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Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

A young Nigerian writer living in New York City returns to Lagos in search of a subject-and himself.Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history. Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense") is an (initially) unpublished work of Friedrich Nietzsche written in 1873, one year after The Birth of Tragedy. It deals largely with epistemological questions of truth and language, including the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases-which means, strictly speaking, never equal-in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. According to Paul F. Glenn, Nietzsche is arguing that "concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality." Although all concepts are human inventions (created by common agreement to facilitate ease of communication), human beings forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe that they are "true" and do correspond to reality. Thus Nietzsche argues that "truth" is actually: A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. These ideas about truth and its relation to human language have been particularly influential among postmodern theorists, and "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" is one of the works most responsible for Nietzsche's reputation (albeit a contentious one) as "the godfather of postmodernism.

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.

In Borges's short story, the world consists of a gigantic library which contains every possible book that can ever be written. So, somewhere, there must logically be the book, the one that reveals the Library's secret! Unfortunately, there is no filing system, and no one has any idea of how to find the elusive book. In fact, it's challenging even to locate one which contains a meaningful sentence: most of them are gibberish from beginning to end. Well, our own world isn't quite as bad - but it's still harder than it should be to locate the books you really want to read, when they're mixed up with the ones you just think you might want to read. I am often appalled at the amount of time I waste on this site, but comfort myself with the thought that it has helped me find some amazing books I normally wouldn't even have considered. But exactly how helpful has it been? The other day, it occurred to me to try and answer this question quantitatively. I calculate that, since I started hanging out here in late 2008, I have read 42 books just because someone here has recommended them. (I didn't count books recommended by people on Goodreads whom I also know in real life, otherwise the figure would be considerably higher). After some more thought, I've picked out a Top Ten, which I present here for your amusement:10. I've never seen anyone outside Goodreads mention \
  Everything Explained Through Flowcharts\
, recommended to me by David G, but it's the funniest thing I've seen in ages. I challenge you to read it without giggling helplessly at least a couple of times. Why it isn't more famous is more than I understand.9. \
  À rebours\
, a weird 19th century French novel recommended to me by Sabrina, is another book that deserves to be better known. Nothing happens, but it's somehow utterly compelling. I think it's also been very influential.8. I love books written under strong formalist constraints, but I'd never heard of \
  Eunoia\
, recommended by Gary. Five chapters, each using only one vowel, and, even though it sounds impossible, it works remarkably well as poetry. Really!7. Eric W recommended \
  The Terrible Hours: The Greatest Submarine Rescue in History\
. If you're after inspiration and good old-fashioned heroism, look no further. 6. Choupette was so indignant about \
  Plateforme\
 that I had to check it out for myself. I liked it enough that I also read \
  Les particules élémentaires\
. I won't promise that you'll enjoy them, but they're certainly going to make you think.5. Everyone recommended \
  The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains\
. Alas, all too true. The mere fact that I'm sitting here writing this proves his point.4. Would you believe it, I hadn't even heard of \
  Infinite Jest\
 before I joined GR. Within a couple of months, I'd given in and bought a copy. Admittedly, I also bought a copy of \
  Twilight\
 at the same time...3. Pavel told me I had to read \
  Voices from Chernobyl\
, and he was right. Whatever your opinions on nuclear power, it's irresponsible not to. You can't take more than a chapter or so at a time; after that, you just sit there stunned, doing your best not to cry. Another book that people have unaccountably overlooked.2. Was I really going to read a thousand page physics text full of scary math? I did a math degree in the late 70s, but this looked way over my level. However, Nick called me chicken enough times that I decided to tackle \
  The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe\
. I've finally got to the end, and wow, was it a fascinating read! If you like math and physics, take Nick's advice: forget the pop science books and go for the big one. It's worth the effort.1. I don't really know Norwegian, and how likely was it that I'd buy a three volume magical-realist Norwegian novel by an author I'd never heard of? But, moved by Oriana's glowing review, I started thinking that I speak Swedish, Norwegian isn't that different (it's a kind of Spanish/Portugese deal), so why not give it a shot? By the time I was 20 pages into \
  Forføreren\
, I was hooked, and then I immediately continued with \
  Erobreren\
 and \
  Oppdageren\
. The trilogy is the most brilliant thing I have read this century, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you Oriana!So, there you are, and I hope I've made at least one sale :) In the interests of completeness, here's the rest of the list, in alphabetical order:\
  99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style\
\
  The Authoritarians\
\
  The Bent Sword\
\
  Breaking Dawn\
\
  Crowds and Power\
\
  The Dreamfighter: And Other Creation Tales\
\
  Eclipse\
\
  L'élégance du hérisson\
\
  Exercices de Style\
\
  Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will\
\
  Go the Fuck to Sleep\
\
  Galatea 2.2\
\
  Gray Matters\
\
  Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!\
\
  The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos\
\
  How To Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own\
\
  Musical Chairs\
\
  Mysterier\
\
  New Moon\
\
  No Hope for Gomez!\
\
  Not a Chance: Fictions\
\
  The Riddler's Gift (Lifesong, #1)\
\
  The Sparrow\
\
  Sult\
\
  The Triple A's Check It Out\
\
  Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights\
\
  Whom God Would Destroy\
\
  Zazie dans le métro\
Happy Goodreading!

