'She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world'
Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia's progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector's landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman's inner life.
Krzysztof Urban rocznik 1960. Urodził się i mieszka w Pruszkowie. Z wykształcenia Technolog Żywienia Zbiorowego. W roku 2009 wydał powieść „Dożywotka”. Przez kilka lat był redaktorem w Piśmie religijno-społecznym „Jednota”. Obecnie pracuje jako kościelny w Parafii Ewangelicko-Reformowanej w Warszawie. Opowiadania w niniejszej publikacji napisał przede wszystkim dzięki własnym inspiracjom, a także cudzym doświadczeniom. Każde przedstawia inną historię życia i picia. Skupia się na ostatniej fazie uzależnienia – jest to studium rozpadającej się psychiki, kiedy ratunkiem staje się szpitalny detoks wraz z zamkniętą terapią. Większość bohaterek i bohaterów ją podejmuje, rodzi się nadzieja. Czasem jest już za późno. Nieocenioną pomocą w pisaniu opowiadań był jego brat Bogdan, który jest terapeutą uzależnień. Żeby poruszyć wyobraźnię czytelnika, pisarz zawiesza czasami akcję opowieści przed momentem kulminacyjnym, nie wprowadzając ostatecznego rozwiązania. Trzeba w takim momencie zamyślić się i poddać działaniu tajemniczej magii narracji. Tajemnica, zawierająca się w samym procesie choroby, też warta jest rozwagi, tym bardziej, że mamy do czynienia z tak spektakularnym, a jednocześnie wręcz metafizycznym niekiedy ujęciem tematu. Celebrowanie choroby przez niektórych bohaterów Urbana ma cechy objawień, graniczących z przeżyciami religijnymi. Profanum zyskuje tu rangę sakrum w szokujących wymiarach istnienia. Ze „Wstępu”
Opowiadania zawarte w tym tomie są niezwykle żywe, ironiczne, skrzące się dowcipem, wyczulone na konkret. I – choć niby wyabstrahowane z konkretnej rzeczywistości – mówią bardzo wiele i bardzo krytycznie o naszym wspólnym tu i teraz. Działanie i dzianie się schodzą tutaj na plan dalszy – bohaterowie tych często groteskowych tekstów to przede wszystkim myśliciele i mówcy, czynni uczestnicy zajmujących dialogów, jakby wyjętych z teatru absurdu. Główną rolę grają opowiadania, w których najważniejsze są strona językowa, aspekt teoretyczno-filozoficzny oraz sieć intertekstualnych nawiązań. O charakterze całości tomu najlepiej świadczy wręcz brawurowe opowiadanie „Instrukcja napisania powieści bernhardowskiej”, stanowiące serce i/lub mózg całego tomu – smakowity kąsek dla wielbicieli twórczości Thomasa Bernharda.
Manhattan has become the Island of Death.
The former President of the United States stands barefoot in a purple toga around a cooking fire in the lobby of the Empire State Building.
He is Dr Wilbur Daffodil-II Swain and Slapstick or Lonesome No More! is his story – one of monstrous twins, orgies, revenge, golf, utopian schemes, and very little tooth brushing. In this post-apocalyptic black comedy – dedicated to Laurel and Hardy – Vonnegut is at his most hilarious, grotesque, and personal.
'The unhappiness that I need and long for . . . is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and die with lust. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.'
Alienated from society, Harry Haller is the Steppenwolf, wild, strange and shy. His despair and desire for death draw him into an enchanted, Faust-like underworld. Through a series of shadowy encounters, romantic, freakish and savage by turn, Haller begins to rediscover the lost dreams of his youth.
Adopted by the Sixties counterculture, Steppenwolf captured the mood of a disaffected generation that was beginning to question everything.
After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law's house, where she numbly submits to the old man's advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences.
This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.
On the morning of April 16, Dr Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead rat in the middle of the landing.'
It starts with the rats. Vomiting blood, they die in their hundreds, then in their thousands. When the rats are all gone, the citizens begin to fall sick. Like the rats, they too die in ever greater numbers.
The authorities quarantine the town. Cut off, the terrified townspeople must face this horror alone. Some resign themselves to death or the whims of fate. Others seek someone to blame or dream of revenge. One is determined to escape.
