Added by: arcadius | Karma: 2802.10 | Fiction literature | 3 August 2010
5
Smilla's Sense of Snow
Six year old Isaiah leaps to his death from the roof of the apartment building in which he lives with his mother. Smilla Jaspersen, who lives in the same building and has come to love the little boy as her own, does not believe Isaiah would go willingly on the roof as he's very afraid of heights. Although there is only one set of footprints on the roof, she still suspects foul play as supported by her "reading" of the footprints.
Added by: arcadius | Karma: 2802.10 | Fiction literature | 3 August 2010
8
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
First novel by Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1952 and reissued in 1954 as Utopia 14. This anti-utopian novel employs the standard science-fiction formula of a futuristic world run by machines and of one man's futile rebellion against that world. The novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society.
Added by: arcadius | Karma: 2802.10 | Fiction literature | 3 August 2010
3
Slapstick or Lonesome No More
Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the US, King of Manhattan, and one-half of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the 1st floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern.
Anthem is set in a distant collectivist future, when every form and emblem of individualism have been erased and society has reverted to a preindustrial level. In this novella, as many of her writings, Ayn dramatizes her philosophy of Objectivism in the main character. Its hero is a scientist in a world where the pursuit of knowledge is a crime, and he struggles against the established society to discover the meaning of individual freedom.
This edition is written in English. However, there is a running Spanish thesaurus at the bottom of each page for the more difficult English words highlighted in the text.
Pudd'nhead Wilson is an ironic novel by Mark Twain. It was serialized in The Century Magazine (1893-4), before being published as a novel in 1894.
The setting is the fictional Missouri frontier town of Dawson's Landing on the banks of the Mississippi River in the first half of the 1800s. David Wilson moves to town and a chance remark of his causes locals to brand him a "pudd'nhead" - a nitwit.