Emo Nemo

Mily

Sarah

Shaidrian Rios

Jimmy Beans

miCCwatreSSop

Julie Wynne - videos

Kapuster

Nicky Tallon

Harini Sen

Vastralaya

Evan Shively (Perseus271)

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

'A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.'

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.

\
  I don’t know what is true and what is a lie, nor what I saw, or what I dreamed—or rather what I dreamed and what I only saw—nor what I knew, nor what I believed. I don’t know if I am transferring my consciousness to this paper as white as snow, and if it will remain there, leaving me without it. Why should I still keep it…? Do I know anything?; do I believe anything? Has what I am writing about here really happened, and did it happen like I am telling it? Can things like these really happen? Is this just a dream, within another dream?\
A priest, a village, faith and doubts.I could write many paragraphs about this short novel, but I would be repeating¹ myself.²First time I read Unamuno's prose. Definitely not the last.You can find this little gem online.(view spoiler)[Spanish - English (hide spoiler)]

Gustav Hasford’s THE SHORT-TIMERS is my unicorn. It is the book that has eluded me for almost fifteen years. Finally, I wizened up and went to my library; I guess there are some books that will not become part of my personal collection. Enough about me. The book. My unicorn. As a kid I knew that the movie Full Metal Jacket was based on this book. (Brief interlude: most of the best lines quoted from the movie were never said by that character in the book.) My father, a veteran of Viet Nam was part of the 1st Marine Division, 5th Regiment, 1st Battalion in ’68-’69 and told my brothers and I that this movie was as close as it got to any art form depicting Viet Nam in any sense of accuracy. So, I thought I knew the story.WRONG.THE SHORT-TIMERS gave Stanley Kubrick some ideas, an outline. Had Kubrick stayed faithful to the novel I am certain that the book would still be in print today. Where Kubrick went wrong was how he took aspects of a Marine’s psychology and twisted it to show only the parts that could be sensationalized. Hasford’s novel has other ideas. THE SHORT-TIMERS wants to show how an ordinary man becomes a monster, but still maintains (or struggles to maintain) some semblance of humanity. You see, it is easy to say that the guys who humped through the jungle during that much neglected and disrespected war were crazy, but it is harder to understand why exactly they were the way they were. These men were changed. One moment at a time they were transformed into killers. Joker and Cowboy and Pyle were never given a chance to be individuals; individuals get you dead. Rather, Joker and Cowboy and Pyle were twisted and broken and shaped into one tiny metallic splinter of a cog in the Green Machine wheel. And as their individualism was erased, something else took its place. It’s hard to say exactly was this something was. Attitude? Bravery? Loyalty? Fantasy? Bat-shit craziness? But by the time these men (except Pyle; you all know what happened) reached Viet Nam, this new persona became hardened. Death was nothing to fear. Killing was to be embraced. Even when a tank commander runs over a little Vietnamese girl and a water buffalo or when some of the guys are killing rats (VC rats) in their bunks or trenches there is a moment when the grisly nature of war should become apparent, but never does because the little girl’s papasan only wants reimbursement for the dead animal, knowing that the girl’s life is worthless monetarily and he needs money to buy food, and the rats are merely a gesture by God as a means to entertain the Marines while they are waiting for that moment when Charlie and ten-thousand of his closest friends run through the wire, eager to taste the blood of American soldiers. By the time Joker meets up with Rafterman (and there is a heck of a back-story as to how Rafterman got his name) human emotion is only felt by the New Guys, the phony-tough and the crazy-brave. Once Rafterman experiences his first taste of bloodlust, once his first confirmed kill has been acknowledged, Hasford paints one of the most horrible scenes this reader has ever pictured in his mind. (I will not spoil this for you…trust me; it’s worth the wait to read it for yourself.) And it is during these times that Hasford’s novel far surpasses Kubrick’s film.Allow me to illustrate my point. There is a scene in the movie where Joker and some of the other Marines are fighting in Hue. The movie shows some destroyed buildings, rubble mounds, and military movements. Hasford describes it as such: We see the great walls of the Citadel. With zigzagging ramparts thirty feet high and eight feet thick, surrounded by a moat, the fortress looks like an ancient castle from a fairy tale about dragons who guard princesses in need of assistance. The castle is black stone against a cold gray sky, with dark towers populated by shadows that are alive. The Citadel is actually a small walled city constructed by French engineers as protection for the home of Gia Long, Emperor of Annamese Empire. When Hue was the Imperial Capital, the Citadel protected the Emperor and the royal family and the ancient treasure of the Forbidden City from pirates raiding from the South China Sea. We are big white American boys in steel helmets and heavy flak jackets, armed with magic weapons, laying siege to a castle in modern times…Metal birds flash in and shit steel eggs all over the place. F-4 Phantom jet fighters are dropping napalm, high explosives, and Willy Peter—white phosphorus. With bombs we are expressing ourselves; we are writing our history in shattered blocks of stone…Wise, like Solomon, we have converted Hue into rubble in order to save it.DAMN! THAT IS SOME WRITING! As I said, this book is my unicorn. But that’s not all; Hasford goes further into the mind of a Marine in Viet Nam. In surrealistic dream sequences, Hasford examines what it means to be a lifer, poge, or grunt through strange interactions between Joker and what can only be described as a vampire who is also a colonel in the United States Marine Corp. Great metaphor, strange (yet incredible) storytelling. There is also a scene when Joker gets knocked off his feet from an explosion and his body splits in to three parts: mind, body, and spirit. The mind and body want Joker to heal, but the Spirit only wants to leave Viet Nam, seek some other realm. I wish I could give you more detail, but that would only ruin an extraordinary reading experience. By the time the book gets to the third part, Joker is only a skin-suit. He no longer resembles himself. He has become a Short-Timer, a person that only has x amount of days and a wake-up. He has become paranoid, worried about self-preservation. In essence, he has become an animal. And that is the message Hasford successfully conveys. War is ugly. War is harsh. War is cruel. War has no survivors. And as Plato so succinctly stated: “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” to which I have to agree. For the living must carry that burden with them for the rest of their lives.HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION 

