Nicholas Boulton
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Language
English
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Description
Hailed by Nabokov as "the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced," Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) left his mark as a playwright, novelist, and writer of short stories. Gogol's works remain popular with both writers and readers, who prize his originality, imaginative gifts, and sheer exuberance. This collection offers an excellent introduction to the author's works. Opening a door to his bizarre world of broad comedy, fantasy, and social commentary,...
22) Mountolive
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 3
Language
English
Formats
Description
The astounding third offering in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, a richly detailed and extraordinary expansion of the events of Justine and Balthazar. David Mountolive is a British diplomat who views love as just another everyday transaction. But as romance turns to betrayal and secret alliances are exposed, Mountolive's affair will bring the true complexity of contemporary love to the forefront amid the swirling political climate of Alexandria. ...
23) Balthazar
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 2
Language
English
Formats
Description
The deeply affecting second novel of the Alexandria Quartet, which boldly questions perception and the nature of contemporary love. In Alexandria, Egypt, in the years before World War II, Durrell's narrator, Darley, seeks to fully understand his sexual obsession with two women: the infamous Justine, and Melissa, a dancer. In Darley's conversations with Balthazar, a doctor and mystic, it soon becomes clear that Darley's fixation is more complex and...
24) Clea
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 4
Language
English
Formats
Description
The final installment of the Alexandria Quartet. Years after his liaisons with Justine and Melissa, Darley becomes immersed in a relationship with Clea, a bisexual artist. The ensuing chain of events transforms not only the lovers, but the dead as well, and leads to the series' brilliant and unexpected resolution. Praised by Life as among the 'most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time,' Clea carries on Durrell's assured and...
25) Justine
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
This “very remarkable novel”—first in the acclaimed Alexandria Quartet—tells a haunting story of love, desire, and deception in the Egyptian city pre-WWII (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).
Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and...
Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and...
26) Justine
Author
Language
English
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Description
Justine is the tragic story of a young woman who embarks on a journey to France where she plans to lead a life of uncompromising virtue. Justine watches as her sister, Juliette, becomes corrupted by a wicked Abbess in the nunnery where she was raised. Hoping to escape the same fate, Justine breaks out on her own only to become the victim of many who claim to be charitable and trustworthy, suffering sexual abuse and terror that force her to extreme...
Author
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English
Description
Considered one of the first existentialist novels, Notes from Underground contains one of the most unsettling characters in 19th-century fiction. Resentful, cruel, entitled and pitiful, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man is a disturbing human being bent on humiliating others for his own amusement. He despises modern society and stews in a self-imposed misery, articulated through his bitter, contradictory monologues about torment and alienation. The Gambler...
Author
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English
Description
Praised by Chekhov as his favourite writer, Nikolai Leskov occupies a unique place in
Russian literature. His original stories often seem like folk-tales, their larger-than-life
characters including soldiers, Tsars, priests and gypsies. Leskov's storytelling, simple
in its style, combines a deep religious spirit with comic absurdity.
The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Leskov's best-known work, is a realist
account of a young woman who...
Author
Language
English
Description
In Moscow an unknown author approaches a publisher (the narrator), asking him to read and publish his manuscript. The narrator agrees to read it before the author returns three months later. At the heart of the story in the manuscript is a love triangle and themes of corruption, concealed love and fatal jealousy. When one of the central characters is discovered dead, the narrative becomes a murder-mystery as the search for the culprit begins.
Written...
30) Naples '44
Author
Language
English
Description
Naples '44 is an unflinching autobiographical account of a year in Naples after the armistice and Allied landings in Sorrento in 1943. Working as a British counterintelligence officer under the Allied occupation, Lewis documents the rich pageant of life in the city and its surrounding areas. There is suffering and squalor: criminal gangs are on the rise, along with typhus and black market commerce, and the female population is forced into part-time...
Author
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English
Description
Is there any music more instantly recognisable and beautifully scored than Tchaikovsky's wildly popular ballet Swan Lake? These and other works have become enduring classics, yet they were not uncontroversial in Tchaikovsky's day, and there are those that still wonder if his style is fundamentally European or ardently Russian. Find out more about Tchaikovsky's childhood obsession with music, his turbulent relationships with friends and colleagues,...
32) The Magus
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Language
English
Description
Nicholas Urfe accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island, in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. He meets the Maurice Conchis, who introduces him to Lily, his ideal of the perfect woman. But is she flesh or fantasy? As the past bleeds into the present, he finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from imagination. Under the spell of this magic isle and its presiding spirit, he struggles to understand the rules of the...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was 'insane' and 'a perfect idiot'. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage...
34) My Childhood
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Series
Language
English
Description
Published in 1913, My Childhood is the first in an autobiographical trilogy by the Russian writer and five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Painfully moving in places, the book tells of the experiences of a young boy who goes to live with his grandparents following the death of his father. Gorky's depiction of 19th-century Russia through the eyes of his younger self is remarkable. As he recalls memories of his youth, contrasting themes and emotions...
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English
Description
The music of Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák is suffused with natural nobility, fluency and freshness, and embodies the spirit of his native land. This revealing biography portrays Dvořák as a complex and wide-ranging composer, and explores the creation and performance of his music as well as its reception on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing his art in all its richness and variety. Musical excerpts include the Cello Concerto, the 'New World'...
36) The Monk
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English
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Description
Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder and incest.
Author
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English
Description
Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.
Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual...
Author
Language
English
Description
Dumas's novel became one of the great love stories from its first publication in 1848. The title role of the consumptive heroine and her ultimate sacrifice inspired actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo, and led Giuseppe Verdi to write La traviata. In the hands of Nicholas Boulton, the story of passion and conflict is as fresh and moving as when it was first written.
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English
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Description
An insider's view of court life and culture during the Renaissance, here is the handiwork of a 16th-century diplomat who was called upon to resolve the differences in a war of etiquette among the Italian nobility. The ultimate resource on aristocratic manners, it remains the most definitive account of life among the Renaissance nobility.