|
Showing 1 - 25 of
40 matches in All Departments
|
The Short End of the Sonnenallee
Thomas Brussig; Introduction by Jonathan Franzen; Translated by Jenny Watson
|
R268
R236
Discovery Miles 2 360
Save R32 (12%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
Thomas Brussig's classic German satire, translated into English for
the first time and introduced by Jonathan Franzen, is a comedic,
moving account of life in East Berlin before the Fall of the Berlin
Wall Thomas Brussig's slim novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee,
is a satire set, literally, on the Sonnenallee, the famed
"boulevard of the sun" in East Berlin. Within this boulevard lives
Michael, an adolescent who faces daily ridicule whenever he steps
out of his apartment building and comes into view of the
observation platform on the West side. "Look, a real Zonie. Can we
take your picture?" Hopelessly in love with the most beautiful girl
on the street, Michael is batted away in favour of the Western boys
who are free to cross the border. What chance does Michael have,
and how much trouble will he get into by pursuing her?
Laugh-out-loud funny and unabashedly silly, Brussig's novel follows
the bizarre, grotesque quotidian details of life in the German
Democratic Republic. As this new translation shows, the ideas at
its heart - freedom, democracy and life's fundamental hilarity -
hold great relevance for today.
'His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch-like triumph' Telegraph 'A
pleasure bomb of a novel' Vogue 'A true modern master' Independent
It's 23 December 1971, and the Hildebrandts are at a crossroads.
Fifteen-year-old Perry has resolved to be a better person and quit
dealing drugs to seventh graders. His sister Becky, the once
straight-laced high school social queen, has veered into
counterculture, while at college, Clem is wrestling with a decision
that might tear his family apart. As their parents - Russ, a
suburban pastor, and Marion, his restless wife - tug against the
bonds of a joyless marriage, Crossroads finds a family, and a
nation, struggling to do the right thing. 'Funny, moving, crackling
with life, it has what all great fiction should have' Financial
Times 'Intoxicating - a luxuriant domestic drama' Guardian THE
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION BOOK OF
2021 * AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR * A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE
YEAR * A LIT HUB BOOK OF THE YEAR
Thomas Brussig's classic German novel, The Short End of the
Sonnenallee, now appearing for the first time in English, is a
moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before
the fall of the Wall Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the nubbin of a
street, the Sonnenallee, whose long end extends beyond the Berlin
Wall outside his apartment building. Like his friends and family,
who have their own quixotic dreams--to secure an original English
pressing of Exile on Main St., to travel to Mongolia, to escape
from East Germany by buying up cheap farmland and seceding from the
country--Micha is desperate for one thing. It's not what his mother
wants for him, which is to be an exemplary young Socialist and
study in Moscow. What Micha wants is a love letter that may or may
not have been meant for him, and may or may not have been written
by the most beautiful girl on the Sonnenallee. Stolen by a gust of
wind before he could open it, the letter now lies on the fortified
"death strip" at the base of the Wall, as tantalizingly close as
the freedoms of the West and seemingly no more attainable. The
Short End of the Sonnenallee, finally available to an American
audience in a pitch-perfect translation by Jonathan Franzen and
Jenny Watson, confounds the stereotypes of life in totalitarian
East Germany. Brussig's novel is a funny, charming tale of
adolescents being adolescents, a portrait of a surprisingly warm
community enduring in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. As Franzen
writes in his foreword, the book is "a reminder that, even when the
public realm becomes a nightmare, people can still privately manage
to preserve their humanity, and be silly, and forgive."
|
Freedom (Paperback)
Jonathan Franzen
|
R568
R442
Discovery Miles 4 420
Save R126 (22%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
Purity (Paperback)
Jonathan Franzen
1
|
R330
R264
Discovery Miles 2 640
Save R66 (20%)
|
Ships in 5 - 10 working days
|
The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The
Corrections Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her
real name is Purity, that she's saddled with student debt and a
reclusive mother, but there are few clues as to who her father is
or how she'll ever have a normal life. Then she meets Andreas Wolf
- internet outlaw, charismatic provocateur, a man who deals in
secrets and might just be able to help her solve the mystery of her
origins.
