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Книги издательства «Random House, Inc.»
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«Chuck Palahniuk's world has been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise «Non-Fiction» prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer — each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.» |
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When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire — to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. |
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Gertrude has lost her husband and Anne, an ex-nun, her God. They plan to live together and do good works. Tim is a different sort of soldier. He plans to live off rich friends. Who will judge whom in this story? |
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«This work tells the story of man's fascination with butterflies, as symbols, as objects of beauty, and of obsession — in the tradition of Susan Orlean's «The Orchid Thief». From Hindu mythology to Aztec sacrifices, butterflies have served as a metaphor for resurrection and transformation. Even during World War II, children in a Polish death camp scratched hundreds of butterflies onto the wall of their barracks. But as Sharman Apt Russell points out in this rich and lyrical meditation, butterflies have above all been objects of obsession. From the beastly horned caterpillar whose blood helps it count time, to the peacock butterfly with wings that hiss like a snake, Russell traces butterflies through their life cycles, exploring the creatures' own obsessions with eating, mating, and migrating. She reveals the logic behind our endless fascination with butterflies as well as the driving passion of such legendary collectors as the tragic Eleanor Glanville, whose children declared her mad because of her compulsive butterfly collecting, and the brilliant Henry Walter Bates, whose collections from the Amazon in 1858 helped develop his theory of mimicry in nature. Russell also takes us inside some of the world's most prestigious natural history museums, where scientists painstakingly catalogue and categorize new species of Lepidoptera, hoping to shed light on insect genetics and evolution. «An Obsession with Butterflies» is a luminous journey through an exotic world of strange beauty; a book to be treasured by anyone who's ever watched a butterfly mid-flight.» |
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«Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that Anything Goes. Stephen, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms. Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday, an epithalamion for your sister's wedding or a villanelle excoriating the government's housing policy, The Ode Less Travelled will give you the tools and the confidence to do so. Brimful of enjoyable exercises, witty insights and simple step-by-step advice, «The Ode Less Travelled» guides the reader towards mastery and confidence in the Mother of the Arts.» |
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Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. It was The Old Man and the Sea that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives. |
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«This book is the follow up to the previous volume, «On Beauty». Apparently beauty and ugliness are concepts that imply each other, and by ugliness we usually mean the opposite of beauty, so all we need do is define the first to understand the nature of the second. But the various manifestations of ugliness over the centuries are richer and more unpredictable than is commonly thought. The anthological quotations and the extraordinary illustrations in this book lead us on a surprising journey among the nightmares, terrors, and loves of almost three thousand years, where acts of rejection go hand in hand with touching gestures of compassion, and the rejection of deformity is accompanied by decadent ecstasies over the most seductive violations of all classical canons.Among demons, madmen, horrible enemies, and disquieting presences, among horrid abysses and deformities that verge on the sublime, among freaks and the living dead, we discover a vast and often unsuspected iconographic vein. So much so that, on gradually encountering in these pages the ugliness of nature, spiritual ugliness, asymmetry, disharmony, disfigurement, and the succession of things sordid, weak, vile, banal, random, arbitrary, coarse, repugnant, clumsy, horrendous, vacuous, nauseating, criminal, spectral, witchlike, satanic, repellent, disgusting, unpleasant, grotesque, abominable, odious, crude, foul, dirty, obscene, frightening, abject, monstrous, hair-raising, ugly, terrible, terrifying, revolting, repulsive, loathsome, fetid, ignoble, awkward, ghastly and indecent, the first foreign publisher to see this book exclaimed: 'How beautiful ugliness is!'» |
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«The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a «good crop». Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks, they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven year old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever. «A Painted House» is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience.» |
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«In this first of a series, David Talbot, vampire survivor of «Memnoch the Devil», calls forth Pandora, last seen in «Queen of the Damned», to tell her own extraordinary tale. Once a mortal girl in ancient Rome, she was given immortality by Marius, her lover and the dark genius of the Lestat novels.» |
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Ten years on from Trainspotting, Simon 'Sick Boy' Williamson is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity, which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realize his dream of directing and producing a pornographic movie, Sick Boy must team up with old pal and fellow exile Mark Renton and a motley crew that includes the city's favourite ex-aerated-water-salesman, 'Juice' Terry Lawson. In the world of Porno, however, nothing is straightforward, as Sick Boy and Renton find out that they have unresolved issues to address, concerning the increasingly unhinged Frank Begbie, the troubled, drug-addled Spud, but, most of all, with each other. |
