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From the bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking and Make
Russia Great Again comes a comic tour de force, the story of one
man's "lively and funny" (New York Journal of Books) journey
through lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic,
an aging screenwriter is holed up in a coastal South Carolina town
with his beloved second wife, Peaches. He's been binge-eating for a
year and developed a notable rapport with the local fast-food chain
Hippo King. He struggles to work--on a ludicrous screenplay about a
Nazi attempt to kidnap FDR and, naturally, an article for Etymology
Today on English words of Carthaginian origin. He's told Peaches so
often about the origins of the word mayonnaise that she's developed
an aversion to using the condiment. He thinks he has Covid. His
wife thinks he is losing his mind. In short, your typical pandemic
worries. Things were going from bad to worse even before his doctor
suggested a battery of brain tests. He knows what that means:
dementia! But even in these scary times, there are plenty of things
to do to distract him. His iPhone is fat-shaming him. He's. been
trying to read Proust and thinks the French novelist missed his
true calling as a parfumier. And he's discovered nefarious Russian
influence on the local coroner's face. Why is Putin so keen to
control who decides who died peacefully and who by foul play in
Pimento County. Could it be the local military base? Has Anyone
Seen My Toes? is a "laugh-out-loud" (Publishers Weekly) romp
through a time that has been anything but funny.
In an attempt to gain congressional approval for a top-secret
weapons system, Washington lobbyist "Bird" McIntyre teams up with
sexy, outspoken neocon Angel Templeton to pit the American public
against the Chinese. When Bird fails to uncover an authentic reason
to slander the nation, he and Angel put the Washington media
machine to work, spreading a rumor that the Chinese secret service
is working to assassinate the Dalai Lama.
Meanwhile in China, mild-mannered President Fa Mengyao and his
devoted aide Gang are maneuvering desperately against sinister
party hard-liners Minister Lo and General Han. Now Fa and Gang must
convince the world that the People's Republic is not out to kill
the Dalai Lama, while maintaining Fa's small margin of power in the
increasingly militaristic environment of the party.
On the home front, Bird must contend with a high-strung wife who
entertains Olympic equestrian ambition, and the qualifying
competition happens to be taking place in China. As things unravel
abroad, Bird and Angel's lie comes dangerously close to reality.
And as their relationship rises to a new level, so do mounting
tensions between the United States and China.
In "the Trump satire we've been waiting for" (The Washington Post),
award-winning and bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking
delivers a hilarious and whipsmart fake memoir by Herb
Nutterman--Donald Trump's seventh chief of staff--who has written
the ultimate tell-all about Trump and Russia.Herb Nutterman never
intended to become Donald Trump's White House chief of staff. Herb
served the Trump Organization for twenty-seven years, holding jobs
in everything from a food and beverage manager at the Trump
Magnifica to being the first general manager of the Trump Bloody
Run Golf Course. And when his old boss asks "his favorite Jew" to
take on the daunting role of chief of staff, Herb, spurred on by
loyalty agrees. But being the chief of staff is a lot different
from being a former hospitality expert. Soon, Herb finds himself
deeply involved in Russian intrigue, deflecting rumors about Mike
Pence's high school involvement in a Satanic cult, and leading
President Trump's reelection campaign. What Nutterman experiences
is outrageous, outlandish, and otherwise unbelievable--therefore
making it a deadly accurate account of being the chief of staff
during the Trump administration. With hilarious jabs at the biggest
world leaders and Washington politics overall, Make Russia Great
Again is a timely political satire from "one of the funniest
writers in the English language" (Tom Wolfe).
Airborne is how William F. Buckley, Jr. describes his sail across
the wide Atlantic with his son and five friends. The trip, for
fifteen years a dream, for fifteen months a planned operation, was
always a risk: one doesn't set out haphazardly in a small sailboat
across 4,400 miles of ocean, and Buckley's account of perils of the
sea as experienced by himself since he acquired his first sailboat
at age thirteen is at once graphic, instructive, and terrifying.
But, we learn quickly, the concern is mostly for the prospect of
thirty days and thirty nights away from the cosmopolitan jungle to
which he and his friends are accustomed; their lair, so to speak.
