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Vastralaya

Evan Shively (Perseus271)

The SPOOKIEST of British wartime fantasy classics for a Hair-Raising Read! If you’re looking for a VERY special Supernatural treat, filled with lots of evil tricksters, this is the way great writers USED to write ‘em.It’s a nonstop spiritual saga, a literary film noir, peopled by restless but good-hearted Ghosts wandering the empty streets of WWII London in search of their own salvation, and a sleepwalking innocent sent on numerous mysterious Evil errands by an Undead and Unrepentant Demon whose name and endlessly progressing incarnations are legion - until the imminent (yikes!) day when the World May be HIS!Together with a crowd of mortals who are perfectly oblivious to the black, demonic thunderheads gathering over their dear bombed-out city as the fateful Night of Hallowe’en draws ever nigher...THIS is Charles Williams’ final and definitive statement - as buddy of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, he was the third and final member of their merry wartime literary trio, The Inklings.It is the story of young lovers during the Blitz, eking out their constantly-at-risk romance at the worst of all times. When a random bomb ends the life of one of them, she is given, as an unquiet spectre, the chance to begin anew - in the next, ghostly, invisible, world...But it will make your SKIN CRAWL with its evocation of the Pure Evil that seeks absolute domination over the seen and this other, unseen world.To be quite frank, though, I CAN’T recommend reading it in a dark, empty house, alone in the middle of the night.But if you DO find a copy (or get the Kindle version) I can’t guarantee you won’t listen to me!

Wow! I am so glad I returned to this story! It took me less time to read it this second time but I got so much more out of it. Rereading Williams’s tale in relation to C. S. Lewis's book The Great Divorce made all the difference. Having read Many Dimensions, another Williams thriller, during the intervening years also helped. And Thomas Howard’s book, The Novels of Charles Williams, also made a tremendous difference in allowing me to penetrate the miasma of descriptive prose for which Williams is famous. (Thanks again Julie!)All I can say is do not be fooled by the title. Please. The descent part is only half of the story. There is redemption and salvific joy here too. Charles Williams wrote to show that our choices are all-critical and always matter. In Descent into Hell action centers around the production of a play which takes place on Battle Hill—named for the many historic military battles which have occurred on the locale. As this is a story about the all-important battle for souls, this name also serves as a spiritual double entendre. Near the end, there was a glorious climax where a dying woman’s request, a young girl’s fear, and a new friend’s tested promise all come together in a moment of divine propinquity which, when I read it, had tears running down my cheeks. It was so beautiful. There is also no denying the great darkness in descent. I believe Williams meant this to be a warning. It is certainly a thriller. What struck me were the characters that chose hell, turned away from others, were rejecting and/or quitters. So long as one persisted in something, with someone, somewhere, there was hope. The message I take from this is, don’t ever give up. Continue to reach out to others. Another beautiful passage in the book is where Williams describes one character offering Joy in exchange for carrying the other person’s fear. What a powerful image of love-in-action. =================================(ORIGINAL REVIEW) December 16, 2008: One part horror, one part salvation and the rest the possibility for either, Descent Into Hell isn't all as ominous as the title sounds. Yes, there is at least one character who allows delusion to sweep away reason and reality. The reader watches in fearful fascination as the deadly descent begins and progresses.This was my first ever book by Charles Williams, a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and a member of the famous Inklings, the literary pub group they belonged to. How I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at those meetings! I can just imagine Williams reading this book to his compatriots. No blood and gore thriller produced today, no matter how fiendish, can surpass the reality of an individual succumbing to evil without a fight; it is chilling.If the book were only about darkness, however, I don't think I could have finished it. Instead, there is a parallel story about another character that is also haunted, disappointed and apparently even more justified in following a path of descent, which does not. Descent contains many beautiful passages, hidden or double meanings, places where you want to pause and reflect on the author's full intention. It is a book worth reading slowly. Williams believed that everything which happens has an underlying spiritual meaning. It was the spiritual side of things he was interested in--the physical world was -- is -- clothing so-to-speak to dress what is really happening. That belief is not too far from Lewis’ own Shadowlands concept. Again, just imagine the great conversations they had!Read Descent Into Hell but plan to take your time with it. It can be confusing in places. I admit that I did not understand all of it. I'd love to find a William's expert somewhere who could go over the book with me because there are confusing bits here and there, but even so, it was an incredible book. I'm sure I'd raise my rating to 5 stars if I could only understand it all. I definitely plan to read it again and – God willing – I want to read the rest of his books.

At last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five novels from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space."The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat."Life, the Universe and Everything"The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky- so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew."So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak."Mostly Harmless"Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?Also includes the short story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe".

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.Three books in one volume: The Thieving Magpie, Bird as Prophet, The Birdcatcher. This translation by Jay Rubin is in collaboration with the author.

C.S. Lewis said that upon reading this astonishing 19th-century fairy tale he "had crossed a great frontier," and numerous others both before and since have felt similarly.In MacDonald's fairy tales, both those for children and (like this one) those for adults, the "fairy land" clearly represents the spiritual world, or our own world revealed in all of its depth and meaning. At times almost forthrightly allegorical, at other times richly dreamlike (and indeed having a close connection to the symbolic world of dreams), this story of a young man who finds himself on a long journey through a land of fantasy is more truly the story of the spiritual quest that is at the core of his life's work, a quest that must end with the ultimate surrender of the self.The glory of MacDonald's work is that this surrender is both hard won (or lost!) and yet rippling with joy when at last experienced. As the narrator says of a heavenly woman in this tale, "She knew something too good to be told." One senses the same of the author himself.Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

More than just a classic political novel, Warren’s tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—it’s not much of one—of goodness in a sinful world. Willie Stark, Warren’s lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the one time Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. Jack Burden is his press agent, who carries out the boss’s orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that’s simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.

