Anni ’30 del secolo scorso. In un paese dell’Alabama l’avvocato Atticus Finch è incaricato della difesa di un afroamericano accusato di aver stuprato una ragazza bianca. è Scout, la figlia di Atticus, l’indimenticabile voce narrante della vicenda, a mostrarci il duro pregiudizio razzista e la battaglia di un uomo per salvare un innocente. Il capolavoro della letteratura americana, vincitore del premio Pulitzer e della Medaglia presidenziale della libertà.
Il destino di scrittore di Budd Schulberg si intreccia con una scabra epopea dell’America amara. Figlio del tycoon della Paramount e prediletto di Hollywood, ha dato vita a capolavori come Il colosso d’argilla e Fronte del porto, ma è anche un comunista colpito dal maccartismo. Spesso ha scelto Hollywood come osservatorio ideale, esplorando i retrobottega degli studios, simboli di una leggenda americana frenetica e impietosa. In questo contesto, Schulberg ha dedicato due romanzi a questa dualità. Il primo, Perché corre Sammy?, narra la nascita della leggenda attraverso un piccolo fattorino ebreo che diventa un potente produttore, sacrificando la sua umanità per l’ambizione. Il secondo, I disincantati, esplora la morte di una leggenda. Qui, un grande scrittore dimenticato, travolto dalla crisi del ’29, si lascia umiliare in un ultimo misero lavoro da sceneggiatore. L’opera di Schulberg è intrisa di autobiografia, e I disincantati è segnato dall’incontro reale con Francis Scott Fitzgerald, osservato mentre si consuma. Nel 1939, un produttore avverte Schulberg che Fitzgerald sta lavorando sulla sua sceneggiatura, rivelando che la leggenda è ancora viva, ma in una condizione di decadimento.
The tragic impact of the Vietnam War on a relationship between father and daughter. The father is an upstanding individual who believes in the American Dream, but his daughter has a different dream, to get America out of Vietnam and she kills innocent people to achieve it. For the father it is the end of the world, he has lost his daughter. By the author of Sabbath's Theater
Hailed in the US as a Native-American To Kill A Mockingbird, and winner of the
US National Book Award, The Round House is Louise Erdrich's undeniable - and
unmissable - masterpiece.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. Days later, the night before New Year's Eve, John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. This is a portrait of marriage, and life, in good times and bad.
From one of the best writers in American literature, a classic novel about smuggling, intrigue, and love. To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. By turns funny and tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not is literary high adventure at its finest.
Sillitoe's portrayal of the mind of an incorrigible rebel. By the author of "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning", "Snowstop", "The Open Door", "Life Goes On", "The Storyteller" and "Last Loves".
Ruben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings. He has been obliged to take early retirement from his job as a librarian due to 'rationalisation' and the new political realities of South Africa. His wife has died. One of his sons has settled in Australia, the other is about to emigrate to Canada while trying to persuade Ruben that it is too dangerous to remain. The only constants are his old family home, haunted by the ghost of a young slave woman; and his housekeeper, Magrieta, with whom he has a shared history that goes back more than half his life.When Tessa Butler comes out of the rain one night in response to an advertisement for a lodger, Ruben is captivated by her. She restores passion to his life, but brings with her a turbulent past.
When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth. As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear. Over a disturbed and confusing dinner, Nathan gleans snippets of Amy's haunting Jewish background, and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusions...
Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, T
Returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple.
Spiral down dimly lit streets lined with madmen and their black deeds, through cold twists of catacombs, and across a sea that strikes with tight, angry fists. From the tortured mind of Edgar Allan Poe, three tales--"The Cask of Amontillado, " "The Black Cat, " and "The Fall of the House of Usher"--speak to the hidden places within us all.
Damage is the gripping story of a man’s desperate obsession and scandalous love affair. He is a man who appears to have everything: wealth, a beautiful wife and children, and a prestigious political career in Parliament. But his life lacks passion, and his aching emptiness drives him to an all-consuming, and ultimately catastrophic, relationship with his son’s fiancée. Chilling and brilliant, Damage is a masterpiece—a daring look at the dangers of obsession and the depth of its shattering consequences.
The bestselling author of "A Perfect Spy" epitomizes and transcends the spy novel genre to present a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in Europe.
Englische Lektüre ab dem 7. Lernjahr. Buch mit Vokabelbeilage
491 pages
18 hours of reading
The Circle ist das weltweit größte Internet Unternehmen – Google, Facebook, Apple und Twitter, alles in einem – und auf dem Weg, ein alles überwachendes Netz zu erschaffen. In dieses Unternehmen steigt die 24jährige Mae ein und lernt nach und nach die Machenschaften ihres Arbeitgebers kennen.
David, white-haired & over 60, is a TV culture critic & lecturer at a New York college. He meets Consuela, a 24-year-old student, daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who puts his life into erotic disorder & haunts him for the next eight years.
In this wise and dazzling work of fiction, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow writes comically and tragically about the tenacity of first love. ""The Actual" (is) the ultimate springtime story".--"San Francisco Chronicle Book Review".
From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch - `Scout' - returns home from New York City to visit her ageing father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past - a journey that can be guided only by one's own conscience. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humour and effortless precision - a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to a classic.
Un episodio di guerriglia durante la guerra civile spagnola, un ponte che deve essere fatto saltare, un piccolo gruppo di partigiani uniti dall'unica speranza che "un giorno ogni pericolo sia vinto e il paese sia un posto dove si vive bene"; in mezzo a tutto questo, Robert Jordan, il dinamitardo, l'inglés giunto da Madrid per organizzare la distruzione del ponte. Robert è un irregolare nell'esercito repubblicano, un intellettuale votato a una causa che, tra mille dubbi, egli sente non meno sua degli altri: perché al di là di ogni errore e di ogni violenza ci sia pace e libertà per tutti.
