Engelstalig

"Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!." Henry David Thoreau built his small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the next two years, he lived there as simply as possible, learning to eliminate the unnecessary material and spiritual details that intrude upon human happiness. Thoreau described his experiences in Walden, using vivid, forceful prose that transforms his reflections on nature into richly evocative metaphors. In a world obsessed with technology and luxury, this American classic about seeking "the essential facts of life" seems more relevant today than ever. This beautiful, fully illustrated edition of Walden brings a rarely seen visual and artistic dimension to Thoreau's philosophical masterpiece.

An epic adventure: from the Vikings to the Enlightenment, from barbaric outpost to global hub, this book tells the dazzling history of northern Europe's transformation by sea.

'Pye writes like a dream. Magnificent' Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps
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This is a story of saints and spies, of anglers and pirates, traders and marauders - and of how their wild and daring journeys across the North Sea built the world we know.

When the Roman Empire retreated, northern Europe was a barbarian outpost at the very edge of everything. A thousand years later, it was the heart of global empires and the home of science, art, enlightenment and money. We owe this transformation to the tides and storms of the North Sea.

Boats carried food and raw materials, but also new ideas and information. The seafarers raided, ruined and killed, but they also settled and coupled. With them they brought new tastes and technologies - books, science, clothes, paintings and machines. Drawing on an astonishing breadth of learning and packed with human stories and revelations, this is the epic drama of how we came to be who we are.
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'A closely-researched and fascinating characterisation of the richness of life and the underestimated interconnections of the peoples all around the medieval and early modern North Sea' Chris Wickham, author of The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000

'Elegant writing and extraordinary scholarship . . . Miraculous' Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of Periodic Tales and Anatomies

'Bristling, wide-ranged and big-themed . . . at its most meaningful, history involves a good deal of art and storytelling. Pye's book is full of both' Russell Shorto, New York Times

'For anyone, like this reviewer, who is tired of medieval history as a chronicle of kings and kingdoms, knights and ladies, monks and heretics, The Edge of the World provides a welcome respite' Prof Patrick J Geary, Wall Street Journal

KING Yes. I shall release you - SAKUNTALA When? KING When? When, like a bee, I kiss the bud of your unbruised lip And flood my thirsting mouth with nectar. Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, their separation by a curse, and eventual reunion, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to certain types of mystical experience. The pioneering English translation of Sakuntala in 1789 caused a sensation among European composers and writers (including Goethe), and it continues to be performed around the world. This vibrant new verse translation includes the famous version of the story from the Mahabharata, a poetic and dramatic text in its own right and a likely source for Kalidasa. The introduction discusses the play in the aesthetic and cultural context of ancient India. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved.

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey. He shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend. This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, and its consuming dread - is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever.

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

'Love is her best work...a slender but mesmerising tale' Evening Standard

"Barbara Maddox arrived at psychologist Gail Feldman's office complaining of two problems: sexual dysfunction with her husband and unwarranted anger at her daughter, Michelle. Dr. Feldman took her case, not knowing what affect it would have on her life as well as her patient's; soon, through hypnosis, Barbara was able to recall that she had been systematically tortured and abused for more than a decade by, among others, her mother and grandparents, all of them members of a satanic cult. And the memories plunged both patient and doctor into an abyss." "Barbara had protected herself from the memories by denying and forgetting them. During the years with the cult, she was able to escape into "the light," and in effect watch her other self until it was safe to return. One of the great themes in this vital book is how the human brain defends the body, how the soul can survive when the body suffers." "The book will shock you; the transcripts of the therapy sessions are strong - very strong - stuff. But as a document about the depths of human evil and the transcendental power of the mind to heal itself, Lessons in Evil, Lessons from the Light is unparalleled. For Barbara triumphed. She lives in an enduring relationship with her husband and two children. And Dr. Feldman, her own marriage shaken by the revelations of her patient, also triumphed. This book itself is testimony to that." "There are some who do not believe in the existence of satanic cults, yet evidence for them goes back as far as the Middle Ages. The editor's note puts it this way: "We feel that to deny the existence of such cults is to deny both a social and human truth, and that in Barbara's case by accepting the reality of the worst, we can also see proof of the best."" "Once read, you will never forget Lessons in Evil, Lessons from the Light."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

