Added by: stovokor | Karma: 1758.61 | Fiction literature | 2 January 2009
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After 100 years, Conrad's distinctive novel of espionage and counter-espionage is still the apex of the genre, the indispensable masterpiece. It's bleak, mordant, suspenseful, and funny, and it's wildly under-appreciated. This is so perfect a spy novel that frankly no other spy novel needed ever to be written. Conrad has said it all. It's tightly plotted, completely plausible except perhaps for a few too-convenient chance meetings on the street, and profoundly insightful into the "politics" of terror. And it's freshly pertinent, even to the point of including an inadvertent suicide bomber. Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (1857-1924) was a Polish-born novelist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He is regarded as one of the greatest English novelists, which is even more notable because he did not learn to speak English well until he was in his 20s. He is recognized as a master prose stylist.
Added by: stovokor | Karma: 1758.61 | Fiction literature | 2 January 2009
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This is what one of the readers wrote about this book: The Greatest Russian Novel... of the 20th Century written in English by a Pole!
Honestly, you could remove any and all of the prepositional qualifiers from that assertion, and I'd still be willing to defend it. Under Western Eyes is a superb novel in every way - in emotional impact, in intelligence, and in narrative art - and it is very specifically a Russian novel as well as a novel about Russia. Anecdotes suggest that Conrad wrote it in response to his reading of Dostoevsky; if so, he exceeded his model in dazzling narrative acrobatics and in intelligence. Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (1857-1924) was a Polish-born novelist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He is regarded as one of the greatest English novelists, which is even more notable because he did not learn to speak English well until he was in his 20s. He is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence and Graham Greene. Writing during the apogee of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the British Merchant Navy to create novels and short stories that reflected aspects of a world-wide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul. Amongst his best known works are Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Under Western Eyes (1911), Victory (1915) and The Rescue (1920). With special dedication for biGBrother :)
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succиs de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.
Added by: bitemate | Karma: 61.84 | Other | 30 December 2008
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Advances in Deep-Fat Frying of Foods provides straightforward background on the engineering aspects of deep-fat frying, discusses flavor acquisition during frying, and delineates novel frying technologies employed to make fried foods healthier.
Monday begins on Saturday - Понедельник начинается в субботу
Added by: otherwordly | Karma: 222.42 | Fiction literature | 28 December 2008
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Monday Begins on Saturday (Russian: Понедельник начинается в субботу) is a 1964 science fiction (science fantasy) novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Set in a fictional town in northern Russia, where highly classified research in magic occurs, the novel is a satire of Soviet scientific research institutes, complete with an inept administration, a dishonest, show-horse professor, and numerous equipment failures. It offers an idealistic view of the scientific work ethic, as reflected in the title which suggests that the scientists' weekends are nonexistent.
The "Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry" located in a fictional Northern Russian town of Solovets is portrayed as a place where everyone must work hard willingly, or else their loss of honesty is symbolized by hair growing from their ears. These hairy-eared people are viewed with disdain, but, in a turn symbolic of Soviet times, many of them stay in the institute because it provides them with a comfortable living no matter what.
Tale of the Troika, which describes Soviet bureaucracy at its worst, is a sequel, featuring many of the same characters.
