Книги жанра Random House Inc.
Название: The New Shostakovich
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2006
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Who was Dmitri Shostakovich? The USSR's official figurehead composer and son of the revolution that brought the Soviet state into being, or a secret dissident whose contempt for the totalitarian regime was scathing? Perhaps both? Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated into the most rancorous debate the world of classical music has ever known. Ian MacDonald's «The New Shostakovich» presents the case for the dissident view, arguing passionately that the meaning of the composer's music cannot be fully appreciated without a knowledge of the terrible times he and his fellow artists lived through under Soviet Communism. A widely read and critically acclaimed book in the 1990s, this new edition has been comprehensively revised, extensively corrected, and updated with much new material. Whichever side of the debate readers support, «The New Shostakovich» presents them with a viewpoint which cannot be ignored.
Название: The Night Watch
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2007
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Walking the streets of Moscow, indistinguishable from the rest of its population, are the Others. Possessors of supernatural powers and capable of entering the Twilight, a shadowy parallel world existing in parallel to our own, each Other owes allegiance either to the Dark or the Light. The «Night Watch», first book in the «Night Watch» trilogy, follows Anton, a young Other owing allegiance to the Light. As a Night Watch agent he must patrol the streets and metro of the city, protecting ordinary people from the vampires and magicians of the Dark. When he comes across Svetlana, a young woman under a powerful curse, and saves an unfledged Other, Egor, from vampires, he becomes involved in events that threaten the uneasy truce, and the whole city...
Название: Non-Fiction
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2005
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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.
Название: Norwegian Wood
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2001
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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.
Название: Nuns And Soldiers
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2001
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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?
Название: An Orange Revolution
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2006
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In December 2004, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered to defy the results of a transparently rigged presidential election. The charismatic popular candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was disfigured after being poisoned by his opponents. The security forces threatened violent repression. But the demonstrators stayed and, as international pressure grew, the corrupt old regime that had been supported by Putin's Kremlin was deposed. It was the most significant moment for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. «An Orange Revolution» is the gripping account of this historic uprising and the events that led to it. Often in thrall to the Kremlin but aspiring to the liberties of western Europe, Ukraine was treated roughly by the twentieth century, occupied by the Germans and annexed by the Soviets. It saw guerrilla fighting after the Second World War and dissent was crushed by successive Communist administrations. Its history has been one of corruption, power struggles, organised crime, but a resiliently optimistic population. Based on firsthand observation and interviews with major players and anonymous demonstrators alike, this is about a people who have forced a lasting change: judges who defied death threats, a murdered journalist, amateur musicians who composed an anthem for the people, and soldiers who staked their lives to back the opposition. «An Orange Revolution» also traces the story of the author's family, who paid a high price for speaking out. An Orange Revolution is a captivating book about a defining moment in European history.
Название: An Obsession with Butterflies
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2004
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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.
Название: The Ode Less Travelled
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2007
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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.
Название: The Odessa File
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 1995
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The suicide of an elderly German Jew explodes into revelation after revelation: of a Mafia-like organization called «Odessa» ...of a real-life fugitive known as the «Butcher of Riga..»of a young German journalist tumed obsessed avenger... and, ultimately, of brilliant, ruthless plot to reestablish the worldwide power of SS mass murderers and to carry out Hitler's chilling «Final Solution».
Название: The Old Man and the Sea
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 1994
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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.
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2007
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»Vintage Youth» is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of «Oliver Twist» by Charles Dickens and Irvine Welsh's controversial bestseller «Trainspotting.» «Vintage Youth» is just one of ten «Vintage Classic Twins» to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. «Oliver Twist»: Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go. Dickens graphically conjures up the capital's underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves and lost and homeless children, and gives a voice to the disadvantaged and abused. «Trainspotting»: Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food into your mouth; choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.
