout Catholic mother, who largely dictated the household rules. The story focuses primarily on two incidents and the resulting situations on the girls' lives. The first was an action by Cecilia to deal with her emotions over her life. And the second was the relationship between Lux - the sister who pushed the boundaries of the household rules most overtly in doing what most teenagers want to do - and Trip Fontaine, he who could have any girl he wanted but wanting solely Lux.

1999 American film directed by Sofia Coppola

Made of Honor revolves around Tom and Hannah, who have been platonic friends for 10 years. He's a serial dater, while she wants marriage but hasn't found Mr. Right. Just as Tom is starting to think that he is relationship material after all, Hannah gets engaged. When she asks Tom to be her "maid" of honor, he reluctantly agrees just so he can attempt to stop the wedding and woo her.

American singer, guitarist and songwriter

English musician and singer for Radiohead

The body of a young girl (Laura Palmer) is washed up on a beach near the small Washington state town of Twin Peaks. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is called in to investigate her strange demise only to uncover a web of mystery that ultimately leads him deep into the heart of the surrounding woodland and his very own soul.

American drama television series from 1990–1991

A former lawyer attends a community college when it is discovered he faked his Bachelor's degree. In an attempt to get with a student in his Spanish class, he forms a Spanish study group. To his surprise, more people attend the study group and the group of misfits form an unlikely community.

American comedy television series created by Dan Harmon

This science-fiction Western series from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy was inspired by Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973) and is set at a Wild West theme park created by Dr. Robert Ford (Sir Anthony Hopkins) with human-like androids, where guests are encouraged to indulge their fantasies and desires.

US science fiction thriller television series from 2016

OZ chronicles McManus' (Terry Kinney) efforts to control the inmates of Em(erald) City as well as the drug trade and the violence. There have been many groups of inmates during the run of the show and not everybody makes it out alive. There are the gangstas (Adebisi, Wangler, Redding, Poet, Keene, Supreme Allah), Muslims (Said, Arif, Hamid Khan), Italians (Pancamo, Nappa, Schiebetta), bikers (Hoyt), Aryans (Schillinger, Robson, Mark Mack), Christians (Cloutier, Cudney), Latinos (Alvarez, Morales, Guerra, Hernandez), gays (Hanlon, Cramer), and a pile of others (the O'Riley brothers, Keller, Stanislovsky, etc.). And a great "everyman" character called Beecher offers a good look at a normal man who made one tragic mistake. Besides the regular inmates, there are guest stars such as Method Man, Luke Perry, Master P, Treach, etc. and a bunch of prison staff doctors (Dr. Nathan), a nun/psychologist (Sister Peter Marie), a bunch of guards--some honest, some crooked--and, of course, the warden, Leo Glynn. The whole thing is narrated and held together by inmate Augustus Hill, who provides the show with context and some sense of theme, and ties everything together nicely.

Set in a world only minutes from our own, "Black Mirror", a UK and USA non-hosted anthology series; unveils how modern technologies can backfire and be used against their makers, every episode set in a slightly different reality with different characters combating different types of technologies. The series ran from 2011 until 2019.

Four friends establish a contract stipulating they have to leave their respective girlfriends at the same time. If one of them violates the pact, he has to pay a thousand dollars to the three others.

Broad City follows two women throughout their daily lives in New York City. This is the original web-series the hit Comedy Central TV-series is based off.

The assorted humiliations, disasters and rare triumphs of four very different twenty-something girls: Hannah, an aspiring writer; Marnie, an art gallery assistant and cousins Jessa and Shoshanna.

The past, present, and future lives of surviving Oceanic Flight 815 passengers are dramatically intertwined as a fight for survival ensues in a quest for answers after crashlanding on a mysterious island. Each discovery prompts yet more secrets, as the hastily-formed colony search for a way off the island, or is this their home?

An innocent man is framed for the homicide of the Vice President's brother and scheduled to be executed at a super-max penitentiary, thus it's up to his younger brother to save him with his genius scheme: install himself in the same prison by holding up a bank and, as the final month ticks away, launch the escape plan step-by-step to break the both of them out, with his full-body tattoo acting as his guide; a tattoo which hides the layout of the prison facility and necessary clues vital to the escape.

