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Penguin Group
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The Extermination of Michael Moore is his anti-memoir. Breaking the autobiographical mode, he hilariously presents 20 far-ranging, irreverent vignettes from his own life. Moore is his own meta-Forrest Gump, as one moment he's an 11-year old boy stuck on a Senate elevator with Bobby Kennedy, and the next moment he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with a dazed and confused Ronald Reagan. Changing planes in Vienna, he escapes death at the hands of the terrorist Abu Nidal (others weren't so lucky). He founded his first underground newspaper in fourth grade. He refused to be on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite at 16 ('There's not enough Clearasil in the world for that to happen'). And he became the youngest elected official in the country at age 18 by enlisting an 'army of local stoners' who had no idea what they were doing as his campaign staff. Before Michael Moore became the Oscar-winning filmmaker and all-round rabble rouser and thorn-in-the-side of corporate and right-wing America, there was the guy who had an uncanny knack of just showing up where history was being made. This book is a wild, revealing, take-no-prisoners ride through his early life. Alternately funny, eye-opening, and moving, this is a book Michael Moore was been writing — and living — for a very long time. |
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This brand new edition provides a comprehensive and highly visual introduction to Florence; over 600 superb photographs capture the history, local people and variety of everyday life in one of Italy's most magical cities. The 'Places' section provides a detailed, district-by-district exploration of all the places to visit and principal sites along the way are clearly cross-referenced by number to the full-colour maps found throughout the guide. Expanded and updated restaurant listings feature the best eateries to suit all budgets within each area, providing the address, phone number, opening times and price range, followed by a useful review. A brand new 'Editor's Choice' section illustrates everything you simply can't afford to miss, including lesser-known attractions, family activities and money-saving hints. Expert local writers provide authoritative essays on the city's history along with interesting cultural features. A fully-indexed street atlas enables instant orientation, helping you to navigate around the city with ease and also plots restaurants. The comprehensive 'Travel Tips' section provides all the essential information you'll need for a hassle-free trip, covering accommodation for all budgets, transport, activities and useful booking information, plus a handy A-Z of further practical advice and contact details. The unique combination of insightful exploration alongside practical advice makes this guide a fascinating background read and an invaluable on-the-spot companion. |
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From Alexandria to York, this unique illustrated guide allows us to see the great centres of classical civilization afresh. The key feature of Cities of the Classical World is 120 specially drawn maps tracing each city's thoroughfares and defences, monuments and places of worship. Every map is to the same scale, allowing readers for the first time to appreciate visually the relative sizes of Babylon and Paris, London and Constantinople. There is also a clear, incisive commentary on each city's development, strategic importance, rulers and ordinary inhabitants. This compelling and elegant atlas opens a new window on to the ancient world, and will transform the way we see it. |
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I was born in a trunk. It was during the matinee on Friday. I stopped the show. Arresting and wonderful, The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There, a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling. |
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'The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression — in some ways the most modern of them all'. The story of the British short story since the Second World War is one of change and revolution and this powerful and moving collection brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of the form. Containing thirty-four of the most widely regarded postwar British writers, it features tales of love and crime, comedy and the supernatural, the traditional as well as the experimental. This many-storied, many-splendored collection is a brilliant portrait of the generation of writers who have immediately influenced the brightest, sharpest and most intriguing writers who continue to emerge today. |
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Meade is nineteen and living in Paris with her twin brother, Ben Ho, far from their privileged upbringing in Nashville, Tennessee. Hers is a restless quest of balancing addictions: to her brother, her pills and her purging. But when Ben Ho falls for a girl at art school, Meade's precarious equilibrium is shaken. Meade descends into a vortex of glamour and passion with the fashion photographer who becomes her lover. As her sexual obsession shifts from her brother to her troubled Iranian lover, Meade cannot know she has made a tragic match with someone whose secrets go further, deeper and darker than anything she can fathom. A stark, unflinching novel with a dark heart, Comes the Night chronicles a fevered and tormented journey through the frothy, glossy world of fashion and the shadowy recesses of love. |
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1586 — London, England. Sixteen-year-old Mercy Hart is the daughter of one of London's richest — and strictest — cloth merchants. Kit Turner is an actor and the illegitimate son of the late Earl of Dorset. A chance encounter finds Kit falling for the beautiful Mercy's charms, but their love is forbidden. A merchant's daughter and a vagabond — it simply cannot be. If Mercy chooses Kit she must renounce her family name and leave her home. Will she favour duty over true love, or will she give Kit his heart's desire? |
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Think nothing tastes as good as slim feels? You're obviously not eating the right food... Holly, Naomi and Kate are determined to win the battle of the bulge. So it's down to the local slimming club, where carbs are strictly off the menu and there's no escaping the scales. But calorie-counting isn't the only thing on their minds. Newly engaged Holly should be over the moon. So why does she blush every time her sexy boss walks into the room? Curvaceous Naomi finds herself the object of a very unusual fetish and a shocking secret is revealed when an unexpected visitor arrives on Kate's doorstep. Yet with a little group support (and a particularly brutal weight loss boot camp) the women manage to stick to their regime, in time for the glamorous Slimmer of the Year Awards. But with tempting buffet tables, highly competitive contestants and even the odd fat fetishist lurking, it's anyone's guess as to what will happen... |
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Fifteen-year-old Aaron lives amongst the rubbish piles in the slums of Cairo. His job? To collect broken glass. His life? Wasted. His hope? To find a future he can believe in... |
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Watch out for the mosquitoes', they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn't any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs'. Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood. |
