lessing doris briefing for a descent into hell
Lessing Doris Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London's Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird. Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday… 'Briefing for a Descent into Hell' is one of Doris Lessing's most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.
2017 Руб.
Lessing Doris On Cats
A collection of charming and celebrated writings about cats, from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semi-feral creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination remained undiminished by the handsome domesticated creatures who shared her flats and her life in London and grew into real love with El Magnifico, the awkwardly lovable cat who in his later years suffered the great indignity of becoming a three-legged beast. Consisting of Lessing's celebrated collection of stories, 'Particularly Cats and Rufus', and the poignant though unsentimental memoir, 'The Old Age of El Magnifico', this book is a brilliant evocation of the feline world.
1891 Руб.
Alighieri Dante Inferno. The Divine Comedy I
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.
4881 Руб.
Marias Javier Your Face Tomorrow. Volume 3. Poison, Shadow and Farewell
The concluding part in Javier Marias' spy trilogy masterwork Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by Bertram Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra's collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives - and horrific acts. The scenes enter him like a poison, contaminating everything good, yet he is powerless to counteract them. Set against a background of brutality, Poison, Shadow and Farewell asks whether violence can ever be justified and completes the extraordinary journey that has led us on a descent into hell and a re-emergence, not entirely unscathed, into life.
2567 Руб.
Lessing Doris The Fifth Child
A classic tale from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben, their feral fifth child. 'Listening to the laughter, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David would reach for each other's hand, and smile, and breathe happiness.' Four children, a beautiful old house, the love of relatives and friends - Harriet and David Lovatt's life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values. But when their fifth child is born, a sickly and implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large and ugly, violent and uncontrollable, the infant Ben, 'full of cold dislike', tears at Harriet's breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child, faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of what, exactly, she has brought into the world …
1733 Руб.
Lessing Doris The Memoirs of a Survivor
A compelling vision of a disorietating and barbaric future from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many years in the future, city life has broken down, communications have failed and food supplies are dwindling. From her window a middle-aged woman – our narrator – watches things fall apart and records what she witnesses: hordes of people migrating to the countryside, gangs of children roaming the streets. One day, a young girl, Emily, is brought to her house by a stranger and left in her care. A strange, precocious adolescent, drawn to the tribal streetlife and its barbaric rituals, she is unafraid of the harsh world outside, while our narrator retreats into her hidden world where reality fades and the past is revisited …
2017 Руб.
Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr The Gulag Archipelago
'It helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph '[The Gulag Archipelago] helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph with a new foreword by Jordan B. Petersona vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation. 'Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece...The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III
3533 Руб.
The Story. 100 Great Short Stories Written by Women
Witty, heartbreaking, shocking, satirical: the short story can excite or sadden, entice or repulse. The one thing it can never be is dull. Now Victoria Hislop, passionate ambassador for the art of the short story, has collected 100 stories from her favourite women writers into one volume. Here are Man Booker Prize winners and Nobel Laureates, well-known feminists and famous wits, national treasures and rising stars. All handpicked by one of the nation's best-loved novelists, there's a story for every mood, mind-set and moment in life. Featuring an all star cast of authors including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Fitzgerald, Miranda July, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf, The Story is the biggest and most beautiful collectino of women's short fiction in print today.
6486 Руб.
Kate Lauren Unforgiven
High school can be hell. Cam knows what it's like to be haunted. He's spent more time in Hell than any angel ever should. And his freshest Hell is high school, where Lilith, the girl he can't stop loving, is serving out a punishment for his crimes. Cam made a bet with Lucifer: he has fifteen days to convince the only girl who really matters to him to love him again. If he succeeds, Lilith will be allowed back into the world, and they can live their lives together. But if he fails . . . there's a special place in Hell just for him. Tick-tock. The long-awaited new novel in the global bestselling Fallen series.
1935 Руб.