“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a sixty-year friendship between the brilliant and bookish Elena and the fiery, rebellious Lila with unmatched honesty and brilliance.The four books in this novel cycle constitute a long, remarkable story, one that Vogue described as “gutsy and compulsively readable,” which readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.   

"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?

American novelist, journalist, editor, and lecturer

Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order" (Slate). In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life.

In a poor, remote section of Southern Mexico, the paramilitary group, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest is on the run. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the nameless little worldly “whiskey priest” is nevertheless impelled toward his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers.   In his introduction, John Updike calls The Power and the Glory, “Graham Greene’s masterpiece…. The energy and grandeur of his finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist.”

When an open-minded Jewish librarian and his son become victims of the Holocaust, he uses a perfect mixture of will, humor, and imagination to protect his son from the dangers around their camp.

1997 Italian film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni

The adventures of high school and junior high students on the last day of school in May 1976.

In 2027, in a chaotic world in which women have become somehow infertile, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea.

A high school wise guy is determined to have a day off from school, despite what the Principal thinks of that.

A stage-play producer devises a plan to make money by producing a sure-fire flop.

Two British track athletes, one a determined Jew, and the other a devout Christian, compete in the 1924 Olympics.

A bunch of guys hang around their college for months after graduation, continuing a life much like the one before graduation.

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.

A kindhearted but bumbling idiot who likes to steal bananas, is passed off for a snitch hiding from the mob.

A boy growing up in Dublin during the 1980s escapes his strained family life by starting a band to impress the mysterious girl he likes.

2016 musical comedy-drama film directed by John Carney

Henry Fool is a 1997 American black comedy-drama film written, produced and directed by Hal Hartley, featuring Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak, and Parker Posey. Set like previous Hartley films in less affluent parts of Long Island, it recounts how the lives of a fatherless family are overturned by a mysterious outsider and how, as in The Unbelievable Truth, expectation and reality again conflict.

A young man searches for home in the changing city that seems to have left him behind.

A Polish rabbi wanders through the Old West on his way to lead a synagogue in San Francisco. On the way, he is nearly burned at the stake by Native Americans and almost killed by outlaws.

A free-spirited woman "kidnaps" a yuppie for a weekend of adventure. But the fun quickly takes a dangerous turn when her ex-convict husband shows up.

A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.

New Jersey, 1950s. Two brothers run an Italian restaurant. Business is not going well as a rival Italian restaurant is out-competing them. In a final effort to save the restaurant, the brothers plan to put on an evening of incredible

1996 film by Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott

The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

Of Gods and Men (French: Des hommes et des dieux) is a 2010 French drama film directed by Xavier Beauvois, starring Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale. Its original French language title is Des hommes et des dieux, which means "Of Men and of Gods" and refers to a verse from the Bible shown at the beginning of the film. It centers on the monastery of Tibhirine, where nine Cistercian monks lived in harmony with the largely Muslim population of Algeria, until seven of them were kidnapped and assassinated in 1996 during the Algerian Civil War.Largely a tale of a peaceful situation between local Christians and Muslims before becoming a lethal one due to external forces, the screenplay focuses on the preceding chain of events in decay of government, expansion of terrorism, and the monks' confrontation with both the terrorists and the government authorities that led up to their deaths. Principal photography took place at an abandoned monastery in Azrou, Morocco.

An intellectually nonconformist friar investigates a series of mysterious deaths in an isolated abbey.

1986 mystery historical drama film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.

Jonathan Michael Richman is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. In 1970, he founded the Modern Lovers, an influential proto-punk band. Since the mid-1970s, Richman has worked either solo or with low-key acoustic and electric backing. He now plays only acoustic to protect his hearing. He is known for his wide-eyed, unaffected, and childlike outlook, and music that, while rooted in rock and roll, is influenced by music from around the world.

In 1930s England, a man from an aristocratic family takes up the pseudonym Albert Campion and, with the help of his ex-burglar manservant, solves mysteries.

The cases of eccentric, but sharp, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

DI Crabbe retires from the police force after being shot and sets up his own restaurant. However, his ex-boss, Chief Constable Fisher constantly calls Crabbe back on duty.

The lives of two eccentric metal detectorists, who spend their days plodding along ploughed tracks and open fields, hoping to disturb the tedium by unearthing the fortune of a lifetime.

Three misfit priests and their housekeeper live on Craggy Island, not the peaceful and quiet part of Ireland that it seems to be.

A coming-of-age comedy set in the "go-go" 80s about a college student enjoying a last hurrah before summer comes to an end--and the future begins.

A group of actors move to Los Angeles to make it big, but end up working as caterers.

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

American teen comedy-drama television series

A comedy series adapted from the award-winning play about a young woman trying to cope with life in London whilst coming to terms with a recent tragedy.

Bernard Black runs a book shop, though his customer service skills leave something to be desired. He hires Manny as an employee. Fran runs the shop next door. Between the three of them many adventures ensue.

The Up series of documentary films follows the lives of ten males and four females in England beginning in 1964, when they were seven years old. The first film was titled Seven Up!, with later films adjusting the number in the title to match the age of the subjects at the time of filming. The documentary has had nine episodes—one every seven years—thus spanning 56 years. The series has been produced by Granada Television for ITV, which has broadcast all of them except 42 Up (1998), which was broadcast on BBC One. Individual films and the series as a whole have received numerous accolades; in 1991, the then-latest instalment, 28 Up, was chosen for Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films of all time.

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