How do doctors piece together obscure medical clues to make a diagnosis? What happens when the decisions are a matter of life and death? In these twenty-six gripping tales culled from his three decades in medicine, the eminent neurologist Harold Klawans, "the shrewdest medical super-sleuth writing today" (The (London) Sunday Times), reaches to the heart of modern medicine. Here the author of the highly acclaimed Toscanini's Fumble and Newton's Madness recounts how as a terrified resident he once confused the smell of his own nervous sweat with the odor of the patient - which turns out to be the essential clue in the diagnosis. We meet the "Lone Ranger" who becomes a mummy after he's given an experimental drug for schizophrenia; the vice president of a bank who believes that snake venom will cure his Lou Gehrig's disease; a man whose eyes, even while driving, suddenly, spontaneously, close; and an eminent neurologist from Vienna whom Klawans exposes as having been a member of the SS. One of the most chilling stories chronicles the drama of a patient whose family chooses to keep him confined to his wheelchair and refuses him treatment to satisfy their own need for control. Bizarre, disturbing, moving - and always fascinating - these tales show how fine the line is between life and death. Klawans poses such controversial questions as: When is someone considered dead? Should doctors fight to extend a life that cannot be saved? When is prolonging life just prolonging the final agony? We witness how in a race to perform the first heart transplant in Chicago, doctors are ready to pull out the heart of a man thought to be dead but who is only unconscious. We see a desperate father who holdsnurses at gunpoint while he disconnects the life support system for his comatose child. Throughout, Klawans defends the patient's right to decide when, where, and how to die, with the help of help or his physician. Guided by this superb storyteller and gifted and compassionate doctor, we explore the edges of life and death and come closer to the mystery of what it means to be a human being.

72-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident. Plagued by insomnia, he tries to push back thoughts of things he would prefer to forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus - by telling himself stories. He conjures up a parallel world for himself.

"New York City, Spring 1967: Twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Falling into a passionate affair with Margot, Walker soon finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible is told by three different narrators as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island, in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers." -- Publisher description.

A multi-generational novel set over the course of a day, The Other Side centers on the journey of Vincent and Ellen MacNamara. Married for sixty-six years, the two have seen their share of hardships: emigration from Ireland to America; the bitter disappointments handed down to their children and grandchildren; and, most recently, setbacks to their health. In The Other Side, Vincent returns from a period of convalescence in a nursing home after Ellen, disoriented from a stroke, had pushed him to the ground, injuring him. As family members assemble, the incident becomes a nexus for the anger, anguish and misunderstandings that have simmered for decades.

It's the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco's dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel's country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of Manuel's, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana.

The country house is full of traces of the poet--notes, photographs, journals--and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana's lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.

Louise Erdrich's brilliant novels of contemporary Native American and Midwestern life have brought her legions of fans and great critical acclaim. Here, in her latest and most luminescent work in the series begun with Love Medicine, the central character is Lipsha Morrissey, the illegitimate son of June Kashpaw and Gerry Nanapush. Lipsha brings together in his birth, rearing, and inheritance all of the major families from Erdrich's previous books, and, of course, represents the future. At a crossroads in his life, Lipsha is summoned by his grandmother. He returns to the reservation and falls in love for the first time. But the object of his newfound obssesive desire, the beautiful and charismatic Shawnee Ray, is in the midst of deciding whether to marry Kipsha's boss, the wealthy reservation entrepreneur Lyman Lamartine. Lipsha is determined to win Shawnee Ray's love and begins with a modern approach - he asks her out for Chinese food. When their evening goes hopelessly, absurdly awry, he decides to try a more traditional method and goes to see his great grandmother, Fleur Pillager, a tribeswoman of a powerful ancient family, to ask for a Love Medicine. After following Fleur to her home in the remote woods, he realizes that this sacred and cherished ground is the exact spot that Lyman and others with aggressive business interests have chosen to open their federally sanctioned bingo palace. As is the case on so many reservations today, Lipsha finds himself torn between success and meaning, love and money, the future and the past. A novel of spiritual depth, lyrical prose, and wild hope, The Bingo Palace explores the implications of the mystical element of chance in contemporary life andis sure to please all of Louise Erdrich's ardent fans as well as attract many new readers.

