Showing results for "Lightning" in Literary Fiction

In 1936, escalating violence and unrest in Spain explodes into civil war. Sandro Risco Canovas, an apolitical but unlucky engineering student, is guilty by association and is named among the hundreds on Franco's blacklist. Hunted by the police, he seeks refuge with Jorge, a wounded zealot, and Teresa, a revolutionary spy. He is forced to flee the city alone, posing as a priest along the sacred pilgrimage route, the Saint James Way. On his trusty bicycle, Libertad (a la Don Quixote), Sandro makes his way toward his seaside village of Arcasella.

“Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted.... This is glorious work.” — Washington Post “A gripping, deeply relevant book.” — New York Times Book Review From Paulette Jiles, author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Enemy Women and Stormy Weather, comes a...

"All I want is to be a success.That's all I ask." Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then he fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top - and to the very heart of corporate insanity.

Set in contemporary Dublin and the surrounding countryside, Ghosts and Lightning is a picaresque account of Denny Cullen's life after he is called back home to attend his mother's funeral. Denny - a sweet-natured but disillusioned young man who feels powerless in the face of death, dope, and the dole queue---is the steadiest in a cast of unstable characters.

One of the very best in the popular Blandings series, set in that idyllic Shropshire countryside, where the sun always shines. Comedy centres around Clarence, the dotty ninth Earl of Emsworth, doting on his prize pig: The Empress. His brother Galahad fears her fate is under threat with Clarence's rival Sir Gregory Parsloe. Parsloe is aiming to prevent her taking the County Prize. He lives in fear of Galahad publishing his memoirs and revealing their wild younger days.

This audiobook includes exclusive music by Kyd Miller Duchovny, the author's son From the New York Times–bestselling author David Duchovny, an epic adventure that asks how we make sense of right and wrong in a world of extremes For the past twenty years, Bronson Powers, former Hollywood...

A man sits at his hearth as thunder shakes the mountains. Then—a knock. A stranger steps in, soaked and shivering, armed not with warmth or need, but with polished copper and an urgent offer. He doesn't sell comfort. He sells protection—against the very sky. The Lightning-Rod Man is Herman Melville at his most compact and cunning. This sharply drawn tale uses one room, one storm, and two voices to stage a quiet war between reason and fear, independence and submission, belief and the glittering promise of safety. It's a sales pitch wrapped in a sermon, disguised as a fable.

"The Lightning-Rod Man" appeared in 1854, in Putnam's Monthly Magazine no. 20 (August). What grand irregular thunder, thought I, standing on my hearthstone among the Acroceraunian hills, as the scattered bolts boomed overhead and crashed down among the valleys, every bolt followed by zigzag irradiations, and swift slants of sharp rain, which audibly rang, like a charge of spear-points, on my low shingled roof. I suppose, though, that the mountains hereabouts break and churn up the thunder, so that it is far more glorious here than on the plain.

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, The Lightning-Rod Man was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, the Lightning-Rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning-rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult encounter with the Lightning-Rod man in this story about overcoming fear and superstition.