At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.Written with a bone-dry sense of humour and a fascination with the oddness of existence The Emigrants is highly original in its heady mix of fact, memory and fiction and photographs.

First published in 1972, Vine Deloria Jr.'s God Is Red remains the seminal work on Native religious views, asking new questions about our species and our ultimate fate. Celebrating three decades in publication with a special 30th-anniversary edition, this classic work reminds us to learn "that we are a part of nature, not a transcendent species with no responsibilities to the natural world." It is time again to listen to Vine Deloria Jr.'s powerful voice, telling us about religious life that is independent of Christianity and that reveres the interconnectedness of all living things.

Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant, serious mind combined with her striking image, her rigorous intellectualism and her groundbreaking inquiries into what was then seen as 'low culture' - celebrity, photographs, camp - propelled her into her own unique, inimitable category and made her famous the world over, emblematic of twentieth-century New York literary glamour.Today we need her ideas more than ever. Her writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism, Fascism, Freudianism, Communism and Americanism, forms an indispensable guide to our modern world. Sontag was present at many of the most crucial events of the twentieth century: when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down, in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel and in besieged Sarajevo. Sontag tells these stories and examines her work, as well as exploring the woman behind Sontag's formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, her agonizing construction of herself and her public myth.Sontag is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted personal archives and on hundreds of interviews conducted with many people around the world who spoke freely for the first time about Susan Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait of an endlessly complex, dazzling woman; one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, who lived one of its most fascinating lives.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marylin Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 2008, the Swedish Academy hailed J. M. G. Le Clézio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.” The outlying humanity that Le Clézio explores in this collection of stories finds its expression in the understanding of children. The world of Mondo and Other Stories is that of a natural world pushed to the margins by complacent, indifferent modernity.  Haunting and beautiful, these stories speak to a universal longing for a life beyond the confines and trappings of modern existence. In each tale it is a child who can see and appreciate these places filled with wonder and knowledge. Mondo is a little boy whose connection to the beauty in everything unites a seaside town. Little Cross perturbs the order of things with her question: “What is blue? Daniel flees his stifling school and absent parents for the sea. All these children, like the wise billy goat in the collection’s final story, understand “so many things, not the things you find in books that men like to talk about but silent, strong things, things full of beauty and mystery.” And in the end, so do we.

Les Enfants Terribles holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction. Written in a French style that long defied successful translation - Cocteau was always a poet no matter what he was writing - the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when the present version was completed by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Miss Lehmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.

Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias’s mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homocidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the “new novel,” The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child’s murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred.

Considered one of the major French writers of our century, Nathalie Sarraute is the author of several novels, plays, and essays, as well as of Childhood, her autobiography. A pioneer of the nouveau roman (or "new novel"), a literary movement that sought to free the novel from the confines of plot, characterization, and time, she was recently honored by the presentation of her complete works in the prestigious Pliade series (other authors in the series include Honor de Balzac, Ernest Hemingway, and Franz Kafka). George Braziller is delighted to have been publishing all of Sarraute's work in America since 1958.

Set against the backdrop of Europe’s slide into Fascism, this twentieth-century erotic classic takes the reader on a dark journey through the psyche of the pre-war French intelligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the glamour of its victors. One of Bataille’s overtly political works, it explores the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force, bringing violence, power, and death together in a terrifying unity.