Название: On Beauty
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2004
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Beauty is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times. In terms of form and style, Beauty has been conceived for a vast and diversified readership: taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich and intelligent panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have sought to define it. Beauty is Umberto Eco at his most captivating and eclectic: we read not only of Botticelli and Michelangelo but of how the fashion of the 1960s owes much to ancient Egyptian dress, and how ancient Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. It makes the familiar new, and sheds a brilliant new light on the unfamiliar. Illustrated in full colour throughout and produced to the highest standards, Beauty is an indispensable book.
Название: On Literature
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2006
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After the opening essay on the general significance of literature, Eco examines a number of major authors from the Western canon. A stimulating chapter on the poetic qualities of Dante's «Paradiso» is followed by one on the style of the Communist Manifesto. The next three essays centre on nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature: one on the French writer Nerval's masterpiece, «Sylvie» (a major influence on Eco and a novella that he translated into Italian), one on Oscar Wilde's love of paradox, and one on Joyce's views on language. The last three pieces deal with the road that leads from Cervantes via Swift to Borges' «Library of Babel», then an essay on Eco's own anxiety about Borges' influence on him, and the volume ends with an article on the enigmatic Italian critic and anthropologist Piero Camporesi. «On Literature» is a provocative and entertaining collection of sprightly essays on the key texts that have shaped Eco, the novelist and critic. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in how new light is shed on old masters by a great contemporary mind.
Название: On Ugliness
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2007
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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!'
Название: Only You Can Save Mankind
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2004
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As the mightly alien fleet from the very latest computer game thunders across the computer screen, Johnny prepares to blow them into the usual million pieces. And they send him a message: We surrender. They're not supposed to do that. They're supposed to die. And computer joysticks don't have 'Don't Fire' buttons... It's hard enough, trying to save Mankind from the Galactic Hordes. It's even harder trying to save the Galactic Hordes from Mankind. But it's only a game, isn't it?
Название: A Painted House
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2001
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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.
Название: The Painted Veil (movie tie-in)
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2007
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'She did not know what to say. She was undecided whether indignantly to assert her innocence or to break out into angry reproaches. He seemed to read her thoughts. «I've got all the proof necessary» '. Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with Charles Townsend, a man whom she finds charming, attractive and exciting. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange but terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera epidemic rages. First published to a storm of protest, «The Painted Veil» is a classic story of a woman's spiritual awakening.
Название: Pandora
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 1999
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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.
Название: The Penis Book
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2006
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Ah, the trusty penis. The cock, knob, widgie, pink python, groin bollard — call it what you will, this is one part of the male anatomy that never ceases to provide endless fascination, and frequently mirth. Half the population have one, and the other half, so Freud would have us believe, would like to. And yet still our flaccid friend is so often misunderstood. The «Penis Book» seeks to redress the balance, exposing all (quite literally) there is to know about the honourable member. Throbbing with facts, figures, photos and illustrations, the book leaves no foreskin unturned in its quest to bring you the low-down on its subject. Told with wit, vim and lashings of wicked humour, even the most prudish won't be able to resist raising a smile (and perhaps something else). The «Penis Book» is a celebration of the male member in all its purple-helmeted glory. So whether you're male or female, straight or gay, you'll find something in here to titilate and stimulate.
Название: Pete Doherty
Жанр: Random House Inc.
Год: 2007
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Pete Doherty, erstwhile singer with The Libertines, is a British icon. Whether he is playing impromptu gigs in his front room or performing at Live 8, he possesses a sense of drama and expectation not seen in a performer since Sid Vicious. He is enigmatic, charismatic and thoroughly entertaining. Since leaving The Libertines, his life has become something of a rock 'n' roll soap opera where rumours of crack addiction abound, gossip about his relationship with Kate Moss is rife, and predictions for his future vary wildly. Written by Alex Hannaford, former rock and pop editor on the «London Evening Standard», and with a brand new foreword by Pete's mum, Jackie Doherty, this is the definitive biography of Pete Doherty.
