Jordan

Bruna Guedes

Husain Kothari

FRNK

Uendi Prifti

Abdul Hasib

Loughlin Sullivan

Delaney Knopp

Auriel W

Blake Molmen

Dani Shahar

Luis Javier Campos nieto

You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.

The revolutionary literary vision that sowed the seeds of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's groundbreaking philosophy, and brought her immediate worldwide acclaim.This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress...“A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times

Set largely in a Fukuoka hospital during World War II, this novel is concerned with lethal vivisections carried out on downed American airmen. It is told from the first-person point of view of one of the doctors and the third-person perspective of his colleagues who cut open, experiment on, and kill the crew members. The novel is based on a true incident. It was made into the 1986 movie Umi to dokuyaku, directed by Kei Kumai and starring Eiji Okuda and Ken Watanabe. A movie which has not been translated and released to the English-speaking world. I’d love to see it.The book seems an object lesson in how much may be omitted from a narrative without evicerating it. (Sorry.) The characterizations are quite thin yet they work. You might say the approach is minimalist. In his non-Christian novels, Endo always seems to do a lot with very little. The Christian novels (Silence and The Samurai) seem bloated by comparison. The Girl I Left Behind, Deep River, and The Sea and Poison are all quite honed with very little waste. This is one of Endo's earliest novels, though not his first. It seems a little choppy in execution but this might be the translation.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the original title of a novella written by the famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson that was first published in 1886. The work is commonly known today as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or simply Jekyll &amp; Hyde. It is about a London lawyer named John Gabriel Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.

伝説のチェスプレーヤー、リトル・アリョーヒンの密やかな奇跡。触れ合うことも、語り合うことさえできないのに…大切な人にそっと囁きかけたくなる物語です。

THE best preface to this journal written by a young girl belonging to the upper middle class is a letter by Sigmund Freud dated April 27, 1915, a letter wherein the distinguished Viennese psychologist testifies to the permanent value of the document: "This diary is a gem. Never before, I believe, has anything been written enabling us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl, belonging to our social and cultural stratum, during the years of puberal development. We are shown how the sentiments pass from the simple egoism of childhood to attain maturity; how the relationships to parents and other members of the family first shape themselves, and how they gradually become more serious and more intimate; how friendships are formed and broken. We are shown the dawn of love, feeling out towards its first objects. Above all, we are shown how the mystery of the sexual life first presses itself vaguely on the attention, and then takes entire possession of the growing intelligence, so that the child suffers under the load of secret knowledge but gradually becomes enabled to shoulder the burden. Of all these things we have a description at once so charming, so serious, and so artless, that it cannot fail to be of supreme interest to educationists and psychologists.

It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.The Goldfinch combines vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

An English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, 20 years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging.The maze of human memory--the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it--is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to determine the present.Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances.The story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires--a child's for his parents, a man's for understanding--may give rise to the most complicated truths.A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his best.

Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises profound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.

At midnight comes the point of balance. Of danger. The instang of utter stillness when between two beats of the heart, an alternative reality can slip through, like a blade between the ribs, and swithc you into a new and terrifying world.Four Past Midnight: four heart-stopping accounts of that moment when the familiar world fractures beyond sense, the fragments spinning away from the desperate, clutching reach of sanity...(back cover)

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption--the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo.Apt Pupil--a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.The Body--four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.The Breathing Method--a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.source: stephenking.com

Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away...but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke... Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten...and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener’s hand is severed as “the dome” comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when—or if—it will go away.Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens—town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician’s assistant at the hospital, a selectwoman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing—even murder—to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn’t just short. It’s running out.source: stephenking.com

When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's THE GREEN MILE was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller lists—simultaneously—and delighted millions of fans the world over.Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefes... and yours.