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in
Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and
their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the
hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a
series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the
Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a
marriage-and a society-wrenching itself apart. First published in
1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the
most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in
postwar American literature - a novel that, according to Irving
Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts,
and Seize the Day."
|
The Corrections (Paperback)
Jonathan Franzen; Edited by Jonathan Galassi
|
R556
R420
Discovery Miles 4 200
Save R136 (24%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
Crossroads (Paperback)
Jonathan Franzen
|
R594
R320
Discovery Miles 3 200
Save R274 (46%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
Thomas Brussig's classic German satire, translated into English for
the first time and introduced by Jonathan Franzen, is a comedic,
moving account of life in East Berlin before the Fall of the Berlin
Wall Thomas Brussig's slim novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee,
is a satire set, literally, on the Sonnenallee, the famed
"boulevard of the sun" in East Berlin. Within this boulevard lives
Michael, an adolescent who faces daily ridicule whenever he steps
out of his apartment building and comes into view of the
observation platform on the West side. "Look, a real Zonie. Can we
take your picture?" Hopelessly in love with the most beautiful girl
on the street, Michael is batted away in favour of the Western boys
who are free to cross the border. What chance does Michael have,
and how much trouble will he get into by pursuing her?
Laugh-out-loud funny and unabashedly silly, Brussig's novel follows
the bizarre, grotesque quotidian details of life in the German
Democratic Republic. As this new translation shows, the ideas at
its heart - freedom, democracy and life's fundamental hilarity -
hold great relevance for today.
The climate crisis is here. Our chance to stop it has come and
gone, but this doesn't have to mean the world is ending. 'If you
care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on
it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping
that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or
enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is
coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.' The
honesty and realism of Jonathan Franzen's writings on climate have
been widely denounced and just as widely celebrated. Here, in his
definitive statement on the subject, Franzen confronts the world's
failure to avert destabilising climate change and takes up the
question: Now what?
|
Purity (Paperback)
Jonathan Franzen
|
R557
R430
Discovery Miles 4 300
Save R127 (23%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
As the 1950s close, Peanuts enters its golden age. Linus, who had
just learned to speak in the previous volume, becomes downright
eloquent. Charlie Brown cascades further down the hill to loserdom.
But the rising star is undoubtedly Snoopy. He's at the centre of
the most action-packed episodes. Jonathan Franzen, author of The
Corrections and life-long Peanuts fan, introduces the collection.
|
Freedom (Paperback)
Jonathan Franzen
1
|
R298
R270
Discovery Miles 2 700
Save R28 (9%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'A masterpiece' New York Times
'Stupendous, magnificent, unforgettable, witty and rich. A great
American novel' Spectator From the National Book Award-winning
author of The Corrections comes a darkly comedic novel about
family, now hailed as an American classic. They had been the
perfect family: liberal gentrifiers, the avant-garde of the Whole
Foods generation. But the Berglunds are struggling to live in an
ever more confusing world. Walter, an environmental lawyer and
commuter cyclist, has taken a job with Big Coal. Patty, the ideal
hands-on mother and wife, is growing unhinged in front of the
neighbours' attentive eyes. Their son has moved in with the
Republican family next door, and Richard Katz, outre rocker and
Walter's best friend and rival, has re-entered their lives.
'Writing in prose that dazzles, Franzen has now written the two
novels that best define modern America' Independent 'A masterpiece.
Franzen skewers the particularity of modern life and love like no
one else' Daily Telegraph
A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning
author of Freedom and The Corrections In The End of the End of the
Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past
five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigour to the
themes - both human and literary - that have long preoccupied him.
Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle,
recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an
illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces
contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect
from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a
unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature and
with some of the most important issues of our day, made more
pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the
Earth is remarkable, provocative and necessary.
