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Книги издательства «Penguin Group»
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Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a concept that will change the way you look at the world. Black Swans underlie almost everything, from the rise of religions, to events in our own personal lives. A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: it is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. And why do we always ignore the phenomenon of Black Swans until after they occur? As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reveals, we are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the ‘impossible’. In this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know, and shows us how to face the world. |
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Jeremy Clarkson, it has to be said, sometimes finds the world a maddening place. And nowhere more so than from behind the wheel of a car, where you can see any number of people acting like lunatics while in control (or not) of a ton of metal. In Born to be Riled, Clarkson takes a look at the world through his windscreeen, shakes his head at what he sees – and then puts the boot in. Among other things, he explains: • why Surrey is worse than Wales • how crossing your legs in America can lead to arrest • the reason cable TV salesmen must be punched • that divorce can be blamed on the birth of Jesus Raving politicians, pointless celebrities, ridiculous ‘personalities’ and the Germans all get it in the neck, together with the stupid, the daft and ludicrous in a tour de force of comic writing guaranteed to have Clarkson’s postman wheezing under sackfuls of letters from the easily offended. |
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Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year old black child of the Rio slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Beach, and presents her with a ring. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west.... |
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«When Rosalind is banished by her uncle, who has usurped her father's throne, she flees to the forest of Arden where her exiled father holds court. There, dressed as a boy to avoid discovery, she encounters the man she loves — now a fellow exile — and resolves to remain in disguise to test his feelings for her. A gloriously sunny comedy, «As You Like It» is an exuberant combination of concealed identities and verbal jousting, reconciliations and multiple weddings.» |
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«This is a title in an inexpensive range of classics in the «Penguin Popular Classics» series.» |
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Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them — earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder — sorely testing the young hero's optimism. |
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«When it isn't prison, it's hell — or at least that's the belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike «Ginger» Brady. For this is the British Army in the days of National Service.» |
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«The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader magnificently represents the great voices of this era. It includes such masterworks of world literature as Pushkin's poem «The Bronze Horseman»; Gogol's «The Overcoat»; Turgenev's novel First Love; Chekhov's Uncle Vanya; Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych; and «The Grand Inquisitor» episode from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; plus poetry, plays, short stories, novel excerpts, and essays by such writers as Griboyedov, Pavlova, Herzen, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Maksim Gorky. Distinguished scholar George Gibian provides an introduction, chronology, biographical essays, and a bibliography.» |
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«These thirty stories, including the piece «Rain», are set in the Pacific Islands, England, France, and Spain.» |
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«The stories collected here, including «The Alien Corn», «Flotsam and Jetsam», and «The Vessel of Wrath», reconfirm Maugham's stature as one of the masters of the short story.» |
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Maugham learned his craft from Maupassant, and these stories, featuring his alter-ego Ashenden, display the unique and remarkable talent that made him an unsurpassed storyteller. |
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These thirty stories — most set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their own essentially European values and the richness and ambiguity of their unfamiliar surroundings — show a master of the genre at the peak of his power. |
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Cas Perry doesn't want a relationship. When her father walked out on her and her mother she decided relationships, love, marriage, the whole shegang, simlpy weren't worth the heartache. But is Cas, immoral most of the time and amoral when it comes to business, going too far with her new TV programme, Sex with an Ex? Unfeeling and unscrupulous, she ruthlessly manipulates everyone she comes into contact with. Until she meets Darren. A babe. Trouble is, he's a highly principled babe. He believes in love, marriage, fidelity and constancy, so can he believe in Cas? Is it possible the world is a better place than she imagined? And if it is, after a lifetime of playing games, is this discovery too late? |
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«Eugene Onegin» is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountain head of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it contains a large cast of characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. «Eugene Onegin» was Pushkin's own favorite work, and this new translation by Stanley Mutchell conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.» |
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When Daisy Buchan is 25, her beloved mother dies, and as she is reeling from this trauma, she is shocked to be told by her father that she is adopted — that her real mother was a poor young teenager from Cornwall. She does not know who her father is. Eventually Daisy finds out more about her mother, Ellen Pengelly, a farmer's daughter from a remote Cornish village, and as the layers of her family history are stripped away Daisy is horrified by what she learns. She is taken on a journey back to the past, a journey that uncovers a gripping story of innocence corrupted, and a family torn apart by greed and misery ... |
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Everyone knows that Jeremy Clarkson finds the world a perplexing place – after all, he wrote The World According to Clarkson. Yet despite this, things don’t seem to have improved much. However, Jeremy is not someone to give up easily and he’s decided to have another go. In And Another Thing, our exasperated hero discovers that: He inadvertently dropped a bomb on North Carolina... We’re all going to explode at the age of 62... Russians look bad in Speedos. But not as bad as Brits do... No one should have to worry about being Bill Oddie’s long lost sister... He should probably be nicer about David Beckham. Thigh-slappingly funny and – as ever – in your face, Jeremy Clarkson bursts the pointless little bubbles of the idiots while celebrating the special, the unique and the sheer bloody brilliant … |
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Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron; ruthless manipulator, brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Medellín cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts. Terrified of the new Colombian President’s determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages. In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Márquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark and volatile months. |
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‘César Montero was dreaming about elephants. He’d seen them at the movies on Sunday...’ Only moments later, César is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed. But César is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown – under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning’s lampoons. As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants’ sanity in tatters? |
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Leonardo is the greatest, most multi-faceted and most mysterious of all Renaissance artists, but extraordinarily, considering his enormous reputation, this is the first full-length biography in English for several decades. Prize-winning author Charles Nicholl has immersed himself in manuscripts, paintings and artefacts to produce an intimate portrait of Leonardo. He uses these contemporary materials — his notebooks and sketchbooks, eye witnesses and early biographies, etc — as a way into the mental tone and physical texture of his life and has made many discoveries about him, his work and his circle of associates. The book identifies what Nicholl argues is an unknown portrait of the artist hanging in a church near Lodi in northern Italy. It also contains new material on his eccentric assistant Tomasso Masini, his homosexual affairs in Florence, and his curious relationship with a female model and/or prostitute from Cremona. A masterpiece of modern biography. |
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