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John Irving

    March 2, 1942

    John Irving is a master storyteller, crafting sprawling, epic narratives that delve into themes of fate, coincidence, and complex family dynamics. His prose is celebrated for its rich texture, dark humor, and unexpected twists that immerse readers in worlds both bizarre and profoundly human. Irving expertly weaves disparate elements, such as wrestling motifs and tragic events, into cohesive tales that explore human resilience in the face of life's unpredictability. His works possess a unique charm, examining deep questions of human existence through unforgettable characters and unconventional plots.

    John Irving
    Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good
    A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
    The world according to Garp
    Mozart
    A son of the circus
    The Cider House rules
    • The Cider House rules

      • 736 pages
      • 26 hours of reading

      'The reason Homer Wells kept his name was that he came back to St Cloud's so many times, after so many failed foster homes, that the orphanage was forced to acknowledge Homer's intention to make St Cloud's his home.' Homer Wells' odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to an adult life running a cider-making factory and a strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend...

      The Cider House rules
      4.6
    • A son of the circus

      • 832 pages
      • 30 hours of reading

      Born a Parsi in Bombay, sent to university and medical school in Vienna, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen - a 59-year-old orthopedic surgeon, living in Toronto. Periodically, the doctor returns to India; in Bombay, most of his patients are crippled children. Once, twenty years ago, Dr Daruwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, twenty years later, the doctor will be reacquainted with the murderer.

      A son of the circus
      4.3
    • Mozart

      The 'Haydn' Quartets

      • 116 pages
      • 5 hours of reading

      Focusing on Mozart's renowned string quartets, this guide highlights the composer's deep friendship with Joseph Haydn, who greatly influenced his work. It explores the musical intricacies and emotional depth of these quartets, offering insights into their historical context and significance. The book serves as both an analysis and appreciation of Mozart's contributions to chamber music, making it a valuable resource for music enthusiasts and scholars alike.

      Mozart
      4.2
    • Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good

      • 200 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      Surgically, but with wit Francesco Filippi demolishes each and every myth that has taken root about Mussolini and fascism in an uplifting handbook for political and intellectual self-defense. No stones are left unturned, including the colonial devastation of Libya and Ethiopia.

      Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good
      3.8
    • This collection features the first three novels of this highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author. Compassionate, satirical, deeply insightful and humorous, these compelling novels have gained him millions of fans. Setting Free the Bears : Siggy and Hannes were disenchanted students and fellow conspirators. Astride a 700cc royal Enfield motorcycle, they roamed the Austrian countryside. When Gallen, a lovely hitchhiker, joined them, they zeroed in on the Vienna Zoo--and Siggy's setting free the bears! The Water-Method Man : The acclaimed second novel by the author of the #1 international bestseller, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Fred "Bogus" Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, he stubbornly clings to the notion he'll make something of his life. The 158 Pound Marriage : Sometimes they looked at each other, aroused half out of their minds by the thought that each had just been making love with another, and it would be enough to make them want to do it--together--all over again. Well, almost enough.

      Setting Free The Bears / The Water-Method Man / The 158-Pound Marriage
      3.9
    • Last Night in Twisted River

      • 554 pages
      • 20 hours of reading

      In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County-to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto-pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. A tale that spans five decades.

      Last Night in Twisted River
      3.8
    • ""The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.""So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of "A Widow for One Year" and "The Cider House Rules."

      The Hotel New Hampshire
      3.8
    • John Irving hat sie als seine liebste Geschichte bezeichnet: Ein Mann, der auf den Händen geht, ein Bär auf einem Einrad – das sind nur zwei der Seltsamkeiten, die dem Hotelinspektor begegnen, der zusammen mit seiner Familie in der Pension Grillparzer, Wien, Ecke Planken- und Seilergasse absteigt, um zu prüfen, ob sie eine höhere Klassifikation verdient. Dem Irving-Leser sind sie vertraut: Die kurze Erzählung 'The Pension Grillparzer', 1976 erschienen und später in 'The World According to Garp' eingebaut, enthält Irvings ganzen erzählerischen Kosmos in nuce, ist verrückt, skurril, phantastisch und damit bester Irving für Einsteiger. Beigegeben sind Irvings 'notes' zu seiner Story.

      The pension Grillparzer
      3.7
    • In One Person

      • 425 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      Billy, a solitary bisexual man, is dedicated to making himself worthwhile.

      In One Person
      3.7
    • A Widow for One Year

      • 542 pages
      • 19 hours of reading

      Twenty years after The World According to Gary, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy and the "difficult" women who survive. --back cover

      A Widow for One Year
      3.7
    • Until I Find You

      • 844 pages
      • 30 hours of reading

      The story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships with older women. John Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.

      Until I Find You
      3.7
    • The Water-Method Man

      • 384 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first.... "Three or four times as funny as most novels." THE NEW YORKER

      The Water-Method Man
      3.6
    • The Imaginary Girlfriend

      • 192 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      "The Imaginary Girlfriend is a candid memoir of the writers and wrestlers who played a role in John Irving's development as a novelist and as a wrestler"--Publisher's description

      The Imaginary Girlfriend
      3.4
    • Trying to save piggy sneed

      • 220 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      In a spirited opening piece, John Irving explains how he became a writer. There follow six scintillating stories written over the past twenty years, inlcuding The Pension Grillparzer, previously only to be found inside The World According to Garp, and now given its first independent airing.