Dawkins C. The Graybar Hotel
A man sits collect-calling strangers every day just to hear the sounds of the outside world; an inmate recalls his descent into addiction as his prison softball team gears up for an annual tournament; a prisoner is released and finds freedom more complex and baffling than he expected.In this stunning debut story collection, Curtis Dawkins, who is currently serving a life sentence without parole, offers a glimpse into the reality of prison life through the eyes of the people who spend their days and years behind bars. .
1147 Руб.
Dawkins C. The Graybar Hotel
A man sits collect-calling strangers every day just to hear the sounds of the outside world; an inmate recalls his descent into addiction as his prison softball team gears up for an annual tournament; a prisoner is released and finds freedom more complex and baffling than he expected.In this stunning debut story collection, Curtis Dawkins, who is currently serving a life sentence without parole, offers a glimpse into the reality of prison life through the eyes of the people who spend their days and years behind bars. .
1147 Руб.
Lessing Doris The Golden Notebook
The landmark novel by Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing – a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal. Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writer’s block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. Fearing the onset of madness, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook addresses her problems as a writer; the red her political life; the yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook – the Golden Notebook – which is the key to her recovery and renaissance. Bold and illuminating, fusing sex, politics, madness and motherhood, ‘The Golden Notebook’ is at once a wry and perceptive portrait of the intellectual and moral climate of the 1950s – a society on the brink of feminism – and a powerful and revealing account of a woman searching for her own personal and political identity.
1043 Руб.
Fielding Henry Tom Jones
Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach him a sort of wisdom to go with his essential good-heartedness. This 'comic, epic poem in prose' will make the modern reader laugh as much as it did his forbears. Its biting satire finds an echo in today's society, for as Doris Lessing recently remarked 'This country becomes every day more like the eighteenth century, full of thieves and adventurers, rogues and a robust, unhypocritical savagery side-by-side with people lecturing others on morality'.
887 Руб.
Henry O., Брэдбери Рэй, Киплинг Редьярд Джозеф Dog Stories
This anthology rounds up a pack of vivid and colourful tales by a wide range of writers from Chekhov, Chesterton and Kafka to Patricia Highsmith and Doris Lessing. The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling’s heroically faithful ‘Garm’, Bret Harte’s irrepressible scoundrel of a ‘yaller dog’ and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs in Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Ava’s Apartment’. Here are stories which touchingly illuminate the dog’s role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff ’s ‘Her Dog’, where a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry’s tale of a dissatisfied lapdog’s escape to P. G. Wodehouse’s cheerfully naive watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others – Ray Bradbury, James Thurber and Penelope Lively among them – offer imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman’s most faithful friend.
4862 Руб.
Gibbins David Inquisition
258 As the blood of martyred Christians runs through Rome's catacombs, Pope Sixtus entrusts their most sacred object to a devoted follower. Soon after, the Holy Grail disappears into the darkness of time. 1684 While overseeing the evacuation of the English colony of Tangier, Samuel Pepys attempts to retrieve a treasure which has resurfaced after more than a thousand years. Meanwhile, a Jewish merchant is tortured by the Altamanus, a secret group determined to locate the Grail. Present Day A wreck off the Cornish coast reveals clues to a mystery that marine archaeologist Jack Howard had thought beyond solving. He embarks on an epic quest that takes him to the sunken ruins of the pirate city of Port Royal in Jamaica. But the spectre of the deadly Inquisition dogs his every step, and Jack must face a descent into hell itself if he is to uncover the greatest reward in Christendom.
2597 Руб.
Lessing Doris The Good Terrorist
A hugely significant political novel for the late twentieth century from one of the outstanding writers of the modern era and winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction. In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they see around them. These maladjusted malcontents try desperately to become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. Only Alice seems capable of organising anything. Motherly, practical and determined, she is also easily exploited by the group and ideal fodder for a more dangerous and potent cause. Eventually their naive radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, but the aftermath is not as exciting as they had hoped. Nonetheless, while they may not have changed the world, their lives will never be the same again …
1873 Руб.