Random House, Inc.
Длина 210

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The richest and most depraved man on Earth takes a wild space journey to distant worlds, learning about the purpose of human life along the way.

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Primarily known as a dramatist, Chekhov also wrote short stories. This selection of his work includes The Swedish Match, Easter Eve, Mire, On the Road, Verotchka, Volodya, The Kiss, Sleepy and The Steppe.

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Emma Wodehouse has led a simple life, but during the course of this, she at last reaps her share of the world's vexations. In this comedy of manners, the heroine learns to come to terms with the reality of other people, and with her own erring nature.

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Two small masterpieces in one volume. First, The Double, a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare that foreshadows Kafka and Sartre. A minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger - a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of his increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner plurality of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work. Second, The Gambler, a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky - who once gambled away his wife's wedding ring knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.

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Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life.

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History offers few eras richer in drama than the last years of imperial Russia. Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra, presided over a glittering world of huge palaces, lavish balls, and incomparable luxury. Then their cherished son Alexis was born. His hemophilia led to their tragic entanglement with the bizarre Siberian mystic Rasputin and eventually to the disintegration of their empire. Nicholas and Alexandra is the unforgettable intimate account of the entire imperial family, now in a trade paperback format for the first time. Told with scrupulous historical accuracy and stunning narrative power, Nicholas and Alexandra is a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

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This is the book Anne Rice was born to write, a novel about the childhood of Jesus from Alexandria to Galilee in the turbulent 1st century - the story of the boy who was born to be King of the Jews, the 'ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, and the ultimate immortal'. Incomparable in its boldness and daring, shockingly timely in its evocation of the Middle Eastern world in another era, hers is a unique and palpable rendering of part of the greatest story ever told. Evoking this crucial time in the life of Christ, based on the Gospels and her intense research into the period, Anne Rice magically recreates these years of drama, confusion, and enlightenment. The story opens in cosmopolitan Alexandria where the family has fled. But, when Herod dies, they take ship for Israel, a land under Roman occupation at a time of insurrection and confusion after the death of a tyrant king. It is an astonishing child's eye view - part innocent, part knowing - of Jewish life in these unruly years of occupation; and of the boy's growing awareness, first of his extraordinary powers, and then of the whispered mysteries surrounding his birth...We watch him grow, steeped in the laws, rituals and traditions of his people, beginning to discuss and dispute with the Elders, and to ask questions that cannot be answered. And, at the end, we feel the strength of his resolve as the boy comes face to face with the truth about his past and the challenge of his future.

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By the author of "The Name of the Rose", these essays, written over the last 20 years and culled from newspapers and magazines, explore the rag-bag of modern consciousness. Eco considers a wide range of topics, from "Superman" and "Casablanca", Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, Jim Jones and mass suicide, and Woody Allen, to holography and waxworks, pop festivals and football, and not least the social and personal implications of tight jeans.

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In the "USA Today" bestselling Needlecraft Mysteries, Betsy Devonshire, owner of the Crewel World needlework shop, knows how to untangle even the most knotty of mysteries. But a soggy murder case might have Betsy in over her head... Even though running Crewel World keeps Betsy plenty busy, a little extra cash on the side doesn't hurt. So when the local senior complex, Watered Silk, asks her to teach a class on the tricky punch needle technique, Betsy jumps at the opportunity to win over some new customers. Unfortunately, the business that Betsy drums up is not of the needlework variety. A young woman is found floating in Watered Silk's therapy pool, and Betsy's sleuthing skills are immediately called upon to figure out who drowned her. But the list of suspects is more twisted than any Betsy has encountered before. The young woman had three lovers - each with a motive for the murder. It's up to Betsy to sort out the snarl of romantic entanglements and find a killer, or the wrong man is bound to get pinned for a crime he didn't commit...

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Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

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How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions. Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.

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The National Bestseller The election of Donald Trump to be the 45th President of the United States of America shocked and dismayed progressives across the country. What We Do Now, a collection of passionate manifestos by some of the country's leading progressives, aims to provide a blueprint for how those stunned progressives can move forward. Its powerful contributions - from economists, environmentalists, activists, artists, politicians, and novelists - will offer encouragement and guidance to practicing constitutionally protected acts of resistance throughout the unprecedented upcoming administration. Among the contributors are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Gloria Steinem, Paul Krugman, Robert B. Reich, George Saunders and Dave Eggers as well the heads of the ACLU, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the Arab American Association, the National GLBTQ Task Force, the Freedom of the Press Association, and other prominent activists.

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A tale of quiet lives in an early 19th-century English provincial town which engages the reader at every level, from the author's chronicle of everyday details to the most exacting philosophical and moral reflection.

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Setting the romantic rural Scotland of the late 17th century against the prosaic cities of Glasgow and London, this story paints a tragic portait of Rob Roy MacGregor. The feudal world of the Highlands withers away under the onslaught of new commercial and political realities.

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In the book which put South America on the literary map, Marquez tells the haunting story of a community lost in the depths of that almighty continent where time passes slowly. A poetic masterpiece whose rich and powerful language easily survives the translation from Spanish, this is the most celebrated text of magic realism, the literary movement which has dominated world fiction for the last thirty years.

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This is a painfully drawn portrayal of private life, but its wider subject-matter also makes it a fictional document of post-revolutionary France.

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An old man recounts his past to a voluptuous widow, revealing mans compulsion to create and destroy what he loves... Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional biography of aging artist Rabo Karabekian - first introduced in Breakfast of Champions who wants only to be left alone at his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked in his potato barn.

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Friday Night Lights meets Glee - the incredible and true story of an extraordinary drama teacher who has changed the lives of thousands of students and inspired a town. Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to see a high school production of Les Miserables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S. Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Broadway turns to Truman High when trying out controversial shows such as Rent and Spring Awakening before they move on to high school theater programs across the nation. Volpe's students from this blue-collar town go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders. Michael Sokolove, a Levittown native and former student of Volpe's, chronicles the drama director's last school years and follows a group of student actors as they work through riveting dramas both on and off the stage. This is a story of an economically depressed but proud town finding hope in a gifted teacher and the magic of theater.

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Ren Ishida is nearly finished with graduate school when he receives news of his sister, Keiko's, sudden death. She was viciously stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister's affairs, still failing to understand why she chose to abandon the family and Tokyo for this desolate town years ago. As he comes to know the figures in Akakawa, from the enigmatic politician to his fellow teachers and a rebellious, alluring student named Rio, Ren delves into his shared childhood with Keiko and what followed, trying to piece together what happened the night of her death. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren struggles to find solace in the void his sister has left behind.

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After years of surviving near-death in a concentration camp, Ross is finally safe, living in New York City among friends. But he is only beginning to understand that freedom is far from easy - and that paradise has a price.