      Trying to save piggy sneed
      3.4
    • All That Is

      • 369 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      NATIONAL BESTSELLER A New York Times Book Review Notable Book An NPR "Great Reads" Book All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. Philip Bowman returns to America from the battlefields of Okinawa and finds success in the competetive world of publishing in postwar New York—yet what he most desires, and what eludes him, is love. Here is PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter's dazzling, sometimes devastating portrait of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.

      All That Is
      3.4
    • My Movie Business

      • 192 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      After two producers, four directors, thirteen years, and uncounted rewrites, the movie version of John Irving's acclaimed novel, The Cider House Rules, at last made it to the big screen. Here is the author's account of the novel-to- film process. Anecdotal, affectionate, and delightfully candid, My Movie Business dazzles with Irving's incomparable wit and style. schovat popis

      My Movie Business
      3.4
    • The Fourth Hand

      • 334 pages
      • 12 hours of reading

      While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the reporter her husband's hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is very much alive.

      The Fourth Hand
      3.4
    • Setting Free the Bears

      • 352 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five year old John Irving, already a master storyteller.

      Setting Free the Bears
      3.4
    • John Irving, one of the world's greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years -- a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren't the first or the last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time -- among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

      The last chairlift
      3.3
    • "As we grow older--most of all, in what we remember and what we dream--we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. "An aura of fate had marked him," John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. "The chain of events, the links in our lives--what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do--all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious." Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past--in Mexico--collides with his future"--

      Avenue of Mysteries. Straße der Wunder, englische Ausgabe
      3.2
    • Because of Mr. terupt

      • 336 pages
      • 12 hours of reading

      Seven students are about to have their lives changed by one amazing teacher in this school story sequel filled with unique characters every reader can relate to. It’s the start of a new year at Snow Hill School, and seven students find themselves thrown together in Mr. Terupt’s fifth grade class. There’s . . . Jessica, the new girl, smart and perceptive, who’s having a hard time fitting in; Alexia, a bully, your friend one second, your enemy the next; Peter, class prankster and troublemaker; Luke, the brain; Danielle, who never stands up for herself; shy Anna, whose home situation makes her an outcast; and Jeffrey, who hates school. They don’t have much in common, and they’ve never gotten along. Not until a certain new teacher arrives and helps them to find strength inside themselves—and in each other. But when Mr. Terupt suffers a terrible accident, will his students be able to remember the lessons he taught them? Or will their lives go back to the way they were before—before fifth grade and before Mr. Terupt? Find out what happens in sixth and seventh grades in Mr. Terupt Falls Again and Saving Mr. Terupt. And don't miss the conclusion to the series, Goodbye, Mr. Terupt, coming soon! "The characters are authentic and the short chapters are skillfully arranged to keep readers moving headlong toward the satisfying conclusion."--School Library Journal, Starred

      Because of Mr. terupt
      4.4
    • Die blaurote Luftmatratze

      • 285 pages
      • 10 hours of reading

      15 berühmte Schriftsteller erzählen ein sommerliches Ferienstück, in dem - so die einzige Bedingung - eine blaurote Luftmatratze vorkommen muss. Illustriert von internationalen Starzeichnern stellt sich beim Lesen dieses Buches unweigerlich ein Gefühl von Sommer-Sonne-blauer-Himmel ein. Man wähnt sich schmökernd auf einer sanft schaukelnden Luftmatratze. Einer blauroten, versteht sich.

      Die blaurote Luftmatratze
      5.0
    • Ferienlesebuch

      • 380 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      Das Buch, das eine ganze Reisebibliothek ersetzt und noch in jeden Koffer passt. Das Ferienlesebuch 2004 mit vergnüglichen und spannenden Erzählungen großer Autorinnen und Autoren. Mit wasserfester Schutzhülle.

      Ferienlesebuch
      4.5
    • John Irving über Günter Grass und Elisabeth Mann Borgese, über Marcel Reich-Ranicki und Hunde, die Klavier spielen können. Ein Stimmungsbericht über das Deutschland der neunziger Jahre.

      Deutschlandreise
      3.9
    • Die Jubiläums-Edition: 12 erfolgreiche Diogenes Bücher in einmaliger Ausstattung zum einmaligen Preis zum Start des Jubiläums am 1. Juni 2002. Alfred Andersch: Der Vater eines Mörders. Paulo Coelho: Der Dämon und Fräulein Prym. Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Labyrinth / Turmbau. Stoffe I-IX. Patricia Highsmith: Der süße Wahn. John Irving: Gottes Werk und Teufels Beitrag. Donna Leon: Venezianisches Finale Ingrid Noll: Der Hahn ist tot. Bernhard Schlink: Der Vorleser Georges Simenon: Der Mann, der den Zügen nachsah. Patrick Süskind: Das Parfum. Andrzej Szczypiorski: Die schöne Frau Seidenman. Urs Widmer: Der Geliebte der Mutter.

      Jubiläums- Edition in 12 Bänden