This extraordinary memoir takes in 3 generations of Margaret Forster's family, beginning with her grandmother, who took to her grave the secrets of the first 23 years of her life. It also acts as a commentary on how women's lives have changed.

With the publication of Open Heart, internationally acclaimed Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has written a psychological tour de force that takes as its subject nothing less than love and the nature of man's soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital's top surgeons. But it isn't until Benjy learns that his internship has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery. This journey brings the supremely rational, coolheaded physician to surrender all his deeply held beliefs when his experience in India awakens an erotic passion that dares to destroy his tidy world as he pursues the illicit love of the administrator's wife.

What system of morals should rational people select as the best for society? Using a contemporary psychological theory of action and of motivation, Richard Brandt's Oxford lectures argue that the purpose of living should be to strive for the greatest good for the largest number of people. Brandt's discussions range from the concept of welfare to conflict between utilitarian moral codes and the dictates of self-interest. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Nothing interesting ever happened in the small, eastern Washington wheat town of Antioch-until now. Without warning, Antioch has suddenly become a gateway for the supernatural-from sightings of angels and messianic images materializing in the sky to a weeping crucifix with the power to heal. Yet these miracles are only the beginning of something much bigger: the return of the Messiah as prophesied in the Bible. Then a self-proclaimed porphet mysteriously appears at a local ranch with a message...but is it from God? In search of answers and hungry for miracles, the national media-along with the curious-flock in droves to the all-but-forgotten town. But what's great for local business has just the opposite effect on Travis Jordan. The burned-out-former pastor has been trying to hide his past in Antioch. Now the whole world is headed to his backyard to find the Messiah, and in the process, every spiritual assumption he has ever held will be challenged. The startling secret behind this visitation ultimately pushes one man into a supernatural confrontation that will forever alter the lives of everyone involved.

If a country’s Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world’s billions of individuals are really managing?

In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how—by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy—we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.

'A glittering stream of revelatory light . . . Fascinating' THE TIMES'Rich, complex and original' TOM HOLLAND'One of the best books on Blake I have ever read' DAVID KEENAN'Absolutely wonderful!' TERRY GILLIAM'An alchemical dream of a book' SALENA GODDEN'Tells us a great deal about all human imagination' ROBIN INCE***Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted. Yet from his ignoble end in a pauper's grave, Blake now occupies a unique position as an artist who unites and attracts people from all corners of society, and a rare inclusive symbol of English identity. Blake famously experienced visions, and it is these that shaped his attitude to politics, sex, religion, society and art. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, we are now in a better position to understand what was happening inside that remarkable mind, and gain a deeper appreciation of his brilliance. His timeless work, we will find, has never been more relevant.In William Blake vs the World we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context. And although the journey begins with us trying to understand him, we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves.

This essential collection, the first of its kind, draws together twenty-six stories by vital women writers. Here are stories written by the famous and by those whose names are less well known; recluses and extroverts; the rich and the impoverished; novelists and poets; heterosexuals, bisexuals, and lesbians. Many were American and English expatriates caught up in the artistic revolt of Paris between 1890 and 1940; others, who ventured forth in imagination only, drew on its innovative spirit. Many refuted traditional concepts of gender and sexuality; all challenged restrictive definitions of femininity. Colette, H. D., Susan Glaspell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, Anais Nin, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and May Sinclair number among this period's host of accomplished women writers. A woman becomes obsessed by a life-size doll and rescues the memory of its original model from neglect; another keeps an array of Parisian gowns under lock and key rather than join the masquerade of fashion; two housewives use their attention to domestic detail to detect--and shield--a murderer. Here are writers who cast aside conventions. Rebellious, talented, provocative, they parade their tales of those who take life on their own terms--you know, that kind of woman.

"A thrilling departure: a short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman--a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent departure from one of our most gifted novelists" -- prové de l'editor.

ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS
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“Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague

It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself.

Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.

"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes"--

At a family picnic, 16-year-old Aksel's wild, beautiful mother drowns while swimming drunk in a fast-flowing river. Aksel's father is unable to confront his wife's death and the family sinks into isolation and bereavement. Gradually Aksel, a talented pianist, dedicates his life to honoring his mother's memory by playing the music she loved. The novel leaves us with complex questions about the creative process itself, and ultimately asks whether it is possible to produce our most exquisite art forms without personal suffering. Ketil Bjornstad, an international jazz pianist, made his literary debut in 1972 as a poet. He has written novels, plays and essays, as well as fictionalized biographies of artistic figures.

Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.

"Jerry Engels is a junior at Penn State University, living in a fraternity, failing the courses in his major, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, and thinking about women, sex, and love. Since losing the rich, beautiful, and kind Rosalind Ingleside in his last year of high school, he has had four girlfriends and slept with dozens of other women, including wild, hard-bitten, and married women he has encountered in the small towns of central Pennsylvania." "When the novel opens, he has just lost Pat Gaheris, a gorgeous sorority girl. Soon he begins to pass the time with Anne, an unattractive and inexperienced art student, who suspects she is a lesbian. Enter Elizabeth, Jerry's Freshman Composition teacher. After a chance meeting one weekend at a ski resort, they seem likely to go their separate ways. But, in the novel's decisive scenes, Jerry refuses to let her drop him, while the well-educated, ambitious, and divorced Elizabeth discovers, to the reader's surprise as well as her own, that she is drawn to her handsome and attentive student. In the end, Jerry chooses to embrace a life given purpose and shape by desire."--BOOK JACKET.

When a Brazilian man's face is disfigured, he attempts a grisly self-surgery in this novel of survival.

An explosive first novel-Madame Bovary set in modern Germany-about a wife and mother whose failed love affairs have driven her to the edge of sanity, and to a startling attempt at vindication.
After being jilted by a rich boyfriend, Margaret Sartoris, eighteen and heartbroken, throws herself into a comfortable but stifling marriage to Ernst, a war veteran with a penchant for routine and order, who still lives with his mother in a small German village.
It's not a bad life, considering Margaret's psychological scars, but neither Ernst's adoration nor the birth of a daughter can reawaken her frozen emotions. It's not until she slides into an affair with a married man with whom she plans to run away that her passions are stirred, but these plans are a fantasy that cannot possibly come true. The repercussions nevertheless will explode with unimaginable force in these astonished lives.
A remarkable psychological portrait, an oustanding debut novel.

'The greatest enterprise of its kind in history,' was the verdict of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in June 1928 when The Oxford English Dictionary was finally published. With its 15,490 pages and nearly two million quotations, it was indeed a monumental achievement, gleaned from the efforts of hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary people who made it their mission to catalogue the English language in its entirety.In The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester celebrates this remarkable feat, and the fascinating characters who played such a vital part in its execution, from the colourful Frederick Furnivall, cheerful promoter of an all-female sculling crew, to James Murray, self-educated son of a draper, who spent half a century guiding the project towards fruition. Along the way we learn which dictionary editor became the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame's Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, and why Tolkien found it so hard to define 'walrus'. Written by the bestselling author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne and The Map That Changed the World, The Meaning of Everything is an enthralling account of the creation of the world's greatest dictionary.

Life changes forever for Joe during the summer of 1960 in Great Falls, Montana, when Joe Brinson's father loses his job and goes off to fight the wildfires, and his mother begins an affair with another man.

Set against the splendor of Venice, Stitch is the moving story of the meeting between a group of Americans and a world-famous sculptor. Stitch, a character whom certain critics have recognized as one of the most remarkable portraits of Ezra Pound, is a man who has shaped and been shaped by the most profound intellectual and political experiences of the 20th century. What the Americans learn from him comprises the brilliant center of this novel.

Mr. Mani is a deeply affecting six-generation family saga, extending from nineteenth century Greece and Poland to British-occupied Palestine to German-occupied Crete and ultimately to modern Israel. The narrative moves through time and is told in five conversations about the Mani family. It ends in Athens in 1848 with Avraham Mani's powerful tale about the death of his young son in Jerusalem.　

A profoundly human novel, rich in drama, irony, and wit.

Clara Velde is a successful fashion writer in New York City and the star of the story. The book's title refers to the disappearance of Clara's prized emerald ring. Clara associates the ring with her love for the Washington, D.C. politico Ithiel and with her own professional and personal power. The ring's apparent theft leads Clara into a series of psychological crises and forces her to confront a long-buried complex of interpersonal issues.