But it happened: notwithstanding vicissitudes amusing, annoying,
and even dangerous, suddenly the schooner, and the entire trip,
were airborne, and the experience resulted in a fusion of hopes,
fears, ambitions, and pleasures that lifts the book from the
category of mere chronicles of the sea, into a chronicle of our
time, a passage of the spirit.
When the networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe
Biden on Saturday, November 7, 2020, people from coast to coast
exhaled--and danced in the streets. This quick-turnaround volume, a
collection of 38 personal essays from writers all over the
country--"many of America's most thoughtful voices," as Jon Meacham
puts it--captures the week Trump was voted out, a unique juncture
in American life, and helps point toward a way forward to a nation
less divided. An eclectic lineup of contributors--from Rosanna
Arquette, Susan Bro and General Wesley Clark to Keith Olbermann,
Stewart O'Nan and Anthony Scaramucci--puts a year of transition
into perspective, and summons the anxieties and hopes so many have
for better times ahead. As award-winning columnist Mary C. Curtis
writes in the lead essay, "Saying you're not interested in politics
is dangerous because, like it or not, politics is interested in
you." Novelist Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for Vice
President George H.W. Bush, laments, "The Republican Senate, with
one exception, has become a stay of ovine, lickspittle quislings,
degenerate descendants of such giants as Everett Dirksen, Barry
Goldwater, Howard Baker and John McCain." Nero Award-winning
mystery novelist Stephen Mack Jones writes, to Donald Trump,
"Remember: You live in my house. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is my
house. My ancestors built it at a cost of blood, soul and labor. I
pay my taxes every year to feed you, clothe you and your family and
staff and fly you around the country and the world in my
tricked-out private jet. If you violate any aspect of your
four-year lease--any aspect--Lord Jesus so help me, I will do
everything in my power to kick yo narrow ass to the curb." As
Publisher Steve Kettmann writes in the Introduction: "The hope is
that in putting out these glimpses so quickly, giving them an
immediacy unusual in book publishing, we can help in the mourning
for all that has been lost, help in the healing (of ourselves and
of our country), and help in the pained effort, like moving limbs
that have gone numb from inactivity, to give new life to our
democracy. We stared into the abyss, tottered on the edge, and a
record-setting surge of voting and activism delivered us from the
very real threat of plunging into autocracy."
Christopher Buckley at his best: an extraordinary, wide-ranging
selection of essays both hilarious and poignant, irreverent and
delightful.
In his first book of essays since his 1997 bestseller, "Wry
Martinis," Buckley delivers a rare combination of big ideas and
truly fun writing. Tackling subjects ranging from How to Teach Your
Four-Year-Old to Ski to A Short History of the Bug Zapper, and The
Art of Sacking to literary friendships with Joseph Heller and
Christopher Hitchens, he is at once a humorous storyteller, astute
cultural critic, adventurous traveler, and irreverent
historian.
Reading these essays is the equivalent of being in the company of a
tremendously witty and enlightening companion. Praised as both
deeply informed and deeply funny by "The Wall Street Journal,"
Buckley will have you laughing and reflecting in equal measure.
The Columbianna, an ancient tramp steamer with a notably eccentric
crew, 200 layers of paint on her decks, a sailing history going
back to 1945, and demons in her plumbing, was crossing the Atlantic
for the umpteenth time-but on this occasion with a sharp-eyed
observer, whose brilliant account brings to life the harshness,
humor, and bizarreness of life on board. Steaming to Bamboola is a
story of the author's time at sea. He tells first-hand about
typhoons, cargoes, smuggling, mid-ocean burials, rescues,
stowaways, hard places, hard drinking and hard romance. It is the
tale of a ship and her crew, men fated to wander for a
living--always steaming to, but never quite reaching, Bamboola. The
was the first book by renowned author and humorist Christopher
Buckley, which was originally published in 1982 to glowing reviews.
Forty years and over a twenty books and hundreds of articles later,
Buckley introduces Columbianna and her roguish crew to a new
generation of readers.
In 1980, Buckley gathered together his friends and set out to sail
across the Atlantic. This is what he correctly describes as a
"celebration" of that thirty-day event. Here are the calms and the
storms, the melodrama and the rumination, the wine and the song,
the navigation and the introspection that in Buckley's distinctive
blend capture the imagination of sailors and non-sailors, amuse the
lighthearted and the dour, and engross the reader who wishes he
were aboard, as also the reader who thanks heaven that he is not.
Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a
cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest--and
most celebrated--books of all time. In recent years it has been
named to "best novels" lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library,
and the London Observer.
Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the
incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is
furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to
kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy--it is his own
army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must
fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt
to excuse himself from the perilous missions he's assigned, he'll
be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic
rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly
dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be
removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be
relieved.
This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller's
masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a
wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred
Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from
Joseph Heller's personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is
the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.
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Windfall - The End of the Affair
William F. Buckley; Foreword by Christopher Buckley
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R691
R564
Discovery Miles 5 640
Save R127 (18%)
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All the virtues of Bill Buckley's earlier books are here--but this
one is profoundly different. 1990 was a very good year, producing
vintage Buckley. He celebrated deeply meaningful anniversaries: the
fortieth year of his marriage; the fortieth since his graduation
from Yale; the thirty-fifth from National Review, the magazine he
founded, and then decided--to considerable shock--to retire from
editing. In the year in which he became a senior citizen, he
appeared, daringly, as a harpsichordist with two symphony
orchestras; wrote a controversial book advocating voluntary
national service, a proposal not calculated to endear him to his
fellow conservatives; and endured the death of a close friend. Thus
is completed (perhaps) the end of several affairs--and the capstone
volume of a diarist-journal keeper-journalist, who has proved to
be, over books at sea and on land (Cruising Speed, The Unmaking of
a Mayor, Airborne, Atlantic High, Overdrive, Racing Through
Paradise), both his own Boswell and Johnson.
Fifty years after its original publication, "Catch-22 "remains a
cornerstone of American lit-erature and one of the funniest--and
most celebrated--novels of all time. In recent years it has been
named to "best novels" lists by "Time, Newsweek, "the Modern
Library, and the London "Observer." Set in Italy during World War
II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier,
Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has
never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the
enemy--it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of
missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if
Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous
missions he's assigned, he'll be in violation of Catch-22, a
hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane
if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if
he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven
sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Since its publication
in 1961, no novel has matched "Catch-22"'s intensity and brilliance
in depicting the brutal insanity of war. This fiftieth-anniversary
edition commemorates Joseph Heller's masterpiece with a new
introduction by Christopher Buckley; personal essays on the genesis
of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical responses and
reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and
others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller's personal
archive; and a selection of advertisements from the original
publishing campaign that helped turn "Catch-22 "into a cultural
phenomenon. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic
of world literature.
One hundred of Ray Bradbury's remarkable stories which have,
together with his classic novels," "earned him an immense
international audience and his place among the most imaginative and
enduring writers of our time.
Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red
planet, with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky. Here are the
stories that speak of a special nostalgia for Green Town, Illinois,
the perfect setting for a seemingly cloudless childhood--except for
the unknown terror lurking in the ravine. Here are the Irish
stories and the Mexican stories, linked across their separate
geographies by Bradbury's astonishing inventiveness. Here, too, are
thrilling, terrifying stories--including "The Veldt" and "The Fog
Horn"--perfect for reading under the covers.
Read for the first time, these stories become as unshakable as
one's own fantasies. Read again--and again--they reveal new,
dazzling facets of the extraordinary art of Ray Bradbury.
Christopher Buckley's latest book continues his exploration of how,
despite the intellectual tools of science and philosophy, we are
still somehow left with questions about identity, memory, love,
loss, value, self, and God - not to mention the depredations of
war. In his poetry and nonfiction, he has considered these matters
in the belief that the answers to their mysteries are in the very
act of pursuit. On every page is the work of a consummate artist
who is also, recognisably, a companion spirit on the journey all of
creation has been on all this time.
Poetry. In this remarkable anthology of poems about Weldon Kees or
inspired by Weldon Kees--each accompanied by a statement by the
poet regarding Kees's influence, magic, and power over the
imagination of 20th Century American poetry--the editors
Christopher Buckley and Christopher Howell have scored a major coup
in American letters. Coupled with these poems are nearly 20 essays
by some of the greatest lights of 20th Century American poetry,
including Dana Gioia and Joseph Brodsky.