'Misery' is a gruesome story of torture with blood, guts, and a psychopath. It's a well told tale, the characters are well developed and the fact that there are only two of them never gets boring. It's a real page turner, in fact I finished it tonight after getting off the subway on the platform before I walked home. But, this book is more than just a thriller, just like King is more than just a pulp writer.I read an article by the ever optimistic and cheerful Harold Bloom in college about how dismayed he was that young people like Stephen King so much. All the literature crtics I've read hate King and it seems like it's just because people actually enjoy reading his work. Yeah, Bloom, I said 'work' just like I would about Tolstoy's 'work' because Stephen King as damned hard worker. Think of all the books he's churned out over the last few decades. I'd like to see Harold Bloom show enough imagination to write fiction instead of just criticizing it all the time.I'm actually new to Stephen King's fiction. I've read a few of the essays and articles he's written and a really great graduation speech he gave at UMaine awhile ago in which he extolled the virtues of our mutual home state, but this is only my 3rd novel by him. I like this guy, and I know why too. It's not just because he makes me scream and I have a hard time putting his books down, it's because King loves writing. He has a real and self-aware relationship with what it means to be a writer. He knows he's not Tolstoy or Faulkner, he doesn't try to write that way. He knows how to tell a good god damned story and he has a passion for it. I appreciate his self awareness as a writer and the fact that he ackowledges how difficult the whole process is while not making us feel like he's somehow superior because he's figured out how to do it.In 'Misery' it's almost like we get to watch King write this story. He doesn't just set us up for a crazy story and watch us discover things about his characters, it feels like he actually comes with us and makes the discoveries at the same time we do. That's what makes a good storyteller. And I don't give a damn if Bloom likes him or not.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. The text in this 372-page paperback edition is based on that first published in Great Britain by Collins Modern Classics (1998), and includes a note on the text by Douglas A. Anderson (2001). Unforgettable!

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.

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."

In the middle of the night, private eye Philip Marlowe drives his friend Terry Lennox to the Mexican border. When Marlowe returns home police are waiting for him and learns that Terry's wife Sylvia has been killed. He's arrested as an accessory but released after a few days and is told the case is closed since Terry Lennox has seemingly committed suicide in Mexico. Marlowe is visited by mobster Marty Augustine who wants to know what happened to the $350,000 Lennox was supposed to deliver for him. Meanwhile, Marlowe is hired by Eileen Wade to find her husband Roger who has a habit of disappearing when he wants to dry out but she can't find him in any any of his usual haunts. He finds him at Dr. Veringer's clinic and brings him. It soon becomes obvious to Marlowe that Terry's death, the Wades and Augustine are all somehow interconnected. Figuring out just what those connections are however will be anything but easy.

A woman writing a children's fantasy story is constantly harrassed by visits and communications from people, who may or may not be real. When she and her husband pay a visit to their isolated, countryside retreat - her childhood home - her experience intensifies, and she resorts to drastic measures to eliminate the problem.

Based on a concept album project written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and the subsequent long-running Broadway performance, this film tells the story of the final 6 days in the life of Jesus Christ through the troubled eyes of Judas Iscariot. Too often mis-labeled a musical, this film is a "rock opera." There are no spoken lines, everything is sung.

A disillusioned filmmaker has an encounter with a young girl who has a ritual of repeating "Tomorrow is my birthday" everyday. He tries to communicate with her through his video camera.

It is the '90s and the tradition of 'compensated dating' is well underway in Japan. Four high school girls are engaged in enjo kosai in order to satisfy their desire for different things. You can usually find them in Shibuya district of Tokyo where they will give you their time, and sometimes more, in exchange for money that buys pretty things.

1998 Japanese film directed by Hideaki Anno

A sheriff investigating the disappearance of a young girl from a small island discovers there's a larger mystery to solve among the island's secretive, neo-pagan community.

The first film of a four-part adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel . In St. Petersburg of 1805, Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a rich nobleman, is introduced to high society. His friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, joins the Imperial Russian Army as aide-de-camp of General Mikhail Kutuzov in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon.

There is a theory that man is born with half a per mille too little. That alcohol in the blood opens the mind to the outside world, problems seem smaller and creativity increases. We know it well; after the first glass of wine, the conversation lifts, the possibilities open up. Martin is a high school teacher. He feels old and tired. His students and their parents want him terminated to increase their average. Encouraged by the per mille theory, Martin and his three colleagues throw themselves into an experiment to maintain a constant alcohol impact in everyday life. If Churchill won World War II in a dense fog of spirits, what could the strong drops do for them and their students? The result is positive in the beginning. Martin's class is in a different way now, and the project is being promoted to a real academic study with the collection of results. Slowly, but surely, the alcohol makes the four friends and their surroundings loosen up. The results are rising, and they really begin to feel life. As the objects go inboard, the experiment progresses for some, and goes off track for others. It becomes clearer and clearer that alcohol can generate great results in world history, but that all daring can also have consequences. The film is described as a fun, touching and thought-provoking drama about friendship, freedom - and alcohol.

