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A haunting and beautiful reinterpretation of the Japanese kitsune folktale tradition, Fog Island Mountains is a novel about the dangers of action taken in grief and of a belief in healing through storytelling.
Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a painting. Two men talk to each other and before long the writer -someone like them, one of them- begins to address us. Thus commences the fugue that is Beauty on Earth,in which the coming of a beautiful orphan to her uncle's inn brings a gradual chaos upon his town. Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz published La Beauté in 1927. This translation by Michelle Bailat-Jones is a gift for which English language readers have waited decades.
In the deep winter snows of a Swedish hamlet, a strange young woman fakes a break-in at the house of an elderly artist in order to persuade her that she needs companionship. But what does she hope to gain by doing this? And who ultimately is deceiving whom? In this portrayal of two women grappling with truth and lies, nothing can be taken for granted. By the time the snow thaws, both their lives will have changed irrevocably.
How did computers take over the world? In late 1945, a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their ostensible goal was to build a computer which would be instrumental in the US government's race to create a hydrogen bomb. The mathematicians themselves, however, saw their project as the realization of Alan Turing's theoretical 'universal machine.' In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson vividly re-creates the intense experimentation, incredible mathematical insight and pure creative genius that led to the dawn of the digital universe, uncovering a wealth of new material to bring a human story of extraordinary men and women and their ideas to life. From the lowliest iPhone app to Google's sprawling metazoan codes, we now live in a world of self-replicating numbers and self-reproducing machines whose origins go back to a 5-kilobyte matrix that still holds clues as to what may lie ahead.
In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooden room - one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person. For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice and death. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an aeroplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls 'the hard things - rock mountain and salt sea', she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire. Holy the Firm is a profound and breath-taking book about the natural world by a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most influential figures in contemporary non-fiction.
When Ella's father John dies unexpectedly, she learns that her mother, whom left the family years ago due to mental illness, is still alive.
Le Bal depicts the life of the Kampfs who, having recently gone up in the world thanks to luck with the stock decide to throw a ball in order to launch themselves into society. Their daughter Antoinette, who has just turned fourteen, dreams of atte
It's all dry sand running through the fingers.' When Bill Mor falls in love with Rain Carter he discovers a new way of being and a new joy in the world and his surroundings. To be with Rain he must abandon his prosaic life as a schoolmaster, his domineering wife Nan and his troubled teenaged children. He must draw on the powers of selfishness, hatred and anger in order to make the final break. But what love could survive all that violence? WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BIDISHA VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.
Classic horror 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 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..
Brings together many of the finest fiction writers from throughout Europe, representing thirty-two countries.