"...what man wins more happiness than just its shape and the ruin when that shape collapses?"Sophocles' Oedipus Rex has never been surpassed for the raw and terrible power with which its hero struggles to answer the eternal question, "Who am I?" The play, a story of a king who acting entirely in ignorance kills his father and marries his mother, unfolds with shattering power; we are helplessly carried along with Oedipus towards the final, horrific truth. To make Oedipus more accessible for the modern reader, our Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classics includes a glossary of the more difficult words, as well as convenient sidebar notes to enlighten the reader on aspects that may be confusing or overlooked. We hope that the reader may, through this edition, more fully enjoy the beauty of the verse, the wisdom of the insights, and the impact of the drama.

The Bacchae is one of the most disturbing plays in the ancient Greek genre. Euripides delves into the religiousity of the time with the " beware of spying on secret rites". The other three plays, Ion, The Women of Troy and Helen, are noble but not as good.

In Ballard's hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." Bataille has been called a "metaphysician of evil," specializing in blasphemy, profanation, and horror.Story of the Eye, written in 1928, is his best-known work; it is unashamedly surrealistic, both disgusting and fascinating, and packed with seemingly endless violations. It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album.Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only suited for adults who are not easily offended.

The story follows Jack, a highly intelligent serial killer, over the course of twelve years, and depicts the murders that really develop his inner madman.

A mother personally challenges the local authorities to solve her daughter's murder when they fail to catch the culprit.

<p>Mulholland Drive (stylized as Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 surrealist neo-noir mystery film written and directed by David Lynch and starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, Mark Pellegrino, and Robert Forster. It tells the story of an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts), newly arrived in Los Angeles, who meets and befriends an amnesiac woman (Harring) recovering from a car accident. The story follows several other vignettes and characters, including a Hollywood film director (Theroux).</p><p>The American-French co-production was originally conceived as a television pilot, and a large portion of the film was shot in 1999 with Lynch's plan to keep it open-ended for a potential series. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, television executives rejected it. Lynch then provided an ending to the project, making it a feature film. The half-pilot, half-feature result, along with Lynch's characteristic surrealist style, has left the general meaning of the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch has declined to offer an explanation of his intentions for the narrative, leaving audiences, critics, and cast members to speculate on what transpires. He gave the film the tagline "A love story in the city of dreams".</p>

While travelling the countryside to locate his nephew, a small town doctor finds himself interacting with people from his past and future.

A man went back to Guizhou, found the tracks of a mysterious woman. He recalls the summer he spent with her twenty years ago.

The lives of an English working-class family are told out of order in a free-associative manner. The first part, "Distant Voices", focuses on the father's role in the family. The second part, "Still Lives", focuses on his children.

It's the Christmas season. With her mom's help, Lynne, a girl of perhaps eight, dresses up; her younger brother Steven plays with a toy car. The children leave with their dad, who's affectionate with them. They walk down a railroad t

Aadid tells us his life in seven minutes. He's an Arabic-speaking young man working the night shift at a laundromat and dry cleaners somewhere in the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, they wash U.S. flags for free. He says the

A detective investigating a man's death in the mountains meets the dead man's mysterious wife in the course of his dogged sleuthing.

A chronicle of the last days of a factory that is about to shut down. Among the workers forced to idle away until the end of the week, Jacques, a young technician is busy dismantling a machine while, without noticing it, turning on s

A young driver, Speed Racer, aspires to be champion of the racing world with the help of his family and his high-tech Mach 5 automobile.

While never-ending rain and a strange disease spread by cockroaches ravage Taiwan, a plumber makes a hole between two apartments and the inhabitants of each form a unique connection, enacted in musical numbers.

A wife questions her life choices as she travels to Stockholm to see her husband receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A father and his daughter struggle to survive in deep space where they live in isolation.

Thirteen year-old Marta has recently moved back to southern Italy with her mother and older sister and struggles to find her place, restlessly testing the boundaries of an unfamiliar city and the catechism of the Catholic church.

As an actress begins to adopt the persona of her character in a film, her world becomes nightmarish and surreal.

After 30 years of wrongful imprisonment, a woman plans to take revenge on her former lover.

Madame de Dumeval, the Duke de Tesis and the Duke de Wand, libertines expelled from the court of Louis XVI, seek the support of the Duc de Walchen, German seducer and freethinker, lonely in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue 

A pop singer gives up her career to become an actress, but she slowly goes insane when she starts being stalked by an obsessed fan and what seems to be a ghost of her past.

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