A young woman named Calista meets the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder in the sweltering summer of 1976. She knows nothing about him or his work, but this chance encounter will change her life for good. But while Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself - struggling to raise the money for his next feature film - is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. In his new novel that is, by turns, funny, tender and profoundly truthful, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze to the nature of time, fame, family and nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go?
Otto Biersma Poradie kníh (chronologicky)






On The Move: A Life
- 397 stránok
- 14 hodin čítania
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.' It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks' earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels - sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents. With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions - bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming - also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists - A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Francis Crick - who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer - and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human
The inspiring story of a son and his dying mother, who form a "book club" that brings them together as her life comes to a close.
Matterhorn
- 736 stránok
- 26 hodin čítania
Thirty years in the making, this towering, critically-acclaimed and huge international bestseller is now available in paperback.
From the Publisher: Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency. His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell.
Man Gone Down
- 431 stránok
- 16 hodin čítania
Winner of the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. One of the Ten Best Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review 'Vivid, graphic and poignant' Washington Post 'Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success' New York Times Book Review '[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas's urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine' O' the Oprah Magazine On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.
The gargoyle
- 501 stránok
- 18 hodin čítania
A young man is fighting for his life.Into his room walks a bewitching woman who believes she can save him.Their journey will have you believing in the impossible.The nameless and beautiful narrator of The Gargoyle is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and wakes up in a burns ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned. His life is over he is now a monster.But in fact it is only just beginning. One day, Marianne Engel, a wild and compelling sculptress of gargoyles, enters his life and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly burned mercenary and she was a nun and a scribe who nursed him back to health in the famed monastery of Engelthal. As she spins her tale, Scheherazade fashion, and relates equally mesmerising stories of deathless love in Japan, Greenland, Italy and England, he finds himself drawn back to life and, finally, to love.
Vybrané okruhy z mechaniky pohrôm
- 472 stránok
- 17 hodin čítania
Debutový román mladej talentovanej Američanky vyvolal už v čase svojho vydania nezvyčajný rozruch a kritika označila autorku za zázračné dieťa súčasnej americkej literárnej scény. Svoju povesť potvrdila krimi románom Nočný film. Blue van Meerová má rada literatúru a zbožňuje záhady. Niekoľko temných hádaniek jej do cesty privial aj samotný život: jej matka tragicky zahynula od jej smrti kočujú od jednej školy k druhej s otcom, univerzitným profesorom a notorickým sukničkárom, a keď konečne na rok zakotvia na prestížnej súkromnej škole St. Gallway, Blue sa stane členkou elitného študentského spolku, čo vedie profesorka filmovej vedy, ktorej život a aj desivú smrť opriadajú mnohé nezodpovedané otázky.

