![]() ![]() Her beloved adopted son Matteo has been kidnapped and is in danger once more. And now, with A Trial in Venice, set five years later, Hannah is forced back to Venice-both to opulent yet crumbling villas and the Jewish ghetto known as Veneto. Roberta Rich followed that action-packed adventure with The Harem Midwife, which exiled Hannah and her beloved husband Isaac to Constantinople-only for Hannah to become enmeshed in the shady politics of a sultan's harem. In The Midwife of Venice, set in 1575, Hannah Levi was forced to flee Venice with the baby of a Venetian aristocratic family whom she rescued. The thrilling conclusion to the #1 national bestselling historical trilogy by Roberta Rich. ![]()
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![]() We wanted to be part of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who formed in Paris in the 60s.' ![]() 'The weather was palindromic on the day we tried to infiltrate experimental French literature. Similarly, in the introduction to the poem,‘This is Crispin’, we get a parody of pretension that is hard to miss: Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, for instance), is premised on a calculating and self-conscious ‘cleverness’ that makes the piece cringe-worthy to read. The speaker (named Joe in this poem, as if to leave no doubt) gradually reveals his apparent spontaneity (the gifting of W.G. In a slightly different manner, ‘A sestina for my friends’ sends up the pretensions and potential pomposity of the poet. It makes you feel terribly helpless really, At the same time ‘Eating Out’ undercuts any sense of self-righteousness by satirising the middle-class complacency of the speaker:Ī big steel cage in the alley out the back, ![]() His earliest pieces, such as ‘Intelligent Animals’ (a poem written for Liberty about the treatment of terrorist suspects) and ‘Eating Out’ (a poem about food, excess and waste), display a strong social conscience. ![]() ![]() Oliver, the obnoxious anti-hero of Joe Dunthorne’s debut novel, is nothing if not a lover of words, and Dunthorne himself is essentially a poet. ![]() ![]() He fantasises that even if a girlfriend "went into labour at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. Nick Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year-the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. Fever Pitch is both an autobiography and a footballing bible rolled into one. ![]() ![]() ![]() Alexandra and Sukie both learn that Jenny's brother, Christopher (who had also been Van Horne's lover) killed Jane using methods involving electrons and quantum physics he learned from Van Horne. While conducting a white magic spell at their rented condominium (part of Van Horne's old mansion), Jane, who had earlier been complaining of odd electric shocks, suddenly dies of an aneurysm of the aorta. ![]() After touring the Canadian Rockies (Alexandra), Egypt (Alexandra and Jane) and China (all three), they agree to revisit Eastwick, largely out of unspoken guilt for their role in Jenny's death. ![]() They begin to restore their friendship as they one by one become widowed, which is implied to be the work of Jane, the most aggressive of the witches and who had pushed for the death of their romantic rival, Jenny Gabriel, who died of metastasized ovarian cancer shortly after her marriage to Van Horne. All three women had remarried, left Eastwick and gradually fallen out of touch. Thirty years have passed since Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart and Sukie Rougemont terrorized the Rhode Island town of Eastwick with their witchcraft and cavorted with Darryl Van Horne, possibly the devil. First published in 2008, it is a sequel to his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. The Widows of Eastwick is the final novel by John Updike, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning "Rabbit" series. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. ![]() ![]() Keyes skilfully peels back the layers of Cara’s insecurities about food, about her bodyĪt the beginning of the novel, Cara, a receptionist at an upmarket hotel, is told by a guest that she is “a fat bitch”. ![]() Her ambivalent relationship with money is expressed in a needy compulsion to share her wealth with the wider family – generosity that borders on ostentation and yet signals a subtle attempt to control those around her, to position herself in the role of provider, while asserting her professional success. Tensions become apparent: Johnny feels emasculated Jessie suffers guilt about her superior financial position. Jessie is the successful owner of a grocery company, employing her husband, Johnny, who works alongside her. The key theme here is addiction in its various guises: to shopping, to food, to status and money. Over the past 20 years, Marian Keyes has built a reputation for breezy fiction that also tackles difficult and, at times, controversial subjects, and Grown Ups is no exception. But beneath the surface, resentments fester and when Cara attends a family dinner after suffering from concussion, secrets emerge that threaten to expose the weakness of the threads that bind them. ![]() ![]() Brothers Johnny, Ed and Liam seem close in spite of their different personalities, while their wives – Jessie, Cara and Nell – appear to get along well. T he Caseys are a sprawling Irish family who gather at every possible opportunity: anniversaries, birthdays and holidays. ![]() ![]() And I have my gallery In Washington and responsibilities at home to consider." I don't want to turn into the sort of woman my mother was, dependent and little more than an ornament. And we have some problems, primarily over his tendency to be smothering and overprotective. Our backgrounds are just about as far apart as two can be. He's asked me to marry him."Īnne fiddled with her spoon, tracing the design of the silver handle while she examined her feelings. He's generous and fun and stimulating, but he can be the most stubborn, overbearing, infuriating-" He makes me laugh and he makes me feel sexy. For all his macho swaggering, he's the most caring person I've ever known. "Sometimes I'm sure I am, and other times I don't know. ![]() Is that Spider's doing? Are you in love with him?" ![]() Not just your appearance-which I like, by the way-but you've got a new spark to your personality. Popping a slice of orange into her mouth, Vicki eyed her closely. Over breakfast, Anne told her friend about Spider, leaving out most of the delicious details. ![]() ![]() How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today's kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology-and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() To end this post in a happy note (besides the rating), what can you say about this book? Nothing, you can only whisper. Every Romanian carried a world inside them, and mine had quickly gone from dark to black.įollow the last couple of months before the communist regime ended in Romania (officially, at least) through the eyes of a teenager in need of expressing himself. He has to whisper, he has to write, he has to not trust anyone. He looks at his surrounding and knows-knows that life shouldn’t be this way, soundless, cold, filled with fear, only that he can’t say it aloud. Cristian Florescu, a high school student during the communist years of Romania, is the one to catch her attention this time. Like in her other novels, Sepetys focuses on teenagers and on an important moment of their life. Again, not that it changed anything really, only impressed me more. A gut-wrenching, startling historical thriller about communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the 1 New. It didn’t actually change the reading experience, but it did make me see everything in a new light and perhaps appreciate her writing even more. As a writer of historical fiction, Sepetys’ greatest strength is her dedication to research. ![]() Months of caution and paranoia cascade into a frightening series of bloody protests. Much of the book unfolds slowly, creating a foreboding sense of rising tension, until the dam suddenly breaks. Probably my favorite fun fact about an author, but Ruta Sepetys is a Lithuanian American whose father was refugee. The novel is a master class in pacing and atmosphere. ![]() ![]() ![]() Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town her weakling husband and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. The novel’s characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. ![]() Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find – music, cosmology, fascism. ![]() A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s magisterial novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. ![]() You can read this before The Melancholy of Resistance PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.Ī powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. Here is a quick description and cover image of book The Melancholy of Resistance written by Laszlo Krasznahorkai which was published in 1989–. Brief Summary of Book: The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai ![]() |