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«Former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, named Prime Minister of Russia in 1999 and, one year later, President, has been something of a media darling in the West, having successfully marketed himself as an enlightened leader with both feet planted firmly on the Eastern borders of Europe. Anti-establishment journalist and human-rights activist Anna Politkovskaya disagrees strenuously with this point of view. In her new book, she trains her steely gaze on, as she puts at, Putin «without the rapture». From her privileged vantage-point at the heart of Russian current affairs, Politkovskaya reports from behind the scenes, dismantling both Putin the man and Putin the brand name, arguing that he is a power-hungry product of his own history in the security forces and so unable to prevent himself from stifling dissent and other civil liberties at every turn. After centuries of living under tyrants, Politkovskaya argues, this is not what contemporary Russians want. The book is, however, not simply a biography or an analysis of Putin's presidency. Politkovskaya's writing is known for its humanity and its passion, and her focus is on individual human beings and their stories. As she puts it, «my book is jottings made on the margins of life in Russia. For the time being, I cannot analyse that existence. I'm just living and noting what I see». So her readers are treated to expos-s of mafia dealings and scandals in the provinces, of corruption in the military and the judiciary, of the decline of the dissident intelligentsia and concomitant rise of street traders, and of the truth behind the Moscow theatre siege. Other shocking stories fill out an intimate portrait of nascent civil institutions being subverted under the unquestioning eyes of the West.» |
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Set in Reformation Europe, Q begins with Luther's nailing of his 95 theses on the door of the cathedral church in Wittenberg and traces the adventures and conflicts of two central characters, an Anabaptist, a member of the most radical of the Protestant sects, the anarchists of the Reformation, and a Catholic spy and informer, as they travel across Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The four young writers who shelter behind the pseudonym Luther Blissett have created a world of intrigue, violence and intense political and religious passion. Far from the traditional historical novel, Q is the stuff of which cults are made. |
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Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as he intervenes he wonders why: for the sake of politics, or for love? |
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Tom Ripley detests murder — unless it is absolutely necessary. If possible he prefers someone else to do the dirty work; in this case, a victim of a fatal disease, with no criminal record, who will murder for a reward, in order to provide for his young widow and child. |
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«On the 45th floor of the Matsumoto Tower in LA, the headquarters of the Japanese Electronics Corporation, celebrities from the film and music world mix with the captains of industry and politics. On the 46th floor, the dead body of a young woman is discovered. By the author of «Jurassic Park».» |
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Greeks living in Germany who speak Italian because they run a pizzeria; Katka, whose mescalin cactus enables her to separate body and mind, with the result that they check in a psychiatric clinic together; Klaus who tries to broaden his vocabulary with the help of a radio programme, Russian for Children, and promptly ends up in jail on his first visit to Moscow; contract killers on the trams; bodies in the basement; lunatics on the road: welcome to the wonderfully absurd world of Wladimir Kaminer. Kaminer moved from Moscow to Berlin ten years ago in a lucky wave of emigration, hoping for a better life and an apartment of his own. But, he found much more: a country adrift in the extraordinary flux of reunification and a city that was casting a spell on artists, drifters, losers and hopeless idealists. Of his encounters with these people, Kaminer makes unforgettable tales of compassion and humour. And in relating the singulary offbeat encounters of his own life, he manages to capture something universal about our disjointed times. |
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In this vast and gorgeous tapestry of a novel, serf and master, Cossack and tsar, priest and Jew are brought together in a family saga which unrolls through centuries of history to reveal that most impenetrable and mysterious of lands...Russia. Through the life of a little town east of Moscow in the Russian heartland, Edward Rutherfurd creates a sweeping family saga from the baffling contradictions of Russia's culture and her people — bleak yet exotic, brutal but romantic, land of ritual yet riddled with superstitious fears. From Russia's dawn and the cruel Tartar invasions to Ivan the Terrible and the wild Cossacks, from Peter, Catherine and the days of 'War and Peace' to the drama of the Revolution and the extraordinary events of today — here is Russia's story in a spellbinding novel...history recreated with breathtaking detail and passion. |
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«No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's «The Satanic Verses», which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta («for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies») and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.» |
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«Death stalks the city of angels...Jimmy Gage, a reporter for «SLAP» magazine, stumbles on an explosive story while interviewing Garrett Walsh, an Oscar-winning Hollywood director who has just finished serving time for the murder of a teenage actress. Walsh swears he's not guilty and tells Gage he's written a movie about what really happened — «The Most Dangerous Screenplay in Hollywood». Gage is sceptical, but when Walsh turns up dead — and the screenplay missing — he goes to work to find out the truth.» |
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Peter Ackroyd's marvellous biography is a living attempt to reach into the heart of Shakespeare. He creates an intimate and immediate connection with his subject, so that the book reads like the work of a contemporary — meeting Shakespeare afresh on his own ground. Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, this is a book by a writer about a writer, and a fascinating and detailed depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited. |
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