Added by: arcadius | Karma: 2802.10 | Fiction literature | 4 August 2010
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"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novel - the one that catapulted its author to national fame - is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, ...
Added by: arcadius | Karma: 2802.10 | Fiction literature | 4 August 2010
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Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a secret group of radical utopians, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp - a terrible mental, spiritual, and physical ordeal that inspired him to write the novel The House of the Dead. Told from the point of view of a fictitious narrator - a convict serving a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife novel describes in vivid detail the horrors that Dostoevsky himself witnessed while in prison. The House of the Dead also describes the spiritual death and gradual resurrection from despair experienced by the novel’s central character ...
JunkieJunkie (alternative title spelled Junky) is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs. It was his first published novel and has come to be considered a seminal text on the lifestyle of heroin addicts in the early 1950s. Burroughs' working title was Junk. Partly because he saw that becoming a publishable writer was possible (his friend Jack Kerouac had published his first novel The Town and the City in 1950), he began to compile his experiences as an addict, ‘lush roller’ and small-time Greenwich Village heroin pusher.
Added by: arcadius | Karma: 2802.10 | Fiction literature | 3 August 2010
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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.
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.
