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Triple bill of romantic dramas based on the novels by Nicholas
Sparks. In 'Dear John' (2010), while Special Forces Army Sergeant
John Tyree (Channing Tatum) is home on leave, he meets beautiful
college student Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) and the two fall
in love. When the time comes for Savannah to return to college, she
promises to write to John during his 12-month enlistment overseas.
However, their budding love affair is put to the test when John
decides to re-enlist in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. 'Safe Haven'
(2013), follows the fortunes of a guarded young woman who
unexpectedly finds love in a North Carolina town. Katie Feldman
(Julianne Hough) stands out on arrival in Southport. Beautiful but
highly reserved, she makes it clear that she expects to have little
involvement in the social life of the town and its inhabitants.
However, an unforeseen chain of events brings Katie close to Alex
(Josh Duhamel), a widower who runs a store while also attempting to
bring up his young children. As she inexorably falls in love with
Alex and the children Katie begins to let down her guard, but doing
so threatens to raise the dark secret she has been protecting. Will
she find a way to reconcile the trauma of her past with the
possibility of a brighter future? 'The Best of Me' (2014), charts
the relationship between Dawson Cole (Luke Bracey/James Marsden)
and Amanda Collier (Liana Liberato/Michelle Monaghan), two people
from opposite sides of town, who fall deeply in love as teenagers.
However, Amanda's parents don't approve of Dawson and their
relationship is short-lived due to a number of unfortunate events
outside of their control. 20 years later, the pair are reunited at
a mutual friend's funeral and it doesn't take long for their
romance to rekindle. But although it seems the universe is
conspiring to bring them back together after all this time, it
seems there are still other forces at work which are determined to
keep them apart...
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Metamorphosis (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka, Michael Hoffman
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R240
R207
Discovery Miles 2 070
Save R33 (14%)
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Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions
of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest
writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take
us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England
to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on
the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and
printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile
cloth and stamped with foil. One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor
Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach.
Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is
one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction,
and is accompanied here by two more classic stories. 'He is the
greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such
novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison
to him' - Vladimir Nabokov
Based on the encoding process, arithmetic codes can be viewed as
tree codes and current proposals for decoding arithmetic codes with
forbidden symbols belong to sequential decoding algorithms and
their variants. In this monograph, we propose a new way of looking
at arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. If a limit is imposed
on the maximum value of a key parameter in the encoder, this
modified arithmetic encoder can also be modeled as a finite state
machine and the code generated can be treated as a variable-length
trellis code. The number of states used can be reduced and
techniques used for decoding convolutional codes, such as the list
Viterbi decoding algorithm, can be applied directly on the trellis.
The finite state machine interpretation can be easily migrated to
Markov source case. We can encode Markov sources without
considering the conditional probabilities, while using the list
Viterbi decoding algorithm which utilizes the conditional
probabilities. We can also use context-based arithmetic coding to
exploit the conditional probabilities of the Markov source and
apply a finite state machine interpretation to this problem. The
finite state machine interpretation also allows us to more
systematically understand arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols.
It allows us to find the partial distance spectrum of arithmetic
codes with forbidden symbols. We also propose arithmetic codes with
memories which use high memory but low implementation precision
arithmetic codes. The low implementation precision results in a
state machine with less complexity. The introduced input memories
allow us to switch the probability functions used for arithmetic
coding. Combining these two methods give us a huge parameter space
of the arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. Hence we can choose
codes with better distance properties while maintaining the
encoding efficiency and decoding complexity. A construction and
search method is proposed and simulation results show that we can
achieve a similar performance as turbo codes when we apply this
approach to rate 2/3 arithmetic codes. Table of Contents:
Introduction / Arithmetic Codes / Arithmetic Codes with Forbidden
Symbols / Distance Property and Code Construction / Conclusion
Your natural gift is the natural expression that spontaneously
unfolds when you open your heart. This book is for people who have
always suspected they have uplifting qualities that can make a
difference in the world and with the people they interact with.
Rather than declaring success principles and spiritual truths as
many other spiritual and personal growth books, this book functions
as a tool that allows you to experience your unique spiritual
essence for yourself. The early chapters walk readers through the
elemental natural gifts of human beings and how to see your unique
blend of these qualities. The book then shows how to unlock your
natural gift from your limiting self beliefs and to awaken it. Next
it guides you to walk with your natural gift in your daily life and
to offer it to others. Finally, it teaches you how to keep yourself
intact and find support when walking with your heart open - the
natural state for offering your gift. Michael Hoffman is a trained
spiritual guide who offers workshops and coaching for people to
directly experience their spiritual connection and natural gift. He
trained with a Spiritual Teacher, Zen Master, and Shaman for 22
years to guide and support people in their spiritual development.
