Ac3d _

Hettie Rose

Yudha Prast

emil petrakiev

Jamie Bohanna

Felipe Mancheno

Adam Symonds

Christopher Acker

Nehroz NRH

Tara B

Ferran Salguero Mateu

Steven Cow-Meat

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.

Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods—World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, crypt analyst extraordinaire, and gung-ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first... Of course, to observe is not its real duty—we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes—inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe—team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.

Robert M. Pirsig's Zen &amp; the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father &amp; his young son.

The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . .Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes--Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic. --front flap

Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just deserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons--and the unpredictable forces of nature and society--he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.

A comic masterpiece that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat includes an introduction and notes by Jeremy Lewis in Penguin Classics.Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian 'clerking classes', it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.In his introduction, Jeremy Lewis examines Jerome K. Jerome's life and times, and the changing world of Victorian England he depicts - from the rise of a new mass-culture of tabloids and bestselling novels to crazes for daytripping and bicycling.

Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life.

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

The hilarious novel of the healing arts that reveals everything your doctor never wanted you to know. Six eager interns—they saw themselves as modern saviors-to-be.   They came from the top of their medical school class  to the bottom of the hospital staff to serve a  year in the time-honored tradition, racing to answer  the flash of on-duty call lights and nubile  nurses. But only the Fat Man—the Clam, all-knowing resident—could sustain them in their struggle to survive, to stay sane, to love and even to be doctors when their harrowing year was done.

Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal but grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley—is up to his tricks in a 90s film and also Rene Clement's 60s film, "Purple Noon."

Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, the fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.

After suffering a nervous collapse while serving at the altar, a young ordinand is sent to London for psychiatric counseling, where he descends into an unfamiliar world of outcasts, hustlers, rent boys, religious fundamentalists, and AIDS patients. In deepening despair, he starts picking up male hustlers and takes a job in London leading walking tours through the haunts of Jack the Ripper. As the past and present come full circle, he eventually comes to understand the true meaning of passion. Intelligent and emotional, the narrative structure integrates the contemporary and the historical, the personal and the theological, the comic and the polemic in a revelatory way.

I have rarely read a novel of such intensity. And it touches on so much: the art world as well as art itself, relationships of many kinds, family, love, loss, psychology and the outsider, the world that is New York City, personas......much more that I'm forgetting (or avoiding for spoilers sake). But then is is titled "What I Loved" and it lives up to it's title. In addition to being one of the most intense reading experiences, in many ways this has been one of the most unusual. At times I felt I was reading, not a novel, but a memoir, the actual life story of an aging art historian and university professor looking back on who and what had figured prominently in his life---what he had loved. The story takes place in the art and university worlds of New York City, but it is not necessary,in my opinion, to be a part of them to become engaged in Leo's life and story. His story of finding a work of art he likes, the artist who becomes his true friend; two families whose lives intermingle over decades. The art world is a large part of this story and descriptions of various works of art can occasionally become long, somewhat rambling sidetracks. But these sidetracks always have connections to the central story if you are patient. Hustvedt also portrays the less savory side of the art world but this is once again through those many aspects of "what I loved."And supporting all of the story is masterful prose and excellent timing of presentation. The pacing and control, emotions--everything struck me as perfectly done. Hustvedt had me in the palm of her hand. (Even a section that was a bit over the top was over the top in just the right way.)I'm trying to be careful not to come close to any spoilers in this review which could dampen the emotional impact of this novel for other readers. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who feels a spark of interest in a book set in this world, an arrestingly written look back on a life.As an addendum, I realize that I neglected to say what may (or may not) be obvious. I intend to continue reading the author's works.

Sadly this book was a bit of a letdown. It had an extremely interesting concept- what if mankind found a way to limit the female birth rate? As gradually fewer baby girls are born into the world, what happens to the gender imbalance and how does it affect humanity as a whole? The novel is titled The First Century After Beatrice, but it takes place within a 30 year period- not nearly enough for us to see the lasting impact on the world.The writing style was dull too- The idea is we're reading some stuffy scientists memoirs, but it was tough going for me. The book felt too factual, and didn't have enough emotional impact.Perhaps worst of all- This book explores the after effects of discrimination against women, but nearly all the main characters who achieve anything are men. The titicular Beatrice is pretty much a non entity, and I could not stand the main character's wife. Apart from that, the narrator and his male friends all sit around and talk about how to solve this birth rate problem. In a word- Disappointing!

Set in a time of great social upheaval, warfare, and terrorism, and against a stark, lawless Siberia at the end of the Russian Revolution, The People’s Act of Love portrays the fragile coexistence of a beautiful, independent mother raising her son alone, a megalomaniac Czech captain and his restless regiment, and a mystical separatist Christian sect. When a mysterious, charismatic stranger trudges into their snowy village with a frighteningly outlandish story to tell, its balance is shaken to the core.