Nathaniel Fisher, his wife Ruth, and their children David and Claire run a small funeral business that offers the best care to be found anywhere close by. Prodigal son Nate Jr. arrives home for Christmas just as his father is killed by a bus, and has to stick around when he and David are willed the funeral service together. How does a family who helps others deal with grief deal with its own?

The professional and personal lives of those who work in advertising on Madison Avenue - self-coined "mad men" - in the 1960s are presented. The stories focus on those at one of the avenue's smaller firms, Sterling Cooper, and its various incarnations over the decade. At the heart of these stories is Donald Draper, the creative genius of the company. That professional creative brilliance belies the fact of a troubled childhood, one that he would rather forget and not let anyone know about except for a select few, but one that shaped who he is as an adult and as an ad man in the need not only to sell products but sell himself to the outside world. His outward confidence also masks many insecurities as evidenced through his many vices, such as excessive smoking, drinking and womanizing - the latter despite being a family man - and how he deals with the aftermath of some of the negative aspects of his life.

It's the 1980s and at McKinley High, there's two different groups of teenagers, the Freaks with cool and charismatic Daniel Desario and tomboy Lindsay Weir and the Geeks with Lindsay's shy younger brother Sam, gentle Bill Haverchuck, and self-proclaimed ladies' man Neal Schweiber. The show chronicles the normal teen/adolescence problems any teenager goes through including acceptance, drugs, drinking, and bullying.

American teen comedy-drama television series

Meet the wildly dysfunctional Bluth family. This family was once at the height of real estate development in Orange County, California. But when the family business - the Bluth Company - goes bust, they're suddenly found penniless with their assets frozen. They move into their last remaining asset - the model home left over from their latest housing tract. Their luxury vehicles are replaced with a reminder of the family's former wealth: 'the stair car that accompanied their private jet'. The patriarch of the family is George Bluth - he's now in prison, and loving every minute of it. His wife Lucille and daughter Lindsay are spoiled socialites who can't handle getting kicked out of family restaurants. His son Buster is in his mid 30's and lives at home. His son George Oscar Bluth is a magician who started a group to get magicians to be taken seriously, and gets kicked out when his own tricks are revealed. Lindsay is married to a man named Tobias Funke, once a psychiatrist, who decides to become an actor. The only sane member of the family: Michael Bluth, along with his son George Michael, want nothing to do with the family business. But one bizarre circumstance after another keeps Michael and George Michael from leaving their eccentric family.

In the mythical continent of Westeros, several powerful families fight for control of the Seven Kingdoms. As conflict erupts in the kingdoms of men, an ancient enemy rises once again to threaten them all. Meanwhile, the last heirs of a recently usurped dynasty plot to take back their homeland from across the Narrow Sea.

Set in the Prohibition era of the 1920s Boardwalk Empire is the story of Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, the treasurer of Atlantic County, Atlantic City, New Jersey. Due to his relationships with mobsters as well as political contacts, the Federal Government start to take an interest in him. His lavish lifestyle seems at odds with his position, and as well as his connections, there is prolific bootlegging in the area.

American TV series set in Atlantic City during the Prohibition era

The streets of Baltimore as a microcosm of the US's war on drugs, and of US urban decay in general. Seen not only through the eyes of a few policemen and drug gang members but also the people who influence and inhabit their world - politicians, the media, drug addicts and everyday citizens.

Ross Geller, Rachel Green, Monica Geller, Joey Tribbiani, Chandler Bing, and Phoebe Buffay are six twenty-somethings living in New York City. Over the course of 10 years and seasons, these friends go through life lessons, family, love, drama, friendship, and comedy.

Ted Mosby sits down with his kids, to tell them the story of how he met their mother. The story is told through memories of his friends Marshall, Lily, Robin, and Barney Stinson. All legendary 9 seasons lead up to the moment of Ted's final encounter with "the one."

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