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city. But that all changes when it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, S.Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, 'The Twenty-Seventh City' shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unravelling into terror and dark comedy. 'A huge and masterly drama…gripping and surreal and overwhelmingly convincing.' 'Newsweek' 'Franzen has managed to put together a suspense story with all the elements of a complex, multi-layered psychological novel…A riveting piece of fiction that lingers in the mind long after more conventional pot-boilers have bubbled away.' 'The New York Times Book Review' 'Unsettling and visionary. 'The Twenty-Seventh City' is not a novel that can be quickly dismissed or easily forgotten: it has elements of both 'Great' and 'American'. A book of memorable characters, surprising situations, and provocative ideas.' 'Washington Post' 'Franzen goes for broke here – he's out to expose the soul of a city and all the bloody details of the way we live. A book of range, pith and intelligence.' 'Vogue'
|
The Laughing Policeman (Paperback)
Maj Sjoewall, Per Wahloeoe; Introduction by Jonathan Franzen
1
|
R311
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R59 (19%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
The fourth book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from
the 1960s - the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime
writing. Hugely acclaimed, the Martin Beck series were the original
Scandinavian crime novels and have inspired the writings of Stieg
Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo. Written in the 1960s, 10
books completed in 10 years, they are the work of Maj Sjoewall and
Per Wahloeoe - a husband and wife team from Sweden. They follow the
fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn
character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction;
without his creation Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's
Kurt Wallander may never have been conceived. The novels can be
read separately, but are best read in chronological order, so the
reader can follow the characters' development and get drawn into
the series as a whole. On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine
bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press,
anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly
dubs him a madman. But Martin Beck of the Homicide Squad suspects
otherwise: this apparently motiveless killer has managed to target
one of Beck's best detectives - and he, surely, would not have been
riding that lethal bus without a reason. With its wonderfully
observed lawmen, its brilliantly rendered felons and their murky
Stockholm underworld, and its deftly engineered plot, 'The Laughing
Policeman' has long been recognised as a classic of the police
procedural.
A brilliant personal history from the award-winning author of 'The
Corrections'. Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of 'Freedom' and
the highly acclaimed 'The Corrections', arrived late, and last, in
a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. 'The Discomfort Zone'
is his intimate memoir of his growth from a 'small and
fundamentally ridiculous person,' through an adolescence both
excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing
and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class
family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal
insight into the decades in which America took an angry turn away
from its mid-century ideals. He tells of the effects of Kafka's
fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the
elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof
of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his
mother's house after her death, the web of connections between his
all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life
lessons to be learned in watching birds. Sparkling, daring and
arrestingly honest, 'The Discomfort Zone' is warmed by the same
combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that
characterize Franzen's fiction. It narrates the formation of a
unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American
family.
Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international
bestselling author of THE CORRECTIONS. Jonathan Franzen's THE
CORRECTIONS was the best-loved and most written-about novel of
2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became
known as 'The Harper's Essay, ' Franzen's controversial 1996 look
at the fate of the novel. This essay is reprinted for the first
time in HOW TO BE ALONE, alongside the personal essays and
painstaking, often funny reportage that earned Franzen a wide
readership before the success of THE CORRECTIONS. Although his
subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax
prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's
writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the
hidden persistence of loneliness, in postmodern, imperial America.
Alzheimer's disease and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure
as an Oprah Winfrey author. As a collection, these essays record
what Franzen calls 'a movement away from an angry and frightened
isolation toward an acceptance -- even a celebration -- of being a
reader and a writer. ' At the same time they show the wry distrust
of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate
relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the
tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of
the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics
at work today
THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'A genuine masterpiece, the
first great American novel of the twenty-first century' Elle
'Funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent' Guardian A
brilliantly perceptive and moving novel that announced Jonathan
Franzen as one of our greatest living writers. The Lamberts - Enid,
Alfred and their three grown-up children - are a troubled family
living in a troubled age. After fifty years as a wife and mother,
Enid is ready to have some fun, but her husband Alfred is losing
his mind to Parkinson's. As his condition worsens, and the Lamberts
are forced to face the long-buried secrets and failures that haunt
them, Enid sets her heart on gathering everyone together for one
last family Christmas. 'Compellingly readable, funny and above all
generous spirited' Daily Mail 'A novel of outstanding sympathy,
wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with
stylistic brio and psychological and political insight' Financial
Times 'A big-hearted, panoramic American epic, intelligent and wise
but also wildly, stonkingly funny' Independent
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of strange happenings – earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance Louis falls in love with Renée Seitchek, a passionate and brilliant seismologist, whose discoveries about the origin of the earthquakes complicate everything.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Unlimited Love
Red Hot Chili Peppers
CD
(1)
R226
R143
Discovery Miles 1 430
|