Since its first publication in two volumes between 1918-1923, The Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and most talked about books of our time. In all its various editions, it has sold nearly 100,000 copies. A twentieth-century Cassandra, Oswald Spengler thoroughly probed the origin and "fate" of our civilization, and the result can be (and has been) read as a prophesy of the Nazi regime. His challenging views have led to harsh criticism over the years, but the knowledge and eloquence that went into his sweeping study of Western culture have kept The Decline of the West alive. As the face of Germany and Europe as a whole continues to change each day, The Decline of the West cannot be ignored. The abridgment, prepared by the German scholar Helmut Werner, with the blessing of the Spengler estate, consists of selections from the original (translated into English by Charles Francis Atkinson) linked by explanatory passages which have been put into English by Arthur Helps. H. Stuart Hughes has written a new introduction for this edition. In this engrossing and highly controversial philosophy of history, Spengler describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity. Guided by the philosophies of Goethe and Nietzsche, he rejects linear progression, and instead presents a world view based on the cyclical rise and decline of civilizations. He argues that a culture blossoms from the soil of a definable landscape and dies when it has exhausted all of its possibilities. Despite Spengler's reputation today as an extreme pessimist, The Decline of the West remains essential reading for anyone interested in the history of civilization.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which the author addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. The book received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars, but was praised by some literary critics.

Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his life. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. For Wittgenstein, logic was something we use to conquer a reality which is in itself both elusive and unobtainable. He famously summarized the book in the following words: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.' David Pears and Brian McGuinness received the highest praise for their meticulous translation. The work is prefaced by Bertrand Russell's original introduction to the first English edition.

This is the only complete English translation of one of the most significant and fascinating works of the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The Parerga (Volume 1) are six long essays; the Paralipomena (Volume 2) are shorter writings arranged under thirty-one differentsubject-headings. These works won widespread attention with their publication in 1851, helping to secure lasting international fame for Schopenhauer. Indeed, their intellectual vigor, literary power, and rich diversity are still extraordinary even today.

On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life), published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin's book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had collected on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a Christmas children's story by Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel written in rhymed verse with illustrations by the author. It follows the Grinch, a grouchy, solitary creature who attempts to thwart the public's Christmas plans by stealing Christmas gifts and decorations from the homes of the nearby town of Whoville on Christmas Eve. Miraculously, the Grinch realizes that Christmas is not all about money and presents.

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be.Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

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.

In the struggle to achieve world peace and world dominance, rivaling governments are secretly developing weapons technology that could threaten the future exist...

Darkest Dungeon is a gothic roguelike RPG dungeon crawler about the psychological stresses of adventuring. You will lead a band of four heroes on a perilous sid...

Wasteland 2 is the direct sequel to the first ever post-apocalyptic computer RPG. The original Wasteland was the inspiration for the FALLOUT series of games, an...

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

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

1997 Canadian independent science-fiction horror film by Vincenzo Natali

In the future, a sadistic gang leader is imprisoned and volunteers for a conduct-aversion experiment, but it doesn't go as planned.

1971 dystopian crime film directed by Stanley Kubrick

In the midst of the festive season, a Goan Catholic family discovers that they have lost their property to the Government and their family honour is at stake. Sanjit, the soldier son has to fight a different battle. As the tension an

With his wife's disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it's suspected that he may not be innocent.

A former police detective juggles wrestling with his personal demons and becoming obsessed with a hauntingly beautiful woman.

A committed dancer struggles to maintain her sanity after winning the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake".

2010 American psychological horror film by Darren Aronofsky

As a modern-day scientist, Tommy is struggling with mortality, desperately searching for the medical breakthrough that will save the life of his cancer-stricken wife, Izzi.

2006 American science fiction romantic drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky

A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer's client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.

In the summer of 1987, a college graduate takes a 'nowhere' job at his local amusement park, only to find it's the perfect course to get him prepared for the real world.

In 2035, a technophobic cop investigates a crime that may have been perpetrated by a robot, which leads to a larger threat to humanity.

2004 American science-fiction action film directed by Alex Proyas

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

A laid back Southern man is sentenced to two years in a rural prison, but refuses to conform.

1967 American prison drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg

A U.S. Army officer serving in Vietnam is tasked with assassinating a renegade Special Forces Colonel who sees himself as a god.

1979 American war film directed by Francis Ford Coppola

An adaptation of the cult memoir of game show impresario Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell), in which he purports to have been a C.I.A. hitman.

In a violent, futuristic city where the police have the authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, a cop teams with a trainee to take down a gang that deals the reality-altering drug, SLO-MO.

A family looks to prevent evil spirits from trapping their comatose child in a realm called The Further.

In the Falangist Spain of 1944, the bookish young stepdaughter of a sadistic army officer escapes into an eerie but captivating fantasy world.

2006 Mexican-Spanish dark fantasy film directed by Guillermo del Toro

In the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other under the revolutionary "Battle Royale" act.

A man struggles with memories of his past, which include a wife he cannot remember and a nightmarish world no one else ever seems to wake up from.

1998 science fiction/neo-noir film directed by Alex Proyas

A teenage boy finds himself recruited as a member of an elite team of pilots by his father.

Nine noble families fight for control over the lands of Westeros, while an ancient enemy returns after being dormant for millennia.

music

movies

shows

books

games

Active tastebuds