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'He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye...' Profound and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing literary voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Whether describing the most beautiful poem ever composed or an invention gone horribly wrong, these eight exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, fantastical world of wonder, adventure and cruel twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems. This book contains: The Magic Paint, The Death of Marinese, Censorship in Bitinia, Knall, Gladiators, The Fugitive, Bureau of Vital Statistics, and Buffet Dinner. |
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Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father-whom he'd been led to believe was dead-is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group. In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami's debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion. |
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Britain's funniest comic opens up his man drawer to the nation. Imagine you had a deeply eccentric and possessive Hungarian grandmother who played scrabble for money. Or that everyone thinks Kenny Everett's your dad because he picks you up from school, drunk. Or that your mother is convinced you'll be world-famous after a dodgy Tarot reading. Welcome to the bizarre and hilarious life of Michael McIntyre. In this brilliantly written autobiography, Michael reveals the trials, tribulations and the triumphs that have taken him from birth (easy) to Britain's most-loved comic (not so easy). With a joke and witty observation guaranteed on every page, Michael's memoir is the funniest and most-heartwarming read of the year. |
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On 2 March 1998 ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was snatched off the street by a stranger and bundled into a white van. Hours later she found herself in a dark cellar, wrapped in a blanket. When she emerged eight years later, her childhood had gone. In 3,096 Days Natascha tells her incredible story for the first time: her difficult childhood, what exactly happened on the day of her abduction, her imprisonment in a five-square-metre dungeon, and the mental and physical abuse she suffered from her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil. 3,096 Days is ultimately a story about the triumph of the human spirit. It describes how, in a situation of almost unbearable hopelessness, she slowly learned how to manipulate her captor. And how, against inconceivable odds, she managed to escape unbroken. |
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This is a 1959 classic 'hard' science-fiction novel by renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. It tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers — including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr. Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly — engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians. In the pacy, engaging style of John Wyndham and John Christopher, with plenty of hard science thrown in to add to the chillingly credible premise (he manages to foretell Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech converters), Hoyle carries you breathlessly through to its thrilling end. |
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'It seemed to me that the bees were working on the very same kinds of problems we are trying to solve. How can large, diverse groups work together harmoniously and productively? Perhaps we could take what the bees do so well and apply it to our institutions'. When Michael O'Malley first took up beekeeping he thought it would be a nice hobby to share with his son. But he noticed that bees not only work together to achieve a common goal but, in the process, create a remarkably productive organization, like a miniature but incredibly successful business. O'Malley also realized that bees can teach managers a lot, identifying 25 powerful insights such as: Distribute authority — the queen bee delegates relentlessly and worker bees make daily decisions; Keep it simple — bees exchange only relevant information; and, Protect the future — when a lucrative vein of nectar is discovered, the entire colony doesn't rush off to mine it. Blending practical advice with interesting facts about the hive, The Wisdom of Bees is a useful and entertaining guide for any manager looking to get the most out of his or her organization. |
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This brand new edition provides a comprehensive and highly visual introduction to Venice; over 600 superb photographs capture the history, local people and variety of everyday life in Italy's most magical city. The 'Places' section provides a detailed, district-by-district exploration of all the places to visit and principal sites along the way are clearly cross-referenced by number to the full-colour maps found throughout the guide. Expanded and updated restaurant listings feature the best eateries to suit all budgets within each area, providing the address, phone number, opening times and price range, followed by a useful review. A brand new 'Editor's Choice' section illustrates everything you simply can't afford to miss, including lesser-known attractions, family activities and money-saving hints. Expert local writers provide authoritative essays on the city's history along with interesting cultural features. A fully-indexed street atlas enables instant orientation, helping you to navigate around the city with ease and also plots restaurants. The comprehensive 'Travel Tips' section provides all the essential information you'll need for a hassle-free trip, covering accommodation for all budgets, transport, activities and useful booking information, plus a handy A-Z of further practical advice and contact details. The unique combination of insightful exploration alongside practical advice makes this guide a fascinating background read and an invaluable on-the-spot companion. |
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John Taylor just discovered his long-gone mother created the Nightside — the dark heart of London — and intends to destroy it. To save his birthplace, he will have to travel back through a very distant — and probably deadly — past. |
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The author of Peter Rabbit and other tales, Beatrix Potter is still, after a century, beloved by children and adults worldwide. In this first Cottage Tale, Albert introduces Beatrix, an animal lover and Good Samaritan with a knack for solving mysteries. With help from her entourage of talking animal friends, Beatrix sets out to win over the human hearts of Sawrey, where she's just bought an old farm — and plans to stay. |
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Gideon is more than a hit man. In a world of money, violence, women, and love on the run, he's the master of the game. Now Gideon's got the job of a lifetime. The prize is the woman he desires and a cool million. The problem is it's just the kind of hit that can make him more enemies. Like the two beautiful strangers on Gideon's tail. Are they there to protect him or bring him down? There's one way to find out. Follow them into an underworld where killers and victims alike thrive on the darker passions of revenge and desire. |
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