Michael also holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from Boise State
University and has worked as a psychotherapist and spiritual guide
since 1986.
From the (mock) introduction by the (fictitious) translator: "'The
Naked Ear' is an unpolished, apparently unfinished piece of writing
by an author about whom nothing is known, not even his name. The
manuscript that chanced to come into my possession in so bizarre a
fashion is signed--self-mockingly, one presumes--'John of
Silence.'" Who was this 'John of Silence'? Was he alive? Could he
be found? Surely a man doesn't pour out his soul like this into
four thick notebooks... only to toss them into an unlocked train
station locker?..."
Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913.
During the next four years, the two writers--Frost, an unknown poet
who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family
to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary
journalist--formed the most important friendship between poets
since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended
with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World
War.
The story of Edward Thomas' turn to poetry, in fact, has been
dominated by the account of Robert Frost's injunction: to break his
existing prose into lines, bringing his musical cadence and his
direct speaking voice into conversation with formal prosody. Thomas
himself had already championed Frost's own early work: "These poems
are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of
rhetoric.... Their language is free from the poetical words and
forms that are the chief material of the secondary poets. The metre
avoids not only old fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later
fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact the medium is common
speech.... Mr. Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as
Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into
poetry once again."
This book presents for the first time the full record, arranged
chronologically, of what the poets wrote to, for, and about one
another--their letters, poems, and Thomas' review of Frost's first
two books. They reveal a warmth and charm that give us the key to
the relationship between Frost and Thomas.
The six stories that make up "Little Pieces" are all set in Japan,
land of Zen austerity, manga excess, and much in between. In "First
Snow," a joyous chance reunion of a babysitter and her one-time
charge unexpectedly spirals into confession and response. Sonoko,
in the story that bears her name, slips with practiced ease out of
the world of her life into that of 11th-century Japan. In "The
Miracle," the miracle is that nothing happens-until the end. The
narrator of "The Concussion," age 87, sums up the spirit of these
stories when, responding to the disbelief he inspires, he says, "I
have the sort of face that turns everything I say into a joke.
Still..." "First Snow" and "Sonoko" first appeared in The Japan
Times.
Green will illustrate and shed new light on the gamut of issues
associated with renewable energy, a topic whose importance
increases exponentially with every temperature record-setting year.
Jane and Michael Hoffman use their years of experience to explain
the technological and economic future of this ecologically
significant issue. They incisively explain its politics: what
countries are doing right now and, most importantly, what we should
be doing. Green will cut through the hype and polemics surrounding
ecologically friendly technologies and present the unvarnished
truth. It will guide the reader through the misinformation and
confusion over global warming, and demonstrate the degree to which
renewable energy can be part of the solution.
The four stories of Part I vary in setting from Shinobazu Pond to
19th-century Germany, where Dostoevsky toils in despairing,
poverty-stricken exile on Crime and Punishment. The "Nectar
Fragments" of Part II are linked short stories set in the fictional
Montreal suburb of Nectar, where an aging recluse living like a
prisoner in the house in which he grew up struggles to recast the
story of Abraham and Isaac into modern form. Was Abraham a saint,
or a murderer? No one suspected the recluse himself had a son - who
one day appears, seemingly out of nowhere...
Michael Hoffman's characters are, willy-nilly, participants in
plots that don't add up. Some emerge stronger; others, shadows of
their former selves. The six stories and one novel that make up
this collection are set, wholly or primarily, in Japan, land of the
artful mask. Meet the man who loses his key and sets in motion a
chain of events whose incomprehensibility he will never understand;
a small girl who accosts a fugitive murderer (is he really a
murderer?) for sex, only to be admonished to go back to school; a
murdered boy who is resurrected (is he really?) and wreaks his mad
revenge; and, finally, Sidney Levin, whose reunion twenty years
later with a lost Japanese girlfriend ends in a hopeless
entanglement with her growing daughter.
Why did the woman in the restaurant scream? Why is the man falsely
charged guilty? The empty cafe fills; reason unravels. In the
novella "Solitude, " the last of eight tales in this volume,
Solomon Rose returns home after 22 years to confront a dilemma
soluble only by murder.
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