On the run from the AIDS epidemic -- and in search of their own lost love -- Colin Nieman and Justin Time abandon New York City for the tiny Kansas village of Galatea. Racially polarized and desperately poor, the town is dominated by Rosemary Krebs. a white matriarch determined to resurrect her lost Southern childhood, and Abraham Greeving, the black preacher who will do anything to stop her. Now It's Time to Say Goodbye is the story of violence and prejudice in small-town America: of Divine, a black hustler who's slept with as many men as he can seduce: of Wade Painter, a white artist insulated by his wealth and hermitlike existence: of Webbie Greeving, a budding academic called back to take care of her disabled father; and of Myra Robinson, the grieving mother who lost her daughter long before she was kidnapped. As their stories unfold we learn the true story of Galatea's dark past and even darker future: of Eric Johnson, an albino black man lynched because of the color of his skin: and of Lucy Robinson, the white teenager who must pay for her parents' crimes.Now It's Time to Say Goodbye is a literary thriller writ large. An astonishing achievement that recalls the work of James Baldwin and Carson McCullers, it marks a bold new direction for a young novelist already recognized as "one of the most eloquent voices of his generation" (Michiko Kakutani, New York times).

A former neo-nazi skinhead tries to prevent his younger brother from going down the same wrong path that he did.

Ambitious but troubled movie director Edward D. Wood Jr. tries his best to fulfill his dreams, despite his lack of talent.

When a simple jewelry heist goes horribly wrong, the surviving criminals begin to suspect that one of them is a police informant.

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

A computer hacker is abducted into the digital world and forced to participate in gladiatorial games where his only chance of escape is with the help of a heroic security program.

Violence ensues after an extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth finds a kindred spirit in a government agent exposed to their biotechnology.

An undercover cop in a not-too-distant future becomes involved with a dangerous new drug and begins to lose his own identity as a result.

Popular Broadway actor Gary Johnston is recruited by the elite counter-terrorism organization Team America: World Police. As the world begins to crumble around him, he must battle with terrorists, celebrities and falling in love.

The lives of three men who were childhood friends are shattered when one of them has a family tragedy.

A man with short-term memory loss attempts to track down his wife's murderer.

An inner-city junior high school teacher with a drug habit forms an unlikely friendship with one of his students after she discovers his secret.

The story of Harvey Milk and his struggles as an American gay activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official.

A horrific car accident connects three stories, each involving characters dealing with loss, regret, and life's harsh realities, all in the name of love.

A young man in a small Midwestern town struggles to care for his mentally-disabled younger brother and morbidly obese mother while attempting to pursue his own happiness.

When a beautiful stranger leads computer hacker Neo to a forbidding underworld, he discovers the shocking truth--the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.

A puppeteer discovers a portal that leads literally into the head of movie star John Malkovich.

Jerry Lundegaard's inept crime falls apart due to his and his henchmen's bungling and the persistent police work of the quite pregnant Marge Gunderson.

A lovelorn screenwriter becomes desperate as he tries and fails to adapt 'The Orchid Thief' by Susan Orlean for the screen.

A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future.

By day, mild-mannered Dexter is a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police. But at night, he is a serial killer who only targets other murderers.

The original surreal sketch comedy showcase for the Monty Python troupe.

The Baltimore drug scene, as seen through the eyes of drug dealers and law enforcement.

A chronicle of the lives of a dysfunctional family who run an independent funeral home in Los Angeles.

Controversal spoof of current affairs television, and the role of celebrity in the UK.

A comedic behind the scenes look at a late night talk show.

Gay lawyer Will and straight interior designer Grace share a New York City apartment. Their best friends are gleeful and proud gay Jack and charismatic, filthy-rich, amoral socialite Karen.

The dark and twisted trials of two plastic surgeons.

The Right Honorable James Hacker has landed the plum job of Cabinet Minister to the Department of Administration. At last he is in a position of power and can carry out some long-needed reforms, or so he thinks.

A drug-addicted nurse struggles to find a balance between the demands of her frenetic job at a New York City hospital and an array of personal dramas.

Bertram Wooster, a well-intentioned, wealthy layabout, has a habit of getting himself into trouble and it's up to his brilliant valet, Jeeves, to get him out.

Ten television drama films, each one based on one of the Ten Commandments.

Comedy sketches written and performed by renowned duo Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Hour long show which looks at the life of American super-secret operators.

Victoria Coren hosts the fiendishly difficult quiz in which two teams of three contestants have to find the connection between seemingly unrelated clues.

A wacky alien comes to Earth to study its residents and the life of the human woman he boards with is never the same.

A spoof of the well known This Morning With Richard & Judy, by Lee and Herring.

The inner workings of a successful PR firm - lying for a living.

Three people are stranded on a planet on the far side of the galaxy. In order to return to earth they must first locate a crystal to power their spacecraft. But to find the crystal they must navigate their way through a series of pra

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