An old postman has spent his whole life delivering mail to the mountain of Hunan and is about to retire. His only son is due to take over his duties. As father and son journey through the mountains, the son begins to appreciate the toil and burden his father has to bear as postman for the villagers, and the old postman is also deeply moved as his son relates his mother's anxiety as she waits for him to return home from every trip.

Once upon a time - in the heart of the 20th century - there was a remote and secretive colony ensconced within central Chile from which nobody could escape...while Colonia Dignidad was known for its sweet honey, surrounding communities whispered of numerous, rumored atrocities committed within the reinforced boundaries of the commune. Conceived and tyrannically run by former Nazi Paul Schäfer, Colonia's covert activities ranged from politically sanctioned torture - on behalf of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship - to Schäfer's personally orchestrated crimes against the children of Colonia. Inspired by a reported case, THE WOLF HOUSE testifies on behalf of semi-fictionalized Colonia captive Maria, a young German girl punished for releasing two beloved pigs. Maria escapes with her 'children' and finds false refuge within a supernaturally sentient house with the capacity to betray Colonia Dignidad's infamous legacy.

12-year-old Paul lives an isolated existence with his mother, who works at a private psychiatric hospital in the woods near their house. One day, Paul encounters a young teen named Gloria, a mysterious new patient with whom he quickly becomes infatuated. As the fledgling pair forge a tentative friendship, Gloria convinces Paul to help her escape. But when they embark on a perilous journey together, his devotion is put to the test as Gloria's dangerous unpredictability gradually starts to surface.

A few days before Christmas, traveling entertainer Marc Stevens is stuck at nightfall in a remote wood in the swampy Hautes Fagnes region of Liège, his van conked out. An odd chap who's looking for a lost dog leads Marc to a shuttered inn; the owner gives Marc a room for the night. Next day, the innkeeper, Mr. Bartel, promises to fix the van, demands that Marc not visit the nearby village, and goes through Marc's things while the entertainer takes a walk. At dinner that night, Bartel laments his wife's having left him, and by next day, Marc is in a nightmare that may not end.

Dean Pereira and Cindy Heller Pereira are a young, working class married couple - Dean currently working as a painter, and Cindy working as a nurse in a medical clinic - with a young daughter named Frankie. Despite their relatively tender ages, they are both ravaged by the life they've eked out together and by the experiences they've had leading into their marriage. Dean, a high school drop out, comes from a broken home, where he never really had a mother figure. He never saw himself getting married or having a family despite falling in love at first sight with Cindy. He doesn't have any professional ambition beyond his current work - which he enjoys since he feels he can knock off a beer at 8 o'clock in the morning without it affecting his work - although Cindy believes he has so much more potential in life. Cindy also comes from a dysfunctional family, with her own mother and father not setting an example of a harmonious married or family life. One of her previous serious relationships was with Bobby Ontario, that relationship which has a profound affect on many aspects of her marriage to Dean. Dean and Cindy head off on an overnight getaway together without Frankie, the getaway which may provide a clearer picture if their marriage can survive its many issues.

It's the last day of school. Christian (19) and his younger sister Sofie are on their way to a party together with their friends. They've got to finish studying for their finals, take the tests themselves, and then school's out for good. The party has come just at the right time, and is just what Christian needs; right up until the point his sister commits suicide in an upstairs bathroom. Exams and graduation completed, Sofie's unexplained suicide is still affecting everyone concerned, especially Christian, who is convinced that Sofie was trying to tell him something before she killed herself at the party. But life has to go on, and before they all have to split up and go their own way Christian and his friends decide to go on their traditional trip to Sweden to celebrate midsummer for one last time. Although the group's usual rituals in connection with the midsummer trip aren't the same without Sofie, everyone does their best to enjoy themselves. And when Christian's long held, yet unrequited feelings for the beautiful Trine finally appear to be reciprocated, it looks like the trip is going to turn out just fine anyway. But then Christian discovers that someone - or something - has decided that Sofie's suicide should not go unexplained - and one night he wakes up with the feeling that Sofie is in the room with him. Has Sofie really come back? Or are Christian's feelings of guilt and sorrow over Sofie's apparently meaningless death making him imagine things? The dreadful truth is lurking in the dark shadows cast by the fir trees in the Swedish forest. The trip turns out to be like nothing they've experienced in the past - and the lives of those who get to drive back home after midsummer is over will never be the same again.