But a few, like stoic Dr Rieux, stand together to fight the terror. A monstrous evil has entered their lives but they will never surrender to it.
They will resist the plague.
At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacitly excluded. Their room is where the Game is played, the Game being their own bizarre version of life. All that they do outside is effectively controlled by the rules of the Game: unfortunately the rules of the Game prescribe that the two children must die…
Collected here in Penguin Classics are two of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's shorter works, Notes from Underground and The Double, translated by Ronald Wilks with an introduction by Robert Louis Jackson.
Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence 'underground'. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double, perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragicomic study of human consciousness.
Stolarz ukryty w fotelu, studenci planujący zbrodnię doskonałą, znudzeni życiem fanatycy ekscytujących doznań, kaleki weteran wojny japońsko-chińskiej – bohaterów opowiadań Ranpo Edogawy łączy obsesja, która stopniowo przeradza się w obłęd. Edogawa, jak mało który pisarz, potrafił wydobyć z ludzkiej psychiki to, co najmroczniejsze, ale robił to w przystępnej dla każdego formie.
„Gąsienica” to kolekcja siedmiu opowiadań, które pokazują różne etapy twórczości pisarza, uważanego za ojca japońskich kryminałów. Znajdziemy tu inspirowane Arthurem Conanem Doylem historie detektywistyczne, ale też toczące się na granicy jawy i snu mrożące krew w żyłach opowieści grozy. Wszystkie zaś dobrze znane japońskim czytelnikom, dla których zagadki wymyślone przez Ranpo Edogawę stanowią literacki kanon.
Za wybór i przekład z japońskiego odpowiada Dariusz Latoś. Wprowadzenie do tomu autorstwa Andrzeja Świrkowskiego, który na Uniwersytecie im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu bada twórczość Edogawy i jest chyba jedynym w Polsce „ranpologiem”, pozwoli jeszcze lepiej odnaleźć się i zanurzyć w świecie pisarza.
In the remote Kingdom of Castalia, the scholars of the Twenty Third century play the Glass Bead Game. The elaborately coded game is a fusion of all human knowledge - of maths, music, philosophy, science, and art. Intrigued as a school boy, Joseph Knecht becomes consumed with mastering the game as an adult. As Knecht fulfils his life-long quest he must contend with unexpected dilemmas and the longing for a life beyond the ivory tower.
In this brilliantly perceptive novel, a middle aged professor living in California is alienated from his students by differences in age and nationality, and from the rest of society by his homosexuality. Isherwood explores the depths of the human soul and its ability to triumph over loneliness, alienation and loss.
Ten years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realise his dream of directing and producing a pornographic movie, Sick Boy must team up with old pal and fellow exile Mark Renton. In the world of Porno, though, nothing is straightforward, as Sick Boy and Renton find out that they have unresolved issues to address concerning the increasingly unhinged Frank Begbie, the troubled, drug-addled Spud, but, most of all, with each other.
Bob Dylan's only fictional book, Tarantula was written in 1966 during the creative peak that produced Blonde on Blonde. Reminiscent of Dylan's best songs, it is essential reading for anyone interested in his creative processes.
Initial publication was repeatedly delayed, and Tarantula circulated for years only as a bookleg photocopied from reviewers advance proofs. Fittingly, perhaps, because this is a book that captures the tone and spirit of the turbulent times in which it was written.
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count.
'These stories of bewilderment, heartbreak and psychotropics will charm you with their humour and stun you with wisdom that's both rigorous and compassionate'
Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing
After returning from a pleasant holiday with his wife, Astrid, and their two children, Thomas walks out the front door. Thomas walks up the street. Thomas keeps walking. Astrid gradually realizes that her husband has not just gotten up early to go to work. She waits for as long as she can and then puts as much energy as she can into trying to find him - coming to understand, along the way, that there is little she can do if Thomas is striving to stay lost. In precise and hypnotic prose that cuts as cleanly as a scalpel, To the Back of Beyond is a novel that takes away the safe foundations of a marriage and a lifestyle to ask deeper questions about identity, connection and how free we are to change our lives. It is a graceful and resonant work from one of Europe's most important writers.
It’s the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him.
But the enemy above is not Yossarian’s problem – it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening ‘Catch-22’ that allows for no possibility of escape.
The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experience friendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival. Regarded by many as her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf's response to the loss of her brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.
The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
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