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Moby- Dick (Paperback)
Herman Melville; Introduction by Elizabeth Renker; Afterword by Christopher Buckley
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R204
R170
Discovery Miles 1 700
Save R34 (17%)
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"Moby-Dick" is at once a thrilling adventure tale, a timeless
allegory, and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. At
its heart is the powerful, unknowable sea--and Captain Ahab, a
brooding, one-legged fanatic who has sworn vengeance on the mammoth
white whale that crippled him. Narrated by Ishmael, a wayfarer who
joins the crew of Ahab's whaling ship, this is the story of that
hair-raising voyage, and of the men who embraced hardship and
nameless horrors as they dared to challenge God's most dreaded
creation and death itself for a chance at immortality.
A novel that delves with astonishing vigor into the complex souls
of men, "Moby-Dick" is an impassioned drama of the ultimate human
struggle that the "Atlantic Monthly "called "the greatest of
American novels."
With an Introduction by Elizabeth Renker and a New Afterword
President of the United States Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell
of a time getting his nominees appointed to the Supreme Court.
After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To
Kill A Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by
voters that the Senate won't have the guts to reject her -- Judge
Pepper Cartwright, the star of the nation's most popular reality
show, Courtroom Six.
Will Pepper, a straight-talking Texan, survive a confirmation
battle in the Senate? Will becoming one of the most powerful women
in the world ruin her love life? And even if she can make it to the
Supreme Court, how will she get along with her eight highly
skeptical colleagues, including a floundering Chief Justice who,
after legalizing gay marriage, learns that his wife has left him
for another woman.
Soon, Pepper finds herself in the middle of a constitutional
crisis, a presidential reelection campaign that the president is
determined to lose, and oral arguments of a romantic nature.
Supreme Courtship is another classic Christopher Buckley comedy
about the Washington institutions most deserving of ridicule.
Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He's a spokesman for the
Academy of Tobacco Studies-in other words, a flack for cigarette
companies, paid to promote their product on talk and news shows.
The problem? He's so good at his job, so effortlessly unethical,
that he's become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for
the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure
and the other want to sell you a disease, what will become of the
original Puff Daddy?
Philip Levine is one of the foremost poets of the last fifty years,
but moreover he is a master and unparalleled practitioner of the
long poem in our time. No recent poet has written as many
exceptional long poems as Levine, and his influence has continued
virtually undisturbed since his death in 2015. In this new
anthology, twenty-one prominent American poets testify to Levine's
immense importance and his singular mastery of the long poem's many
forms, offering an important discussion of the signature form of
one of the great poets of the English language. Contributors
include Kelly Cherry, Kate Daniels, Peter Everwine, Kathy Fagan,
Christopher Howell, Richard Jackson, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux,
Paul Mariani, and many more.
Christopher Buckley investigates the large, unanswerable questions
that have dogged humanity since the Beginning. Often the seascapes
along the California coast toss their debris of ontological doubts
upon the shores of his writing . . . uncertainties concerning God,
the human condition, the limits of our knowing, and the
universe.Buckley's poetry provides readers with the constant
blending of beautiful language and stirring content. Full of
emotion, "Varieties of Religious Experience" promises to deliver
meaningful messages.
In an attempt to gain congressional approval for a top-secret
weapons system, Washington lobbyist "Bird" McIntyre teams up with
sexy, outspoken neocon Angel Templeton to pit the American public
against the Chinese. When Bird fails to uncover an authentic reason
to slander the nation, he and Angel put the Washington media
machine to work, spreading a rumor that the Chinese secret service
is working to assassinate the Dalai Lama.
Meanwhile in China, mild-mannered President Fa Mengyao and his
devoted aide Gang are maneuvering desperately against sinister
party hard-liners Minister Lo and General Han. Now Fa and Gang must
convince the world that the People's Republic is not out to kill
the Dalai Lama, while maintaining Fa's small margin of power in the
increasingly militaristic environment of the party.
On the home front, Bird must contend with a high-strung wife who
entertains Olympic equestrian ambition, and the qualifying
competition happens to be taking place in China. As things unravel
abroad, Bird and Angel's lie comes dangerously close to reality.
And as their relationship rises to a new level, so do mounting
tensions between the United States and China.
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