Lucy is a university student who is working a number of jobs. She volunteers at a research lab, works at a coffee shop, and as a photocopy clerk in an office. She responds to an advertisement and embarks on an erotic freelance job in which she is required to sleep in bed alongside paying customers.

West Side Story is the award-winning adaptation of the classic romantic tragedy "Romeo and Juliet". The feuding families become two warring New York City gangs--the white Jets led by Riff and the Latino Sharks, led by Bernardo. Their hatred escalates to a point where neither can coexist with any form of understanding. But when Riff's best friend (and former Jet) Tony and Bernardo's younger sister Maria meet at a dance, no one can do anything to stop their love. Maria and Tony begin meeting in secret, planning to run away. Then the Sharks and Jets plan a rumble under the highway--whoever wins gains control of the streets. Maria sends Tony to stop it, hoping it can end the violence. It goes terribly wrong, and before the lovers know what's happened, tragedy strikes and doesn't stop until the climactic and heartbreaking ending.

Six thugs, who are strangers to each other, are hired by a crime boss, Joe Cabot, to carry out a diamond robbery. Right at the outset, they are given false names with the intention that they won't get too close and will concentrate on the job instead. They are completely sure that the robbery is going to be a success. But, when the police show up right at the time and the site of the robbery, panic spreads amongst the group members, and two of them are killed in the subsequent shootout, along with a few policemen and civilians. When the remaining people assemble at the premeditated rendezvous point (a warehouse), they begin to suspect that one of them is an undercover cop.

In Wellington, wallflower Lily is inexplicably attracted to loser Jarrod. She's out of a job; he's nursing a decade-long grudge against someone who teased him in high school. When she accompanies him to his seacoast hometown where he intends to take on his nemesis, she meets his father, his daughter from a one-night stand, and other family members--plus the memory of his talented, dead brother. Jarrod treats Lily badly, invents a relationship with his dead brother's fiancée, and gears up for his fight. Will she finally have enough and go home?

American singer-songwriter, author and poet

The sickest, most twisted animated shorts ever put on television.

The character-driven cartoon chronicles the nautical and often nonsensical adventures of SpongeBob, an incurably optimistic and earnest sea sponge, and his underwater friends. Dwelling a few fathoms beneath the tropical isle of Bikini Atoll in the sub-surface city of Bikini Bottom, SpongeBob lives in a two-story pineapple. Instead of taking the logical approach to everyday challenges, SpongeBob approaches life in a wayward and unconventional way. Whether searching for the ultimate spatula to perfect his burger flipping technique at the Krusty Krab or just hanging out with his best friend Patrick (an amiable starfish), SpongeBob's good intentions and overzealous approach to life usually create chaos in his underwater world.

The adventures of Tim and Daisy who rent a room in Marsha Klein's house under the pretense that they are a couple. Also in the house is frustrated painter Brian. Together with TA fanatic Mike and Daisy's girlfriend Twist the duo get into a series of situations with hilarious results.

A sitcom about two dreamy London roommates: gay unemployed actor Tom Farrell, whose career is going nowhere; and Linda La Hughes, who is about as attractive as a 100-year-old nun, yet has delusions that she is gorgeous and will start a grand romance sometime soon.

An interweaving narrative chronicling the antics of such diverse characters as: a transgender taxi driver, a family obsessed with hygiene and toads, a fiery reverend, a carnival owner who kidnaps women into marriage, and a xenophobic couple who run a local shop for local people.

Jay Sherman is an overweight and somewhat snobbish New York TV movie critic who is forced to review the most pathetic films to which is he always says, "It stinks." In addition to the film parodies, the show also deals with his professional life working for his tyrannical media mogul boss and his personal life with his friends and family. In a world that seems determined to snub him both in the asinine arts he has to endure and his own difficult relationships, Jay gets along as best he can, while enjoying life's bright spots.

