Showing results for "Thomas" in Literary Fiction

This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on...

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra , the philosopher-prophet Zarathustra descends from his mountain solitude to challenge everything humanity thinks it knows about truth, morality, religion, and purpose. Through poetic speeches, parables, and sharp philosophical provocations, he introduces radical ideas that shake modern thought. Part philosophical manifesto, part mystical epic, and part psychological exploration, this revolutionary work pushes listeners to confront a question that still feels urgent today: If old beliefs no longer guide us, what should we become?

Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912 and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.

Thomas Jay entra in riformatorio a dodici anni. Vittima di ideali così forti da non saperli gestire, non è in grado di arrestare la spirale di avvenimenti che lo conducono all'ergastolo. In ogni fase critica della propria esistenza, si aggrappa al talento letterario come a un'ancora di salvezza, e scrive storie sulla gioia di vivere per contrastare il proprio baratro emotivo ed esistenziale. Dal chiuso di una cella racconta la sua incredibile storia ad Ailie, la donna che ama. È un percorso a ritroso verso l'accettazione di se stesso e la riconciliazione con i propri errori.

Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss.

Two on a Tower is Hardy's ninth novel and contains perhaps his most complete use of the theme of love across the class and age divide, to beautifully depict Hardy's reverence for science and astronomy. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social etiquette when she falls in love with young Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer and her social inferior. Despite their differences that society deems unacceptable, together, from an astronomical observatory, the lovers 'sweep the heavens'.

A stunningly beautiful youth and the city of Venice set the stage for Thomas Mann’s introspective examination of erotic love and philosophical wisdom.

Tout en exerçant son métier de maçon, Jude Fawley rêve d'une vie meilleure et s'acharne à acquérir le savoir et la culture. La passion qui naît en lui pour sa cousine Sue, mariée à un maître d'école, va lui faire entrevoir d'autres horizons de bonheur et les conduire tous deux à la perdition.

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.

Brought to you by Penguin. A private eye is catapulted on to a continent-hopping journey that proves difficult to escape – from the bestselling, award-winning author of Gravity’s Rainbow. Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al...

Brought to you by Penguin. Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But, there is...

Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executor of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness, and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.

Two terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” (The Washington Post) Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange...

Sexually innocent Jude Fawley is trapped into marriage by seductive Arabella Donn, but their union is an unhappy one and Arabella leaves him. Jude's welcome freedom allows him to pursue his obsession with his pretty cousin Sue Bridehead, a brilliant, charismatic free-thinker who would be his ideal soul-mate if not for her aversion to physical love. When Jude and Sue decide to lead their lives outside marriage they bring down on themselves all the force of a repressive society.

Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice.

Odysseus. Robinson Crusoe. Harry Potter. What do these memorable characters have in common? Why do we turn to certain stories again and again? And what impact have they made on world history? These 24 eye-opening lectures give fresh insight into some of the greatest heroes in world literature, from warriors such as Beowulf and Odysseus to unexpected heroes such as Uncle Tom and Sancho Panza. Professor Shippey gives you an inside glimpse into the writer's process.

Fifty-two weeks. That's all the time Mona has left to learn about beauty before she loses her eyesight forever. Every Wednesday, Mona's grandfather picks her up after school and takes her to see a great work of art. Together, on their visit to Paris' museums, Mona and her grandfather will experience enchantment and sadness. Above all, they will grow ever closer and learn to lean on each other. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona will discover not only the power of art, but also the meaning of generosity, doubt, melancholy, and loss.

Am malerischen Genfersee wird der Bestsellerautor und Abenteurer Marceau Miller tot am Fuß einer Felswand aufgefunden. Seine Frau Sarah, ungestüm und naturverbunden, ist als Einzige überzeugt, dass es kein Unfall war: Vor zwanzig Jahren führte ein tragisches Ereignis sie schon einmal in...