Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Ducks, Newburyport
An utterly original novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize in which one woman navigates, through compelling inner monologue, the tension and disquiet of contemporary America.
Things Are Against Us
'There are three kinds of strike I'd recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can't wait for the first two.' Things Are Against Us is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted Lucy Ellmann. Bold, angry, despairing and very, very funny, these essays cover everything – from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rages against bras, gives Doris Day and Agatha Christie a drubbing, and pleads for sanity in a world that – well, a world that spent four years in the company of Donald Trump, that 'tremendously sick, terrible, nasty, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, zero-chance lying liar'. Things Are Against Us is electric. It's vital. These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket. Lucy Ellmann is the writer we need to guide us through these crazy times.
Sweet Desserts
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 'exhilarating ... Lucy Ellmann is an original' The Guardian Suzy Schwarz has learnt one or two things about life: other people know how you should live better than you do; sisters (especially Fran) can destroy your sanity and self-esteem; lust calls for careful timing because it rarely coincides with that of your partner; and most heartbreaking of all, parents die on you, leaving you grieving. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad (and they usually are) is food...
Mimi
It's Christmas Eve in Manhattan. Harrison Hanafan, noted plastic surgeon, falls on his ass. So far, so good. 'Ya can't sit there all day, buddy, looking up people's skirts!' chides a weird gal in a coat like a duvet - Mimi! She kindly conjures for him the miracle of a taxi. Recuperating in his apartment with Schubert, Bette Davis, and a foundling cat, Harrison adds items to his life's work, a List of Melancholy Things (Walmart, puppetry, Velcro, whale eyes, shrimp-eating contests...). But when he receives a dreaded invitation to address his old school, Mimi reappears, with all her curves and chaos. She and Harrison fall emphatically in love. And, as their love-making reaches a whole new kind of climax, the sweet smell of revolution is in the air.
Varying Degrees of Hopelessness
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize 'Funny and furious ... Lucy Ellmann is clever, and very angry' The Times In an eminent London art institute - the Catafalque - Our Heroine Isabel (she of the obsessional habits, perpetual virginity and peculiar belly button) sit in wistful contemplation of Chardin's brushstrokes and the virile red socks of passing lecturers. Isabel's wholly imaginary love life (based on the romantic notions of authoress Babs Cartwheel) bears little resemblance to that of her flatmate Pol, who prefers to grip reality by the balls. Enter Robert, victim of an American childhood, kitsch memorabilia, academic rivalry, Pol's belly-dancing and Isabel's mute adoration. Can he be perverse enough not to despair?
Concrete
LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY MICHAEL HOFMANN'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove KnausgaardInstead of the book he is meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph's sister, whose help he invites then reviles; his 'really marvellous' house which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else's very real horror story, and ultimately brings him no release from himself.Concrete is Thomas Bernhard at his very finest: a bleakly hilarious insight into procrastination and failure that scratches the murky depths of our souls.
Man Or Mango?
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019, the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Goldsmiths Prize 'Bold ... Wonderful' Sunday Times 'Hilarious ... Razor-sharp wit' Cosmopolitan Eloise is too old to be called an orphan but insists she is bereft. With a cello, a car, some cats and a supply of Chicken Balti, she has devised for herself a half-alive hermitude. From her sinister country cottage she dispatches plaintive missives to the purveyors of evaporated milk and loo-roll holders. No one is too high, too powerful, to escape the fury of her attack. George is England's only poet of ice hockey (not a full-time job). Pining for inspiration, he plays a...
Worst. Person. Ever.
A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable novel. Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him. Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who ente...
Doctors and Nurses
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize 'As lunatic and splenetic and distinctive as anything that will be published this year ... I begin to suspect she may be some sort of genius' Telegraph 'It is somehow hard not to be optimistic in the hands of a writer so angry and intelligent ... Doctors & Nurses is a novel bracingly alive, making more polite books cadaverous by comparison' Guardian The tranquillity of a rural backwater - SHATTERED! The ancient arts of medicine - EXPOSED! Her darling cleft-chinned doctor - FORCED TO FIGHT FOR HIS LIFE! It was a time of wiping. A time of bandaging. Of patients and their incessant needs. In a world where nurses never wash their hands, and doctors are the lowest of the low, one enormous nurse stands up for LOVE - a nurse that will make you fart with fear...
After Sappho: A Novel
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE A Guardian Best Book of the Year A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection “A work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams." —Jacob Brogan, Washington Post An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century. “The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trade...