A group of never-do-well forest rangers are facing the shutdown of their National Park when a new ranger arrives to help transform them and save the park.

American adult animated television sitcom

Space Ghost in his 40s is no longer a superhero, and now he even goes by his real name Tad Ghostal. However, to remain in the spot-light he has started his own late-night talk show filmed in outer space. With his cohost and former villain Zorak, and his director Moltar they interview celebrities on Earth through their video-phone.

Set in the early/mid-1970s, the life and times of a record executive, Richie Finestra (played by Bobby Cannavale). His record company, American Century, has fallen on hard times and he is busy negotiating its sale to Polygram Records. We see how he started in the industry, the start of his company, its ups and downs, the casualties of his progress and what rock music means to him. Meanwhile, he is also an accessory to a murder.

Based in 1970s New York, this show gives a raw and gritty portayal of the prostitution business that was so publicly executed at that time. As a result of police crack-down, the characters are forced to venture towards relatively safer and more discrete forms of the same work.

A 32-year-old misanthropic musician named Frank lives in Dublin with his mother.

René Artois runs a small café in France during World War II. He always seems to have his hands full: He's having affairs with most of his waitresses, he's keeping his wife happy, he's trying to please the German soldiers who frequent his café, and he's running a major underground operation for the Resistance. Quite often, the Germans' incompetence itself is what nearly lands René and his cohorts in hot water; they are not helped either by the locals, who are dreadfully keen to get rid of the Germans, but their blatant and theatrical attempts at espionage and secrecy often create problems that René must solve quickly.

Jack and Victor have broken out of Chewin' The Fat and now have their own six part series on BBC One Scotland. These Glaswegian patter merchants may be long in the tooth but they're Still Game for all kinds of carry-on.

In the east village, the twentysomething guy, Alex finally moves into this own apartment in New York City's East Village. There he finds that single life is not a walk in the park as he deals with urban life, his boring job at the copy shop, his irritating friends, his selfish sister and his crush on an unattainable goth girl. Yet, for all the troubles, life in the city is still worth it.

Follows a group of teenage 7th graders, including best friends Nick Birch and Andrew Glouberman, as they navigate their way through puberty with struggles like masturbation and sexual arousal all in the Westchester County suburbs of New York City. Acting as over-sexualized shoulder angels are the hormone monsters: Maurice (who pesters Andrew and Matthew and occasionally Nick), Connie the hormone monstress (who pesters Jessi and Nick and occasionally Missy) and Mona (who mainly pesters Missy). Throughout the series, the kids interact with people and objects who are often personified and offer helpful, yet confusing, advice in their puberty-filled lives including the ghost of Duke Ellington, a French-accented Statue of Liberty, a pillow capable of getting pregnant, a bar of Adderall, and even Jessi's own vulva. They seek out their destiny as puberty destroys them mentally and physically.

Two comedians, average nobodies, and celebrity guest stars perform bizarre low-budget comedy sketches.

American sketch comedy series (2007 - 2010)

Gay lawyer Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and straight interior designer Grace Adler (Debra Messing) are best friends living in New York City. Grace is engaged to a real jerk until the relationship falls apart and she moves in with Will. It's supposed to be temporary, until Grace finds her own place, but more and more it looks like a permanent arrangement. Grace's secretary and assistant is fun-loving wealthy socialite Karen Walker (Megan Mullally); Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) is Will's flamboyant gay friend.

Animated MTV series about two teenage heavy-metal music fans who occasionally do idiotic things because they're bored. For them, everything is "cool" or "sucks."

American adult animated sitcom created by Mike Judge

Thomas Shelby and his brothers return to Birmingham after serving in the British Army during WWI. Shelby and the Peaky Blinders, the gang he is leader of, control the city of Birmingham But as Shelby's ambitions extend beyond Birmingham, he plans to build on the business empire he's created, and stop anyone who gets in his way.

To carry out the biggest heist in history, a mysterious man called The Professor recruits a band of eight robbers who have a single characteristic: none of them has anything to lose. Five months of seclusion memorizing every step, every detail, every probability culminate in eleven days locked up in the National Coinage and Stamp Factory of Spain, surrounded by police forces and with dozens of hostages in their power, to find out whether their suicide wager will lead to everything or nothing.

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